Hard bop: Jazz and Black Music, 1955-1965

by David Rosenthal

  Some of the chaos and excitement of those wild times at Minton's comes through in saxophonist Illinois Jacquet's description of the club in To Be or Not to Bop, Dizzy Gillespie's autobiography: "During the time in the forties when Minton's was operating, we used to go up there and jam. I was with the bands at the time, and I would come in and out of town. When I was in the city, we were appearing at the Apollo or downtown at the Paramount or the Strand. After the last show we'd go to Minton's and sit in or listen to some of the guys play.

  "It was sorta like a free-for-all. People that could play would wanna sit in. They could get up and play. Take a chorus or join the session. Sometimes there would be guys that couldn't play as well as some of the other guys. Still, they had the opportunity to get up there and play. But sometimes they would be a little off key. They would think that Monk would be in the key of B-flat, and he would be in the key of F-sharp or D natural. And then these guys wouldn't stay on the stand too long because they could never find the keys that Monk was playing in. So right there he knew that they would probably not be qualified to take up all that time with those long undesirable solos. And like Monk and the others would get into some weird keys sometimes, and while they'd be changing keys, things would be getting modern all the time, because the keys were sorta hanging them up a little bit too sometimes. But a lotta guys just wanted to get up there and pose, and the music was not coming out; quite naturally they tried to get into another key when they saw them coming. You'd modulate into another key, and they wouldn't stay up there too long. Then when they disappeared, the regular guys would come up that could really play, and they'd go on and finish what they were trying to do. So, like, you would get a chance to play things that you would ordinarily play in B-flat, in D natural, see. But you were schooled enough to play in those keys because you knew when you were in a different key.

  "There were many, many giants that would come in there to play. People like Dizzy, Charlie Parker, Denzil Best, Harold West, Shadow Wilson. Sometimes the late Sid Catlett would come in. Monk, Sir Charles Thompson, Bud Powell, Freddie Webster, Don Byas. It was just like a jam, somewhere to go and play. Late at night, because it seemed like the music would sound better that time of morning. They didn't have nothing to do but go to bed. They didn't have to make no shows or be between shows. The job was over."1

  By 1945, the more adventurous among this crew had developed a style—"bop" or "bebop"—that clearly distinguished them from their elders. Its leading lights (some were already beboppers in 1945; others emerged over the next few years) were trumpeters Gillespie, Fats Navarro, Miles Davis, and Kenny Dorham; saxophonists Parker, Sonny Stitt, and Dexter Gordon; pianists Monk and Bud Powell; drummers Clarke, Max Roach, and Art Blakey; and composer Tadd Dameron. Technically, bebop was characterized by fast tempos, complex harmonies, intricate melodies, and rhythm sections that laid down a steady beat only on the bass and the drummer's ride cymbal. Bebop tunes were often labyrinthine, full of surprising twists and turns. All these factors—plus the predominance of small combos in bebop—set the music apart from the Swing bands of the 1930s.

  As a style, bebop was remarkably of a piece, best played by the nucleus of musicians who had been responsible for its technical and aesthetic breakthroughs. Because of the school's compactness, many if not most bebop tunes are also "typical" ones. For instance, Charlie Parker's composition "Donna Lee," which he recorded for Savoy Records with Miles Davis, Bud Powell, bassist Tommy Potter, and Max Roach, is based on the chords to the popular song "Indiana." This in itself was a standard bebop procedure, and "Donna Lee" is a classic bebop melody: serpentine, eccentrically syncopated, and based more on improvisational phrasing than on a simple, "songlike" theme. The three soloists (Parker, Davis, and Powell) all play long phrases that frequently violate the bar lines, spilling over them and beginning and ending in unexpected places. These phrases are counterbalanced, especially in Parker's solo, by fragmentary shorter ones: scraps of material that add to the performance's impromptu quality and to the feeling that we're listening to someone "think aloud," trying out motifs as he modulates from one idea to another. The dense rhythmic counterpoint is enriched by Powell's and, even more, Roach's use of accents placed asymmetrically, sometimes in response to the solos but often tugging against them. Harmonically, all three statements are full of "passing" notes and forays into the outer reaches of the chords. Finally, Parker's tone, slightly shrill, hard-edged, vibratoless and glossy, also tells us we're listening to bebop. Indeed, it formed the basis for virtually every black jazz altoist's sound between 1945 and 1960. On "Donna Lee" and dozens of other masterpieces of the era, everything is off center, almost perversely so . . . eppur si muove! (Galileo's words: "And yet it moves!") The most intricate acrobatics are accomplished with apparently effortless grace and swing.

  More than forty years later, bebop's innovations have been thoroughly absorbed into jazz. Bebop was, after all, a form of jazz, and it was also a logical and inevitable extension of what had come before it. Nonetheless, its initial appearance struck young musicians like a bolt of lightning. Ross Russell, in his novel The Sound, evokes one variant of this response: "The music was full of splintered phrasing and astringent sounds. Its rhythm was angular and complex, queer, off center, yet riveted to some atavistic rock. After a few bars it began to eat away at the nervous system, like something one might have heard at a tribal dance in Africa. It hypnotized. At the same time it irritated. It was jazz. Yet it was not jazz. Certainly it had little in common with the music of Ellington and Goodman, or the swing style that Bemie [the book's hero, a white pianist] understood. It seemed to reflect the turmoil and insecurity of the war years. At the same time it implied a profound contempt for those who had been foolish enough to become involved with the war. But it came forth full loined and girded, arrogant and disquieting. Quite unmistakably, it was all of a piece. Bernie listened and made mental notes. Harmonically the style had not advanced much beyond Ravel and French impressionism. The unique aspects lay rather in the airy, vibratoless intonation of the instruments, more in the classical style than jazz, and in the dodging, off-center rhythms. This could all be reduced fairly to notation, scored and arranged, and might very well decribe the form, but would it explain the emotional content? Bernie wondered how it had all come about and if the girl had the wit or the will to tell him, and, if so, in what sort of language that he might understand. Cool! Gone! Even, the greatest—none of these seemed adequate or precise. The set came to a close. House lights came up. There was no mistaking the reaction of the crowd. The room began to buzz with muted, excited conversation."2

  As this passage suggests, it was not just bebop's technical side but also its emotional charge and even the "hip" world that surrounded it that were so striking and seductive. The United States was entering a period of anesthetized consumerism in 1945, but important minorities either opted out of or were forcibly excluded from these values. In another passage in the same novel, Russell describes bebop's audience: "In addition to the 'young dancing crowd,' Jimmy Vann [leader of the big band in which Bernie plays] was drawing from another group unique in music history. Bernie could well remember the 'alligators' of the late swing period, those serious types, self-styled students of American jazz, who used to edge up to the orchestra shell and remain there all night, indefatigably listening. The 'alligators' were timid souls and few in number. Bernie wondered if they were the spiritual fathers of the new hipster hordes. Certainly the audience of pure listeners, as distinguished from those who came merely to dance, had undergone a remarkable expansion . . . They were most numerous in and around San Francisco. They paid their way into the dance halls. No question there! But all spending stopped at the box office. They formed a cordon several ranks deep around the orchestra shell, cutting dancers off from the source of the music. They ducked under trombone slides, jostled Hassan's drums and sometimes Bernie's piano bench. They did not date. This was considered corny. They did not drink. Also corny. They gave the impression that they h
ad never danced a step in their lives, nor had any intention of so doing. They closed around the bandstand like a cordon of police protecting a head of state . . .

  "Between sets they would gravitate to the roped-off section of tables usually found in the Western dance halls and there, among the litter of iced coffee glasses, and a haze of smoke, laced with the sweet pungent aroma of freshly-burned marijuana, establish their headquarters."3

  Bebop, of course, was many things to many people. To some it was a fad, a weird style of dressing and talking. An ad for Fox Bros. Tailors in Chicago featured the following spiel: "That's right, man! Bop King, Dizzy Gillespie and his great band are another addition to the steadily growing number of top musicians who have made the switch to FOX BROS, for the greatest uniforms and accessories. You dig?" The ad then gives Fox Bros.' prices for "bop ties," "bop caps," and "bop crushers," and ends by urging customers to "order YOUR Leopard Skin Jacket as worn by Dizzy Gillespie . . . BOP IN AND LET FOX BUILD YOU A CRAZY BOX! "4

  To young beboppers, the new music was a banner of rebellion, filled with the excitement of discovery, turning jazz inside out and electrifying a musical language in danger of excessive codification. To "hipsters" it was an alternative lifestyle, pursued with varying degrees of fanaticism. At its most extreme, the world of bebop meant rejecting respectability in favor of a bohemian quest for strong sensations, for the aesthetic and spiritual. Through their dress, vaguely suggestive of European literary intellectuals—berets, goatees, horn-rimmed glasses—beboppers and their followers clearly signaled their affinities.

  In Blues People, an excellent study of the sociology of jazz, Leroi Jones jAmiri Baraka) points to bebop's obvious connection with frustrated black hopes: that the masses moving north during World War II would encounter an integrated society, and that soldiers risking their lives for "democracy" would find justice on their return home. The resulting fury and greater cultural sophistication among urban blacks were certainly two of the vectors converging in bebop: "The Negro music that developed in the forties had more than an accidental implication of social upheaval associated with it. To a certain extent, the music resulted from conscious attempts to remove it from the danger of mainstream dilution or even understanding. For one thing, the young musicians began to think of themselves as serious musicians, even artists, and not performers. And that attitude erased immediately the protective and parochial atmosphere of 'the folk expression' from jazz. Musicians like Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, and Dizzy Gillespie were all quoted at various times as saying, 'I don't care if you listen to my music or not.' This attitude certainly must have mystified the speakeasy-Charleston-Cotton-Club set of white Americans, who had identified jazz only with liberation from the social responsibilities of full ctitzenship."5

  Bebop, then, was partly an outburst of black rage and denial, an attempt to create an alternative world from which one could gaze with distant irony at "square" America. As a bohemian subculture, it was far more tumultuous and original, more genuinely homegrown, than such relatively respectable predecessors as the "Harlem Renaissance" of the 1920s. Cool, ironic distance; it's not for nothing that beboppers' favorite drug was heroin. In the late 1940s, having made a decision familiar to anyone who's watched The Godfather, the Mafia introduced heroin into black ghettos in New York and other cities. The drug's impact on musicians was devastating. Of course, no one forced them to take it, and some didn't, at least not very often—for example, Gillespie, Monk, and vibist Milt Jackson. On the other hand, for "keeping cool" in the face of humiliating and exasperating circumstances, heroin is remarkably effective. In addition to being black, beboppers also had to cope with a sense of being undervalued as artists, denied respect and recognition, and forced to create under sordid and exploitative conditions. Whether all these feelings were equally justified is perhaps debatable, but they have been the common ones among modem-jazz musicians. A list of some major trumpeters of the late 1940s should suggest the extent of heroin addiction—and its consequences—among beboppers: Miles Davis (drug problems in the early 1950s); Freddie Webster (dead at thirty in 1947, a "legendary" figure who scarcely recorded, the Buddy Bolden of modern jazz); Little Benny Harris (best known as composer of "Ornithology," rarely recorded); Sonny Berman (dead at twenty-three in 1947); Red Rodney and Howard McGhee (both out of commission during much of the 1950s); and Fats Navarro (dead in 1950 at twenty-six of tuberculosis complicated by drug addiction).

  Most of these musicians were black (the exceptions being Berman and Rodney), as were all the most original and influential beboppers. Many of the bands and the scene surrounding the music, however, were racially mixed. Where bebop was performed in New York City says a lot about the pigmentation of its audience. Some of the best clubs were in Harlem and Bedford Stuyvesant; others were in Greenwich Village, an island of at least partial integration though predominantly white. The movement's epicenter, however, was 52nd Street between 5th and 6th avenues, in the heart of midtown Manhattan. This block, known simply as "The Street," housed clubs like the 3 Deuces, the Downbeat, the Famous Door, the Spotlite, Kelly's Stables, the Yacht Club, and the Onyx. In Ira Gitler's survey of bebop, Jazz Masters of the 40s, Dexter Gordon sums up what many musicians felt about The Street: "Unquestionably, it was the most exciting half a block in the world. Everything was going on—music, chicks, connections ... so many musicians working down there, side by side."6

  From 1945 till the mid-sixties, jazz was also the preferred music of white renegades, bohemians, and artists. It was particularly central for the loose-knit group of writers associated with the "beat" movement. Jack Kerouac, for example, declared that it all began for him when saxophonist Lester Young turned him on in 1941 to his first joint of marijuana at Minton's. Allen Ginsberg's most celebrated poem, "Howl," begins with these lines:

  I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,

  starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn

  looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly

  connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of

  night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up

  smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats

  floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,7

  Although "Howl" is not about jazz, jazz enters the poem in a number of guises and plays a number of roles in it. In these lines and elsewhere, jazz is dangled like a talisman. It has the power to evoke worlds of desolate courage. It lives by its improvisatory risk-taking and exploration of what came to be known literarily as "open form." And it "fits" with the poem's preceding imagery of drugs, ghettos, transcendence-out-of-squalor, and, of course, rebellion and rejection of bourgeois complacency. Bebop and jazz as a whole, for obvious reasons, could not mean the same things to whites as they did to blacks. Nonetheless, the implications and significances ascribed to them in "Howl" are not very different from those we find in black poet Amiri Baraka's work in the 1950s.

  Yet despite all these associations and bebop's experimental audacity, feelings of rage and rebelliousness do not come through in the music itself. Most bebop, in fact, is exuberant, and this is not primarily a matter of fast tempos. The joy of creation and delight in newness are its most notable affects, and in many bebop performances, it would be hard to identify any other, more nonmusical emotion being expressed. Two exceptions, and for this reason two artists whose work fore- shadowed hard bop's evolution in the 1950s, were Tadd Dameron and Bud Powell.

  If Charlie Parker was bebop's improvisational genius, its Louis Armstrong, then Dameron (1917-1965)—all other things being equal—would have been its Duke Ellington. All other things, however, were not equal. Dameron's career was repeatedly thrown off track by heroin addiction, and he suffered an enforced stay at the Federal Narcotics Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky, from 1958 to 1961. Though there is enough Dameron on records to demonstrate his brilliance, he did not bequeath anythin
g like the corpus Ellington did; nor, except for a period in the late forties, could he keep a regular working band together.

  Dameron's genius lay in his gift for truly memorable melodies, simple yet full of freshness and surprise, songlike and meshed with the harmonies that underpinned them in a way characteristic of the best twentieth-century North American pop and jazz composers. Not surprisingly, Dameron's two heroes were George Gershwin and Duke Ellington. In a conversation with Ira Gitler, he remarked: "When I heard George Gershwin, then I said, 'This is really it.' Gershwin was beautiful. Gershwin and Duke Ellington—always Duke Ellington."8 Gitler has also quoted Dameron on his general approach to music: "Standing in front of his band while rehearsing for a recording date in 1953, he told his men: 'Make those phrases flow. When I write something it's with beauty in mind. It has to swing, sure, but it has to be beautiful.' In 1961 he told me, 'I'm trying to stress melody, with flowing chords, chords that make the melody interesting. I'm trying to build a bridge between popular music and the so-called modern music. I think there is too wide a gap. You can tell that from the way they sell.'"»