I’d like to think that the spirits of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady were in the vicinity of the Pennine village of Marsden on Sunday afternoon. They were certainly invoked by a number of poets of a certain age at The Beat is Back, a triumphant fusion of verse and improvised jazz at the popular Marsden jazz festival.

The Beat is Back was organised by Write Out Loud’s Julian Jordon, who himself read his own translation of a Rimbaud poem, and extracts from Allen Ginsberg’s Howl!, “the poem that changed America”. The show combined Beat poetry, poems about jazz giants, surrealism, Urdu poetry of seduction, and a final, magical suite of poems and music that summoned up the ghosts of long-gone Beat heroes Kerouac, Ginsberg and Cassady.

London legend Jazzman John Clarke kicked off proceedings, livening up the crowded pub and drowning out those chatting at the back of the New Inn with his fire and passion. David Cooke followed, with his thoughtful tributes to John Coltrane, Miles Davis and other jazz giants. Lavinia Murray, better known to her friends on Write out Loud as Moxy Casimir, astonished the audience and kept pianist Edward Henderson and saxophonist Louis Archer, pictured, from the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music in Greenwich, on their toes with her whimsical poems about skinheads and icing, and embryos.

After the break Julian Jordon, backed by Edward and Louis, read Rimbaud and sections of Ginsberg’s epic, a poem that helped to loosen the stays of literature and ushered in the 1960s after a US judge ruled that it wasn’t obscene. Pakistani poet Anjum Malik followed with poems in Urdu and English, explaining that at one time she had refused to translate her poems: “I was an angry young poet. I think I’ve calmed down now.” 

Ralph Dartford warmed up the audience for the climax of the show with a set of poems with hip themes, amid locations such as Greenwich Village and Jack Kerouac’s hometown, Lowell. Then enter Dave Morgan and musicians Kevin Bates and James Hartnell with their Green Door Ensemble suite of four sections: Steppenwolf, Subterraneans, Go Jack Go, and Mr Nagata in Autumn. The mood was often mournful, elegaic (“Now the beat has gone”), the music atmospheric, the rhythm insistent. As it was throughout the show.

Titfers off to all the players, with particular cheers for razor-sharp jazz improvisers Edward and Louis, turning verse into notes at the drop of a hat. And more cheers for impresario Julian Jordon, who assembled this rich mix of performers, kept the crowd in order, and created a Beat-style, poetry-jazz happening in the heart of the Pennines.  Greg Freeman