1940s
Towards the end of the 30s, Swing had become a gigantic business enterprise. The very word 'swing' became a marketing device from which spun out a whole lot of merchandise ranging from cigarettes to articles of female clothing.
Swing music began to conform to general public demands, and soon became a flow of endlessly repeated musical clichés. Thus it was only a matter of time before it evolved into something else. And it did...the other way around!
While swing had everyone up and dancing to the music, bebop did the opposite. It invited you to sit down and listen. That is if you cared to concentrate on, as Louis Armstrong said, "weird chords which don't mean nothing...no melody to remember and no beat to dance to".
Indeed, many of the leading swing musicians of the early 40s personally felt insulted. Tommy Dorsey said "bebop has set music back 20 years".
But for all its apparent dislocation from the past, bebop's arrival made sense. It mostly operated over swing's fast four-four beat, but with accents more unpredictably scattered and without the steady thump-thump of the bass drum.
Like all breakthroughs in jazz, bebop's contribution lay in its rhythm. While New Orleans jazz and swing used rhythmic ideas of African ancestry, they were nowhere near as eloquent as an African drum choir. As bebop developed as a movement, the style of its drumming went closer to recapturing the mysterious polycurrents swirling beneath jazz. And the man who pushed the new music towards a multi-layered pulse was drummer Kenny Clarke.
Kenny Clarke was with the Teddy Hill swing band. (Also in the line-up was a young trumpeter named John Birks 'Dizzy' Gillespie.) Clarke was inspired by the work of Count Basie's Jo Jones, and wanted to make the drum sound lighter and create more interesting tension by setting contrasting rhythmic ideas to pull and push each other.
Clarke's boss fired him for musical disruption in 1940 - but hired the stubborn young drummer a year later when he put together a small-group house band for a new venue - Minton's Playhouse at Harlem's 108th Street. Given the freedom to choose his players, Clarke took the opportunity to seek out like-minded men. Among them was Gillespie, Charlie Christian on guitar, and a vague but inventive pianist influenced by stride piano and who used odd, dissonant chords and left unexpected cliff-hanging spaces in his music. His name : Thelonious Monk.
Cut to another joint in Harlem called Munroe's Uptown House. Alto saxophonist Charlie Parker was eking a thin living from a cut of the door money. When Kenny Clarke heard Parker, he found that he was into a kind of harmony other saxophone players had yet to touch. Thus Parker landed up at Minton's and a new repertoire began to develop.
Though established jazz stars like Coleman Hawkins, Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Fats Waller came to Minton's to jam in the small hours, Clarke's band had its collective mind elsewhere.
A name gradually began to stick for what they were doing. Not that they initially liked 'bebop' - the vocal mimicry of the darting, offbeat accents of this music. But stick it did!
To swing musicians, let alone unfamiliar audiences, Bebop sounded at first as if the soloists had entered too early or too late. Phrases seemed to be left hanging. And it sounded as though they were unaware of the bar-lines or parent key! In Swing, the moment of a chord change usually coincided with the traditional 'strong' beat. Bebop did the opposite, and perversely hit weak or offbeats instead.
Beboppers soon enjoyed a sort of underground cult status. Musicians and a small band of enthusiastic followers in New York knew about bebop, but few others did. Radio disk jockeys continued to play swing, when between 1942 and 1944 the American Federation of Musicians shut down the recording business in search of better rates.
Thus bebop (or bop) musicians perfected their music almost in secret as far as the record-buying public was concerned. And when the strike ended and bebop emerged, the impact was like a dramatic shock-wave.
When the union ban lifted in 1944, a band that included Charlie Parker and Max Roach and a Coleman Hawkins-led band including Dizzy Gillespie made the first (now classic) bebop recordings. Polls began to acknowledge the ascendancy of the new musicians and in 1945 Parker and Gillespie began the sensational succession of small-group recordings that produced classics like 'Groovin' High', 'Billie's Bounce', 'Now's the Time', and 'Ko-Ko'.
Bebop had become both a musical and social revolution. It changed the sound of jazz along with the vocabulary and fashion sense of the young.
Dizzy Gillespie helped the new public discover the new music, and by the end of the 40s he had formed a dramatic big band that embraced Latin-American dance band music. Further uniting jazz with its rhythmic ancestry.
The luminous inspiration of Parker, Gillespie and their contemporaries, encouraged many brilliant musicians to follow - like trumpeters Ramon Navaro and Clifford Brown; saxophonists Dexter Gordon, Sonny Rollins and Sonny Stitt.
Sensing the new mood, swing bandleaders like Earl Hines, singer-trumpeter Billy Eckstine and Woody Herman encouraged the bop players (as did Coleman Hawkins who played with almost the same harmonic sense as the new generation) to enter the recording studio.
There are two interesting counter-reactions to the bop revolution.
1. Many friends of jazz didn't know what to make of bebop's complexities. So with great determination they oriented themselves backward to a revival of interest in the conversational styles of the early jazz in New Orleans. With the exception of surviving New Orleans jazzmen, for whom traditional jazz was a logical form of expression, no important black musicians participated in the revival of Dixieland - even though it spread all over the world.
2. More importantly, it also led to a music that used many of the innovations of bebop, but enchanted the audience with a softer, less bone-rattling sound.
Cool jazz, was around the corner.
