ROOTS OF BEBOP

The 'boppists' were very conscious of the past, reworking standard jazz melodies and quoting at length from their predecessors. The harmonic shadings of Coleman Hawkins, Art Tatum and Duke Ellington had taken jazz forward in the late 1930s, as too did the melodic invention of Lester Young and Roy Eldridge, all of whom were role models for aspiring bop players. Bebop had a strong Kansas City derivation with its use of a less prescriptive rhythm section. It was in part a reaction to the excesses of the big band swing era, which had pushed jazz along a nationwide, commercial road; and in part the forward momentum and constant innovation that is at the heart of jazz history. It was almost as if all prevailing jazz dictums were overthrown: bop favoured the small combo not the (uneconomic) big band, the searing tone of Charlie Parker and not the studied lyricism of Benny Carter, unison opening melodic statements rather than dense textures, and, most importantly, improvisation was its soul rather than arrangement or composition. There is too a smattering of the 'bunker mentality' of the jazz musician, the musician playing only for himself; and also a sense of taking jazz from just entertainment, just a dance form, to another level - that of the respected artist, where Parker and his kind could be considered alongside Bartok or Ravel. Bop was never a conscious movement, but the accidental meeting of forward thinking musical minds expanding the boundaries of the jazz world in the 1940s. Dissatisfied sidemen in the big bands of Teddy Hill, Billy Eckstine and others, and the big band of the benevolent Earl Hines (a band, which like Buddy Bolden's before, was never recorded) were the seedbeds where 'boppists' developed. Its fusion point was 52nd Street in New York, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, where small jazz clubs had proliferated in the late 1930s. Typical of these clubs were Monroe's Uptown House and Minton's, where travelling musician's joined the house band for after hours jam sessions. Here the language of bop, a new musical etiquette, was developed.

BOP'S PROGRESS

Parker moved on to Los Angeles and bop swept the country. The new independent record labels, such as Guild and Savoy, which had grown out of the musician's union recording strike of the early 1940s, were able to catch its developing years from 1945 onwards. But the tragic life and early death of Charlie Parker was symbolic: like its chief protagonist, bop burnt furiously bright for only a short while. It became an established jazz gospel, and, like a religious movement, shattered into sects. Throughout the 1950s bop was tugged one way and then another as new conceptions were developed and its vocabulary extended.