With bop, you had to know—not feel; you had to know what you were doing.
h o w a r d m c g h e e
The older musicians did what they had to do. But in the age that we came up in we didn’t have to do those things, you know? We just figured, we felt like we were liberated people, and we acted like liberated people. d i z z y g i l l e s p i e
When Leonard Feather assembled a group portrait of the bebop move-ment for his 1949 book Inside Be-bop, the bop revolution had reached its crest. The place of honor was given to the two ‘‘living legends’’ of bebop, Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. Crowding the picture were their musical progeny—the even more youthful wave of musicians drawn to the movement by the 1945 recordings. Parker and Gillespie, still at the beginning of potentially long careers (Parker was not yet thirty), had already attained the status of founding fathers. Their revo-lutionary exploits earlier in the decade were painstakingly documented and celebrated in Feather’s prose, supplying the raw material for an of-ficial history of the insurgency, now successful and settling in for a long stay.
As events receded further into the past, the utility of revolutionary fervor vanished. Even the word bebop became an embarrassment, linked as it was to social eccentricity and drug abuse and the planned obsoles-cence of fashion. Within a few years, Feather’s publisher convinced him to change the title of the book to Inside Jazz. The change, in retrospect, is significant. Bebop has become yet another style of jazz, yoked in an ironic embrace to the traditions it fought so hard to displace. In the pro-cess, the early history of bebop is reduced to a period piece, nostalgia for
1 6 8
.
Professionals After Hoursthose unwilling to relinquish their glimpse of a time when the ‘‘world was swinging with change.’’
It is a challenge, therefore, to return to the beginning of the 1940s, to the earliest point at which it is possible to imagine a bebop movement, and try to understand just what sent the bop pioneers on their unortho-dox path. A group portrait taken sometime in 1942, although featuring many of the same faces, would look quite different from the successful, cocksure revolutionaries several years later. It would be a snapshot, not a formal portrait, since the various parties would not necessarily know one another, and certainly would not understand why they were being assembled. They would be a raffish, heterogeneous bunch, some mugging for the camera, others standing indifferently with their backs turned.
Most would have a professional identity with one or another of the large dance bands, although some, like the reclusive Thelonious Monk, would not. Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker would already be recognizable as figures to be reckoned with, although it would be hard to foresee how their divergent temperaments and musical proclivities could be bridged.
Others now familiar to jazz fans would be ranged alongside them (Kenny Clarke) or just edging into the picture frame (Max Roach, Bud Powell).
But the group would include many now largely lost to obscurity: Howard McGhee, Joe Guy, Leonard Gaskin, Allen Tinney, Vic Coulsen, Benny Harris, Kermit Scott.
It is misleading to speak of the ‘‘typical’’ bebop pioneer: the sample is too small, the spiky sense of individuality too prominent. Nevertheless, some sense of the forces drawing this disparate group together may be gleaned by examining their salient collective characteristics.
First, the bebop revolution was distinctly African-American—a move-ment with a firm base in the musicians’ community of Harlem. There were, to be sure, a few white faces in the crowd from the start: Johnny Carisi sat in frequently at Minton’s, while as early as 1944 bop bands on 52nd Street used pianists Al Haig and George Wallington and drummer Stan Levey. Racial mixing was no casual public gesture in the early 1940s, even in relatively tolerant New York City. The willingness of blacks like Gillespie to accept and even encourage white musicians in their midst proves that there was no conscious policy of racial exclusion behind be-bop. If anything, these transgressions were a deliberate and provocative attempt to extend the relaxed social spirit of the musicians’ community, within which personal relations between blacks and whites were more collegial than in perhaps any other professional sphere of the time, into the broader public sphere of commerce.
Spitballs and Tricky Riffs
.
1 6 9But if bebop cannot be easily tied to a conscious expression of a sepa-ratist sentiment, it was nevertheless rooted deeply in the uncomfortable realities of race in America. For jazz musicians, the situation was par-ticularly poignant, for music was manifestly capable of transcending ra-cial barriers. Yet there is no escaping the fact that black musicians lived and worked in a separate and unequal world, facing obstacles and endur-ing indignities that set them apart from their white counterparts. Even as they enjoyed a degree of social freedom and prosperity known to few others of their race, they were acutely aware of their precarious status as second-class citizens. Bebop was shaped and to an extent stimulated by these social facts. Without the omnipresent pressure of racial hostility, musicians of such divergent talents and temperaments might not have found themselves forced into the same narrow space, and they would not have had the same incentives to forge a new path.
Second, the bop pioneers were young—in their teens or early twenties in 1942. Their ranks were occasionally peppered with older musicians, who either sponsored their activities (Earl Hines, Coleman Hawkins, both nearing forty) or recorded with them (Sid Catlett, Clyde Hart, Cozy Cole, Budd Johnson, Don Byas, all in their early thirties). But on the whole, the bebop generation falls within a strikingly narrow age range. With the exception of Kenny Clarke (born in 1914), nearly all were born be-tween 1917 and 1924, and entered professional life sometime bebe-tween 1935 and 1942.1
The formative years of the bop pioneers’ careers were therefore bounded by two crucial historical events: the boom and bust cycle of the Swing Era and the outbreak of the Second World War. The Swing Era defined the ‘‘art world’’ within which they would live and work. As we have seen, the startling expansion of the music industry shattered the older, more static role of the dance musician, holding out the tantalizing prospect of unprecedented reward (even as it systematically constrained the possibility for individual action). Those coming of age after 1935 naturally had higher expectations than their predecessors, for they could
1. A partial list of bebop pioneers, by birth date, would include Kenny Clarke (1914); Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Tadd Dameron (1917); Howard McGhee, Tommy Potter, Charlie Christian (1918); Art Blakey (1919); Charlie Parker, Gil Fuller, Leonard Gaskin, Joe Guy, Curley Russell (1920); Allen Tinney, Billy Taylor (1921); Oscar Pettiford, Duke Jordan, Cecil Payne (1922); George Wallington, Dexter Gordon (1923); Max Roach, Bud Powell, J. J. Johnson, Benny Harris, Al Haig, Sarah Vaughan (1924); Stan Levey (1925).
Older musicians often associated with bop, either by performing and recording with bop groups or as leaders of bands that employed bop musicians, include Earl Hines (1903);
Hawkins (1904); Sid Catlett, Budd Johnson, Clyde Hart (1910); Don Byas, Trummy Young (1912); and Billy Eckstine (1914).
1 7 0
.
Professionals After Hourssee firsthand the vast profits being made. They were predictably frus-trated when the economic contraction after 1939 forced them into un-equal competition with both their white counterparts and older, better-connected black musicians for a share of the shrinking pie. The onset of war partially salvaged the situation, by stimulating the economy with new defense spending and creating a nearly hysterical demand for en-tertainment on the home front. But the fabric of American life was warped by war into unpredictable new patterns. The resultant chaos un-dermined the status quo, making it easier for the imaginative and am-bitious to challenge it.
Finally, the majority of bop pioneers were committed to careers as commercial dance musicians. They fit Howard Becker’s category of ‘‘in-tegrated professionals’’—participants in an art world whose contributions mesh smoothly and efficiently with those of other professionals (whether performers, creators, logistical support, or middlemen) to create artistic products.
This point requires reiterating because the beboppers have so often been caricatured as disgruntled and marginalized rebels, alienated by the
‘‘tasteless commercialism’’ of swing and bent from the outset on creating an avant-garde movement that would ‘‘drag [jazz] outside the main-stream of American culture.’’ Disgruntled and alienated they may have become, even colorfully so (the bohemianism that has figured so promi-nently in popular accounts is not entirely an exaggeration). But the early history of bebop suggests that they originally saw themselves—if only for the want of a realistic alternative—as dedicated and even enthusiastic participants in a system that offered, at least in theory, a reasonable re-ward for artistic excellence. Their reaction to the Swing Era, to both its music and its business arrangements, was not revulsion that art and com-merce had promiscuously been allowed to mix, but frustration that things could no longer be made to work to their advantage.
To construe the bop revolution as ‘‘anticommercial’’ is naive. Bebop proposed a revised relationship between artist and audience that tried to avoid the most debilitating or distasteful consequences of the cash nexus;
but significantly, ‘‘the political economy of jazz in the 1940s . . . was not appreciably different from that of earlier decades. . . . Bebop was pro-duced, distributed, and consumed within the same network of capitalist social relations as ’30s swing and ’20s early jazz.’’ The boppers had no particular quarrel with their profession per se, but by virtue of the restless energy of youth they had few inhibitions against reshaping it as circum-stance seemed to dictate. In this, they resembled Thomas Kuhn’s
revo-Spitballs and Tricky Riffs
.
1 7 1lutionaries: ‘‘Almost always the men who achieve these fundamental in-ventions of a new paradigm have been either very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they change. And perhaps that point need not have been made explicit, for obviously these are the men who, being little committed by prior practice to the traditional rules . . . are particularly likely to see that those rules no longer define a playable game and to conceive another set that can replace them.’’
The particular form that bebop took, in short, resulted from the ex-plosive combination of broad economic opportunity with the realities of racial inequality. The music industry gathered young musicians of ex-traordinary skill together from across the country and concentrated them in New York City. Racial inequality ensured that their efforts would be underrewarded and their talents would go underutilized. The peculiar dynamics of the jam session suggested a new shape and purpose for their intellectual and artistic aspirations. Without these circumstances, it is unlikely that there would have been a bebop movement.
A Spectrum of Possibilities
The careers of the bebop pioneers tended to follow a predictable pattern, beginning with a period of apprenticeship. From their diverse points of geographic origin, they rose rapidly through the ranks of various local or territory bands, making their mark as soloists, arrangers, or reliable sidemen. By 1942 most had reached the level of the national or name dance bands, spending much of their time on the road but returning often enough to New York to establish a reputation in the musicians’ com-munity there. In various after-hours clubs and jam session spots, they fell into the company of others who shared their interests and attitudes.
Their training was likely to have been haphazard, mostly a matter of self-education. In their fascination with technical virtuosity and harmonic complexity, fueled by an engaging combination of restless curiosity and guileless ambition, they were self-consciously progressive.
To this point, the broad outlines of their experiences differed little from those of hundreds of other black musicians over the previous decade. It is the subsequent phase that sets the bebop generation apart: a period of disillusionment, coinciding with the beginning of the war, in which they gradually began to disengage themselves from the art world of the Swing Era. Exactly when a given musician began imagining an alternative to the usual career path is impossible to say. The process was a subtle one, perhaps perceivable only in hindsight. Some factors—thwarted ambition,
1 7 2
.
Professionals After Hoursa weary disgust with working conditions—conspired to dislodge musi-cians, at least temporarily, from their usual career paths. Others pulled them toward the after-hours jam session, a shadow world closely asso-ciated with the professional world of the dance musician and yet set apart from it. These factors and their effect on the bop generation from 1942 to 1945 will be described and analyzed in more detail in subsequent chap-ters: the jam session in chapter 5, the disruptions of the war years in chapter 6.
For now, the focus is on explicating the pattern that brought the bebop pioneers to 1942. Within the general pattern, of course, there was ample room for individuality. The two most important musicians of bebop—
Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie—show with particular clarity how sharply divergent temperaments and personal goals within the bebop movement could be.
In their public personalities as well as in their personal lives, Parker and Gillespie were a study in contrast. As his nickname indicates, John Birks ‘‘Dizzy’’ Gillespie cultivated a mischievous persona. ‘‘I was all-ways bad, you know,’’ he once told an interviewer. Onstage, he was constantly in motion, animated by a barbed humor that drew most of its edge by signifying on the traditional role of the black entertainer—keeping the squares amused at their own expense. Offstage, he was a shrewd and sober businessman who was as responsible as anyone for the direction the bebop movement ultimately took. He was, according to Miles Davis, the ‘‘head and hands’’ of bebop, ‘‘the one who kept it all together.’’ Gil-lespie’s progress from brash outsider to establishment figure (chosen by the State Department to represent America on overseas tours at the height of the cold war) is the progress of bebop itself, from fringe move-ment with bohemian overtones to as near the center of American culture as jazz is likely to get.2
2. Which, apparently, is not very far. Gillespie’s sensitivity to being on the outside as a black jazz musician was amply demonstrated during a televised musical evening at the Reagan White House on 4 December 1982. The hapless Itzhak Perlman, acting as master of ceremonies, turned at one point to the white saxophonist Stan Getz to ask him about the origins of bebop (Gary Giddins, ‘‘Jazz and the Reagans: They Don’t Call It the White House for Nothing,’’ Village Voice 27 [21 December 1982]: 1, 105). Getz had the sense to duck the question, but Gillespie, already infuriated at his treatment by the White House staff (‘‘they sent me down some fried chicken, a couple of pieces of watermelon’’), vented his anger afterward to the press: ‘‘Perlman asked what bebop was. Getz didn’t know what to say. Here was a guy asking him about the music when I was really one of its creators.
Getz should have pointed to me and said, ‘Ask him.’ . . . I’m mad. And don’t let me get
Spitballs and Tricky Riffs
.
1 7 3Charlie Parker’s life, by contrast, was a painful mixture of steely de-termination and sordid excess. Even as he helped Gillespie steer bebop into the mainstream in the 1950s, his descent into a personal hell was a public spectacle—‘‘like a man dismembering himself with a dull razor on a spotlighted stage,’’ as Ralph Ellison has written. He became entangled with drug abuse as a teenager, and for all the brilliance of his musical achievements, never strayed far from the underworld of pushers and the shadow of drug-induced psychosis. His tragicomic and self-destructive behavior, amply documented and even celebrated in books such as Robert Reisner’s Bird: The Legend of Charlie Parker and Ross Russell’s Bird Lives!, have become part of jazz folklore—the dark underside of bebop.
‘‘Bird was great and a genius musician, man, but he was also one of the slimiest and greediest motherfuckers who ever lived in this world,’’ re-members Miles Davis, who knew Parker well enough to judge. And yet Parker is also known for his fierce and uncompromising dedication to music. He stood unnervingly still while he played, all of his mental and physical energy concentrated on the task at hand. ‘‘No jazzman, not even Miles Davis, struggled harder to escape the entertainer’s role than Charlie Parker,’’ Ellison declares. Trumpeter Howard McGhee makes the follow-ing pointed comparison: ‘‘See, Dizzy was a comedian. He’s funny, he likes to be funny and laugh and so forth. Bird wasn’t like that, he was a serious man. And he figured, when you hit that bandstand, you supposed to be serious. You ain’t supposed to be making people laugh and all that bullshit, like Dizzy would be doing. And he would get mad when he’d see Dizzy do that.’’
Parker and Gillespie were polar opposites in other ways as well. Parker came across as a ‘‘natural’’ musician, whose creations, rooted in the blues tradition, seemed effortless. He had the knack of making the most radical innovations seem instantly understandable, masking both the bristling complexity of the musical language and the disciplined intellect behind it. ‘‘He’d play a phrase,’’ remembers Gillespie, ‘‘and people might never have heard it before. But he’d start it, and the people would finish it with him, humming. It would be so lyrical and simple that it just seemed the most natural thing to play.’’ Parker’s ability to absorb the musical world around him into his playing—as evidenced in his lifelong habit of pep-pering his solos with ingeniously apposite quotations from popular
mad. . . . Man, it was a travesty’’ (Leah Garchik, ‘‘A Breezy Afternoon with Dizzy,’’ San Francisco Chronicle, 20 February 1983, Datebook, 37).
1 7 4
.
Professionals After Hourssongs—astonished his colleagues. Pianist John Malachi recalls that mu-sicians in the Billy Eckstine band used to gather in Parker’s room to listen to the saxophonist play along fluidly with whatever was being broadcast on the radio. ‘‘The alto saxophone was just a metal pipe with keys to him. Whatever he heard, he played.’’
Gillespie, by contrast, was more visibly a striver. ‘‘Bird paid strict at-tention to what people did,’’ according to Buddy Anderson, the trumpeter who first introduced Parker and Gillespie in 1940, ‘‘and if he found any-thing that they did that struck him, he brought that into his any-thing. . . . But Diz is damn near all Diz, and it’s a little bit studied, but nobody could do it but Diz.’’ By his own admission, Gillespie lacked bluesy intensity:
‘‘I’m not what you call a ‘blues’ player,’’ he wrote in his autobiography.
‘‘I mean in the authentic sense of the blues. . . . My music is not that deep—not as deep as Hot Lips Page or Charlie Parker, because Yard [Parker]
‘‘I mean in the authentic sense of the blues. . . . My music is not that deep—not as deep as Hot Lips Page or Charlie Parker, because Yard [Parker]