bebop, cool jazz and the cold war
The goatee, beret, and window-pane glasses were no accidents…. [T]hey pointed toward a way of thinking, an emotional and psychological resolution of some not so obscure social need or attitude. It was the beginning of the Negro’s fluency with some of the canons of formal Western nonconformity, which was an easy emotional analogy to the three hundred years of unintentional nonconformity his color constantly reaffirmed.
—AMIRI BARAKA (LeRoi Jones)
Two dates from the golden age of hip: On a blustery night in the winter of 1948, Miles Davis took the El train up to the Argyle Show Bar on the north side of Chicago. He was 22, the son of a dentist, recently dropped out of Juilliard to play in Charlie Parker’s band. And he was broke. Parker arrived at the club in a condition that appeared contrary to one of his rare shared wisdoms: “Never take Seconals and play chromatics.” He spent the gig nodding off and lurching back in, catching the right key but the wrong tune. Miles smoldered; Max Roach, the drummer, laughed at the sputter of incoherence and brilliance. Parker staggered off the stage, so wasted that he urinated in a phone booth. The owner fired them without pay. Some months later, Parker and the band returned unruffled, impeccable, regal. This time when Bird walked off stage toward the phone booth, he knew what he was doing. Repeating his past indiscretion, he sauntered back, zipping himself up as he went. It was a neat reversal of authority, with black genius asserting itself over white ownership. Parker raised his horn and blew the next day’s news over the heads of the crowd.
And so we arrive at the golden age of hip, a Cold War convergence of art, image, dope, clothes, celebrity, intellectual arrogance and rebel grace. In the postnuclear, pre-Selma crush of the 1940s and 1950s, the complementary revolutions of bebop and the Beat generation provided a new answer to the question of what it meant to be an American. Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk and a small handful of peers transformed America’s music, jazz, from a reflection of national aspirations to an unblinking critique of them. The players were flamboyant in their personal style, often self-destructive in their habits and meticulous in their art. A generation of white writers, led by Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, could only clock in and follow in kind. The meeting point, Kerouac wrote, was one of defiant affirmation: “[Y]ou’d see hundreds of heads nodding in the smoky dimness, nodding to the [bop] music, ‘Yes, yes, yes.’…I saw a whole generation nodding yes.” These two self-marginalized groups staked out new ways for America to approach art, language, work, sex and identity. Against the chilly climate of the Eisenhower and McCarthy years, they created a model for the mass counterculture of the 1960s, in which rock and roll codified rebellion as personal style. This counterculture, in turn, would leave their revolution behind.
Specifically, the beboppers and the Beats changed the role of music and art in bohemia—and in the process, the relationship between bohemia and the marketplace. Rejecting the role of entertainer, the beboppers held themselves above the tastes of the public. Where American popular songs have celebrated the society that produced them, bop presented itself as the opposition: smarter, harder, colder, purer. It was deliberately difficult for both listeners and players. In venues where audiences had come to expect happy rhythms or cathartic ballads, the musicians fostered a cult of rebellion that spread through the same distribution networks as their music and reputations. If the mainstream was unworthy of their regard, a hip subculture, black and white, could get on board by purchasing the right records or making the right scene.
For this small but virally influential group, the jazz hipster who emerged in the 1940s offered a vision of enlightened self-invention. Draped in high seriousness, quoting both the universities and the streets, he hinted at what America might become, a thing that inspired both fear and admiration. The poet and novelist Gilbert Sorrentino, describing the early bop years in New York, recalled the savor of intellectual superiority:
Be-bop cut us off completely, to our immense satisfaction. It was even more vehemently decried as “nigger music,” but even to the tone-deaf it was apparent that it (the music) didn’t care what the hell was thought of it…. It was probably, more than at any other time in its history, including the present, absolutely non-popular: and its adherents formed a cult, which perhaps more than any other force in the intellectual life of our time, brought together young people who were tired of the spurious.
What they shared was an ethos of nonconformity in an era of steely gray. As the pianist Hampton Hawes (1928–1977) wrote, “We were the first generation to rebel, playing bebop, trying to be different, going through a lot of changes and getting strung out in the process. What those crazy niggers doin’ playin’ that crazy music? Wild. Out of the jungle. But so long as they’re not lootin’ no stores or shootin’ our asses, leave ’em be…. Our rebellion was a form of survival.”
Charles “Yardbird” Parker (1920–1955) came out of Kansas City, Missouri, more prolific in his personal dissolution than his early playing. The son of an itinerant entertainer and doting mother, he dropped out of high school and was married at 15; he began using heroin and morphine regularly around that time. After an unpromising start, Parker began to hear music in his head that didn’t exist in the world around him. One day in December 1939, he discovered that by raising his solos into the higher intervals of a tune’s chord changes, he could free himself from the limits of the original tune. This discovery, and the torrents of deconstructed melody he poured forth, provided the foundation of bebop.
John Birks Gillespie (1917–1993) was born in Cheraw, South Carolina, the last of nine children in a poor, musical family. Dizzy grew up studying piano, trumpet and other instruments at home and at the Laurinburg Institute, a trade school in North Carolina. He joined Cab Calloway’s band, where he battled with the bandleader until finally, during an argument in which Calloway accused him of shooting spitballs onstage, he stabbed Cab in the fanny, thereby ending his unhappy tenure. When he met Parker in Kansas City in 1940, Dizzy recognized a kindred spirit. “[T]he moment I heard Charlie Parker, I said, there is my colleague,” he remembered. “Charlie Parker and I were moving in practically the same direction too, but neither of us knew it.” Parker called Dizzy the other half of his heartbeat.
Thelious Monk Jr., known as Thelonious (1917–1982), grew up on West 63rd Street in Manhattan’s San Juan Hill, the neighborhood where James P. Johnson and Willie “the Lion” Smith laid down the rudiments of stride piano. Monk got his start in traveling gospel bands, and by the time he began working the clubs of Harlem, his playing pitted the past against the future: the rolling pump of his left hand evoked the music of 20 years earlier, while the fractured chords and leaping intervals of his right hand explored the unknown.
Kenneth Spearman Clarke, later known as Liaquat Ali Salaam (1914–1985), studied piano, trombone, drums, vibes and music theory as a high school student in Pittsburgh, and played with Gillespie in the big band led by the saxophonist Teddy Hill. Clarke’s asymmetric accents, or “bombs,” on the bass drum earned him the onomatopoetic nickname “Klook-mop” or “Klook,” and got him fired from Hill’s band. All four of these men were born in the flush of the Great Migration, had their childhoods interrupted by the Depression and came of age with the wave of black nationalism that swelled after World War II. By the time they met in New York in the early 1940s, joined by Bud Powell, Max Roach, Miles Davis and a group of fellow conspirators, they were distilling these experiences into something new—nonconformist in sound, look and attitude.
It is a dated word, nonconformity. In today’s splintered pop culture, it is hard to imagine a norm that anyone might conform to; the very notion is unhip. This marks in part the triumph of hip as a national organizing principle, and in part the inevitable absorption of hip into market demographics. Yet in the 1940s, nonconformism still echoed Emerson and Thoreau. In his essay “Self-Reliance,” Emerson prescribed creative individualism against the mediocrity of the masses. “Who so would be a man must be a nonconformist,” he wrote. To Emerson, the approval of society was the stamp of the second-rate. “To be great,” by contrast, “is to be misunderstood.” This is nonconformism as a relinquishing of privilege, opting out of the state in order to shed responsibility for its actions.
The nonconformism of bebop, on the other hand, involved a symbolic reclamation of privilege. This was the nonconformism of the group, responding to collective disenfranchisement. Where the Harlem Renaissance had fed on the aspirations of the Great Migration, the fractured sounds of bebop reflected the frustrations that set in as these aspirations remained out of reach. For the bop generation, a new familiarity with white society bred contempt, or at least critique. As Amiri Baraka noted, “To understand that you are black in a society where black is an extreme liability is one thing, but to understand that it is the society that is lacking and is impossibly deformed because of this lack, and not yourself, isolates you even more from that society.”
These players rained musical, political, sartorial, chemical and attitudinal changes, in different proportions for everybody who encountered them. Gillespie saw bop as evolution, not revolution. Langston Hughes, who was introduced to the music by Ralph Ellison, heard in it the insult of a policeman’s nightstick on a black man’s head. “Bop comes out of them dark days,” he wrote. “That’s why real Bop is mad, wild, frantic, crazy—and not to be dug unless you’ve seen dark days, too. Folks who ain’t suffered much cannot play Bop, neither appreciate it. They think Bop is nonsense—like you. They think it’s just crazy crazy. They do not know Bop is also MAD crazy, SAD crazy, FRANTIC WILD CRAZY—beat out of somebody’s head! That’s what Bop is.” For white hipsters, who often knew “them dark days” mainly as metaphor, bop posed an abstract test of society: Could America accommodate black expression at its least accommodating? In short, could it embrace its own prosecution? This test recurs throughout hip, attaching white affections to even separatist black culture, not just for the rebel romance but as moral investment. When white fans embrace, say, black nationalist hip-hop, they’re acknowledging both the rap and the context of racism that would silence it in their names. If this investment remains at the level of art (or FUBU sportswear), rather than black humanity, such are the limits of hip.
As in earlier hip convergences, there was defiance and rage here, but instead of hiding them behind a cool mask, the bop musicians showed their anger on the surface. Wearing the hauteur of a despised minority, they combined political theater with hustler’s put-on. The squares made easy game. Malcolm Little, a Harlem hustler known as Detroit Red, signaled the new day when he appeared at the draft board in 1943. Dressed in his flashiest zoot suit, yellow knob-toe shoes and wildly conked red hair, he confided to the shrink, “Daddy-o, now you and me, we’re from up North here, so don’t you tell nobody…. I want to get sent down South. Organizethem nigger soldiers, you dig? Steal us some guns, and kill us crackers!” The draft board deferred him. Years later, when he spun similar riffs under the name Malcolm X, he turned white America’s paranoia into his own sport.
The image of the bebopper, like that of the Beat poet, inevitably reeks of cliché. The terms bebop and Beat turned to corn almost as soon as they were coined. As Max Roach explained, it was white critics who called the music bebop, after the name of a Gillespie tune. “It’s another one of those nicknames like boy, nigger and jazz,” he said. “In fact, the music which Dizzy, Bird, Monk and people like that created is very difficult to master technically and very difficult to play emotionally…. They’ve been nicknaming our music for a long time, and I resent terms such as jazz and bebop.” The jazz hipster was literally a cartoon as early as 1942, when the animator Bob Clampett, a regular at the clubs of Central Avenue in Los Angeles, celebrated jazzbo panache in The Hep Cat, the first color Looney Tunes short, now banished as racially insensitive.
Yet this capacity for cartoon or cliché is one way hip spreads its gospel. Though hip often hovers around the arts, it is not quite the same thing. Bebop’s musicians, like the Beats who followed closely in their wake, shook the country as much by their public lives as by their work. Jazz historians often try to separate the two, distinguishing the music from the pharmacological flights or jive talk. This does justice to their musical importance but slights their social impact, which was in many ways more profound. Popular culture leaves its truths through folklore and rumor as well as through higher aesthetic accomplishments. The chords and rhythms tell only part of the larger American story.
As a coded signal, hip communicates through the manners of its messengers as well as the contents of their messages. Some people get it, some simply don’t. Bop went over the heads of many listeners, and even many older players. Sometimes it talked in jive. Yet it was never simple gamesmanship. “There was a message in our music,” said Kenny Clarke. “Whatever you go into, go into it intelligently. As simple as that.” Though the music was complicated, and the musicians often strung out or high, the seriousness traveled with the music. The drummer Tony Williams, who later played with Miles Davis, was moved as much by bop’s demeanor as by its changes:
Miles and Max Roach were speaking like men, acting like men. I saw them and said, “That’s the life I want to live.” Miles showed you how to carry yourself. He inspired people to think beyond what they thought they were capable of…. [T]his is before anyone knew about King or Muhammad Ali or Malcolm X. Miles was the person people of my generation looked to for those things. So when the sixties came, I didn’t need anybody to tell me, “We shall overcome.” I was already living it.
With the expansion of media after the war, including a strong jazz press, bop style spread into the culture. It signaled a break from the routine. Few could play the music, but many could dress or talk the part. Slim Gaillard, a singer who claimed to have coined the term groovy, invented a language he called “voutie,” whose syllables flew around the brain: “Voutie oroony macvoosie ohfoosimo,” and so on. In an era that punished political dissent and distrusted new ideas, a little haberdashery went a long way. Billy Eckstine, who hired both Parker and Gillespie in his bands, marketed his own Mr. B shirts with soft-roll collars; Babs Gonzales launched his own line of bow ties. Dizzy, with his beret and goatee, was such a style icon that wannabes used to copy his glasses using windowpane lenses; when he was once photographed unwittingly with his fly low, some hipsters adopted the half-mast look as the acme of correctness. For a price, Fox Bros. Tailors in Chicago offered a complete getup, including bop tie ($1.50), bop cap ($2.00) and a “leopard skin jacket as worn by Dizzy Gillespie” ($39.50). Ads beckoned aspiring cats to “Bop in here and let Fox build you a crazy box!” The come-ons had an inspired silliness:
OO PAPA, DA FOX BROS. suits are gone!
STAY ON IT, Daddy, you’ll come on like the dawn.
At the same time, as Mailer said, hip reflected the horrors arising from World War II, both domestic and military. In the war, 900,000 African Americans joined the battle against Aryan racism in Europe, only to experience a local version at home and in the service. At home many responded with new resistance to racial discrimination; abroad there was destruction on a level previously reserved for God. While race riots flared in Harlem, Detroit and other cities, and the civil rights movement raised its formative noises, the bop generation restored the separateness that jazz had given up during the mainstreaming of 1930s swing. Bop demanded its own space; it did not try to represent the collective tastes of the public. Bop was the first jazz idiom in which it was not a commercial advantage to be white, and for which the black inventors enjoyed the spoils. They flaunted values that were opaque to the white mainstream and repugnant to many upwardly mobile blacks. It was one thing for previous jazz musicians to endure the clueless belittlements of the establishment, and quite another for the bop clique to take on the jazz faithful.
While hip in the 1940s assumed the silhouette of the bop iconoclast—say, Thelonious Monk, immaculate in goatee, glasses and angular bravado—it also revealed broader shifts in the society at large. It is a unique quality of hip that it appears both cool in the face of racial roil and agile in the face of racial intransigence—like a subatomic particle, moving and not moving. In the golden age of hip, this paradox of cool and kinesis captured the anxieties of a nation on a racial threshold. Bop was the soundtrack to these anxieties.
The underlying conditions of bop had been gathering since the 1930s. Blacks who came north, leaving behind a safety net of family and community, were often disillusioned with the fruits of white America. When the Depression hit, many found themselves with no property or kin in neighborhoods that were degenerating into slums. Northern poverty was less severe but more isolating than the despair of the South, where at least there was food in the fields and the support networks of church and neighbors. Northerners, by contrast, were surrounded by massive black unemployment and the white society that rejected them. They girded themselves with speed and abstraction: hipster slang, hustler fashion, ferociously novel music and dance. As Max Roach said, “We’re not the kind of people who can sit back and say what happened a hundred years ago was great, because what was happening a hundred years ago was shit: slavery…. That’s why every new generation of black people is obliged to try something new. Every new generation of black folks comes up with a new innovation because we’re not satisfied with the way the system is economically, politically and sociologically.”
At the same time, a broader trickle of African Americans was entering the middle class, producing what the black journalist Roi Ottley (1906–1960) called “Café au Lait Society,” a class of black intellectuals and professionals who were politically more liberal and socially looser than the conservative black elite. This class included people like Miles Davis’s father, a middle-class dentist, a Garveyite, an internationalist and a community pillar. Their children grew up with new expectations, reinforced by the media. A daily newspaper from the period might show violent racial strife on the front page, and in the arts pages, the new thing called swing, which captivated blacks and whites alike. These two stories, of social division and cultural crossover, evoke opposite sides of America’s drama of race. The hip of the 1940s would take both into account.
The massive industrial buildup to World War II increased both frictions and interdependence. Hitler’s aggression in Europe, under a banner of racial purification, sparked debate at home about the meaning of race and racism. In 1938, the Carnegie Corporation commissioned a Swedish economist named Gunnar Myrdal to conduct a broad study of the state of black America, ultimately published in 1944 as An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. This marked a new level of white curiosity about black life, which is a step toward hip. While many industries refused to hire African Americans, even though they needed the labor, black activism was both visible and increasingly effective, with an invaluable ally in Eleanor Roosevelt, the first lady. In 1941, Asa Philip Randolph, whom Congressman Arthur Miller of Nebraska once dubbed “the most dangerous Negro in America,” threatened a march of 100,000 African Americans on Washington unless Franklin D. Roosevelt banned discrimination in the defense industries. Roosevelt yielded and passed the landmark Executive Order 9902, the first presidential effort since Reconstruction to include blacks in the American Dream. The victory inspired waves of activism that swept through the following decades. Membership in the NAACP multiplied tenfold during the war.
The media, in their role as nursemaids of hip, provided pockets of integration—in the virtual world, if not the real one. Radio broadcasts of Joe Louis’s heavyweight fights were among the first media events that united the nation. Blacks and whites were glued to the same drama at the same time. The Brown Bomber naturally meant more to African-American communities, where people cried when he lost. But when he fought the German boxer Max Schmeling in 1936 and 1938, against a backdrop of Aryan aggression, the nation cheered a black man in a symbolic battle for racial supremacy. Black rage, once taboo, became a subject for polite literary conversation. By 1940, Richard Wright’s novel Native Son, in which a tormented protagonist named Bigger Thomas accidentally kills a white woman, was a Book of the Month Club selection. (Some taboos still held, though: the club censored passages describing the white woman’s sexual attraction to Bigger.) This minuet of attraction and revulsion, step and counterstep, presaged the fragmented momentum of bop.
Musically, the preamble to bebop involved a similar churn of race and money. The Depression closed many of the jazz clubs that had thrived in the 1920s, and the repeal of Prohibition in 1933 sunk the speakeasies, which had kept many jazz musicians fed. Record sales fell precipitously after the 1929 stock market crash, from more than 100 million in 1927 to just 6 million in 1932. At the same time, the new medium of radio brought music into people’s homes for free. The first commercial radio station, KDKA in Pittsburgh, began broadcasting in November 1920, and by the end of the decade annual sales of receivers topped $850 million. These shifts in economy and technology altered the working relationships among musicians. The scarcity of work depressed wages, making it cheap for bandleaders to put together large ensembles. Bigger bands, in turn, meant more juice for the arrangers, less for the soloists. Publishers, hurt by the declining record industry, made their money selling compositions and arrangements, not performances.
In this economy solos were secondary. The leash for improvisation shortened; the rhythms tightened around steady, danceable beats. Radio sponsors, who became gatekeepers to both money and fame, favored white bands performing in venues frequented by white dancers. The swing era, unofficially inaugurated with Benny Goodman’s August 21, 1935, date at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles, created a playing field on which white bands could compete with black bands for an audience that expected only to be entertained. It is no small irony that Goodman won over the Palomar crowd when he stopped playing the bland pop expected of white bands, and unleashed the jazz charts of his black arranger, Fletcher Henderson.
Though often maligned by modernists, the swing era produced magnificent songwriting and crack ensemble work. Goodman, the biggest star of the era, dented barriers with his interracial bands. But for our purposes here, swing’s racial cast and eagerness to please worked against it as an incubator of hip. White bandleaders like Goodman and the less-talented Paul Whiteman overshadowed black acts. Swing coddled public prejudices that regarded even Duke Ellington and Count Basie as simple showmen. When the bebop generation arrived, one of their first targets was jazz showmanship. Gillespie, who revered Louis Armstrong, also chastised him for ingratiating himself to white audiences. “I criticized Louis for…his ‘plantation image,’” he wrote in his autobiography, faulting Armstrong’s obeisance, “handkerchief over his head, grinning in the face of white racism. I never hesitated to say I didn’t like it. I didn’t want the white man to expect me to allow the same things Louis Armstrong did.” The older jazzmen often returned the favor, dismissing the new music as discordant and inaccessible. Cab Calloway famously slagged Gillespie’s experiments in his band as “Chinese music,” and Armstrong, who made similar objections, complained, “You got no melody to remember and no beat to dance to.” But in distancing themselves from public tastes, the moderns also challenged a white arts establishment that denied jazz the respect accorded European classical music.
We often think of hip as a reaction against the mundane, but even at its most out there, it is never totally above worldly concerns. At the tail end of the Depression, bop’s inner circle came together as it did, and where it did, in part through the most ordinary of considerations: free food.
In 1938, Henry Minton, a former saxophonist and the first black delegate elected to the New York musicians’ union Local 802, took over part of the dining area in the Hotel Cecil on West 118th Street in Harlem. He called the place Minton’s Playhouse, and in the fall of 1940 hired the reedman and big band leader Teddy Hill to manage it and plan the musical program. The men had two bright ideas. First, they offered free food to musicians on Monday nights. And they opened the bandstand for jam sessions, providing a house combo and an open invitation to musicians from the touring bands encamped at the Savoy, the Apollo and other venues. It was good barter. The guest musicians ate for free, then they entertained for free all night long. Minton’s was a scene. Inside, musicians dined on white linens and puzzled over the new math their peers were laying down. Outside, a pair of locals named Baby Laurence and Ground Hog tap-danced for heroin, echoing the 19th-century performers who used to dance for eels at the Catherine Market downtown. Like the musicians inside, Baby and Hog turned their isolation from the mainstream into art, but it was an art of humble ambitions.
The art on the bandstand was a different story. Hill’s roots were in the swing era, but at Minton’s he offered musicians a freedom they didn’t have in their big bands. Though he had only recently fired Kenny Clarke from his band for messing with the foursquare beat, he now hired him to anchor the house band, and brought in Monk to hold down the piano. Clarke was already experimenting with freer rhythms, keeping time on the ride cymbal and saving the bass drum to push the music at odd angles. Monk was a bearish enigma who sometimes went days without talking. He became mentor to Earl “Bud” Powell (1924–1966), another New Yorker, who ultimately disappeared into drug abuse, mental illness and electroshock therapy. Passing few words, Monk and Powell sometimes held hands innocently in public. At Minton’s, Monk broke the music into playful but difficult eccentricities. Soloists couldn’t know when Monk was going to push them off a cliff or show them up as passé. Nick Fenton and Joe Guy, more conventional support men, filled out the house band on bass and trumpet.
Though the primacy of Minton’s as the birthplace of bebop is overstated, the place was a steady home for invention and experiment. The regulars who gathered, including the guitarist Charlie Christian (1916–1942), developed their own private agenda. According to Gillespie, “there were always some cats showing up there who couldn’t blow at all but would take six or seven choruses to prove it. So on afternoons before a session, Thelonious Monk and I began to work out some complex variations on chords and the like, and we used them at night to scare away the no-talent guys. After a while, we got more and more interested in what we were doing as music, and, as we began to explore more and more, our music evolved.” In truth, Gillespie was rarely at Minton’s, and Clarke later denied setting out to embarrass lesser players. But like other cliques, the musicians pushed each other to greater extremes of speed, idiosyncrasy and dissonance. If a visitor to the bandstand couldn’t keep up, Monk might school him, “That’s not the way we play. We changed all that.”
As a vehicle of hip, bop steeped itself in the intellectual world beyond jazz and the hustle of making a living. Like their generation of African Americans as a whole, the bop clique were better educated, more widely read, and more urban than their predecessors. The anarchy onstage or in the musicians’ personal lives conspicuously signaled not sloppiness but intellectual curiosity, a rejection of limits. The players often compared their music to abstract expressionism and action painting, which grew around similar circles of artists exiling themselves from tradition, challenging each other to more abstract and difficult work. Like the musicians, the painters were also social and intellectual outsiders, mainly European émigrés driven from their homelands and into each other’s drunken company by the rise of Hitler. They, too, worked outside popular taste or institutions, even as they carried on in the public eye.
The bebop pioneers were the first generation of jazz musicians who grew up wholly in the age of jazz recordings, familiar at once with the entire breadth of the music. They were the first who could conceive jazz as commentary on jazz. They wore their enlightenment on the outside, sporting the uniform of French intellectuals. Kerouac saw them as 12th-century monks. Even song titles like “Klact-oveeseds-tene” or “Epistrophy” invited incomprehension. Hostile to elements of jazz tradition, they pored over contemporary classical theory and dissected their own work with the same seriousness. The pianist Randy Weston remembered hanging after hours at a Brooklyn luncheonette run by his father, where cats fed coins into a jukebox that played both Stravinsky and Bird. “We were like scientists of sound,” Miles Davis said. “If a door squeaked we could call out the exact pitch.” Their scientific experiments also ran to drugs, which will be discussed more fully in chapter 12.
The players had all developed their chops in big bands, but together they cultivated the hip of the small clique, using their manners as a buffer between themselves and outsiders. They saw their audience as tainted and their loyalties to each other as paramount. “I wanted to be accepted as a good musician and that didn’t call for no grinning, but just being able to play the horn good,” Miles Davis said in his autobiography. “Max and Monk felt like that, and J.J. [Johnson, the trombonist] and Bud Powell, too. So that’s what brought us close together, this attitude about ourselves and our music.” The musicians often declined to announce tunes; they sped the tempos too fast for dancers and expected audiences to listen attentively. Davis famously turned his back to his audience, which critics took as a gesture of arrogance, though he claimed it was just a way to hear his musicians. With some notable exceptions, the white musicians of the swing generation could not keep up with bebop; few older big band musicians, black or white, truly mastered the new idiom. Even after the music moved down to 52nd Street in the late war years, white audiences faced musicians who were self-possessed, inscrutable, wrapped in a dialog that did not include them. Bop was a secret from which it was easy to feel left out.
Gillespie and Parker, the good cop and bad cop of bebop, played this secret from opposite angles. Parker, as Stanley Crouch has written, waged “war with the complicated fact that the Negro was inside and outside at the same time, central to American sensibility and culture but subjected to separate laws and depicted on stage and screen, and in the advertising emblems of the society, as a creature more teeth and popped eyes than man, more high-pitched laugh and wobbling flesh than woman.” The year before Hill and Clarke assembled the band at Minton’s, a head-wrapped Butterfly McQueen attended to Miss Scarlett in the 1939 film Gone with the Wind—a stark reminder that the most lustrous projection of the American psyche, the movies, still saw race relations through the lens of minstrel comedy.
Parker simply blew through this image. In a life lasting just 34 years, he lived in a state of autonomous chaos, beholden for neither his accomplishments nor his spectacular downfalls. Both belonged to him alone. His music was complicated but viscerally communicative. Instead of pandering to audiences, Parker mastered the put-on, adopting a fake English accent and refusing to define his music, describing it only as “trying to play clean and looking for the pretty notes.” Peers described him as thoughtful and well read, yet on key dates he might show up not just high but incoherent. Dedicated to his art, he showed little regard for the needs of his audience, his employers or his colleagues. When he needed a fix, he might hock his horn before a gig or a recording session, or stiff the musicians in his band.
Parker scattered the mythologies of the minstrel show by setting standards no one could follow. The minstrel is a figure audiences feel comfortable with because, even in his duplicities, they know what he’s about. He’s circumscribed by their imagination. Parker, on the other hand, defied measure; personally, musically and chemically, he lived in the uncharted. Though plenty tried, no one could take as many drugs, play as many notes, court disaster as wholeheartedly and then rise from the wreckage with such pure, unpredictable music. It was easier to judge him by his failures—as a colleague, a professional, a husband and father—than to keep up with his accomplishments. Yet these barriers to empathy helped foster a rabid cult among his followers, white and black: If you could hear the man or the music without judgment, you could commend yourself as vicariously inside the loop, hip. This set you apart from the mainstream, which saw only his bad behavior. To accept him was to abandon what Emerson saw as the dull omniscience of the crowd for the enlightenment of the wayward prodigy.
By the time audiences caught up to his early 1940s breakthroughs, Parker had moved on, recording with strings and announcing his desire to study with Edgard Varese (in return, Parker would cook for the composer). Living on 10th Street and Avenue B in the East Village in the early 1950s, Parker listened mostly to classical music and delighted in TV Westerns. He spent his nights gabbing in Ukrainian bars. Like only a few jazz figures, including Armstrong and perhaps Ellington, Parker changed the way musicians approached every instrument. Yet he was detached from the people in his life. A chronic womanizer and absent father, he married four times, the first two times to black women, the last two to whites. In his richest period financially, his daughter Pree died while under the care of a public clinic because Parker did not send enough money for private treatment—in large part because he spent the money on drugs. When he died in 1955, just a few years after his finest recordings, most of the New York newspapers did not even run obituaries, and two papers identified him as Yardbird Parker, not even bothering to learn his age or his first name. The faithful simply kept the faith. The graffito “Bird Lives” began appearing around New York and other jazz towns. Charles Mingus (1922–1979) was among those who insisted that Parker wasn’t really dead, just “hiding out somewhere, and he’ll be back with some new shit that will scare everyone to death.”
Where Parker was personally remote, Gillespie was bop’s great communicator, schooling both his peers and the audience at large. Because he chose survival rather than glorious implosion, the Dizzy myth is much less romantic than Parker’s. Yet his music was every bit as uncompromising and original, and he pushed his peers to higher heights. “Bird was responsible for the actual playing of it and Dizzy put it down,” said Billy Eckstine, who hired both in his pivotal 1944 band. “And that’s a point a whole lot of people miss up on. They say, ‘Bird was it!’ or ‘Diz was it!’—but there were two distinct things.” Hip needs both of these types. With his affable showmanship and fierce professionalism, Gillespie did more than anyone to bring bop to the jazz public. He happily gave Parker the credit for bebop, but rarely worked with him because Bird was too erratic. Avoiding serious drug abuse, and married to the same woman for half a century, he worked a precarious paradox of his own: having invented the aesthetic that rejected jazz showmanship, he used his own abilities as a showman to sell that unsellable aesthetic. Yet his humor had an edge. It was unpredictable, sometimes sharp. Miles Davis, who criticized Gillespie’s stage antics in the same way that Gillespie criticized Armstrong’s, remembered that when they first met in New York, Dizzy would “be sticking his tongue out at women on the streets and shit—at white women. I mean, I’m from St. Louis and he’s doing that to a white person, a white woman…. He used to love to ride elevators and make fun at everyone, act crazy, scare white people to death.”
His hipster-huckster look and jive brought him celebrity but little in the way of record sales. Gillespie maintained that he wore the beret simply because he could stuff it in his pocket, and the goatee because he didn’t like to shave around his lips. But as with Davis’s back-turning, mystique spoke louder than facts. Six decades after his first recordings, these two sartorial accidents remain the easiest way into an often difficult body of music.
Gillespie scattered the aura of the minstrel show by casting his music in global terms, with himself as funky ambassador. Early compositions like “A Night in Tunisia,” which he debuted with Parker in Earl “Fatha” Hines’s band in 1942, referred explicitly to Africa, not just in the title but in the intonations. In 1947, he formed a partnership with a Cuban percussionist named Luciano Pozo y González, better known as Chano Pozo, which ranks among the most visionary in jazz. Chano, who spoke no English, brought West African chants from his Cuban lucumi religion into Dizzy’s big band. When the band debuted the chants at Boston’s Symphony Hall in 1947, even African Americans were not yet ready for his lesson in Afrocentricity. “[T]he black people in the audience were embarrassed by it,” said George Russell, who composed “Cubana Be–Cubana Bop” for Pozo and the band. “The cultural snow job had worked so ruthlessly that for the black race in America at the time its native culture was severed from it completely. They were taught to be ashamed of it, and so the black people in the Boston audience were noticeable because they started to laugh when Chano came on stage in his native costume and began.” The following year Pozo was killed at the Rio Bar on Lenox Avenue and 111th Street after an argument about a bag of weed, but the Afro-Cuban rhythms he and Gillespie brought to jazz survive today in the syncopations of funk, rock, disco and much of modern jazz.
Gillespie’s Pan-African grooves brought a new metaphor to hip. Parker’s prolific whir mirrored the urban clamor of the war years; Monk and Miles, who hit their stride in the 1950s and 1960s, captured the nuclear jitters of the Cold War. Gillespie reflected the early stirrings of globalism, tweaking the language of race as presciently as he had the orthodoxies of jazz. Where European modernists like Picasso had evoked a mythic, primitive Africa, Gillespie restored the continent to the present tense. He aligned modern, urban black Americans with modern Africans, each caught in a political struggle for autonomy. His mercurial humor, sometimes self-effacing, sometimes cutting, can be read as global diplomacy from the African diaspora. This is the opposite of shucking from the plantation. Even in his clowning, Gillespie subtly recast race as a product of history, not biology. Minstrelsy could not work on this stage because its ahistoric notions of black and white did not hold. He was like the term bebop itself: a self-effacing, unserious term, in the shape of a minstrel mask, but doing little to hide the intemperate seriousness underneath the fun.
If hip is enlightenment, Gillespie’s globalism was as visionary as his percussive bop. While Americans tend to think of World War II’s aftermath as nuclear terror and the Cold War, in many ways this has proven a sideshow. The bigger story, as the historian David M. Kennedy argues, has been a realignment of global powers: the gradual triumph of nonwhite revolutionary movements throughout Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean; borderless trade and debt; the intercontinental transit of disease. By century’s end, Kennedy writes, “who can deny that globalization…was the signature and lasting international achievement of the postwar era, one likely to overshadow the Cold War in its long-term historical consequences?” In its intensification of both Third World rhythm and First World abstract modernism, Gillespie’s music prefigured this international free-for-all. The hip cat was both a player and a product for the coming global marketplace, talking a new Esperanto. Where Stravinsky met Bird, and “Klact-oveeseds-tene” was the word of the day—that was where the world was heading. Bop got there first.
Hip thrives on contradictions, and like other movements in this book, bop fed from conflicting traditions. Its complex polyrhythms and extended scales reclaimed a tie with Africa, and the musicians echoed the black nationalism in the streets and barbershops. But the bop crowd’s rejection of their elders, break with tradition and indifference to public tastes owed more to Western modernism. Bop had no interest in being folk art. It rejected African traditions of ancestor worship, functionality and community participation. Where African musics tend to close the gap between performer and audience, inviting everyone to add a line, bop exaggerated this distance. Amateurs were actively discouraged. Bop had it both ways. It was as restless with Africa as with Europe; its legacy was unsettled, dynamic, American.
This internal contradiction reflected the ambiguous interplay of race and jazz. For much of the bebop era, the most popular musician in jazz was not a Minton’s alum, but Benny Goodman. As a clarinetist, Goodman was peerless; as a popularizer, he cut just the right corners. As a bandleader, he was a bastard. But American celebrity responds as much to image as to music, and here Goodman led a split existence. For much of the public, he embodied a mint American archetype, the Urchin Who Made Good. One of 12 children born to poor Russian immigrant Jewish parents, he was ethnic, but not too ethnic; disadvantaged, but not victimized; well mannered but not Brahmin; smart but not donnish. He had rags, he had riches—sign him up. Then as political winds shifted, he came to embody another signature American fable, just as iconic: he was the White Boy Who Stole the Blues.
The story of the white boy who stole the blues is one of the central recurring folktales within hip’s history. It has featured many lead characters, going back to Twain, Dan Emmett, Irving Berlin, Elvis, and on up through Keith Haring, Tom Waits and Eminem, to name just a few. The story—really a body of stories, some felicitous, some shameful—bears ugly testimony to the discrimination faced by black artists, even from a white public with a jones for their art. As it is generally told, it involves simple thievery, hapless imitation and a public too corrupt or ignorant to know the difference. The story assumes that popular culture begins with Platonic ideal forms, from which descend lesser knockoffs, the least of these being the white rip-off. Bop was in part a reaction to this degenerative process in the swing era, when white skin was an advantage in the marketplace. At Minton’s and elsewhere, the bop crowd called the white boy out. As the pianist Mary Lou Williams remembered, Monk told her he wanted “to create something that they can’t steal because they can’t play it.” Though Goodman played at Minton’s, and was treated respectfully by the musicians, many did not survive the treatment with their dignity intact. As the drummer and bandleader Art Blakey put it, “the only way the Caucasian musician can swing is from a rope.” Where white interlopers changed the music, it is taken for granted that what they added was water, diluting a vital black idiom.
But in practice the musicians, black and white, were more expansive than exclusionary. American music, like hip, resists purism; both thrive in the hybrid. Bop’s interests were wide-ranging from the start, European as well as African and Afro-Cuban, and as it evolved, the stew only became more complicated. In 1948, shortly after he left Charlie Parker’s band, Miles Davis joined a racially mixed crowd of musicians, composers and arrangers at the 55th Street apartment of a self-taught white Canadian named Gil Evans. Like the circle at Minton’s, they wanted to push beyond the music that was playing in clubs, experimenting with different textures and instrumentation. With the older Evans (born Ian Ernest Gilmore Green, 1912–1988), Davis developed a rare empathy. “Here was this tall, thin, white guy from Canada who was hipper than hip,” Miles remembered. “Here was Gil on fast 52nd Street with all these super hip black musicians wearing peg legs and zoot suits, and here he was dressed in a cap. Man, he was something else.” The rotating nine-piece group that came together in Evans’s one-room place was mixed in education and musical background, exploring the possibilities of intricate, precise chamber jazz. The music they came up with, released as 78s and ultimately collected as Birth of the Cool, polished the edges of bebop, simplifying the rhythms and slowing the tempos to allow lush spires of elaborate counterpoint. Though the records sold poorly, they gave a name and emotional temperature to a style that fulfilled many of bop’s promises while closing some of its aesthetic doors. The school was cool.
In Robert Farris Thompson’s study of the aesthetic of the cool, he notes that Africans use the cool mask to cover not just sadness but exuberance as well. Davis wore this as a mask of vigilance across the emotional spectrum, implying depths of feeling while showing none. The cool embodied in those sessions was watchful, expectant. The cool mask suited both the Cold War, which bred fear and secrecy, and the laconic furtiveness of the heroin user, whose numbers, black and white, now filled the jazz world. Cool was both defiant and protective. In a famous photograph from 1957, you can see this mask on 15-year-old Elizabeth Eckford, one of nine black students who integrated Little Rock’s Central High School, as she walked through an angry white mob armored only in her sunglasses and poise. “What bothered them,” recalled Minnijean Brown Trickey, another of the Little Rock Nine, speaking of the white students, “was that we were as arrogant as they were.”
Cool, though, came with unexpected consequences in the jazz world. Unlike bop’s first circle, the cool crowd was largely white, including Gerry Mulligan, Lee Konitz, Stan Getz, Lenny Tristano, Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond, among others. Where bop’s radicals had made a virtue of their outsider status, these musicians—sometimes known as the West Coast school, though few actually lived there—had access to audiences and monies that eluded their black peers. The jazz press hyped an East Coast/West Coast rivalry, as the hip-hop press would do four decades later. Cool was complicated but not confrontational, flattering to the generation of men who flooded colleges through the GI Bill. Suiting the new managerial class who made their living with their brains, not their bodies, the music was more cerebral than visceral. By the time it reached the phonographs of the new suburbs, its signature trumpet player and crooner was a white homme fatal named Chet Baker (1929–1988), who seemed to use his prolific flaws to hide his talent, rather than the other way around. Cool players like Dave Brubeck, who made the cover of Time in 1954, enjoyed popular success that eclipsed Parker’s, while bop’s great pianists, Monk and Powell, struggled with the cabaret laws and mental illness, respectively. Davis’s record company, noting this white boho market, graced the jacket of his 1957 Miles Ahead album with a blonde model, to which he responded, “Why’d you put that white bitch on there?” The new audience expected the music in its own likeness. As Miles saw things, “it was the same old story, black shit was being ripped off all over again.”
But the story of the white boy who stole the blues is never as simple as his critics would have it. American pop culture begins in the mongrel, not the Platonic. This is hip’s central story. What we call black or white styles are really hopelessly hybrid. The bebop of Minton’s, for example, brought African and European impulses to a music that already traced its lineage to both continents. Even in the name of purity it was impure, and richer for it. By the same token Goodman, Twain, Berlin, Elvis and Eminem all stand out more for what is uniquely theirs, not the vehicle they borrowed. In a pluralistic cultural marketplace, it makes more sense to think of pop evolution as additive rather than derivative—every change adds something, even if just through the accidents of faulty copying.
In his autobiography, Miles attributes the Birth of the Cool sessions to pure black musical sources: “We were trying to sound like [the white bandleader] Claude Thornhill, but he had gotten his shit from Duke Ellington and Fletcher Henderson.” But this is like saying a rock band has pure white sources because it borrows from the Rolling Stones. Ellington and Henderson themselves adapted ideas from European classical music and African musics as well as jazz. And so on. In American culture, there are no pure black or white sources to tap. When the West Coast musicians took on East Coast bop, they similarly put it through the filter of their own influences and abilities, changing it in the process. If the results were less overtly tied to New Orleans, and more reflective of the car culture and television images of the late 1950s and early 1960s, this was less a dilution than an evolutionary mutation. Cool was the aloofness of bebop taken literally.
Significantly, it built on bebop’s embrace of nonconformity as an ethos of success. Unlike Thoreau, the masters of cool and bop did not drop out of society, but practiced their art in places of public debate. They competed in jazz polls and led the sexual lives of royalty. The jazz press, which grew throughout the 1940s and 1950s, conferred success beyond the judgment of the marketplace, affirming the marginal as valuable art. To be out was to be original; to be original was a measure of success, even if you didn’t necessarily get rich. Bop musicians, who held their own tastes above those of the public, insisted that this was the true success. As the commercial record business boomed around them, lifted by the postwar economy, theirs was a music of transition, relinquishing jazz’s hold on the mainstream of American popular music. That mainstream, which swing had helped create, would soon move elsewhere. Jazz was becoming more like classical music, a taste for an elite minority. Cool told the story of this transition.
Hip would have to move elsewhere as well.
In the popular imagination, ideas like bop or cool travel according to the needs of the people who receive them. Among the cult, they communicate as divine revelations, to be dissected with Talmudic care. Each transmission is wholly new, unlike any that came before. To the broader public, they communicate as familiar image and genre. The bigger the audience, the fewer nuances come through. The difference between the two can be little more than time lag. One reason confrontational art does not topple its targets is that by the time it reaches them, it does so in comfortably familiar form. For example, Kurt Cobain’s nemeses, the frat boys and jocks, ultimately made up much of his audience because they heard the specifics of his indictments as generic wail.
Yet even stripped of their complexities, the ideas can still take root. Bop communicated on both of these levels, as invention and romance. Without the truly breakthrough ideas, it would have passed as simple fad. But without the broader mystique of the bop hipster, which trickled to parts of the culture that the music alone could never reach, its impact would have been limited to the jazz universe, which even then was shrinking. The triumph of hip requires these two operations working in tandem—the cultist and then the universal, each delivering the right drug to the right habit.
The bop musicians’ cerebral music, hieroglyphic lingo and rambling habits all posed the argument that alienation could be a deliberate choice—a position of critical distance, not a condition imposed from above. Parker once said that bebop was not an extension of jazz tradition, but “something entirely separate and apart.” Instead of explaining themselves to the mainstream, they cultivated its incomprehension. As the bassist Coleridge Goode recalled, “It was the bebop tradition to freeze out strangers.” In the tradition of the Greenwich Village moderns, bop was a performance of countermobility, moving out, not up. To be marginal, or far out, was to claim the moral high ground.
The myth of Minton’s, however oversimplified, has survived because it helps us understand where the music came from. It was local, elitist and artisanal—a proudly marginal culture developed against the postwar incipience of mass culture. But as radical as the changes were on the bandstand at Minton’s, the audience was undergoing an even more sweeping transformation. Radio, which became indispensable during the war, brought jazz rhythm to more people than ever before, in a format that ran counter to the elitism of bebop. The transistor radio, invented in 1947 by Walter Brattain and Robert Gibney, made sets portable and cheap, well suited to the budding car culture. They let young people take their music away from the supervision of adults. Radio broadcasts served different needs than nightclubs. They had to entertain and stimulate audiences, not challenge them; to flatter, not provoke. These media craved repetition and novelty more than intricacy and ambiguity. Television’s rise in the 1950s created the first true mass culture in America. Unlike the crowd at a nightclub or a local church, TV audiences were not differentiated by taste or background, and might have little in common with each other or the entertainers. They did not pay to get in, and so did not demand to get their money’s worth; instead, they needed to be held, buttered up for the commercial messages.
This mass audience called for more elemental pleasures: simpler rhythms, simpler sexuality, emotions that resonated throughout the population. Where bop moved toward baroque complexity, the growing audience beyond Minton’s wanted a strong beat, some blues humor and an echo of its newfound mobility and wealth. Though the musicians continued to make important recordings throughout the 1960s, and Monk made the cover of Time magazine in 1964, two more dates stand out from the golden age of hip: On November 20, 1955, eight months after Charlie Parker died, a New York disc jockey named Tommy “Dr. Jive” Smalls brought his rhythm review, featuring Bo Diddley, LaVern Baker, the Five Keys and Willis “Gator Tail” Jackson, to The Ed Sullivan Show. They played strong, simple rhythms with an immediate sex appeal—just the sort of things bop had steered around. The idiom was perfect for television; it jumped off the screen. Nine months later came a Mississippi kid named Elvis Presley. He was the urchin who made good, the white boy who stole the blues, the purest practitioner of nonconformity as an ethos of gaudy success. He was all the stories wrapped up in one libidinal yearn. The other stuff didn’t have a chance.