This is The Beat Generation:

The Beat Generation, a three-CD anthology on Rhino Word Beat Records, highlights the legacy of the Beat era in all its manifestations. It gives glimpses of seminal Beat influences like Langston Hughes and Lord Buckley and re-creates, through poetry, jazz, comedy and interview segments, the aura of "hipness" that came to define the Beat Generation. The collection weaves the bop and postbop melodies of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Gerry Mulligan and others together with classic spoken-word and comedy performances by notables including Kerouac, Kenneth Rexroth and Lenny Bruce.

This literary movement built itself around underground jazz culture, which expressed liberation of body and soul. Inspired by jazzmen and hep cats, the Beat Generation hipsters rejected traditional values, embraced African-American musics, travelling, drugs, a free sex lifestyle as well as spirituality. Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and On the Road author Jack Kerouac launched the radical American counterculture that thrived in the 1960s and 1970s, leaving a tremendous mark on lifestyles, and on the world of arts and opinions — hippies and punks alike. In partnership with the Centre Pompidou on the occasion of the “Beat Generation” exhibition in Paris, the story of the Beat Generation is told by Bruno Blum in a 32-page booklet. PATRICK FRÉMEAUX

Do you like yourself a bit of “Dutch Beat”, or as insiders refer to it, “Nederbeat”? Well, if so then there is no time like the present to get yourself totally wrapped up in a huge heavy dose of it, and if you’re not really sure or perhaps you’ve only maybe dipped a toe in here and there, well now’s the time for that full immersion experience to start. This brand new eight CD box set issued by premier league Dutch reissue specialists Pseudonym, and helmed by the label’s head honcho Hans Van Vuuren, is an exhausting, exhilarating labour-of-love style project … and then some! Diggin’ In The Goldmine has been categorised, broadly speaking as “Dutch Beat” but what purchasers are subject to are around two hundred tracks of exciting, multi-genre, early-days rock music which spans from the immediate post-Beatles and ‘Stones fallout of 1963-64.