Word: bebopping
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None but the French have swum so easily in the rude and mysterious currents of American culture. They found philosophy in our comic strips, published our expatriate novelists, embraced Hollywood movies and dubbed their directors "auteurs." And when the pioneers of bebop pushed jazz away from melody and into the ionosphere of improvisation, French intellectuals were happy to welcome these black American outlaws to Paris after World War II. Bud Powell, the pathfinding bop pianist, settled there in the '50s, made friends and musical history and went a little crazy. Dexter Gordon, a crucial link in tenor-sax bop between...
...many contemporary composers of serious music have sought to expunge all extramusical references from their work. New Age music, on the other hand, is frankly, if often banally, evocative: of waterfalls, wheatfields, even the mysterious but benign resonance of deep space. All nature is grist for its mill. Former Bebop Jazzman Paul Winter, who is now making New Age records, lists his inspirations as he "African mbira (a hand-held instrument played with the fingers or thumbs) as well as the sounds of the humpback whale, eagle and the timber wolf." If much of the music does not actively demand...
...Spenser sings the best sassy blues: "Ideal options aren't something I have much to do with. Most of the time I'm shuttling between bad and worse." Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer prefers stride (when he's not playing chopsticks), and John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee fuses bebop and rap: "Go get the lady with the unusual haircut and add her to the stack. Go get Meyer and the boat and bring the boat around. Use the big anchor and the power takeoff winch to pull the Flush out of the mangroves. Cork up the Munequita...
...dressed like me." Onozuka's Odds On line, now in its first season, shows not only his affection for well-worn American work wear but also a witty and idiosyncratic eye for fabrication and shaping that make his clothes look as funny and funky and comfortable as something a bebop horn player might have worn in the '50s to a gig at Birdland. "I don't love any particular American designer," Onozuka says, "but I love American thrift shops, where you see something all crushed and hung up on a hanger as if someone had just taken...
...that he has been released from Leavenworth, where he was imprisoned for sleeping with an officer's wife. His assignment is to be Oppenheimer's driver and liaison with the native American population. As a well-traveled boxer and musician, Pena straddles two cultures. Oppenheimer calls him a "bebop Indian," though this is not an adequate description. But then, Los Alamos is a breeding ground of misapprehensions. Captain Augustino, the project security officer, is convinced that "Oppy" is passing information to the Soviets, while Klaus Fuchs, a real spy, fails to arouse the captain's suspicion. Anna Weiss, a mathematician...