Word: bop
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Avant-garde jazz grew out of a reaction to the increasing slickness of jazz in its hard bop and cool phases in the late '50s. Musicians who had grown up with the bop revolution could rattle off chordal solos with such facility that there were no longer any challenges left. To restore the music's freshness, another revolution was necessary, but like most revolutions, it brought changes for which few were prepared. Musicians such as Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman sought to move outside the boundaries of traditional musical structure, to ignore the rules of harmony and tonality. Such...
When the Modern Jazz Quartet was formed in 1952, it was a musical revelation. Bop, with its honks and squawks and dissonances, was at the height of its popularity. Dizzy Gillespie was king...
Harvard football has finally broken onto the national sports scene. While watching ABC's Monday Night Football, I distinctly heard the master of magniloquence, that prince of prolixity, Howard Cosell say that he might indeed "bop up" to Cambridge today to witness the spectacle of Ivy football...
Last month's release of Roxy & Elsewhere, a live Zappa album, makes the same point: Zappa has not yet made a firm commitment either to commercialism and top-40 rock, or to original, honest music that disregards industry and public pressure to record million-selling albums. "Be-Bop Tango" is among the best cuts on the new record because it typifies Zappa music and Zappa humor. If you listen carefully to George Duke's scat singing, you hear strains of Thelonius Monk's "Straight No Chaser" and a Zappa remark about 4/4 time: "It's a pedestrian beat...
Miles Davis tops off the week. He's playing today through Saturday at Paul's Mall in Boston and is, as everybody must know, the single dominant figure in jazz. He started out as a Charlie Parker protege in the late 40s, playing bop trumpet, and after Bird died picked up a few proteges of his own--people like Max Roach, Herbie Hancock and John Coltrane were all in his band at one time. Miles went from hot to cool, and then in the late 60s back to hot again, and now his music is spacey and heavily rock-influenced...