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Bebop
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Bebop or bop is a form of jazz characterized by fast tempos and improvisation based on harmonic structure rather than melody. It was developed in the early and mid-1940s. It first surfaced in musicians' argot some time during the first two years of the Second World War.
1939 recording of "Body and Soul" by Coleman Hawkins is an important antecedent of bebop. Hawkins' willingness to stray — even briefly — from the ordinary resolution of musical themes and his playful jumps to double-time signaled a departure from existing jazz.
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Encyclopedia
Bebop or bop is a form of jazz characterized by fast tempos and improvisation based on harmonic structure rather than melody. It was developed in the early and mid-1940s. It first surfaced in musicians' argot some time during the first two years of the Second World War.
History
The 1939 recording of "Body and Soul" by Coleman Hawkins is an important antecedent of bebop. Hawkins' willingness to stray — even briefly — from the ordinary resolution of musical themes and his playful jumps to double-time signaled a departure from existing jazz. The recording was popular; but more importantly, from a historical perspective, Hawkins became an inspiration to a younger generation of jazz musicians, most notably Charlie Parker, in Kansas City.
In the 1940s, the younger generation of jazz musicians forged a new style out of the swing music of the 1930s. Mavericks like Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk were influenced by the preceding generation's adventurous soloists, such as pianists Art Tatum and Earl Hines, tenor saxophonists Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young and trumpeter Roy Eldridge. Gillespie and Parker, both out of the Earl Hines Band in Chicago had traveled with some of the pre-bop masters, including Jack Teagarden, Earl Hines and Jay McShann. These forerunners of bebop began exploring advanced harmonies, complex syncopation, altered chords, and chord substitutions and the bop generation advanced these techniques with a more freewheeling and often arcane approach.
Minton's Playhouse in New York served as a workout room and experimental theater for early bebop players, including Charlie Christian, who had already hinted at the bop style in innovative solos with Benny Goodman's band.
Christian's major influence was in the realm of rhythmic phrasing. Christian commonly emphasized weak beats and off beats, and often ended his phrases on the second half of the fourth beat. Christian experimented with asymmetrical phrasing, which was to become a core element of the new bop style. Swing improvisation was commonly constructed in two or four bar phrases that corresponded to the harmonic cadences of the underlying song form. Bop improvisers would often deploy phrases over an odd number of bars, and overlap their phrases across bar lines and across major harmonic cadences. Christian and the other early boppers would also begin stating a harmony in their improvised line before it appeared in the song form being outlined by the rhythm section. This momentary dissonance creates a strong sense of forward motion in the improvisation. Swing improvisers commonly emphasized the first and third beats of a measure. But in a bebop composition such as Dizzy Gillespie's "Salt Peanuts", the rhythmic emphasis switches to the second and fourth beats of the measure. Such new rhythmic phrasing techniques give the typical bop solo a feeling of floating free over the underlying song form, rather than being tied into the song form.
Swing drummers had kept up a steady four-to-the-bar pulse on the bass drum. Bop drummers, led by Kenny Clarke, moved the drumset's time-keeping function to the ride or hi-hat cymbal, reserving the bass drum for accents. Bass drum accents were colloquially termed "dropping bombs." Notable bop drummers such as Max Roach, Philly Joe Jones, Roy Haynes, and Kenny Clarke began to support and respond to soloists, almost like a shifting call and response.
This change increased the importance of the string bass. Now, the bass not only maintained the music's harmonic foundation, but also became responsible for establishing a metronomic rhythmic foundation by playing a "walking" bass line of four quarter notes to the bar. While small swing ensembles commonly functioned without a bassist, the new bop style required a bass in every small ensemble.
By 1950, a second wave of bebop musicians — such as Clifford Brown, Sonny Stitt, and Fats Navarro — began to smooth out the rhythmic eccentricities of early bebop. Instead of using jagged phrasing to create rhythmic interest, as the early boppers had, these musicians constructed their improvised lines out of long strings of eighth notes, and simply accented certain notes in the line to create rhythmic variety.
Musical style
Bebop differed drastically from the straightforward compositions of the swing era, and was instead characterized by fast tempos, asymmetrical phrasing, intricate melodies, and rhythm sections that expanded on their role as tempo-keepers. The music itself seemed jarringly different to the ears of the public, who were used to the bouncy, organized, danceable tunes of Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller during the swing era. Instead, bebop appeared to sound racing, nervous, and often fragmented. But to jazz musicians and jazz music lovers, bebop was an exciting and beautiful revolution in the art of jazz.
While swing music tended to feature orchestrated big band arrangements, bebop music was much more free in its structure. Typically, a theme (a "head," often the main melody of a pop or jazz standard of the swing era) would be presented together at the beginning and the end of each piece, with improvisational solos based on the chords of the tune. Thus, the majority of a song in bebop style would be improvisation, the only threads holding the work together being the underlying harmonies played by the rhythm section. Sometimes improvisation included references to the original melody or to other well-known melodic lines ("allusions," or "riffs"). Sometimes they were entirely original, spontaneous melodies from start to finish.
Chord progressions for bebop tunes were often taken directly from popular swing-era songs and reused with a new and more complex melody, forming new compositions. This practice was already well-established in earlier jazz, but it came to be central to the bebop style.
Bebop musicians also employed several harmonic devices not typical of the jazz music that had come before. Complicated harmonic substitutions for more basic chords became commonplace. These substitutions often emphasized certain dissonant intervals such as the flat ninth, sharp ninth and the sharp eleventh (or tri-tone).
Instrumentation
The classic bebop combo consisted of saxophone, trumpet, bass, drums, and piano. This was a format used (and popularized) by both Charlie Parker (alto sax) and Dizzy Gillespie (trumpet) in their 1940s groups and recordings, sometimes augmented by an extra saxophonist or guitar (electric or acoustic), occasionally adding other horns (often a trombone), or other strings (usually fiddle or violin) or dropping an instrument and leaving only a quartet.
Although only one part of a rich jazz tradition, bebop music continues to be played regularly throughout the world. Trends in improvisation since its era have changed from its harmonically-tethered style, but the capacity to improvise over a complex sequence of altered chords is a fundamental part of any jazz education.
Etymology
The word "bebop" is usually stated to be nonsense syllables (vocables) which were generated in scat singing, and is supposed to have been first attested in 1928. One speculation is that it was a term used by Charlie Christian, because it sounded like something he hummed along with his playing. However, possibly the most plausible theory is that it derives from the cry of "Arriba ! Arriba !" used by Latin American bandleaders of the period to encourage their bands. This squares with the fact that, originally, the terms "bebop" and "rebop" were used interchangeably. By 1945, the use of "bebop"/"rebop" as nonsense syllables was widespread in R&B music, for instance Lionel Hampton's "Hey Ba-Ba-Re-Bop", and a few years later in rock and roll, for instance Gene Vincent's "Be-Bop-A-Lula" (1956).
Alternatively, but following the logic of Gammond, the term could be derived from the shout of "Hey, vaya arriba", used by audiences to exhort a band to "Take it up". When pronounced in Caribbean Spanish, the "V" of vaya - to some ears - has a "B" sound and the terminal "A" of vaya continues into the initial "A" of arriba. The resulting sound, to an American ear, would be quite similar to the phrase "Hey, Ba-Ba Re-Bop". Also, a five note phrase, played variably melodically but always rhythmically invoking the phrase "Hey, Ba-Ba Re-Bop", is the most repeated phrase in all jazz improvisation from the 40's through the late 60s, thus implying that the term might, indeed, have phraseological origins in music and not in language.
Bebop's influence
By the mid-1950s musicians (Miles Davis and John Coltrane among others) began to explore directions beyond the standard bebop vocabulary. Simultaneously, other players expanded on the bold steps of bebop: "cool jazz" or "West Coast jazz", modal jazz, as well as free jazz and avant-garde forms of development from the likes of George Russell.
Bebop style also influenced the Beat Generation whose spoken-word style drew on jazz rhythms, and whose poets often employed jazz musicians to accompany them. The bebop influence also shows in rock and roll, which contains solos employing a form similar to bop solos, and "hippies" of the 60s and 70s, who, like the boppers had a unique, non-conformist style of dress, a vocabulary incoherent to outsiders, and a communion through music. Fans of bebop were not restricted to the USA; the music gained cult status in France and Japan.
More recently, Hip-hop artists (A Tribe Called Quest, Guru) have cited bebop as an influence on their rapping and rhythmic style. Bassist Ron Carter even collaborated with A Tribe Called Quest on 1991's The Low End Theory, and vibraphonist Roy Ayers and trumpeter Donald Byrd were featured on Jazzmatazz, by Guru, in the same year. Bebop samples, especially bass lines, ride cymbal swing clips, and horn and piano riffs are found throughout the hip-hop compendium.
Samples
- Download sample of "Bird of Paradise" by Charlie Parker from In a Soulful Mood
Bebop musicians
Notable musicians identified with bebop:
- Cannonball Adderley, alto sax
- Chet Baker, trumpet
- Art Blakey, Drums
- Clifford Brown, trumpet
- Ray Brown, bass
- Kenny Burrell, guitar
- Don Byas, tenor sax
- Paul Chambers, bass
- Charlie Christian, guitar
- Kenny Clarke, drums
- John Coltrane, tenor sax
- Tadd Dameron, piano
- Miles Davis, trumpet
- Kenny Dorham, trumpet
- Carl Fontana, trombone
- Curtis Fuller, trombone
- Dizzy Gillespie, trumpet
- Stan Getz, tenor sax
- Dexter Gordon, tenor sax
- Wardell Gray, saxophone
- Al Haig, piano
- Sadik Hakim, piano
- Barry Harris, piano
- Percy Heath, bass
- Milt Jackson, vibes
- J. J. Johnson, trombone
- Duke Jordan, piano
- Lee Konitz, alto sax
- Stan Levey, drums
- Lou Levy, piano
- John Lewis, piano
- Dodo Marmarosa, piano
- Howard McGhee, trumpet
- Charles McPherson, Alto Sax
- Charles Mingus, bass
- Thelonious Monk, piano
- Wes Montgomery, guitar
- Fats Navarro, trumpet
- Charlie Parker, alto sax
- Joe Pass, guitar
- Oscar Pettiford, bass
- Tommy Potter, bass
- Bud Powell, piano
- Max Roach, drums
- Red Rodney, trumpet
- Sonny Rollins, tenor sax
- Frank Rosolino, trombone
- Sonny Stitt, tenor and alto sax
- Lucky Thompson, tenor sax
- George Wallington, piano
Sources
- Berendt, Joachim E. The Jazz Book: From Ragtime to Fusion and Beyond. Trans. Bredigkeit, H. and B. with Dan Morgenstern. Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill & Co., 1975.
- Deveaux, Scott.. The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
- Gidden, Gary. Celebrating Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker. New York City: Morrow, 1987.
- Gioia, Ted. The History of Jazz. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
- Baillie, Harold B. Swing to Bop: An Oral History of the Transition of Jazz in the 1940s. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.
- Rosenthal, David. Hard bop: Jazz and Black Music, 1955-1965. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
- Scaruffi, Piero. A History of Jazz Music, 1900-2000 (2007) ISBN 978-0-9765531-3-7
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