Word: bebop
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Little Herbie Solomon was, every body said, a square. While the other saxophone players at Brooklyn's Abra ham Lincoln High School were trying to imitate the new bebop style of Charlie ("Bird") Parker. Herbie was still practicing to old Illinois Jacquet and Flip Phillips records. You're not with it, Herbie, they said, and refused to let him play with the school's dance band...
MARY LOU WILLIAMS (Mary) swung her way into bebop and then retired from jazz to devote herself to prayer and good works. After ten years' absence from the recording mike, she is back in good form as the pianistic pivot of several talented groups, among them the Howard Roberts Chorus, which sings her Black Christ of the Andes. As a hymn it is simple and moving, with cool kaleidoscopic harmonies, but its jazz superstructure seems to be an afterthought...
...needling inspiration to the others. Rhythms scrambled forward at his touch; the oblique boldness of his harmonies forced the horn players into flights the likes of which had never been heard before. "The Monk runs deep," Bird would say, and with some reluctance Monk became "the High Priest of Bebop." The name of the new sound, Monk now says, was a slight misunderstanding of his invention: "I was calling it bipbop, but the others must have heard me wrong." When bop drifted out of Harlem and into wider popularity after the war, Monk was already embarked on his long...
There came a time ten years ago when Mary Lou Williams decided that jazz was the devil's own music. She was among the best of the bebop pianists, but out on the scene she sensed evil all around her. She could even hear it echo in her playing. One blue night in Paris, "the badness" overwhelmed her; she got up from the piano and quit jazz cold. She drew up a list of names to pray for (urgent cases marked in red), and before long she had an endless coil of sadness, an encyclopedia of bad trouble...
...about to nail the lid on his career with a Dino de Laurentiis film called The Chet Baker Story, but as his luck would have it, the project was dropped: there was not enough material in a life so young and lost. > DRUMMER KENNY CLARKE, 49, was One of bebop's frontiersmen, and when he left for Europe in 1956, he was generally considered the best drummer around. He conceals his reasons for leaving behind a smile of wellbeing, and of all the Americans in Europe, Clarke is by far the most successful. He has a pavilion outside Paris...