Word: bebop
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...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...
...years, migrating north to Chicago and later New York and finally exploding world-wide on records. The jazz anyone plays today depends so much on what happened in those years--on the rise of overpowering soloists like Louis Armstrong, the big-city, big-band style of Duke Ellington, the bebop innovations of Charlie Parker, even the European heritage brought in more and more by the Modern Jazz Quartet--that, while young musicians can strive toward a self-consciously primitive jazz style, they cannot duplicate the attitude and style of the working-class men who, in the first quarter of this...
...modulated by a sophisticated Ellingtonian touch. The first Herd's explosive rendition of such numbers as Apple Honey and Northwest Passage appealed to just about everybody-including Igor Stravinsky, who wrote the Ebony Concerto for Woody in 1946. The second Herd (1947-50) tried to hitch up with bebop, but muffled its big beat in the process and dropped $175,000. In the '50s and early '60s, Herman leaned toward one pop trend and then another, but basically stuck to a swinging style that never buried the beat...
Taste and Love. Ever since Dixieland and ragtime, jazz has worked best, and spoken most eloquently for the black American, when it was most free and spontaneous. By the middle 1950s, after swing and bebop, jazz was wedded to the classics through the progressive jazz of Brubeck, the Modern Jazz Quartet and others. It took on an increasingly formal, warmed-over character. At that moment, the need for the New Thing first stirred among future jazz movers like Alto Saxophonist Ornette Coleman, Pianist Cecil Taylor and Tenor Saxophonist John Coltrane...