Word: bebop
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Jazz rock is merely the handy rubric. The music itself is one of the most exuberant, rich and versatile brands of pop to come along since the heyday of Dylan and the Beatles. From the flowering of boogie-woogie and swing in the 1930s to the advent of bebop and then cool in the 1940s, jazz has lived and gained new ground through hybridization...
...founders of bebop in the 1940s. Now Dartmouth has asked Dizzy Gillespie to become a professor of music. For Gillespie, 55, and for a generation of jazz musicians, this recognition of the cultural importance of jazz was "a long time comin'." Added Dizzy, who is currently playing in Belgium: "A lot's changed since I began. A jazz musician can play with symphonies now. Jazz will be the classical music of the future...
Time: 1950. Scene: Birdland, the now defunct Manhattan cellar where the faithful gathered to hear the latest sounds of bebop. Backstage, the goings on were something less than harmonious, even for bop. The band was taking a vote. It seemed that the house pianist would not contribute to the group's heroin kitty. In fact, he was not interested in drugs at all. That would hardly do, and consequently Billy Taylor was voted out. "I don't know," recalls Taylor, "maybe they thought I was trying to give jazz a good name...
...Jazz Session II" in Radio City Music Hall brought together 30 musicians in an exciting, albeit seemingly disorganized, concert before an enthusiastic young audience. That many of the musicians had never played together before created more interest than actual disorganization. Three of the seven sets were particularly notable. A bebop set led by Dizzy Gillespie and Art Blakey was marked by bizarre incidents as well as musical highlights. Art Blakey amused the audience by running on and off stage carrying his cymbals as the fanatics pleaded for an encore. The height of weirdness came when a violinist with a shaved...
Soon nobody was gonging off Bird. In his 20s, he had already become a legend. He had given his name to Birdland, and along with Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell had founded a whole new jazz idiom called bebop. The beginning came one night while Parker was playing Cherokee in a Manhattan chili house: he reached up and got his line by filching the top notes off the chords. By mingling spontaneous pirouettes of fanciful improvisations with a tune's melody he vastly expanded the freedom of musicians...