Read these three files I uploaded and address the following for each topic
What did you find most interesting in the lecture?
What, if anything, did you take issue with?
Are there relevant topics that you think deserve further exploration?
Jam Sessions and the Birth of Bebop: 5 pts maximum (based on quality and depth of post)
Cubop: 5pts maximum (based on quality and depth of post)
Hard Bop: 5pts maximum (based on quality and depth of post)
Hard Bop
I loved bebop for taking jazz further along. But as hip and great as it was, there was a period when musicians kinda…not totally, but somewhat eliminated the blues, you know? They got so sophisticated that it seemed like they were afraid to play the blues, like it was demeaning to be funky. And I tried to bring that, I didn’t do it consciously at first. But it started to happen.”
-Horace Silver
The jazz scene of the late 1940s and early 1950s was dominated by two factions: cool and bebop. The cool school, championed by Miles Davis and his many Birth of the Cool collaborators, prized controlled, smooth sounds and classically-inspired composition over all other considerations, while bebop became ever more harmonically complex and virtuosic. In the view of a handful of East Coast-based jazz musicians both of these approaches were taking jazz away from where they thought it belonged, rooted in the emotive, visceral sounds of the African American musical experience. The new hard bop emphasized grooves and rhythm over elaborate forms and harmonies; The wail of the church and groan of the honky-tonk over the propriety of the concert hall. Hard bop looked to reconnect with the most elemental aspects of the African American aesthetic, the inflections and feel of spirituals and the blues.
At the fore of this movement to reincorporate blues inflection and driving rhythms into jazzat that time elements dangerously close to becoming exclusive to R&Bwhere drummer Art Blakey, pianist Horace Silver, and trumpeter Clifford Brown. Blakey and Silver had established themselves in the world of bebop but as the 1950s wore on they increasingly wanted to steer their music away from the overly-cerebral aspects of bop. Blakey, a veteran of the big bands of the 1940s, was known as a hard-hitting, versatile player who’s style was edgier than many of his contemporaries. Silver’s professional career had just taken off four years prior when he was discovered by saxophonist Stan Getz. Silver’s straightforward, percussive approach to the piano was innovative in its simplicity. In 1954, these players, working as The Art Blakey Quintet, recorded an album that defined the sound of hard bop, A Night at Birdland with the Art Blakey Quintet.
A Night at Birdland with the Art Blakey Quintet
During a stretch at the New York club, Birdland, the Art Blakey Quintet — later renamed the Jazz Messengers — was recorded live by the Blue Note label. One of the earliest “live” albums, A Night at Birdland featured the playing of Blakey, Silver, Brown, bassist Curly Russell, and saxophonist Lou Donaldson. The performances on the album exemplify a “bluesy approach [that] revolutionized small group jazz playing, adding a jaunty swagger that was absent in bebop and other previous styles of jazz.” The energy of the musicians and of the crowd — you can occasionally hear the calls of “harder, harder” coming from the audience — comes through loud and clear off of the record and into the listeners ear. The album has the feel of a steamy blues jukejoint and a baptist revival rolled into one, the very essence and appeal of hard bop to many listeners.
“Blues” – Art Blakey Quintet (1954)
I went into Birdland with Clifford Brown, Horace Silver, Curly Russell and Lou Donaldson for a few weeks. We made some live, unrehearsed records and they did pretty well. After that it was Horace who decided we should organize a group. He said, ‘We’ll call it the Jazz Messengers.’ So it was Horace who really put the name on it, and it stuck.
– Art Blakey, quoted by Herb Nolan in Down Beat, November 1979, p.21.
I remember when I first met [Horace Silver]. I used to call him “The Connecticut Yankee.” We met at Birdland when he was with Stan Getz. I had broken up the 17 Messengers and when we formed the group with Horace, Hank Mobley, and Kenny Dorham, he said let’s call it the Jazz Messengers. It started out as a corporation. That didn’t work out too good. So we just went on with it. We just carried on and tried to get other musicians to play jazz and build names and get them out there because we need more groups out there to hold the joints open, the jazz joints throughout the United States. I wasn’t too successful at doing that but at least we tried and I had a ball doing it.
– Art Blakey, Radio Free Jazz, March 1977, pp.17-18.
The group before with Horace, Lou Donaldson and Clifford Brown was a very, very happy group. I never will forget that one. And the records still sound fresh today.
– Art Blakey, Radio Free Jazz, March 1977, pp.17-18.
It was just one of those times and it was the right combination, it was a good spirit and the guys really loved each other.
– Art Blakey, Cadence, July 1981, p.9.
Art Blakey’s groups would be the standard bearers for hard bop throughout the fifties, sixties, seventies, and well into the 1980s. Blakey became one of the greatest recruiters of young talent through the years, a skill that kept his groups fresh for more than thirty years. Here is a later version of Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers perform the hard bop classic “Moanin’.” This group features Booby Timmons on piano, Jymie Merritt on bass, Benny Golson on tenor saxophone and Lee Morgan on trumpet.
Blue Train
In 1957, though still working on and off in the bands of Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane recorded his first solo album, Blue Train. Accompanied by Lee Morgan on trumpet, Curtis Fuller on trombone, Kenny Drew on piano and fellow Miles Davis collaborators Paul Chambers on bass and “Philly” Joe Jones on drums (“Philly” Joe was so nicknamed to keep from getting confused with Basie’s drummer “Papa” Jo Jones). The record features the band playing in a distinctly hard bop style. Though an early contribution by Coltrane to the jazz canona player that went on to become one of the most influential figures in jazzit is in no way diminished by this fact. The album combines some of the best talents the late 1950s hard bop scene had to offer.
“Blue Train” – John Coltrane (1957)
;
[Blue Trane] finds Trane blowing hard on one of his first albums as a band leader. With one foot still in the Charlie Parker catalog and one ear turned toward hard bop, the album sounds like a typical club set. The album is best known for the title track, Coltranes first notable composition. His solo starts off with an announcement that he has something to say, but quickly moves toward Birdland. Moments Notice and Locomotion also demonstrate that, even before his work was informed by his eventual stylistic uniqueness and spiritual depth, Trane could write a compelling, well-organized tune.
The groups rendering of the Kern/Mercer ballad Im Old Fashioned and Tranes Lazy Bird are a let down after the first three, although each has some nice playing by various band members.
The album benefits from Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones from Miles band laying down the bass and drums. Kenny Drews plays bluesy piano completes the excellent rhythm section. A young Lee Morgan contributes to the boppish flavor of the album with his Gillespie-ish licks (he even played a bent up horn). Curtis Fuller passes up the rapid fire riffing trombonists sometimes employ in trying to keep up with their more nimble bandmates in favor of a more nuanced, rhythmic variety. And he burns when he has to.
-Mark Schlack
The National Public Radio discussion of Blue Train below situates the album in the development of jazz as presented by poet and music historian A.B. Spellman.
Soul Jazz and the Organ Trio
By the end of the 1950s, a branch of hard bop was demonstrating an increasing amount of influence from the R&B and gospel of the day, what Horace Silver referred to as the “environmental, heredity, regional and spiritual influence” of the African American community in jazz. The connection with popular, more culturally-rooted music traditions was certainly in keeping with the aesthetic values hard bopa return to the blues and funky elements of jazzhowever by the early 1960s this approach to hard bop had become so distinct in its sound that it was given a name and a sub-genre all its own, soul jazz. Though still rooted in the jazz tradition, soul jazz found a much wider audience in the black community than more “traditional” approaches to jazz. For those jazz fans who found bebop too cerebral and the dixieland revival too out of touch with every day life, soul jazz provided the perfect alternative.
lonnie smith playing organ wearing his signature turban.jpg
Dr. Lonnie Smith at the Hammond B-3 organ
While soul jazz was often played in the traditional quintet instrumentation of drums, bass, piano, saxophone and trumpet, a new instrumentation also arose, the organ trio. Comprised of a drummer, guitarist and organist, the organ trio can almost be considered a sub-genre all its own. Playing similar tunes and with a similar feel to other soul jazz outfits this unique combination of instruments created textures and sounds unheard of in a more traditional line up. The organ in question was usually a Hammond B-3, equally capable of creating gritty, down-home effects and lush, rich tones. At the hands of a master player the B-3, supported by guitar and drums was a near perfect vehicle for delivering this new sound of soul jazz.
Listen below to two of the most influential figures in soul jazz, brothers Nat Adderley on cornet and Cannonball Adderley on alto saxophone.
The Jimmy Smith Trio performing “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” on television. This version of the group includes Smith on organ, Quentin Warren on guitar, and Billy Hart on drums.
Cubop
The music of Latin America and the Caribbean has intertwined and influenced jazz from the very beginning. In many regards, as critic Gene Santoro points out, “historically and culturally, New Orleans is a Caribbean city attached to the Mississippi Delta”as we have seen from our earlier discussion about the New Orleans jazz sound. Many of the dance music styles popular in turn-of-the-century New Orleans, those that influenced the formation of jazz, originated in Latin countries, including the charanga and danzón from Cuba. Pianist and New Orleanian Jelly Roll Morton spoke often of the “Spanish tinge” that was an essential element in the foundations of jazz.
Latin dances crazes have been a near-constant in the history of American popular music. The earliest of these fads occurred before the twentieth century with danzón, first invented around 1850. In 1913, the tango, a dance from Argentina took New York and then the rest of the country by storm, so much so that W.C. Handy employed a tango section as an introduction to his famous blues composition, “St. Louis Blues.” (have a look back at the St. Louis Blues lecture if you need a refresher.) The rumba became all the rage in 1930 following the success of the Cuban tune “El Manisero” or “The Peanut Vendor.”
“El Manisero” by the Don Azpiazu Havana Casino Orchestra
sung by Antonio Machin
This pattern would continue throughout the story of American music with dances like the Cha Cha, Samba, and Merengue. For the most part these dances, and the musicians that made them remained separate from jazz, however in the late 1930s into the 1940s a small group of musicians including Cubans Mario Bauza, Machito, Chano Pozo and American trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie recognized a great degree of synergy between the most recent dance music, the Cuban Mambo and jazz, particularly bebop. Thanks to their melding of styles, a new subset known as Afro Cuban jazz, or “Cubop” was it was often called, was created.
Clave: The Heartbeat of Cuban Music
Before we dig into the eventual merging of Cuban music and jazz, it is important to have an understanding of one of the most important elements of the Cuban sound, clave. Clave translates to key or code in English, and is the rhythmic building block of Cuban music. It is a short repeating rhythmic pattern played on two wooden wooden sticks that form the basis of the often complex rhythmic textures of the music. The sound of the clave is not always in the forefront of the music or even perceptible at times, but it is still almost always present on some level in most Cuban music. We can see and hear clave being played in the first ten seconds of “El Manicero” clip above, the clave player is on the right side of the screen.
The two most common clave patterns in Cuban music are the “3-2” and the “2-3.” They are both two bar patterns, “3-2” has three notes played in first bar and two in the second while the “2-3” is the same pattern in reverse. Listen to the example below to hear the two different clave patterns back to back (the 3-2 will be repeated twice followed by a break then the 2-3 will be repeated twice). The clave patterns are notated following the audio example.
Clave Rhythm (3-2, 2-3)
Son clave examples, 3 beats followed by 2 and 2 beats followed by 3.png
These clave patterns, played in the context of a full band, help contribute to the feeling of polyrhythm, two different rhythmic feels going on at once in music. This is created by clave rhythm occurring against an underlying, regular pulse. Click on the image of the clave sticks below below to hear the 3-2 clave and the pulse together. Concepts like polyrhythm and rhythmic variation against a steady pattern seemingly derived from a heritage of African music-making are key to the sound of Cuban styles.
Clave plus Pulse
Machito’s Afro-Cubans
Machito’s role in the formation of Afro-Cuban Jazz can not be overstated. It is widely understood that his band, the Afro-Cubans, were trailblazers in this regard. The band’s arrangements broke new ground by bringing persistent clave rhythms, contrasting rhythmic figures and dynamic contrast–elements that were essential to Afro-Cuban music making–into a big band jazz setting. Written by the band’s musical director/trumpet player Mario Bauza, these arrangements used the group’s instrumentation to great affect, creating a lush, yet powerful backdrop for Machito’s vocal work. This musical hybrid launched a craze which would last over a decade and remain a central style in 20th century dance music. The term for this new sound came to be known as the “Mambo.”
Machito sings “Tambor”
Dizzy Gillespie brings the bop to Cubop
In 1939, Dizzy Gillespie first met Cuban trumpet player Mario Bauza when they were both members of Cab Calloway’s Orchestra. The relationship between the two helped fuel Gillespie’s interest in the sounds of Machito and others who were popularizing Cuban music and Mambo at the time. Where Machito saw the easy similarities between swing and Afro-Cubanthey were both essentially dance music that featured cyclical forms and improvisationGillespie extended the relationship to Afro-Cuban and bebop. In the late 1940s, Gillespie was leading his own big band and wanted to bring the Afro-Cuban style into his own music. To help do so, he hired Cuban percussionist and songwriter Chano Ponzo.
’We Both Speak African’: A Dialogic Study of Afro-Cuban Jazz” (excerpted), Journal of the Society for American Music (5:2, 2011), 195233, by David García
This article situates [Chano] Pozo and the Gillespie big band among American anthropologists and jazz historians and African anticolonialists and folkloric dancers who had been working in the United States since the 1930s with a view to promoting an accurate understanding of African culture and (what was commonly referred to then as) the New World Negro. These scholars, activists, and performers challenged longstanding stereotypes that validated the notion of black inferiority by recognizing the historical and cultural vibrancy of Africa and its connections to black Caribbean and African American cultures. For instance, the West African anticolonialist organization African Academy of Arts and Research (AAAR) sponsored many forms of disseminating accurate information regarding the people of Africa and their cultural inheritance in the New World. One of the Academys concerts, which took place in 1947 prior to Pozos arrival in New York City, featured Gillespie accompanied by Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Nigerian percussionists performing music that some reporters described as African bebop. Events such as this one begin to explain Gillespies reasons for hiring Pozo and, most importantly, indicate that the music Gillespie and Pozo created was an expression of a broader and fervent movement to (1) define jazz as a modern African American art form with African and Caribbean roots and (2) transform the knowledge of Africa and its cultural inheritance in the New World.
The period of the 1930s and 1940s was an extraordinary time in the intellectual, political, and artistic affirmation of Africas importance to black cultures of the New World. In 1930 anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits published one of the earliest statements on the study of the New World Negro, in which he outlined the types of data available, to begin to address how African cultures persisted and interacted with the cultures of Europeans during slavery. In this article Herskovits introduced the concepts of cultural retention, survival, and intensity as a way to study the process of acculturation among black populations in the New World. In addition to his publications, Herskovits presented his research to nonacademic audiences in public speeches with the ultimate goal of debunking the myth of black inferiority in mainstream American society.
Meanwhile, African, African American, and Afro-Latin musicians and dancers in the United States worked regularly with academics and African anticolonialist activists who organized programs for white and black audiences that explored the interrelated histories of, and contemporary political and social issues facing, black populations of the Americas and Africa (the Gillespie African bebop” concert mentioned above was one such event).
Chano Pozo from Havana to New York City
Luciano Chano Pozo Gonzalez began to work as a professional musician in the late 1930s in Havana, performing in musical reviews in theaters. He quickly became successful in writing popular songs in the style of commercialized rumba. Pozo traversed various kinds of boundaries during his career in Havana. He actively performed with professional bands in nightclubs, as well as with neighborhood comparsas. Dance choreographers, theater producers, and radio programmers featured him as a performer of authentic Afro-Cuban dance and drumming. Furthermore, he was a commercially successful composer of Cuban popular songs, many of which were also recorded by Latin big bands in New York City.
Like many of his fellow Cuban musicians before him, Pozo eventually moved to New York City to further his career as a musician, composer, and entertainer. Most sources claim that he arrived in New York in February 1947. Advertisements and reviews of [his early NYC] shows indicate that Pozo performed típico (traditional) Afro-Cuban music as a featured singer, conga player, and dancer. Apparently, he did not join a Latin band as a regular member.
By September [1947] Gillespies interest in incorporating a Cuban percussionist into the big band had peaked. He invited Pozo to rehearse with the band after consulting with his Cuban friend and former swing band member Mario Bauzá. Besides his aim to re-Africanize jazz music, Gillespie had commercial motives for having a seasoned musician and stage performer join the band.
Pozos first recorded performance with the Gillespie big band took place on 29 September 1947 at Carnegie Hall. The rhythm section consisted of John Lewis (piano), AlMcKibbon (bass), Joe Harris (drums),Chano Pozo (conga), and Lorenzo Galan (bongo). When Pozo joined the band, McKibbon became concerned with the clash between the congas son tumbao (rhythmic pattern) and their underlying swing rhythmic structure. Cuban musician Mario Bauzá similarly noted that Pozos conga used to interrupt them, you know, until they found the right kind of approach. Gillespie on more than one occasion had to instruct Pozo to change his pattern:
There was one number that we played called Good Bait that he [Pozo] understood perfectly. So whenever he got on that wrong beat, Id go over and whisper in his ear, da-da, da-da-da [23 clave]. Hed change immediately, because if youre doing boom-boom, and youre supposed to be doing bap on a boom-boom, thats just like beeping when you should have bopped.
By February 1948 [if not before,] Pozo had grasped not only the rhythmic intricacies of playing in a jazz rhythm section but also the structural elements of jazz musical forms and the arrangements dynamics. Recorded in the studio on 30 December 1947, Manteca became an immediate audience favorite, and it remains one of the most, if not the most, recognized Afro-Cuban jazz pieces. More than just using Cuban rhythms, Manteca juxtaposes compositional structures from son and jazz music.
“Manteca” – Dizzy Gillespie (1947)
Jam Sessions and the Birth of Bebop
Theolonious Monk, Howard McGhee, Teddy Hill, and Roy Eldridge outside Minton’s Playhouse
From 1935 through World War II, swing dominated the world of popular music. By the early forties, WWII was taking its toll on all aspects of American life. Swing was no exception. Many of the biggest and best bands of the era couldn’t sustain their once-busy touring schedules in light of rising costs and reduced concert attendance. This, coupled with a two-year ban on commercial recordings starting in 1942, and a general backlash against the highly-commercialized direction the music was heading, signaled the beginning of the end for swing. In its place a plethora of styles filled the void left by the big bands. One of the most influential of these as be bop, jazz’s first “art music,” created in the late night jam sessions of New York.
The Jam Session
Throughout jazz history musicians would often gather after-hours to play together in a stripped-down context that focused on improvisation. At these sessions musicians would play tunes from the standard repertory with each player afforded ample time during each song to “stretch out”; that is to say, solo for multiple choruses and attempt to develop unique, elaborate musical ideas on the spot. Even the accompaniment was highly improvised with each member of the rhythm section creating their own parts and variations while still adhering to the underlying form of the song. More often than not the form would follow the standardized patterns of the blues or rhythm changes (the formal pattern found in the song “What is this Thing Called Love” discussed in unit 3). This process of extended, spontaneous improvisation came to be known as jamming. These loose, often impromptu gatherings were (and still are) called jam sessions.
Although they date back to the pre-jazz era in New Orleans, jam sessions were particularly popular during the swing era when most working musicians were employed by big bands where the opportunities for soloing were generally limited to eight or sixteen bar sections in a handful of tunes per night. This was fine as a way to make a living, but for many jazz musicians the act of improvisation, particularly in an “anything goes, let’s see what you’re made of” context, was what really interested and drove them. Often competitive in naturewhether on the surface in “battles” or more subtle one-upsmanship levelthese jam sessions served as the backdrop for major musical development and innovation, to both individual and stylistic, sometimes genre-bending degrees. Contributing to this creative atmosphere was the absolute lack of commercial or social pressures. There was no audience to keep entertained, only other musicians to impress, and no requirement to adhere to racial dividing linesmany jam sessions were integrated early on, well before the bands were.
Many of the top big band’s featured soloists were the most devoted attendees of late-night jam sessions. Lester Young (of the Basie band), Trummy Young (with Lunceford’s orchestra), Coleman Hawkins, Jack Teagarden (Whiteman), Roy Eldridge (Krupa), Charlie Christian (Goodman), and Teddy Wilson (Goodman), just to name a few, all became well-known in musicians circles for their improvisational skill.
Famous musicians jamming together.jpg
Jack Teagarden, Sidney Bechet, Big Sid Catlett, and Louis Armstrong
Louis Armstrong on the Importance of Improvisation and Jam Sessions (from his autobiography Swing That Music (1936))
Now the basic idea of swing music is not new. The swing idea of free improvisation by the players was at the core of jazz when it started back there in New Orleans thirty years ago. Those early boys were swing-men, though they didn’t know so much about it then as we do today. But they had the basic idea, all right. What happened was that this idea got lost when jazz swept over the country. I think the reason it got overlooked and lost was that when the public went crazy over jazz the music publishing companies and the record companies jumped in and had all the songs written down and recorded and they and the theatre producers and northern dance halls paid our boys more money than they’d ever heard of to help write down and play these songs. Popular songs before jazz had always been played the way they were written and that was what made “song hits” for the publishers. So the commercial men wanted the new jazz tunes played the same way so the public would come to learn them easily and sing them. The public liked that, too, because the new tunes were ” catchy” and different and people liked to sing them and hear them played that way. Jazz was new to them and they didn’t understand it enough to be ready for any “crazy business.” So most of the good jazz players and jazz bands which followed the Dixieland Five went down the easiest road where the big money was, and you can hardly blame them when you look back now and see how few people understood what it was really all about anyway. Some of the boys stuck along and just wouldn’t follow scoring, it wasn’t in ’em, and some of the others that didn’t learn to read music went on swinging the way they had learned to love. Very few of them ever made much money, but playing in small clubs and dives they kept swing alive for many years. Then there was another group of the boys who took a straddle and I think they were the smartest and that they have probably done more to bring swing into its own than anybody. They were the swing-men who went on into the commercial field, joined big conventional bands, played the game as it was dished out to them and made their money, and yet who loved swing so much that they kept it up outside of their regular jobs. They did it through the jam sessions held late at night after their work was done. It makes me think of the way the early Christians would hold their meetings in the catacombs under Rome. With those musicians I guess it was the old saying: “He who fights and runs away will live to fight another day.” At any rate, the truth is that most of the best-known swing artists of today are or were the crackshot musicians with big conventional bands (name bands, we call them because they are usually known by the name of their leader) or on big radio programs, but they don’t miss their jam sessions where they can cut loose as they please, with or without a leader, feel their own music running through them and really enjoy themselves. These swing-men who have come up to the top because of their musicianship are slowly having an influence or, the big bands they play with.
Footage of the Count Basie Orchestra live at Randall’s Island, New York City in 1938.
The soundtrack features extended soloing by Lester Young
By the early 1940s, jam sessions were an institution in Harlem. Attending the top jam sessions, and making a good showing, became a sort of rite of passage for aspiring musicians. Some of the most forward-thinking, creative players of the day were regular attendees of these musical gatherings. For a handful of musicians these informal settings served as a venue to try out new approaches to jazz. A handful of uptown jam sessions became synonymous with this spirit of experimentation, including the gatherings at Small’s Paradise, Monroe’s and Minton’s Playhouse. Out of these sessions bebop was born.
“Minton’s Playhouse,” (by Phil Schaap)
Minton’s was one of a number of clubs where early bop was played and it had an important role in the development of the music. Part of why it has gained such a tremendous reputation was that it remained a successful club, continuing uninterrupted for 32 years. In fact the club has since reopened so you might consider it as a 60 year institution.
What was striking about Minton’s in the early 40s was the jam session policy which lent itself to a wide range of sessions in which different players could get together and experiment with their music.
Henry Minton was able to create the club from part of the dining area in the Cecil Hotel in Harlem. Minton was a clarinet player and professional musician of high regard. In fact, back in 1920 he had been elected as the first black delegate to the musicians union in NY. Unlike many other unions, the American Federation of Musicians (local 802) was integrated from its beginning.
Minton hired Teddy Hill, a successful big band leader to manage the place. Hill had a great rapport with people and was instrumental in creating the club’s exciting atmosphere. This was partly due to the excellent house band which included Nick Fenton on bass, Kenny Clarke on drums, Joe Guy on trumpet and Thelonious Monk on piano.
The House Band would play the first couple of sets and then the evening’s jams would start to take place. Yes, Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker were there, but so were people like Count Basie and Benny Goodman. In fact you really can’t talk about just a few of the players because you leave out so many. It was one of the spots frequented by the musicians of that period.
What distinguished Minton’s from other clubs was while it was run like an “after hours joint,” the operations were above board and “advertiseable.” Minton’s jam session policy provided a space for musicians to experiment and examine their music. In a sense you might describe it as a laboratory (although that’s too formal a term) where players could try out new ideas. This is why it has the reputation for innovation.
An excerpt of a 1941 Minton’s jam featuring guitarist Charlie Christian,
one of the founding fathers of the bebop movement, with accompanying slide show of Charlie Christian images.
Bebop
Many of the generation of jazz musicians coming up in the early 1940s were frustrated with the direction the music was going. The immense popularity of swing resulted in more exposure and higher paychecks, but also extra-musical pressures that often stifled creativity. In an effort to maximize a band’s commercial appeal music industry executives often dictated what songs a group would feature, while club owners and radio stations told them how loud or how long they should play. For the younger generation, these commercial concessions only served to water down the sound and the intent of jazz. A select group of the disenchanted yet highly-talented jazz youth set out to create a new form of musical expression, bebop. As LeRoi Jones put it, “[they] showed up to restore jazz, in some sense, to its original separateness, to drag it outside the mainstream of American culture again.” The beboppers delivered their anti-establishment message not only in their music but in their clothing choices (note Monk’s beret and neck scar
