Word: bop
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...Wild One has Marlon Brando ditching Mark Anthony's toga for a pair of greasy blue jeans and a leather jacket. In the process he picks up a flashy motorcycle and some cool bop talk, and accompanied by a grizzly crew sporting well oiled side-burns, Brando roars to a stop in a one-car town. For a moment it looks like a desperadoes-shooting-up-the-village western with over-powered motorcycles replacing the trusty steed. But what might have been little more than a modern horse opera turns into a brutally realistic blend of tension and violence forceful...
...picture begins with the drum roar of motorcycle motors, as 30 or more of them pound over a highway between the crazy young legs of a bop-sent, trouble-hungry "sickle club" of teen-age boys. Pacing the pack is Marlon Brando, the wild one of the title, an actor whose sullen face, slurred accents and dream-drugged eye have made him a supreme portrayer of morose juvenility. The motorized wolves burst into the small town of Wrightsville, stack their machines along the curb, and pile into the local saloon to look for some action. They...
...hope for such big outfits as his own 16-piece band. Like other jazzmen of the late '30s, he was forced to cut back in the mid '40s, toured for four years with a small combo. "People were trying to decide whether they were going to like bop," he says. "Nobody was thinking of dancing. Big bands had no place to work...
...soon the musical extravagances of bop began to wear thin. Some of its innovations, e.g., more advanced harmonies and trickier rhythms, were absorbed into the jazz idiom as a whole. Big-band music began to appear more often on records. Basie collected a new full-size outfit 16 months ago, bounced back with a reputation as the swingingest band in the land...
Nowadays the Count's crew has most of its riffs written out for it. Nevertheless, old favorites such as One O'Clock Jump sound pretty much the way they used to. All he had to do to bring them up to post-bop fashion, says the Count, was "to put mink coats on the chords...