BEBOP

Like many aspects of American culture, jazz emerged from World War II with a renewed energy. A wartime recording ban conspired with the efforts of a remarkable group of pioneers to strip the 1930s big band down to smaller groups. Such groups revolutionised the harmonic vocabulary of jazz, and transformed it from a dance music into a pure art form known as “bebop.”

The existing culture of jazz—New Orleans jazz and swing, in particular—was fertile soil for the development of radical musical ideas. Throughout the 1930s, big band musicians often split up into smaller combos after a gig and improvised into the early hours of the morning. The spontaneity and competitive nature of such “jam sessions” often led to the introduction of new harmonies and faster tempos. In 1942, alto saxophonist Charlie “Bird” PARKER, the seminal figure of bop, arrived in New York where he often “sat in” at after-hours clubs such as Minton’s Playhouse and Monroe’s Uptown House. The house band at Minton’s was star-studded, featuring guitarist Charlie CHRISTIAN, drummer Kenny Clarke, and pianist Thelonious Monk, all adventurous young musicians who came to epitomise the early bebop style. Legendary trumpeter John “Dizzy” GILLESPIE was a relative latecomer to the scene, if only by less than a year, but he found a kindred spirit in Parker. Both men were heavily influenced by an earlier generation of musicians that included Lester YOUNG, and both were intent on bringing something new to jazz. Parker and Gillespie, who were most responsible for defining the bebop genre, formed their own group in 1944—the first bebop combo. The combo consisted of a piano, double bass, drums, trumpet, and alto saxophone.

THE NEW WORLD OF BEBOP

Parker made his recording debut first as a sideman in 1944 and then leading his own group in 1945. The recordings appeared on the Guild and Savoy labels and remain prime examples of the initial phase of bebop. Following the release of the recordings, a torrent of talent emerged to shape the new sound of jazz. Vibes player Milt Jackson and saxophonist Dexter GORDON were both instrumental in bebop’s development, and firmly held on to the genre throughout their careers. On piano, Monk and Bud POWELL represented the ultra-modern, original bebop school, while the hard bop style of Horace Silver reinterpreted the blues and gospel roots of jazz in light of the new technical complexity and harmonic freedom. In Europe, musicians such as Ronnie Scott, John Dankworth, and Tubby Hayes in Britain, Arne Domnérus and Lars Gullin in Sweden, and Albert Mangelsdorff and Joki Freund in Germany, earned international respect for their own innovations in bebop.

Although the original derivation of the word “bebop” is unknown, the most likely and attractive theory is that it refers to the frequent practice of ending a melodic phrase with two staccato quaver notes, the first falling on the beat and the second syncopated and more heavily accented—”be*bop*.”

The musical root of bebop lay in more complex chord sequences that gave the soloing musician a wider range of notes to choose as part of his improvisation. Whereas in earlier jazz, a single chord had been held for two or more bars, in bebop such a two-bar period would be filled with a range of chords that contained notes far away from those of the original scale. Thus, in a 12-bar blues, perhaps the basic jazz form, a typical 1930s harmonic progression would have been the following:

B, / E7 / B, / B7 /

B / E7 / B7 / B7 /

F7 / E 7 / B7 / F7 /

By contrast, Charlie Parker’s group played the following sequence on the blues “Laird Baird”:

B, / Am75 D7 / Gm7 / Fmll(F7)B7 /

E7 / Em7 / Dm7 / Dm75 /

Cm7 / F7 E7 / Dm7 Dm75 / Cm7 B7 /

The way that the chords change on this treatment allowed the soloists to choose notes that were far away from the original B$ blues scale. In addition, some of the chords were more complex in themselves than traditional jazz chords.

To play effectively in the new idiom, soloists (and accompanying bass players and pianists) needed to be technically accomplished, because not only did they have to know the notes of the chords; they also needed to be able to hear how a chord sequence was progressing, and to be able to fit their melodic line into that changing harmony. As in many forms of music, there was a considerable challenge in fitting the horizontal melodic line to the vertical harmonies, so it was a technical problem as well as a musical one.

Although bebop can be explained as a harmonic revolution, it was, almost equally importantly, a rhythmic revolution, and the rhythmic changes were a major reason why untutored ears found bebop so difficult—and why certain individual musicians who had laid the harmonic roots of bebop found the transition to the new music so challenging. A prime example of this was the tenor player Coleman HAWKINS whose harmonic sophistication was not matched by his more conventional rhythmic style. The bebop rhythmic revolution lay partly in playing tunes much faster than before, but also in the fact that the drummer stopped keeping time on his bass drum, snare, and hi-hat cymbal. Instead, he kept time on the lighter sounding ride cymbal, with assistance from the hi-hat, while the bass drum and snare drum added accents and more complex syncopation. The pianists who laid down the chords also changed their style: rather than playing the chords solidly they tended to play more sparsely, anticipating key changes and making more use of accent. Over this new, more floating background, bebop soloists played a more jagged, elliptical music.

But such concerns had little to do with the public impression of bebop. Instead, the beboppers drew attention to their musical innovations (and technical prowess) with flamboyant public personas. Dizzy Gillespie’s angled trumpet, “zoot suits,” and outlandish mannerisms were far more redolent of bebop than any musical innovations, despite his disapproval of the attention paid to the extramusical accoutrements of bebop.

CHALLENGING THE STATUS QUO

The use of up-to-the-minute vocabulary designed to confuse the unhip can be traced back to the pre-bop tenor saxophonist Lester Young. The boppers brought “hep” lingo an unprecedented degree of exposure and fashion, especially for the approved “cool” or detached deportment often associated with drugs and alcohol. In this they were helped by the appearance a few years later of a similarly flamboyant literary school, the Beat Generation. These writers and poets claimed to have been influenced by bop’s driving pulse and improvisational audacity. This scorn for the conventional became one of the standard credentials for a jazz musician, but much of what seemed so rebellious in the bop style reflected reaction to the pressures of being African-American. Refused service in restaurants, banned from hotels, and in some towns jailed and beaten on the thinnest of pretexts, the African-American musician of the 1940s had little to lose by flouting conventions of dress and behaviour. Liaisons between African-American bop musicians and white women provoked hysteria in the media. For the first time the connection was made between bebop and racial tension in the U.S.

Out of bebop came other movements that owed much to this intellectual freedom within jazz. One such example is “cool” jazz, which tended to more subtle harmonic and melodic explorations, but lacked bebop’s rhythmic drive; yet perhaps the most important was “modal” jazz. Rejecting the complex chord sequences of bebop as too formulaic, musicians such as Sonny ROLLINS, Miles DAVIS (accused of treating his audience with contempt because he would turn his back on it during a performance), and John COLTRANE looked for simpler harmonic patterns on which to base their music, and also explored freer rhythmic patterns that led to a powerful music that became the mainstream of jazz in the late 20th century.

To date, the emergence of bebop is perhaps the most important and radical turning point in the brief but illustrious history of jazz.

Joseph Goldberg