Mark Murphy recorded Bop for Kerouac in six hours on March 12, 1981, with producer and arranger Bill Mays and saxophonist Richie Cole.

[1] Murphy had recorded bop and vocalese (words added to an instrumental soloist's improvisation) previously but this was a complete concept album dedicated to Jack Kerouac.

I never met Jack, and I never expected I’d become a Kerouacian, but I am one of the lucky people still alive who did see Lord Buckley perform...What really turned me on about this guy was that he wrote like an improvising musician...I really connected to him".

He said, "But each night the one they roared for and sometimes stood for was the 8 minute track combining the last page of Kerouac's On the Road and the Landesman/Wolfe song (written for Jack's Beat Generation) "The Ballad of the Sad Young Men".

[14] In his book, A Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers, author Will Friedwald says that the recording is "Murphy's most successful concept album"[10] and calls it "extraordinary".

[10] The AllMusic entry written by Sott Yanow gives the album 4.5 stars saying, "this poetry and jazz set works surprisingly well".

[6] Yanow also includes the album in his list of best individual Muse sets by Mark Murphy in his book The Jazz Singers: The Ultimate Guide.

[15] The Penguin Guide to Jazz assigns 3 stars (meaning a good if middleweight set; one that lacks the stature or consistency of the finest records, but which is certainly rewarding on its own terms).

[7] John Swenson, in The Rolling Stone Jazz & Blues Album Guide, assigns the album 4 stars (excellent, representing peak performances in an artist's career, and providing the best introduction to an artist's work) and calls the recording "an engaging mixture of bop standards interspersed with Kerouac readings".

[8] Stereo Review gives the album an Honorable Mention in its annual Record of the Year Awards for 1981, selected by editorial staff and critics.

[13] Owen Cordle, writing in DownBeat magazine in 1982 likens Richie Cole playing Bird (Charlie Parker) to Mark Murphy's Miles Davis, capturing a "detached cool intensity"[9] in the bebop music.

[9] Writing about the recordings of "The Bad And The Beautiful" and "Ballad Of The Sad Young Men" (with a reading from On The Road), Cordle says they "become a cathartic ache in the heart as Murphy stretches his phrases nearly to the tensile limit of emotion, most like early Miles".

[9] Author, singer, musician, and composer Peter Jones notes that "Bop For Kerouac combines the sadness and the euphoria of the intertwined jazz and beatnik lifestyles that Murphy knew from the inside, but it isn't the crazed, ecstatic homage to bebop that one might expect...the overall tone is elegiac, and ballads dominate".

[4] He finds the tracks with Kerouac readings highly evocative of the 1950s jazz club scene with Murphy an ideal storyteller to take you there.

[4] Commenting on the ballads, Gavin finds those recordings capture the loneliness of the Beat lifestyle and likens Murphy's Kerouac readings to Montgomery Clift in vocal expressivity.