The Bebop Revolution

The Bebop Revolution

QuickTime™ and aTIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor

are needed to see this picture.

QuickTime™ and aTIFF (Uncompressed) decompressorare needed to see this picture.QuickTime™ and aTIFF (Uncompressed) decompressorare needed to see this picture.


are needed to see this picture.QuickTime™ and a

TIFF (Uncompressed) decompressorare needed to see this picture.



The early 1940’s were a time of important change in jazz. Just as the Swing Era was in full

bloom, a musical revolution was brewing in Harlem.

The Bebop Revolution• New ideas were coming together from a diverse cast of creative young

musicians at after-hours jam sessions.

• In an environment of experimentation and spirited camaraderie, bebop, the first modern jazz style, was born.

• It was frenetic, difficult to play, and for many jazz fans, difficult to listen to.

• Most the leaders were defiant, rebellious and disrespectful of authority.

• The emergence of bebop was a broad reflection of some important changes that were beginning to surface in America.

• Some initially criticized bebop but it was too big a force to ignore.

• Bebop changed jazz from popular dance music to intellectual art music.

• By bringing an entirely new vocabulary to jazz, it washed away the musical cliches of swing.

• It opened up jazz to new artistic interpretations that would lead to almost limitless stylistic approaches in the future.


Bebop’s influence is pervasive to this day; its melodies, rhythms, harmonies and repertoire are

still studied by jazz musicians and are intertwined in the very fabric of nearly all

modern jazz.

The Bebop Revolution• In the beginning, bebop was revolution

whose repercussions brought turmoil to the jazz world; some musicians stubbornly ignored it; others embraced it; still others initiated a nostalgic backlash against it.

• Bebop ended up being a evolution as well as a revolution.


With the arrival of bebop, the playing field was suddenly tilted in a disorienting way. Many

musicians, like alto saxophonist Art Pepper, felt threatened. Upon hearing his first bop recording after

returning from the war, Pepper said, “These guys played faster……an they really played. Not only were

the fast, technically, but it all had meaning, and they swung! They were playing notes I never heard of before in the chords. It was more intricate, more bluesy, more swinging, more everything….and it

scared me to death.

The American Federation of Musicians Recording Ban

What caught many musicians off guard was the complete absence of bebop recording during the music’s developmental stages. The American

federatioin of Musicians ban on recording by its members from August 1, 1942 until late 1944 neatly coincides with the new music’s gestation period.

Chances are if you weren’t in Harlem during this time you probably would not have heard any beboop until the first bebop recordings were made in late

1944 and early 1945.

As author and historian Scott DeVeaux put it, “The recording ban falls like a curtain in the middle of the most interesting part of a play; by the time the curtain rises, the plot has taken an unexpected turn, and the characters are

speaking a new language.

The New Breed of Jazz Musician

• The radical inequities of the music business during the swing era had allowed white dance band musicians to earn a comfortable living while denying the same economic opportunities to black musicians.

• Black swing bands were routinely forced to play lesser paying gigs, had to travel farther to get to them, and, particularly in the South, had to deal with racial indignities, stereotypes, segregation and in some cases violence.

• It was becoming increasingly clear the many young, creative blacks who played in dance bands that they were playing a white man’s game that was never going to recognize them for their talents. The world of swing simply wasn’t working for them.

• The informal setting of the jam session allowed them to completely shake the notion of being entertainers, of playing for someone else’s amusement; here they could play only for themselves and their peers.

The Bebop Counter Culture• As the jam session scene coalesced in the early 1940s, a counter-culture

mentality set in that was designated to keep away outside intruders.• Beboppers started to dress differently, wearing goatess, sunglasses, and

berets. • The invent their own hipster language.• Man began to use narcotics.• To gain entry into the bop counter-culture, one had to first hold your own in

the late night jam sessions that were beginning to swirl with experimentation and musical exploration.

• Bebop insiders deliberately tried to embarrass and discourage those who sat in with them by playing standard tunes at frantic tempos or in unusual keys.

• Also used “secret” reharmonizations and chord substitutions that took unexpected twists and turns.

• It was ultimately trial-by-fire initiation process designed to identify who was hip and who was square.

Minton’s, Clark Monroe’s, and “The Street”• The most celebrated early bebop sessions took place at Minton’s Playhouse,

opened in 1938. The house band included pianist Thelonious Monk and drummer Kenny Clarke.

• Although Minton’s became the place for the bebop crowd, other Harlem clubs like Clark Monroe’s Uptown House and The Heatwave also held jam sessions on a regular basis.

• Racial tension in Harlem were compounded, The Savoy Ballroom was shut down for six months because servicemen were supposedly picking up venereal diseases there. “The Street” as it became known, was home to a cluster of clubs situated in the tiny, narrow basements of the brownstones that lined both sides of the street.

• On “The Street,” these clubs had been speakeasies during Prohibition, and as the 1930’s gave way to the 1940s, more and more of them converted to jazz venues.

“The Street” - a list of some of the clubs

• The Onyx - were Dizzy Gillespie and Oscar Pettiford led the first bebop group to play outside of Harlem in November 1943.

• The Downbeat - were Coleman Hawkins had a memorable sty in 1944.

• The Famous Door - where Count Basie appeared in the summer of 1938.

• Kelly’s Stables, actually located on 51st street, where Billie holiday held a long residency in the mid 1940s.

• Jimmy Ryans - noted for programming Dixieland• The Yacht Club, the Spotlight, the Tree Deuces and the

Flamingo Club.

By design , bebop is dramatically different than swing.

• One of the most obvious differences is the size of the ensemble; the standard group is five pieces, with the trumpet, sax, piano, bass, and drums.

• Another important difference is in the arrangements; bebop charts usually are nothing more than the melody played in unison by the horns, followed by the usual succession of solos.

• Tempos were purposely undanceable; usually extremely fast, but also occasionally very slow as well.

• Despite the disaffected demeanor of the players, most bebop is generally high spirited and joyous music.

Radical elements of bebop become apparent.

• Bebop Rhythm - much more syncopated and rhythmically unpredictable than previous jazz styles. Bebop drummers used the bass drum for syncopated accents called dropping bombs.

• Bebop Harmony - Reharmonization or chord substitution• Bebop Melody - bebop melodies are more complex and

challenging to play. Even tunes based on riffs tend to repeat themselves in unpredictable ways.

• Bebop Repertoire - By creating their own publishing companies and making their artists record only original compositions, the label was able to keep all the royalties to themselves. Because f this, many bop original compositions are merely jazz standards with new melodies slapped onto the existing chord changes.

Characteristics of Bebop

• Usually high-spirited, positive and joyful music• Small combo, usually five pieces.• Simple arrangements; horns play melody in unison• Emphasis on lengthy, improvised solos• Extreme tempos - fast or slow• Reharmonization and chord substitution common• Unpredictable melodies, flatted 5th common• New repertoire created from jazz standards using new

melodies.

Dizzy, Bird, and Monk


QuickTime™ and aTIFF (Uncompressed) decompressorare needed to see this picture.

Dizzy, Bird, and MonkThe most import and influential architect of bebop were Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk. Born within thre years of each other (1917-20) in North Carolina (Gillespie and Monk) and Kansas City (Parker), the three shared similarities, yet were radically different in temperament, career path and talents. As there exploratory musical paths led them to each other, they became friends and worked together, but utimately they went their own separate ways. In the retrospect of history we now think of them as icons: Gillespie, the schoolmaster who hid behind a clown’s mask; Parker, the tormented genius who represented everything right and wrong about bebop; and Monk, the mysterious and misunderstood high priest. These three men were at the forefront of a new revolutionary spirit of innovation and creativity that forever changed jazz from dance music into an art form.

John Birks “Dizzy Gillespie”• 1917-1993• First to make an impression on

the New York scene. • Heard Roy Eldridge on radio

broadcasts and began to emulate his style.

• 1937 replace Eldridge in the Teddy Hill band.

• 1939 he became one of the featured soloists in Cab Calloway Orchestra.

• Began to break away from Eldridge style - Calloway called it “Chinese music.”

• Calloway years helped Gillespie develop his arranging skills, he met his musical soul mate Charlie Parker, and he began to develop a lifelong interest in Cuban music and Latin rhythms after meeting Cuban arranger Mario Bauza.

• Became a regular at Minton’s, where he would often share the stage with Monk and Parker.

• Accomplished pianist. Taught chord substitutions and reharmonizations to band members.

• On many occasions, musicians ended up at Gillespie’s apartment on 7th with Diz at the piano and his wife Lorraine, in the kitchen cooking meals.

• In the developmental years, he was the “professor.”

John Birks “Dizzy Gillespie”• Between 1942-44, both Gillespie and

Parker played in the Earl Hines and Billy Eckstine big bands.

• 1943 at the Onyx club, Dizzy and bassist Oscar Pettiford put together the first bebop combo to appear outside Harlem. It was this group that established the two-horn-lay-the-head-in-unison format that subsequent bop groups would us.

• February 1944 - Dizzy participated in what is often called the first bebop recording session with Coleman Hawkins, recording his composition “Woody’n You.”

• In April 1944 , Gillespie and Parker captivated the jazz world when they co-led a combo at the Three Deuces.

• 1945 Gillespie began spending less time with Parker and focusing his attention on his first love, big band music.

• 1947 he co-led a band with percussionist Chano Pozo that introduced a new jazz style incorporating Latin rhythms and percussion called AFRO CUBAN. At their first gig in Carnegie Hall in September, Gillespie not only introduced Pozo to the world, but the innovative George Russell composition “Cubana Be-Cubana Bop.” Although Gillespie had combined Latin music and jazz prior to this with his famous 1942 composition “A Night In Tunisia.”

• December 1947 - Together with Gil Fuller, Gillespie and Pozo wrote and recorded “Manteca” and it is arguably his most famous Afro-Cuban composition

• By 1950’s universally regarded as the top trumpeter in jazz

• He went on to become the most commercially successful of the original bebop musicians and spent much of his later years involved in Music Education.

Charlie Parker - Alto Sax (1920-1955)

















Charlie Parker• Born in Kansas City on August

29th, 1920.

• His father deserted the family and his mother worked nights.

• Young Parker was free to roam Kansas City of the Pendergast era and began to sneak into the Reno and other clubs to hear Lester Young and other great tenor players.

• Started playing alto saxophone as a freshman in high school and started gigging by age 15.

• Those who played with him often said he was the worst musician in the band.

• One night in the Spring of 1937, 17-year-old Parker went to a jam session at the Reno Club where Count Basie drummer Jo Jones was playing. As Charlie began to play, Jones was so appalled that he stopped playing and threw a cymbal across the dance floor. The deafening crash left Charlie humiliated, but determined to improve. That summer, playing the George E. Lee band in Ozarks, Charlie spent all his free time “wood-shedding” (a term used for intense practice) and learning about harmony. When he returned to Kansas City that fall, he was musically a new man, showing phenomenal development and musical growth. By this time (17), Parker had already been married, fathered a son, and divorced.

Charlie Parker• He had now been introduced to heroin,

an addiction that would cause him to become a loner for much of his life.

• 1938 - began working with bandleader Jay McShann.

• One day on the way to a gig at the University of Nebraska, the car Charlie Parker was in, struck and killed a chicken in the road. Charlie stopped the car, retrieved the bird, and had it cooked for McShann when the band arrived. Amused fellow band members started calling him Bird (or Yardbird), a nickname that stuck for life.

• 1938 - Quits McShann band and heads his way east, first to Chicago and then to New York.

• When he arrived in New York, he took a job as a dishwasher at Jimmy’s Chicken Shack, where Art Tatum played the piano nightly. While listening to the pianist every night for three months, Bird absorbed Tatum’s astonishing harmonic restructuring, virtuoso phrasing, and breakneck tempos. Challenging himself to adopt these innovations into his own playing, Bird worked tirelessly, finally achieving a breakthrough while working on the song “Cherokee” at a Harlem jam session.

• 1939 - returns to Kansas City to rejoin McShann until 1942. It was during 1940 and 1941 (regarding his first recording and national broadcasts with the McShann band) that the jazz world outside New York got its first glimpse of Parkers genius.

Charlie Parker• 1942 - quits McShann band to stay in New

York and started to make regular appearances at the Minton’s sessions with Dizzy Gillespie (by then a close friend) and Thelonious Monk. Everyone was experimenting by then.

• Parker played lightening fast runs that, despite being filled with all kinds of unexpected twists and harmonic complexity, made perfect sense. His tone was cutting and dry, unlike the creamy sound of the swing saxophonists. And his imagination never ran out of musical ideas.

• 1942-1944 - Bird and Diz both played in the Earl Hines and Billy Eckstine big band.

• 1944 - Parker and Diz co-led a quintet that opened at the Three Deuces on 52nd Street. The landmark recordings that this group made in November 1945 made a stunning and profound impression on the jazz world - the bop revolution was finally unveiled on vinyl for all to hear.

• 1945 - Drug problem gets worse.

• 1946 - plays with Diz at Billy’s Berg in Los Angeles. This was the first time anyone on the West Coast had heard bebop, and the reaction to the new music was mixed. Parker was depressed that the music was not well received and started drinking heavily.

• 1947 - Parker returned to New York recovered (he had a total break down in LA and was committed to six-month at Camarillo State Hospital for his heroin addiction).

• 1947 - Lead a quintet that included Miles Davis on trumpet and Max Roach on drums. By then he was the leading figure of the bebop movement. The jazz world became a sort of house of mirrors for Bird, as alto saxophonist everywhere were trying to copy everything he played.

• Many young jazz musicians looked at him as a role model and began to experiment with heroin.

Charlie Parker• 1949 (December) - a live radio

broadcast and Parker himself performing, BIRDLAND, the “Jazz Corner of the World” opened at the corner of 53rd and Broadway. Never before had a club been named after a jazz musician, living or dead. It was an unmistakable sign of Charlie Parker’s status as a living legend.

• 1950 - release of Charlie Parker with Strings, Bird became the first jazz artist to make a recording with orchestral accompaniment.

• 1950 - so ill from drug complications that he has to cut back on his playing and recording.

• 1953 - at a concert at Massey Hall in Toronto that was to feature the greats of the bebop period, he had to borrow a plastic saxophone - he had pawned his own to pay off a drug debt.

• 1954 - attempted suicide

• 1955 - March 12 - he died while watching Tommy Dorsey’s TV show at the 5th Avenue apartment of Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, a wealthy jazz patron.

• After viewing Parkers broken down body the coroner estimated Parkers age to be 55. Charlie Parker was 34.

Charlie Parkers Legacy

Bird’s legacy continues to shape jazz today, and it is almost impossible to escape his influence. Young jazz

musicians routinely learn to play bebop by learning Parkers transcribed solos. His virtuosity and technique

are still standards of achievement that are matched by few. His compositions have become the repertoire of modern jazz. Like Louis Armstrong, Parker redefined how jazz was to be played and installed a new jazz vocabulary.

And, like Armstrong, in the process he exerted a tremendous influence on American music and culture.



Thelonious Sphere Monk (1917-1982)


















Thelonious Monk• When around 6 years old moved

with his family from North Carolina to New York.

• Self taught at piano, by the time he was sixteen he was playing at church and professionally at parties.

• His early influences were the Harlem stride players and especially Duke Ellington, who was himself a fine stride player.

• 1940 - Monk became the pianist in the house band at Minton’s Playhouse. By this time, he had already developed a completely unorthodox style and was experimenting with chord substitutions and reharmonization.

• His influence in the formative years of bebop was powerful, but is one that cannot be realistically documented because of the reclusive nature of his personality.

• Dizzy Gillespie was one who credited Monk with inventing many of the harmonic principles of bebop.

• Monks playing was misunderstood by so many. Jazz fans were accustomed to hearing nimble fingered pianists such as Art Tatum and Teddy Wilson.

Thelonious Monk• Instead of the cool demeanor of

most bebop players, Monk was agitated when he played, appearing to be in a wrestling match with the piano.

• In spite of criticism, Monk stubbornly did not change his playing or his stage presence, believing that the world would someday meet him on his own terms. (And we did and he was right).

• 1947 - finally signs a recording contract. It was upstart Blue Note label, whose publicity department labeled him the “High Priest.”

• Among the recordings from the first wo Blue Note albums, Thelonious Monk - Genius of Modern Music Vols. 1 and 2 were his compositions that he had written years earlier, “Straight, No Chaser,” “Epistrophy,” “Off Minor,” “Round Midnight” and others that have since become jazz standards.

• Monks tunes were uniquely original in his rhythmic phrasing, off-beat sparseness, and dissonance.

• Monk, the eccentric genius, is considered to be one of the greatest composers in jazz history.

Thelonious Monk• Monks Blue Note albums didn’t do well as first and he was dropped from

the label. He then lost his cabaret card for 5 years when he took the rap for his mentor Bud Powell (Powell had drugs on him in the car and Monk claimed they were his to protect him from the police).

• 1957 - triumphant return at the Five Spot, a Greenwich Village nightspot with a new quartet that included the young, experimental tenor saxophonist John Coltrane. Their six-month engagement, along with a new critically acclaimed album release Brilliant Corners finally put Monk in a position to attain the fame and respect that had eluded him for so long.

• Monk performed most often in a quartet setting with drums, bass, and tenor sax. He was known to be very animated onstage, often leaving the bandstand during sax solos and working through the audience, waving his arms as he shuffled around. He also had a fetish for exotic hats. Monk’s offbeat personality and music made him a favorite among young hip audiences in the 60’s, and was even featured in a 1964 story in Time magazine.

Other Important Bebop Figure• Bud Powell - influence nearly all jazz pianist that followed him. He was

among the first of the jazz pianist to incorporate a minimal use of the left hand while concentrating on hornlike lines in the right hand.

• Kenny Clarke - Founder of modern jazz drumming. Was the founding member of the Modern Jazz Quartet from 1952 until 1956, when he moved to Paris.

• Charlie Christian - was the first great electric guitarist and the first to exploit the melodic potential of single-note runs on the electric guitar, which took it past its role as a purely rhythm instrument. Died at 25 of tuberculosis.

• Max Roach - is considered to be the greatest bebop drummer. Made drumming more melodic and more polyrhythmic. Co-led the Clifford Brown/Max Roach quintet, one of the first and foremost hard bop groups of the decade that included Sonny Rollins on tenor and Sunny Stitt on alto.

• Dexter Gordan - his playing was a unique blend of the laid-back rhythmic style of Lester Young and the dark, biting tone of Coleman Hawkins. Much of the bebop history and language can be heard very clearly in Dexter Gordan.

Other Important Bebop Figure• Theodore “Fats” Navarro - was another major trumpet stylist of the bebop

era, with a more lyrical style than Gillespie. He became a heroin addict, which prevented him from reaching his full potential and contributed to his early death at age 26.

• Todd Dameron - Prolific composer of many bebop standards. Was one of the first arrangers in the bebop style and was also a fine pianist. His life was also beset by constant drug-related problems.

• Oscar Peterson - One of the most technically virtuostic pianists in jazz history with incredible technique that is often compared to that of Art Tatum. Peterson has been active in jazz since his teens in his hometown of Montreal. His style is somewhat transitional, falling between stride, swing, and bebop.

• J.J. Johnson - was the one of the first trombonists to adapt the unwieldy nature of the instrument to bebop.

The Backlash of Bebop

• A new emerging sound, Rhythm and Blues gained popularity and jazz slipped into the corners.

• The New Orleans Revival. Musicians from the 1920’s who had ended their music careers suddenly found they were in demand for concerts and club appearances.

The Bebop Revolution

Documents

Transcript of The Bebop Revolution