Word: bopped
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...abandoned. It evokes neither swinging hips nor hip flasks. It goes to the head and the heart more than to the feet. Spokesmen for various jazz cliques have claimed that it doesn't swing (or swings like crazy), is cool (or hot), too intellectual (or just warmed-over bop), the end of jazz in America (or its greatest hope...
Swing in the '30s put Chicago jazz into large bands with massed rhythms and careful arrangements. In the late '40s bop became briefly fashionable, with its air-splitting protests against swing stereotypes, but bop's own offbeat, spastic rhythms quickly palled. The jazz style called modern does not protest against anything very much except dullness. At its best, it swings as vigorously as any of its predecessors, but once it starts swinging, it seems to move on to more interesting matters, such as tinkering up a little canon à la Bach or some dissonant counterpoint...
...about it, said one producer: "He's a walking hormone factory." An exhibitor, musing about his own business, said: "He's everybody between 10 and 20 that comes into my theater, and they're really coming to see themselves. He's the Valentino of the bop generation, and he's bringing the kids back to the movies...
...Stars. From the oldtime start, the music came gradually up to date. Things really began to hum when Bop Trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie took the stage with his quintet. Looking bemused and gesturing wildly, he set his cocked trumpet* to his lips and played Gabriel-like tones that sent chills up the listeners' spines. "See, that's a square bend," he explained, pointing to the upswept angle. "Well, I get a sort of square note out of there. When you say 'Pow-w-w,' it comes out like a pounding-like a pounding of bricks...
...combos (e.g., Pianists George Shearing, Erroll Garner, Lennie Tristano) plus informal sessions that lasted till dawn. In the afternoon a slim crowd of cats had attended a forum about the origin and meaning of jazz. But the meaning of the festival itself seemed to be that jazz-whether Dixieland, bop or "modern"-more than ever has America's ear. The festival wound up tidily in the black...