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COPYRIGHT 2005 Center For Black Music Research
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:
This new music expressed the emotional realities of musicians in the midst of a powerful verisimilitude--swing music--that they felt repeated and encouraged the same suppressions and denials that black musicians had been experiencing since the ascendance of ragtime. Inspired by the possibilities inherent in new harmonic, rhythmic, and timbral resources, and by the "carving" exploits of their predecessors, the young lions of the movement created a music that, in spite of its revolutionary intent and qualities, was based squarely in the tradition of the ring. The blues was its bedrock and propelling force, but in expressing the emerging values of a new age, these experimentalists (1) evolved a new harmonic conception, using extended chord structures that led to unprecedented harmonic and melodic variety; (2) developed an even more highly syncopated, linear rhythmic complexity and a melodic angularity in which the blue note of the fifth degree was established as an important melodic-harmonic device; [and] (3) reestablished the blues as the music's primary organizing and functional principle. (138)
Thereby was conceptualized an effective ideological weapon that the leading bebop musicians could use; it was recourse to the source, the African legacy symbolized by the blues form and tonal-harmonic structure. As an emerging power, Islam was associated with Africa by some bebop musicians, and yet "A Night in Tunisia"--if I may allude to one symbolic item--was wishful thinking. Much later, Eldridge Cleaver would spend many restless nights in Algeria. In America, the African legacy was the blues and its tonal system. It was sub-Saharan African cultures, some of which had absorbed elements from Arabic-Islamic culture, not North Africa, that had supplied the background to tonal and stylistic ideas in blues and jazz. Such awareness had continued to exist underground; it had been learned by African-American children and had also been transmitted by musicians such as Count Basie, Jay McShann, Duke Ellington, and others, with more fervor than King Oliver had ever been able to do.
One of the signs of the increasing ambivalence the young musicians of the 1940s felt toward diatonicism in jazz was their recourse to the blues tonal system. This was a foundation on which one could build. The blues tonal system, based on the retention and cultural transmission of auditory materials of non-Western origin, has found expression in jazz history in the most diverse ways and on various instruments. Shortly before the rise of bebop, Jimmy Yancey, Meade Lux Lewis, and others had brought a hitherto-unknown blues-related African legacy to the surface: boogie-woogie. Some left-hand bass lines could have been a reminder about blues tonality's background in west-central Sudanic traditions, and so would boogie-woogie's specific swing and "walking" bass figures that alternate the fifth and sixth scale degrees. (23)
Important to bebop was the fact that blues tonal ideas, in their essence, contradict the Western diatonic scale. Western-tuned keyboards have no slots for blue notes; they are simply not there. But their retention in America in vocal music, in reeds and brass, and even in the timbre of household objects turned out to be an invaluable resource for the resistance by African-American musicians of the 1940s to the never-changing "functional" relationships between tonic, dominant, and subdominant members of a stratified society (mirrored in music) that neither functioned nor harmonized. The time was favorable because nineteenth-century pop chords that had crystallized into ragtime had already retreated from the harmonic panel in swing jazz.
The blues tonal system was one strand on which to draw; equitonal principles and harmonic parallelism were another. But because every tonal sytem has its intrasystemic character, the tough nut to crack was how to represent those alternative auditory images on instruments tuned uniformly at 100-cent intervals, with each note identical in timbre, quite unlike those on African xylophones or lamellophones, in which each member of the tonal "family" would be allowed to display its own personality (timbre). Jazz musicians in the 1940s tried a variety of solutions.
Charlie Parker's pronouncements in an interview with Levin and Wilson (1949) have been quoted in almost every publication about the origins of bebop. Although their exact wording has never been authenticated, they can still give us a hint about what was going on in Parker's mind. Parker had performed "Cherokee" at Clark Monroe's Uptown House, New York, in early 1942. He was accompanied by an unknown band of eight or nine people, including Allan Tinney on the piano and possibly Ebenezer Paul on the bass. (24) Parker is quoted as having said:
I'd been getting bored with the stereotyped changes that were being used, ... and I kept thinking there's bound to be something else. I could hear it sometimes. I couldn't play it.... I was working over Cherokee, and, as I did, I found that by using the higher intervals of a chord as a melody line and backing them with appropriately related changes, I could play the thing I'd been hearing. It came alive. (17)
To me, this paragraph testifies to Parker's constant probing into the entire auditory spectrum. What was it that intrigued him? I think he must have been acutely aware, probably since childhood, of the faint higher partials of a timbre. Probably he was able to detect harmonics in ordinary household noises to the seventh, ninth, and perhaps thirteenth partials. The auditory environment can stimulate in a gifted child the development of these perceptions in long, lonely hours. Personally, I used to identify the seventh, eighth, and ninth partials in the noises of appliances and other machines, and I still feel compelled to do it sometimes. Parker must have been much better at it. I suppose that persons with this kind of auditory environmental processing will tend to find the Western tuning system and timbres shallow. In this sense, Parker's auditory inclinations were the African legacy in his life, reconfirmed by the experience of the blues tonal system, a sound world at odds with the Western diatonic chord categories....
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