One often hears that bebop was a "revolution": that it was an abrupt break with the jazz that came before it. I can barely pick up a new book or article about jazz these days without hearing the claim that the "modernism" was created by the few who visited Minton's Playhouse and that represented a radical break with the past. (Radical in more senses than one, as I will suggest.) But the transition, musically speaking, was actually more gradual than these commentators and authors acknowledge, and perhaps more than they realize.
One does hear of two forward looking swing players, Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young, who not only influenced but participated directly in the bebop movement. But these saxophonists were star soloists in the Fletcher Henderson and Count Basie bands, respectively. So they were part of the broad-based movement in popular music known as swing or big band that emerged to dominate American music in the early ‘30s and cannot conveniently be reappropriated for the cause of “bebop.”
In fact, many things Parker and Gillespie perfected or became known for were being anticipated by swing players for at least ten years before the famous jam sessions took place at Minton’s. So many, in fact, that the ostensible rupture of bebop loses focus.
Consider these “pre-bop” achievements: the long melodic lines of Roy Eldridge. The coloristic, tense harmonies of Duke Ellington (and yes, before 1941). The angular melodic freedom of Nat King Cole (the pianist) and Erroll Garner. The trio format used by these same two musicians. The musicianship, control, and beat of Benny Carter. The blues inflection, coupled with fabulous technique, of Johnny Hodges. The speed and fluidity of Chu Berry. The metric displacement of Charlie Christian. And of course, the chordal substitutions of Art Tatum, transferred to the saxophone by Don Byas before Bird took his first flight (yes, this is demonstrable in the recorded history of jazz, but that’s another post).
Don Byas: Bird or Dinosaur?
How many prophets can there be before the Messiah starts to seem a little cramped in his firmament?
Parker and those in his circle are important for synthesizing the work of these swing masters. (That they were quite familiar with all of them can be demonstrated in their music as well as their statements on record.) The bebop insurgents had a novel and compelling rhythmic approach that was their own. But like any musicians, their ideas were also wound up in their personal ways of approaching their horns and their medium. Their personal styles became an orthodoxy later—an ironic, though not unique, outcome for their “revolution”. Fifteen or so years later, that is, with the help of critics, producers, and retrospective discourse of musicians themselves.
The claim that bebop was a new musical wave often appears in tandem with one asserting a new political maturity. Black modernism in this narrative carries the component of self-awareness of racial subjugation and is a form of resistance to it. “Revolution” in this sense is not therefore not used nor intended as a strictly aesthetic term. Yet the notion of modernism on which this whole narrative rests depends on a pre-modern. I submit there is an implicit condescension regarding the jazz, included its African-American strains, of at least the 20s and 30s, and perhaps earlier.
Political sympathies, then, ought not to be driven by artistic tastes anymore than the reverse. Insofar as we are interested in jazz and modernism in the arts, it is valid to consider swing era masters as both modern and progressive. If we wanted to read the history of their time in their music, we would find northern migration and growth of mass popular culture through new media to be significant factors in its making. If we were interested in the aesthetic outlines of modernism, we could find it in swing masters concern with technique, awareness of their place in the development of their music and its past, and their view of their art as autonomous from a direct social function such as dancing or civic occasions.
If we are interested in looking to music for a progressive reading of the eventual consolidation of American rights and of racial empowerment, why should the advent of the swing era not be subject matter? Louis Armstrong’s performative style has been criticized as playing to white stereotypes. But perhaps the sheer power and confidence visible in film footage could be viewed differently, as evidence of black man in control of his own image—just as is celebrated with Miles Davis, evident in Ellington’s manner, and arguable even in the case of John Coltrane’s spiritualist stance.
There are aesthetic implications in bringing the music of the swing era back in to jazz studies. Techniques (both in the sense of skill and of concept) may change with history, but they are not history itself. When fashions change, when the zeitgeist changes, of course new techniques arrive that help give them expression. But music is not cumulative like science: old ways may be lost precisely in the effort to do something different. Bebop was faster than swing, but playing slowly was not a limitation. It is a technique that must be achieved.
As mentioned, the changes are matters of personal artistic choice, and do not necessarily imply a higher conceptual advancement. This is why no one knows what to do with Thelonious Monk or Lucky Thompson. They were not bebop, because they did not simply apply Parker and Gillespie’s instrumental style to their own instruments. But they were just as advanced. Modern jazz. The techniques of any era, past and present, are interesting intellectually and artistically available for those who might want to change again and stand outside orthodoxy. Especially if we, as artists or writers on the arts, don't see history as linear.
There are pedagogical reasons along with scholarly ones to take a broad view of jazz history. Jazz performance can and should teach techniques that may be basic but are still necessary. Are young musicians taught to play slowly and convincingly? Is it really that simple to play guitar with four equal quarter notes, in accompanying other musicians, as Freddie Green did? Try it. Insofar as these techniques are simple, they have a profound simplicity: they must be achieved, and carry insights that are lost in greater complexity. Rhythm itself, an item of mastery from the ragtime era (to listen to Jelly Roll Morton’s recordings), is hard to represent with notation, but can be transmitted in practice, through mentorship within an artistic community—just as they were once developed.
In the end, the retrospective assignment of “revolutionary” status to bebop is a sign of a definite political agenda. It is not bad to have such an agenda. I am in accord with this agenda, or its political thrust. That is one reason why I want to make it explicit. The assignment of revolutionary status to bebop, however, seems to be a way of justifying later radical experiments. The implicit argument behind this self-legitimation is that change is a constant, and thus the desired changes must happen in the present. The corollary for the need to justify radical change is to point to radical change in the past. Part of this view stems from the ‘sixties and its music, when revolution, or talk of it, was actually in the air for reasons that it was not in the ‘forties.
To those that take the view of history as constant, radical and still necessary change—and the history being made now—I would only ask, do we all change together, in one direction? That we is a question to which many revolutionaries, and those leaders who made their revolution into an oppressive orthodoxy, might answer “yes.” It is not the view of artists, though, who value individual expression, however politically engaged they may be. With respect to swing and to bebop, let us go back to their history and ask how they viewed it themselves.
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