Word: bop
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...mini-neighborhoods, each with its own trace of accent, its own numbered Main Street. Don't register surprise when you turn a corner in New York and find a different town: Walk reconstituted from the graceful spirituality of Riverside Church; you are a matter of blocks from the be-bop, voodoo jungle of Harlem. Gaze down from the tallest, plushest apartment building, and spy a slum at its feet. The very old is never far from the very new. Nor the very rich from the very poor...
...State of Grace. Since 1939, when Powell first soared to prominence as a 15-year-old boy wonder, his entire career has been a long, tense battle with drink, drugs and derangement. He sat in at the birth of bop at Minton's Playhouse in New York, toured with Cootie Williams' Orchestra. Then in 1945 he suffered the first of a series of breakdowns that have kept him in and out of mental hospitals ever since. He formed his own trio in 1949 and was soon the dominant pianist in jazz and the idol of a generation...
...Bop Ruled the Night. The esthetic decline involved in this defection is all but unthinkable to Birdland's old habitues, who knew the place as the remaining link to the great days of the early '50s, when bop ruled the night on 52nd Street and Broadway. The club was christened in honor of Charlie "Bird" Parker, and its stars have been mainly his musical descendants. Now Miles Davis is no longer welcome, and neither is Thelonious Monk or John Coltrane; their music, Goodstein thinks, has become too involuted and personal to please Birdland's current customers...
...this bleak time by his friend, mascot and champion, the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, 50. The baroness had abandoned the aseptic, punctual world of her family* for the formless life of New York's night people. In 1955 she acquired undeserved notoriety when Charlie Parker died in her apartment (BOP KING DIES IN HEIRESS' FLAT); she had merely made an honest stab at saving his life with gifts of money and medicine in his last few days. From then on, though, Nica cut a wide swath in the jazz world...
Monk was making a small but admired inroad into the "funk" and "soul" movements that had superseded the "cool." Funk was a deeper reach into Negro culture than jazz had taken before, a restatement of church music and African rhythms, but its motive was the same as bop's?finding something that white musicians had not taken over and, if possible, something they would sound wrong playing...