When discussing the history of Jazz, an important type of music is developed that changed the music industry. This music, bebop, helped to influence other types of music, and it also let us appreciate jazz more As is so often the case in jazz, when a style or way of playing becomes too commercialized, the evolution turned in the opposite direction. A group of musicians, who had something new to say, something definitely new, found each other reacting against the general Swing fashion.
This new music developed, at first in spurts, originally in Kansas City and then most of all in musician’s hangouts in Harlem, particularly at Minton’s Playhouse, and once again at the beginning of a decade. Contrary to what has been claimed, this new music did not develop when a group of musicians banded together to create something new, because the old could no longer work. The old style worked very well. It also is not true that the new jazz style was developed as an effort on behalf of an interconnected group of musicians.
The new style formed in the minds and on the instruments of very different musicians in many different places, independent of each other. But Minton’s became a focal point, just as New Orleans had been forty years earlier. And just as Jelly Roll Morton’s claim to have “invented” jazz then is crazy, so would be the claim of any musician to have “invented” modern jazz. This new style called bebop was like, onomatopoetically, the then best-loved interval of the music: the flatted fifth. The words “bebop” or “rebop” came into being, when someone attempted to “sing” these melodic leaps.
Bebop, which was also called bop, was the fist kind of modern jazz, which split jazz into two opposing camps in the last half of the 1940’s. The most important musicians who gathered at Minton’s where Thelonious Monk, piano, Kenny Clarke, drums, Charlie Christian, guitar, Dizzy Gillespie, trumpet, and the altoist Charlie Parker. This was later to become the real genius of modern jazz, as Louis Armstrong is the genius of traditional jazz. One of these musicians, Charlie Christian, is not only a founder of modern jazz but also one of those who created from Swing the basis for the making of modern jazz.
There is a whole group of such “pioneers”: together the last generation of Swing and pathbreakers for bop. Among the trumpets, it is Roy Eldridge: among the pianists, Clyde Hart; among the tenors, Lester Young; among the bassists, Jimmy Blanton; among the drummers, Jo Jones and Dave Tough; among the guitarists, Charlie Christian. Bebop was an instrumental music. No singer could have made it. Charlie Parker forever changed the fundamental relationship between voices and instruments as it had existed up to that point.
Horn players still had to breathe, and so they had to base their phrased on the length of the human breath, but no longer did they need to limit what they played to the boundaries of the voice. They played faster, way beyond what any human voice could make out with clarity, and they played melodies that never were meant to be sung. Bop never came as naturally to the voice as it did to Parker’s alto saxophone and Dizzy Gillespie’s trumpet and then to the other instruments. The new music may have reassigned many of jazz’s basic principles, especially the primacy of the blues, but it was almost only a player’s music.
Most bop musicians had an unusual technique. They played long, dazzling phrases with many notes, difficult intervals, unexpected breaks, and unusual turns in melodic direction. On slower tunes, they had a good ear for small changes of harmony. Only really skilled musicians were able to play bebop well, and only sophisticated listeners at first appreciated it. In bebop performances, musicians usually played an complex melody, followed with long periods of solo improvisation, and restated the theme at the end.
The bassist supplied the basic beat for the group by plucking a steady, moving bass line. The drummer perfected the beat with sticks or brushes on cymbals, snare drum, and tom-tom. The bass drum was reserved for unexpected accents called “bombs. ” The pianist inserted complex chords at irregular intervals to suggest, rather than state, the complete harmonies of the piece. Whereas earlier jazz was mainly diatonic, much of the thinking that informed the new movement was chromatic. Thus the harmonic territory open to the jazz soloist was greatly increased.
Bebop took the harmonies of the old jazz and superimposed on them additional “substituted” chords. It also broke up the metronomic regularity of the drummer’s rhythmic pulse and made solos played in double-time and having several bars with sixteenth notes. The result was complicated improvisation. Bebop musicians understood the small combo format, which was popular in small group jazz of the 1930’s and early New Orleans jazz of the 1920’s. Whereas the tunes performed by big band musicians often borrowed the chord changes of popular melodies, upon which they superimposed their own melodic inventions.
Charlie Parker’s composition “Chasin the Bird,” for example, is based upon the harmonic structure of the popular tune “I Got Rhythm. ” By taking more syncopated and faster rhythms, bebop musicians added more to the standard isometric dance rhythms of swing. Like early New Orleans jazz bands and big bands, bebop musicians usually arranged their tunes to fit either a twelve-measure or thirty-two-measure form. There are many theories about the origin of the word bebop as there are about most jazz expressions.
One possibility is that the word “bebop” originated in the jazz musician’s practice of vocalizing or singing instrumental melodic lines with nonsense syllables (scat singing). Bebop phrases usually had hard endings with a specific long-short pattern on the end. This rhythm was often vocalized as “rebop” or “bebop. ” The name seems to have first been in print as the title of a tune recorded by the Dizzy Gillespie Sextet in New York in 1945. A few years later, jazz musicians shortened the term to “bop. ” When it emerged, bebop was unacceptable not only to the general public, but also to many musicians.
The resulting breaches, first, between the older and younger schools of musicians and, second, between jazz musicians and their public, were deep, and the second never completely healed. Bebop developed at a period in the history of jazz when some musicians were trying to create a new elite and exclude their number all who did not meet planned artistic standards. Barriers, real and artificial, were put up, not only between bebop musicians and the public at large, but also between themselves and other jazz artists. Experimentation in jazz raises the question of criticism.
Critics and the media were quick to put down the new music of the 1940’s. Many of the jazz critics who had already put down bebop found themselves in an uncomfortable position after bop had proven itself as a major force in music. We must think that bebop was a concept so completely foreign, compared to the music of the past, that not even all the professionals agreed with it, and critics usually look at the opinion of current professionals. Both Roy Eldridge and Louis Armstrong, two of the top jazz musicians of the period, stated in public their disapproval of Bebop.
Bebop musicians became separated from their own audience, from their own employers, from non-jazz musicians, and even from other jazz musicians. The most important reason for this split was that bebop musicians were trying to raise the quality of jazz from the level of utilitarian dance music to a chamber art form. At the same time, they were trying to raise the status of the jazz performer from entertainer to artist. Their attempts were not successful at first, and when their music was dropped, the bebop musicians turned inward.
It was not odd for bebop soloists to play with their back turned toward the audience or to walk off the bandstand as soon as the solo was ended, even though the rest of the group was still playing. The bebop musicians’ shame for the public was equaled only by their reject for people who called themselves jazz musicians but were musically unable by bebop standards. This attitude brought about a breed of person who became known as a “hipster. ” Of this group, Charlie Parker was the leader, the model. Technical skill was part of the movement, and bebop musicians did their best to get rid of anyone who could not meet the demanding pace.
The jam session was the bebop musician’s trial by fire. Dizzy Gillespie once told Marshall Stearns, “The modulations we manufactured were the weirdest, especially if some new cat walked I with his horn and tried to sit in with us. ” The flatted fifth became the most important interval of bebop, or, as it was soon called, bop. Until then, this device would have been felt to be full of errors, or at least sound wrong, although it might have been used in parsing chords, or for the special harmonic effects which Duke Ellington or Willie “The Lion” Smith liked to use as early as the twenties.
But now it made an entire style as the harmonic base of earlier jazz forms was always growing. Within ten or twelve years, the flatted fifth had become a “blue note,” as common as the open thirds and sevenths familiar to the blues. The bebop movement, in addition to making the genius of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Kenny Clarke, and Thelonious Monk, made more innovators than any other period in the history of jazz. The nature of the music required the ultimate skill and creativity. Characteristics of bebop are racing, nervous phrases, which sometimes appear as melodic fragments.
Every note not needed is left out. Everything is highly concentrated. As a bop musician once said: “Everything that is self-explanatory is excluded. ” Many phrases became ciphers for extended musical runs. It is a kind of musical shorthand, and one must listen to a good deal of bop to make this facility, and due to this, bop had a good deal of not being able to understand, mostly in its early years. But this holds true for all art music. Only music without artistic merit is quickly recognized.
Toward the end of the forties, the nervous unrest and excitement of bebop were more and more replaced by a tendency toward calm and smoothness. Under the influence of avant-garde bop sound, many friends of jazz took a different approach to the development of the music. With determination, they started themselves backwards, on the basic forms of jazz. Simple music was needed. There was a New Orleans renaissance, which spread over the entire world. The change to bebop seemed to happen overnight, but the foundations of the style were laid over a period of around six years, 1939-45.
It might actually have taken place faster, but a National Federation of Musicians recording ban was made from August 1942, until November 1944, and a major medium for the transfer of new ideas among the jazz musicians had temporarily denied them. Bebop was probably the most innovative form of jazz ever. Many of the people who practiced not only developed into top-rate artists during the bebop period, but also gave to the music of later periods. That bebop was a revolutionary music is a given fact by most historians and critics, but the length to which it affected society and the musicians who played it has not been fully explored.