Bebop: a case in point. (The African Matrix in Jazz Harmonic Practices.(Critical essay)

The literature on bebop is vast, from contemporaneous accounts such as that by Leonard Feather (1949) to Dizzy Gillespie's memoirs (1979), from detailed musicological and stylistic studies (Owens 1974, 1995) to postmodernist constructions of the jazz tradition from a choice-and-decision-oriented perspective (DeVeaux 1997). One sociopsychological description of the start of bebop has been to emphasize its rejection of commercialized jazz with its harmonic cliches, its Westernized tonal ideas, and the way of life it all symbolized. It is assumed that from this rejection originated most of the drive for trying a different path. Long before Malcolm X, the Black Panther movement, and Louis Farrakhan, bebop was a symbolic sociopolitical reaction to mainstream American values. The emerging conflict was played out in the musical field and by individual idiosyncracies and not by street action, but it was perhaps the most powerful protest by an African-American intellectual elite that the country had seen by the mid-twentieth century.

Samuel Floyd (1995, 136) has outlined three interconnected areas of change:

In the 1940s, certain transitional musical events began to take place in African-American music--events that would have far-reaching effects and would change the course of black music in subsequent decades. These events took place as follows:

1. In jazz, the rise of bebop, with its creators returning to and embracing elements of African-American myth and ritual, changed the course of the genre.

2. In popular music, the rise of rhythm and blues laid the foundation for rock 'n' roll and soul music and also caused an incursion of black music into white society.

3. In concert-hall music, certain black composers embraced myth, paid homage to ritual, and produced works of high quality and import, signaling the rise of black composers of first rank in American society.

With specific reference to bebop, Floyd writes: