Word: bebop
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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DIED. Frank ("Machito") Grillo, 76, Cuban-born bandleader whose 1940s Afro-Cuban dance bands wedded advanced jazz harmonies, big-band instrumentation and pulsing Latin rhythms, helping create salsa and change the course of modern jazz; of a stroke; in London. After World War II, such bebop jazz artists as Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker adapted his Afro-Cuban sound to small-group jazz and often performed and recorded with Machito...
...music, they will put an eye on you. You're going to be like pro-American or something, you know." He also recalls some advice given him when he was playing with the fine Cuban band Irakere in the mid-'70s. "If you want to keep playing bebop on your saxophone, you do it, but don't say it. Don't say jazz. Call it 'progressive Cuban socialist music,' and then you play bebop...
Avant-gardists might applaud his lyrical technique and solid bebop chops while nurturing doubts about his innovative abilities. D'Rivera tends a little toward caution himself-"I like electronics," he says, "but I am very careful with it"-and, even when searching for fresh inspiration, tends to stay close to the roots...
DIED. Thelonious Monk, 64, brilliant and eccentric jazz pianist and founding father of bebop; of a stroke; in Englewood, N. J. As a teenager, Monk honed his highly personal style-skewed melodies, oblique harmonic progressions-in Harlem during the Depression with Trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and Alto-Saxman Charlie ("Bird") Parker. He developed an angular breakaway from conventional jazz that came to be known as bebop and, finally, bop. His asymmetrical ideas had a powerful influence on modern jazz musicians and a whole generation of horn players, but Monk himself lapsed into virtual obscurity in the 1950s. Rescued by a series...
...mood was somber, reflecting anxiety over the arms race, education and the Government's new budget. Some speakers used the campus rostrum for political oratory. One university, Fairleigh Dickinson in Rutherford, N.J., chose not to have a speaker. Instead the students called in Trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, creator of bebop, and let him play his songs Ow and Groovin' High. The campus visit briefly unsettled Gillespie. Afterward the jazzman recalled with a chuckle: "I looked at my program and read, 'Commencement address: Dizzy Gillespie.' I was terrified. Everybody knows a jazz trumpeter's instrument doesn...