The History of Jazz (42 page)

What was this new music? Early modern jazz, or bebop as it soon came to be called, rebelled against the populist trappings of swing music. The simple riffs, the accessible vocals, the orientation toward providing accompaniment to social dancing, the thick big band textures built on interlocking brass and reed sections— these trademarks of prewar jazz were set aside in favor of a more streamlined, more insistent style. Some things, of course, did not change. The thirty-two-bar song form and the twelve-bar blues remained cornerstones of the beboppers’ repertoire. Frequently bebop composers simply grafted an exotic name and a new (and usually more complex) melody onto the chords of earlier popular standards. For example, Thelonious Monk’s “52nd Street Theme” borrowed the harmonies of “I Got Rhythm,” while Charlie Parker’s “Ornithology” was a similar reworking of “How High the Moon.” The instrumentation of modern jazz also stayed true to prewar models. Although the beboppers preferred the small-combo format to the prevalent big band sound, the underlying rhythm section of piano, string bass, drums, and occasionally guitar went unchallenged, as did the use of saxophones, trumpets, and trombones as typical frontline instruments.

Yet how these instruments were played underwent a sea change in the context of modern jazz. Improvised lines grew faster, more complex. The syncopations and dotted eighth note phrasings that had characterized earlier jazz were now far less prominent. Instead, long phrases might stay on the beat for measures at a time, built on a steady stream of eighth or sixteenth notes executed with quasi-mechanical precision, occasionally broken by a triplet, a pregnant pause, an interpolation of dotted eighths or whirlwind thirty-second notes, or a piercing offbeat phrase. The conception of musical time also changed hand in hand with this new way of phrasing; otherwise this less syncopated approach might have sounded rhythmically lifeless, a tepid jazz equivalent to the even sixteenth notes of baroque music. The 2/4 rhythmic feeling of New Orleans and Chicago was now completely replaced by the streamlined 4/4 sound favored by the Kansas City bands. But even more important, phrases often began and ended on the weak beats (two and four) or, increasingly, between beats, with unexpected points of emphasis adding to the querulous, incisive tone of the music. These characteristics imparted an off-balance quality to the proceedings and provided momentum for the solos, which now sometimes stretched on at great length, chorus after chorus. Above all, these crystalline improvisations were made vibrant by the breathless speed with which they were executed. Never before had instrumental technique been so central to the music’s sound. Rarely had jazz tempos been so fast. Or, for that matter, so slow—the boppers were not afraid of even the most languid ballad tempos, but even in these instances their solos frequently implied a doubling of the stated time, staying true to the ethos of speed at all costs. The onomatopoeia of its nickname—at first “rebop” or “bebop,” eventually shortened further to a simple “bop”—was all too fitting. This was music built out of small jabs and feints, rather than the sucker-punch haymakers, driven by straightforward syncopations, of an Armstrong or Hawkins, a Beiderbecke or Bechet.

The harmonic implications of this music also revealed a newfound complexity. Each of the major modern jazz composers delighted in certain trademark harmonic structures: note Dizzy Gillespie’s fondness for patterns that descend in whole or half-steps, for example in “Con Alma” or in his tautly conceived interlude to “A Night in Tunisia,” which unfolds with the austere precision of a Bach prelude; or Charlie Parker’s predilection for ii–V substitutions in “Confirmation,” “Blues for Alice,” or the famous bridge to “Ko Ko”; or, most iconoclastic of all, Thelonious Monk’s mastery of dissonances and unconventional chord structures, so beyond the mainstream that over a generation would pass before Monk’s more outré works became regular parts of the jazz repertoire. True, these devices had been used in jazz before, but never to such a degree. Ellington’s keyboard work from the 1930s and 1940s was heavily laced with dissonance, but these avant-garde tendencies were evident only to careful listeners who detected the eccentric piano work that underlay the big band sound. And, of course, the chords of “Ko Ko” were anything but new, having been borrowed wholesale from the swing standard “Cherokee.” But before Parker, few dared to solo on this rapid romp through the circle of fifths, and the hearty souls who did would have never tried it at the tempos that the boppers preferred.

But more often, the harmonic complexity of modern jazz was implicit, suggested in the melody lines and improvisations rather than stated outright in the chords of the songs. After all, most bop compositions simply followed, more or less, the conventional progressions of prewar standards. But even when working over the familiar territory of “I Got Rhythm” or the twelve-bar blues, the boppers made heavy use of flatted ninths, sharpened elevenths, and other altered or higher intervals, to a degree unknown in earlier jazz. To gauge the full extent of this change, one need merely study the melody line to “Donna Lee,” Charlie Parker’s reworking of the standard “Indiana.” The melody of “Indiana” is conventional, staying close to chord tones at all times, but Parker’s piece immediately moves into deeper waters: almost every bar features one or more altered tones—an augmented fifth, a major seventh played against a minor chord, a flatted ninth leading to a sharpened ninth, and the like. The composition as a whole is nothing less than a textbook example of how bop harmonic thinking revolutionized the flow of the melodic line in jazz. One recalls Parker’s alleged statement that an improviser should be able to use any note against any chord—it was simply a matter of placing it in the right context. All in all, the thirty-two bars of “Donna Lee” serve as a compact proof, almost Euclidean in its elegance, of this daring proposal.

Yet there was also a core of simplicity to this music. Arrangements were sparse, almost to an extreme. Renouncing the thick textures of the big band sound, beboppers mostly opted for monophonic melody statements. And even when there were two or more horns in the band—the pairing of saxophone and trumpet was a typical front line for a bop ensemble—they usually played the melody in unison. The quest for extended compositional forms—the holy grail of jazz—held little fascination for modern jazz players. Their compositional forms were mostly ready-to-hand, drawn from the American popular song repertoire.

The boppers were not formalists. Content, not form, was their preoccupation. Instrumental solos were at the heart of each performance, sandwiched between an opening and closing statement of the melody. Deviations from this recipe were rare— occasionally an interlude might be used between solos (as in Dizzy Gillespie’s “Salt Peanuts”); introductions or codas might be allowed, but they rarely lasted for more than four bars. The free play of improvisation was the thing. Amateur recordings of the day—such as the famous Charlie Parker tapes and discs made by Dean Benedetti or Ralph Bass’s searing account of Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray battling over “The Hunt”—often leave out the melody statements entirely. The tape is not turned on until the solos start, almost as if the tune itself were inconsequential, like the advertisements and coming attractions that fill time before the feature film begins.

The celebrated histories of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie might lead one to believe that this musical revolution took place only on the front line, an upheaval among horn players. In fact, much of the changing sensibility of modern jazz was driven by the rhythm sections. In this regard, the rebel streak of modern jazz revealed its ample distance from the New Orleans–Chicago–New York triangle that had defined so much of the music’s tradition. The rhythmic pulse of this new music instead traced its lineage to the Midwest and Southwest, and especially to Kansas City. The shimmering high-hat sound of a Jo Jones, the crackling guitar lines of a Charlie Christian, the 4/4 walking lines of a Walter Page or a Jimmy Blanton, the sparse piano comping of a Count Basie—each anticipated crucial elements that would come to define the bebop rhythmic sensibility. Under such influences, each instrument in the jazz rhythm section underwent a transformation during these years. The pulse of the music became less sharply articulated, more pointillistic. Sudden accents—the so-called bass drum bombs dropped by bebop percussionists or the crisp comping chords of pianists and guitarists—now frequently arrived off the beat or on weak beats. The dashing tempos required impeccable timekeeping and unprecedented stamina. After the onslaught of modern jazz, the rhythm section would never be the same.

But musicological analysis only takes us so far. Bebop was defined by its social context as much as by the flats and sharps of its altered chords. Outsiders even within the jazz world, the modern jazz players had the dubious distinction of belonging to an underclass within an underclass. Remember, this was a musical revolution made, first and foremost, by sidemen, not stars. Not by Benny Goodman, but by his guitarist Charlie Christian. Not by Duke Ellington, but by his bassist Jimmy Blanton. Not by Earl Hines, but by his saxophonist Charlie Parker. Not by Cab Calloway, but by his trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie. Not by Coleman Hawkins, but by his pianist Thelonious Monk. Not by Louis Armstrong, but by his saxophonist Dexter Gordon. Unfettered by the commercial pressures that beset the name bandleaders of the day, these obscure practitioners of an unheralded art were free to pursue the extreme implications of this new sound. These less-than-famous players relished the opportunity to make a statement with “their” music, and the more difficult it was, all the better— little wonder that the resulting bebop style was, in sports parlance, in your face, a twentieth-century African American way of
épater les bourgeoisie
.

The individualism of the beboppers was fired further by their marginal status as black Americans at a critical juncture in U.S. history. In this last generation before the end of segregation and the passage of the Civil Rights Act, African Americans were intent on testing the limits as never before. The first generation of jazz players had succeeded as entertainers, and white America was content to celebrate them on that level. But the black jazz players of the 1940s wanted more. They demanded acceptance as artists, as esteemed practitioners of a serious musical form. Previously only a rare individual—a Scott Joplin or a Duke Ellington—aspired to these heights. But with the advent of bebop, a whole generation of black musicians was asserting itself as coequals with the purveyors of highbrow culture, the classical composers, the dramatists, the poets, the painters, the sculptors. Another generation would pass before jazz musicians began attending music conservatories in large numbers, but already by the 1940s the ethos that would inspire such ambitions was already evident.

Thus, the birth of modern jazz took place at a strange crossroads: drawing, on the one side, from the pungent roots and rhythms of Kansas City jazz, on the other delving into the rarefied atmosphere of high art. If a contradiction existed, it was exemplified most concretely in the music and abbreviated career of Charlie Parker. Parker the highbrow? One could sense it when, calling his sidemen to the bandstand, he summoned them by playing a snippet of Hindemith on the alto; or when he identified Stravinsky’s “The Song of the Nightingale” during a blindfold test conducted for
Downbeat
in 1948—“Give that all the stars you’ve got,” he told interviewer Leonard Feather—and went on to discuss Prokofiev, Hindemith, Debussy, and Ravel; or when, at the peak of his career, he announced his intention of taking composition lessons from the visionary classical composer Edgard Varèse. Parker the Kansas City jazz stalwart? This was his other, equally valid lineage. Who could deny it after hearing the bittersweet lament of “Parker’s Mood,” as deep a statement of the blues as exists in the jazz tradition? Jazz’s past and future intersect in the life and times of this seminal figure.

Born in Kansas City, Kansas, on August 29, 1920—and moving across the border to Kansas City, Missouri, at age seven—Parker imbibed this tradition at its source, his formative years coinciding with the Pendergast era of semilegal vice with a jazz accompaniment. Like many of his generation, Parker learned jazz through recordings as well as at first hand—but most of his major influences were linked to his Kansas City environs. Above all, Lester Young—whose recorded solos Parker learned note for note—influenced the youngster with a linear conception of improvisation, one that indirectly set the foundation for modern jazz. But two early employers also left their stamp on Parker’s music: saxophonist Buster Smith, a mainstay of Kansas City jazz (who had worked with the Blue Devils and Bennie Moten by the time he hired seventeen-year-old Charlie Parker for his own band in 1937), and Jay McShann, the quintessential Kaycee pianist and master of blues-drenched swing, who helped bring Parker to a national audience a short while later.

Parker’s father, Charles Sr., had worked the black theater circuit as a pianist, singer, and dancer before settling in Kansas City. After his son’s birth, he was rarely at home, both because of his drinking, which was forbidden in the household, and his second career as a chef on a Pullman line. Before Charlie’s tenth birthday, his father had left the household for good. The task of rearing the youngster fell to Parker’s mother, Addie, a strong-willed and religious woman who made ends meet through a variety of jobs: taking in boarders, doing laundry, working as a charwoman. Parker was, by all accounts, a mama’s boy, coddled and pampered by his doting mother. “That’s what I worked for and what I lived for, that boy,” she told an interviewer years later, inconsolable after her son’s early death.
¹

Parker’s first flirtation with music was spurred by an unlikely source. Around the time he entered high school, the youngster heard a radio broadcast featuring the saxophone work of Rudy Vallee, a saccharine crooner more remembered for his stylized vocals than as a horn player. Responding to her son’s urgings, Addie Parker purchased a used alto saxophone for $45. The youngster briefly studied music at Lincoln High School—where Walter Page and a host of Kansas City jazzmen had trained before him—but soon became disappointed with the baritone horn he was assigned in the school band (“all I did was play
coop, coop—coop, coop
,” he recalled in a 1950 interview). His interest was rekindled when he began associating with older students whose musical interests tended toward jazz.