Two major influences converge in the career of Dan Propper: the New York jazz scene of the 1950s and the Beat stylistic revolt, especially as it was evidenced in Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems (1956). The most important thing in Propper's early life was jazz. Born in the Coney Island Hospital in Brooklyn on 15 April 1937, Propper was educated at P.S. 18 in Brooklyn. The only higher education he received was at the New School for Social Research, where Stanley Kunitz advised him simply to drop out. From the early 1950s on, though, Propper was already a member of another kind of scene, and Birdland and the Five Spot, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, and Dizzie Gillespie in a sense provided his college education. An amateur altosaxophonist himself, Propper got a job in 1957 with Decca Records, not as a musician but as an assistant sales promoter. This job, which transformed...