Bebop is a jazz style known for fast paces and complex improvisations based on playing off of harmonies. It developed in the 1940s in the United States of America and symbolized the new stage in the ideas about jazz music and its perception. This paper aims to discuss the history of bebop, its establishment as the major modern jazz movement around the days of the decline of big bands, its fragmentation into the styles of cool and hard bop, and the role African-American musicians played in its development.
As Gioia writes, from its beginning, jazz was the genre of music ready for modernist changes and new techniques (Gioia 185). However, after the appearing of swing and the incredible growth of its popularity, many musicians started to feel a deadlock in the development of jazz. It happened mostly due to the creation of a huge number of popular dance and jazz orchestras that used replicated pieces and methods of the best bands without any contributions to the expression of the true spirit of jazz. The existed situation sat well with the old generation of jazz musicians but dissatisfied the jazz youth. In order to escape the dead state of jazz, such young musicians as alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, pianist Thelonious Monk, drummer Kenny Clarke, trumpet player Dizzy Gillespie, et al. began to experiment with jazz music and little by little created the new style of jazz. Gillespie called it ‘bebop’ or just ‘bop’ that was the combination of syllables he hummed during a bluesy quint, a characteristic feature of the new style that added bluesy thirds and sevenths.
Indeed, bebop did not appear out of the blue. It was created in the contrary with commercial swing, but used the works of swing musicians who played at the boundaries of the two styles as its basis. Talking about them, one should mention saxophonist Lester Young, guitarist Charlie Christian, bassist Jimmy Blanton, and trumpet player Roy Eldridge. However, the riot of musical youth was aimed not only against the sweet smoothness of swing music, but also against the glorification of traditional jazz, which the jazz youth of those days perceived as a museum piece without any prospects for further development. Those musicians understood that the essence of jazz is much broader, and then return to the root improvisation system of jazz did not mean the return to the old jazz style.
Bebop was developed in the Minton’s Playhouse club in New York, where musicians came to play jams after their major jobs, and in the other clubs located on the 52nd Street in New York in the 1940s. At first, it shocked listeners raised on the swing, and bebop music was highly criticized and was not issued by record companies. As Gioia writes, “The simple riffs, the accessible vocals, the orientation towards providing accompaniment to social dancing, the thick big band textures built on interlocking brass and reed sections – these trademarks of prewar jazz were set aside in favor of a more streamlined, more insistent style” (Gioia 187). As an alternative to habitual jazz, bop musicians offered intentionally complicated language of improvisation, rapid paces, and the destruction of established functional relations between ensemble members. The bebop ensemble usually included the rhythm-section and two-three wind bands. The improvisation theme often was the traditional tune that was modified and got the new title. At the same time, bebop musicians often created new themes by themselves. The music composition started with the wind-band unisonous play of the theme that was followed by turn-based play of the ensemble members and ended with the unisonous play again. The musicians often improvised with new rhythm patterns, increased intervals and pauses, and more complicated harmonic language. Furthermore, they used completely different phrasing and the beginning and the final of the solo that often stopped in unpredictable ways. Bop was rhythmically based on plates, and the new style lost its dance function because of the new role of drums that started to accentuate separate music scores in the improvisation.
The first bebop records appeared only in 1944, and the new style rapidly gained its popularity. The first famous bebop musicians were Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Benny Harris, and Miles Davis. The classic representative of bebop style was pianist “Bud” Powell, whose monophonic melodic lines allowed playing back Parker’s saxophone phrases. In several years, bebop became the dominant jazz style with such famous musicians as Jamal, Charlie Barnet, the Thad Jones – Mel Lewis Orchestra, etc. By 1950, bebop became a school of jazz. And, as Gioia states, “The ascendancy of bebop inevitably invited changes” (Gioia 253).
Rosenthal writes that bebop “had depended so much on surprise [that] couldn’t go on repeating itself” (Rosenthal 23). Indeed, the unpredictability of bebop music led to incessant innovations, and, as the result, to the development of new styles including cool jazz and hard bop. According to Brown, the first appearance of cool jazz has the exact date – the two-week engagement of the ‘Birth of the Cool’ band at the Royal Roost Club in New York in 1948 (Brown 108). The band was led by Miles Davis who used to work with Charlie Parker and, as Eckstine says, “sounded terrible” (Brown 108). However, Davis’ failures to play bebop resulted in the development of the new beautiful style based on lyricism and economy of notes. On the contrary with cool jazz, hard bop appeared as the result of the influence blues and gospel music started to have on the classic bebop. Hard bop appeared in the 1950s, and, according to Rosenthal, was created by African-American musicians who grew up in the days of the dominance of bop and rhythm and blues (Rosenthal 24). The famous hard bop musicians were Tadd Dameron, Art Blakeley, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, etc. Hard bop was extremely popular in the 1950s and 1060s, but one could also find its motives in modern jazz.
Bebop was the modern stage in the history of jazz and the transitional phase between dance music based on tunes and less popular ‘music for musicians’ based on rhythms. The developers of bebop revolutionized jazz and created the new ideas about the jazz music and its perception. The group of young jazz musicians was not afraid to break the mainstream swing music and to add to it new motives and a new play that were completely different from the tastes of the most jazz lovers of those days. Thus, they revived the original function of jazz as the music genre subjected to transformation and different variations that led to lots of jazz subgenres and to jazz, as we know it now.
Works Cited
Brown, John Robert. A Concise History of Jazz. Pacific, MO: Mel Bay Publications, 2010. Print.
Gioia, Ted. The History of Jazz. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Print.
Rosenthal, David H. Hard Bop: Jazz and Black Music 1955-1965. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Print.
