Bebop

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For other uses, see Bebop (disambiguation).

Bebop

Swing

Kansas City jazz

Stylistic origins

Cultural origins

Mid-1940s, United States

Clarinet

saxophone

trumpet

trombone

piano

double bass

drums

keyboards

electric guitars

acoustic guitars

Avant-garde jazz

post-bop

Typical instruments

Derivative forms

Subgenres

Hard bop

(Other subgenres)

Regional scenes
United States
Bebop or bop is a style of jazz characterized by a fast tempo, instrumental virtuosity, and
improvisation based on a combination of harmonic structure and occasional references to the
melody. It was developed in the early and mid-1940s. This style of jazz ultimately became
synonymous with modern jazz, when both categories reached a certain final maturity in the
1960s.
Bebop developed as the younger generation of jazz musicians aimed to counter the popular
swing style with a new, non-danceable music that demanded listening.[1] As bebop was no longer
a dance music, it enabled the musicians to play at faster tempos. Bebop musicians explored
advanced harmonies, complex syncopation, altered chords, chord substitutions, asymmetrical
phrasing, and intricate melodies and used rhythm sections in a way that expanded their role. The
classic bebop combo consisted of saxophone, trumpet, piano, double bass and drums.
Some of the most influential bebop artists are: tenor sax players Dexter Gordon, Sonny Rollins
and John Coltrane; alto sax player Charlie Parker; trumpeters Fats Navarro, Clifford Brown, and
Dizzy Gillespie; pianists Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk; guitarist Charlie Christian, and
drummer Max Roach.

Contents

1 Etymology

2 History

3 Musical style

4 Instrumentation

5 Influence

6 Musicians

7 References

8 Further reading

9 External links

Etymology

Dizzy Gillespie, at the Downbeat Club, NYC, ca 1947

"In spite of the explanations of the origins of these words, players actually did sing the words
"bebop" and "rebop" to an early bop phrase as shown in the following example."[2]
Play (helpinfo)
The term "bebop" is derived from nonsense syllables (vocables) used in scat singing; the first
known example of "bebop" being used was in McKinney's Cotton Pickers' "Four or Five Times",
recorded in 1928.[3] It appears again in a 1936 recording of "I'se a Muggin'" by Jack Teagarden.[3]
A variation, "rebop", appears in several 1939 recordings.[3] The first known print appearance was
also in 1939, but it was little-used subsequently until applied to the music now associated with it
in the mid-1940s.[3]
Some researchers speculate that it was a term used by Charlie Christian because it sounded like
something he hummed along with his playing.[4] Dizzy Gillespie stated that the audiences coined
the name after hearing him scat the then-nameless tunes to his players and the press ultimately
picked it up, using it as an official term: "People, when they'd wanna ask for those numbers and
didn't know the name, would ask for bebop."[5] Another theory is that it derives from the cry of
"Arriba! Arriba!" used by Latin American bandleaders of the period to encourage their bands.[6]
At times, the terms "bebop" and "rebop" were used interchangeably. By 1945, the use of
"bebop"/"rebop" as nonsense syllables was widespread in R&B music, for instance Lionel
Hampton's "Hey! Ba-Ba-Re-Bop".

History
"Bebop wasn't developed in any deliberate way."

Thelonious Monk

The 1939 recording of "Body and Soul" by Coleman Hawkins is an important antecedent of
bebop. Hawkins' willingness to strayeven brieflyfrom the ordinary resolution of musical
themes and his playful jumps to double-time signaled a departure from existing jazz. The
recording was popular; but more importantly, from a historical perspective, Hawkins became an
inspiration to a younger generation of jazz musicians, most notably Charlie Parker in Kansas
City.
In the 1940s, the younger generation of jazz musicians created a new style that came out of the
1930s' swing music. They partially strove to counter the popularization of swing with nondanceable music that demanded listening.[1] Mavericks like Gillespie, Parker, Bud Powell and
Thelonious Monk were influenced by the preceding generation's adventurous soloists, such as
pianists Art Tatum and Earl Hines, tenor saxophonists Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young and
trumpeter Roy Eldridge. Gillespie and Parker, both out of the Earl Hines Band in Chicago, had
traveled with some of the pre-bop masters, including Jack Teagarden, Earl Hines and Jay
McShann. While Gillespie was with Cab Calloway, he practiced with bassist Milt Hinton and
developed some of the key harmonic and chordal innovations that would be the cornerstones of
the new music; Parker did the same with bassist Gene Ramey while with McShann's group.
These forerunners of the new music (which would later be termed bebop or bopalthough
Parker himself never used the term, feeling it demeaned the music) began exploring advanced
harmonies, complex syncopation, altered chords and chord substitutions. The bop musicians
advanced these techniques with a more freewheeling, intricate and often arcane approach.
Minton's Playhouse in New York served as an incubator and experimental theater for early bebop
players,[7] including Don Byas, Thelonious Monk, and Charlie Christian, who had already hinted
at the bop style in innovative solos with Benny Goodman's band. Part of the atmosphere created
at jams like the ones found at Minton's Playhouse was an air of exclusivity: the "regular"
musicians would often reharmonize the standards in order to exclude those whom they
considered outsiders or simply weaker players.[1]
Christian's major influence was in the realm of rhythmic phrasing. Christian commonly
emphasized weak beats and off beats and often ended his phrases on the second half of the fourth
beat. Christian experimented with asymmetrical phrasing, which was to become a core element
of the new bop style. Swing improvisation was commonly constructed in two or four bar phrases
that corresponded to the harmonic cadences of the underlying song form. Bop improvisers would
often deploy phrases over an odd number of bars and overlap their phrases across bar lines and
across major harmonic cadences. Christian and the other early boppers would also begin stating a
harmony in their improvised line before it appeared in the song form being outlined by the
rhythm section. This momentary dissonance creates a strong sense of forward motion in the
improvisation. Swing improvisers commonly emphasized the first and third beats of a measure,
but in a bebop composition such as Dizzy Gillespie's "Salt Peanuts", the rhythmic emphasis
switches to the second and fourth beats of the measure. Such new rhythmic phrasing techniques
give the typical bop solo a feeling of floating free over the underlying song form, rather than
being tied into the song form.

Swing drummers had kept up a steady four-to-the-bar pulse on the bass drum. Bop drummers,
led by Kenny Clarke, moved the drumset's time-keeping function to the ride or hi-hat cymbal,
reserving the bass drum for accents. Bass drum accents were colloquially termed "dropping
bombs". Notable bop drummers such as Max Roach, Shadow Wilson, Philly Joe Jones, Roy
Haynes, and Kenny Clarke began to support and respond to soloists, almost like a shifting call
and response.
This change increased the importance of the string bass. Now, the bass not only maintained the
music's harmonic foundation, but also became responsible for establishing a metronomic
rhythmic foundation by playing a "walking" bass line of four quarter notes to the bar. While
small swing ensembles commonly functioned without a bassist, the new bop style required a bass
in every small ensemble.
By 1950, a second wave of bebop musicianssuch as Clifford Brown and Sonny Stittbegan to
smooth out the rhythmic eccentricities of early bebop. Instead of using jagged phrasing to create
rhythmic interest, as the early boppers had, these musicians constructed their improvised lines
out of long strings of eighth notes and simply accented certain notes in the line to create
rhythmic variety.

Musical style
Bebop differed drastically from the straightforward compositions of the swing era and was
instead characterized by fast tempos, asymmetrical phrasing, intricate melodies, and rhythm
sections that expanded on their role as tempo-keepers. The music itself seemed jarringly different
to the ears of the public, who were used to the bouncy, organized, danceable tunes of Benny
Goodman and Glenn Miller during the swing era. Instead, bebop appeared to sound racing,
nervous, erratic and often fragmented. But to jazz musicians and jazz music lovers, bebop was an
exciting and beautiful revolution in the art of jazz.
'Bebop' was a label that certain journalists later gave it, but we never labeled the music. It was
just modern music, we would call it. We wouldn't call it anything, really, just music.
Kenny Clarke[8]
While swing music tended to feature orchestrated big band arrangements, bebop music
highlighted improvisation. Typically, a theme (a "head," often the main melody of a pop or jazz
standard of the swing era) would be presented together at the beginning and the end of each
piece, with improvisational solos based on the chords of the tune. Thus, the majority of a song in
bebop style would be improvisation, the only threads holding the work together being the
underlying harmonies played by the rhythm section. Sometimes improvisation included
references to the original melody or to other well-known melodic lines ("quotes", "licks" or
"riffs"). Sometimes they were entirely original, spontaneous melodies from start to finish.
Chord progressions for bebop tunes were often taken directly from popular swing-era songs and
reused with a new and more complex melody, forming new compositions (see contrafact). This
practice was already well-established in earlier jazz, but came to be central to the bebop style.

The style made use of several relatively common chord progressions, such as blues (at base, IIV-V, but infused with II-V motion) and 'rhythm changes' (I-VI-II-V, the chords to the 1930s pop
standard "I Got Rhythm"). Late bop also moved towards extended forms that represented a
departure from pop and show tunes.
Bebop musicians also employed several harmonic devices not typical of previous jazz.
Complicated harmonic substitutions for more basic chords became commonplace. These
substitutions often emphasized certain dissonant intervals such as the flat ninth, sharp ninth or
the sharp eleventh/tritone. This unprecedented harmonic development which took place in bebop
is often traced back to a transcendent moment experienced by Charlie Parker while performing
"Cherokee" at Clark Monroe's Uptown House, New York, in early 1942. As described by Parker:
[9]

I'd been getting bored with the stereotyped changes that were being used, ... and I kept thinking
there's bound to be something else. I could hear it sometimes. I couldn't play it.... I was working
over "Cherokee", and, as I did, I found that by using the higher intervals of a chord as a melody
line and backing them with appropriately related changes, I could play the thing I'd been hearing.
It came alive.
Gerhard Kubik postulates that the harmonic development in bebop sprung from the blues, and
other African-related tonal sensibilities, rather than twentieth century Western art music, as some
have suggested. Kubik states: "Auditory inclinations were the African legacy in [Parker's] life,
reconfirmed by the experience of the blues tonal system, a sound world at odds with the Western
diatonic chord categories. Bebop musicians eliminated Western-style functional harmony in their
music while retaining the strong central tonality of the blues as a basis for drawing upon various
African matrices."[9] Samuel Floyd states that blues were both the bedrock and propelling force
of bebop, bringing about three main developments:

A new harmonic conception, using extended chord structures that led to unprecedented
harmonic and melodic variety.

A developed and even more highly syncopated, linear rhythmic complexity and a melodic
angularity in which the blue note of the fifth degree was established as an important
melodic-harmonic device.

The reestablishment of the blues as the music's primary organizing and functional
principle.[10]

While for an outside observer the harmonic innovations in bebop would appear to be inspired by
experiences in Western "serious" music, from Claude Debussy to Arnold Schoenberg, such a
scheme cannot be sustained by the evidence from a cognitive approach. Claude Debussy did
have some influence on jazz, for example, on Bix Beiderbecke's piano playing, and it is also true
that Duke Ellington adopted and reinterpreted some harmonic devices in European contemporary
music. West Coast jazz would run into such debts as would several forms of cool jazz. But bebop
has hardly any such debts in the sense of direct borrowings. On the contrary, ideologically, bebop
was a strong statement of rejection of any kind of eclecticism, propelled by a desire to activate

something deeply buried in self. Bebop then revived tonal-harmonic ideas transmitted through
the blues and reconstructed and expanded others in a basically non-Western harmonic approach.
The ultimate significance of all this is that the experiments in jazz during the 1940s brought back
to African-American music several structural principles and techniques rooted in African
traditions.[9]
An alternate theory would be that Bebop, like much great art, probably evolved drawing on
many sources. An insightful YouTube video [11] has Jimmy Raney, a jazz guitarist of the time and
friend of Charlie Parker, describing how Parker would show up at Raney's apartment door in
search of refreshment and the music of Bela Bartok, a leading 20th Century Classical Music
composer. Raney describes the great knowledge and depth of understanding that Parker had with
the music of Bartok and Arnold Schoenberg, in particular Pierrot Lunaire by Schoenberg and the
Quartets by Bartok. Raney recounts his comment to Parker that a section from the Scherzo of the
Bartok's Fifth Quartet sounded a lot like some of Parker's jazz improvisation.[11]

Instrumentation

Several bebop musicians headlining on 52nd Street, May 1948

The classic bebop combo consisted of saxophone, trumpet, double bass, drums and piano. This
was a format used (and popularized) by both Parker (alto sax) and Gillespie (trumpet) in their
1940s groups and recordings, sometimes augmented by an extra saxophonist or guitar (electric or
acoustic), occasionally adding other horns (often a trombone) or other strings (usually violin) or
dropping an instrument and leaving only a quartet.
Although only one part of a rich jazz tradition, bebop music continues to be played regularly
throughout the world. Trends in improvisation since its era have changed from its harmonicallytethered style, but the capacity to improvise over a complex sequence of altered chords is a
fundamental part of any jazz education.

Influence

By the mid-1950s musicians (Miles Davis and John Coltrane among others) began to explore
directions beyond the standard bebop vocabulary. Simultaneously, other players expanded on the
bold steps of bebop: "cool jazz" or "West Coast jazz", modal jazz, as well as free jazz and avantgarde forms of development from the likes of George Russell.
Bebop style also influenced the Beat Generation whose spoken-word style drew on AfricanAmerican "jive" dialog, jazz rhythms, and whose poets often employed jazz musicians to
accompany them.[12][13] The bebop influence also shows in rock and roll, which contains solos
employing a form similar to bop solos, and hippies of the 1960s and 1970s, like the boppers, had
a unique, non-conformist style of dress, a vocabulary incoherent to outsiders, and a communion
through music. Fans of bebop were not restricted to the United States; the music also gained cult
status in France and Japan.
More recently, hip-hop artists (A Tribe Called Quest, Guru) have cited bebop as an influence on
their rapping and rhythmic style. As early as 1983, Shawn Brown rapped the phrase "Rebop,
bebop, Scooby-Doo" toward the end of the hit "Rappin' Duke". Bassist Ron Carter collaborated
with A Tribe Called Quest on 1991's The Low End Theory, and vibraphonist Roy Ayers and
trumpeter Donald Byrd were featured on Guru's Jazzmatazz, Vol. 1 in 1993. Bebop samples,
especially bass lines, ride cymbal swing clips, and horn and piano riffs are found throughout the
hip-hop compendium.

Musicians
Main article: List of bebop musicians
Notable musicians identified with bebop:

Accordion: Frank Marocco

Bass: Ray Brown, Paul Chambers, Percy Heath, Milt Hinton, Charles Mingus, Oscar
Pettiford, Tommy Potter

Clarinet: Buddy DeFranco

Drums: Art Blakey, Kenny Clarke, Jimmy Cobb, Roy Haynes, Eric Ineke, Philly Joe
Jones, Stan Levey, Max Roach

Guitar Kenny Burrell, Charlie Christian, Herb Ellis, Barney Kessel, Pat Martino, Wes
Montgomery, Joe Pass, Jimmy Raney, Ronnie Singer

Piano: Tadd Dameron, Walter Davis, Jr., Bill Evans, Al Haig, Sadik Hakim, Barry
Harris, Ahmad Jamal, Duke Jordan, Lou Levy, John Lewis, Dodo Marmarosa, Charles
Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Oscar Peterson, Bud Powell, Horace Silver, Lennie Tristano,
George Wallington

Saxophone (Alto): Cannonball Adderley, Lee Konitz, Charles McPherson, Frank

Morgan, Charlie Parker, Art Pepper, Sonny Stitt

Saxophone (Baritone): Pepper Adams

Saxophone (Tenor): Don Byas, John Coltrane, Dexter Gordon, Wardell Gray, Sonny
Rollins, Charlie Rouse, Sonny Stitt, Lucky Thompson

Trombone: Carl Fontana, Curtis Fuller, J. J. Johnson, Frank Rosolino

Trumpet: Chet Baker, Clifford Brown, Miles Davis, Kenny Dorham, Dizzy Gillespie,
Howard McGhee, Blue Mitchell, Lee Morgan, Fats Navarro, Red Rodney, Ed Zandy

Vibraphone: Milt Jackson

Vocals: Betty Carter, Billy Eckstine, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan

References
1.
Lott, Eric. Double V, Double-Time: Bebop's Politics of Style. Callaloo, No. 36 (Summer,
1988), pp. 597-605
Tanner, Paul O. W. and Gerow, Maurice (1964). A Study of Jazz, 81. Second edition.
ISBN 0-697-03557-3.
Gleason, Ralph J. (15 February, 1959) "Jazz Fan Really Digs the Language All the Way
Back to Its Origin". Toledo Blade.
Jim Dawson and Steve Propes, What Was The First Rock'n'Roll Record?, 1992, ISBN 0571-12939-0
Nell Irvin Painter (2006). Creating Black Americans. Oxford University Press US.
pp. 228229. ISBN 0-19-513755-8. Retrieved Jul 9, 2009.
Peter Gammond, The Oxford Companion to Popular Music, 1991, ISBN 0-19-311323-6
Miles Davis (1989) Autobiography, chapter 3, pp. 43-5, 57-8, 61-2
Du Noyer, Paul (2003). The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Music (1st ed.). Fulham,
London: Flame Tree Publishing. p. 130. ISBN 1-904041-96-5.
Kubik, Gerhard. "Bebop: a case in point. The African Matrix in Jazz Harmonic
Practices." (Critical essay) Black Music Research Journal 22 Mar 2005. Digital.
Floyd, Samuel A., Jr. (1995). The power of black music: Interpreting its history from
Africa to the United States. New York: Oxford University Press.
Raney, Jimmy and Jamey Abersold. "Jimmy & Jamey Discuss Charlie Parker",
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10guXUWGGB4
Gair, Christopher (2008). The Beat Generation. Oxford: Oneworld Publications. pp. 16
17. ISBN 9781851685424.

1.

Augustyn, Adam, ed. (2011). American Literature from 1945 through today.
Britannica Educational Publishing. p. 101. ISBN 161530133X.

Further reading

Berendt, Joachim E. The Jazz Book: From Ragtime to Fusion and Beyond. Trans.
Bredigkeit, H. and B. with Dan Morgenstern. Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill & Co., 1975.

Deveaux, Scott.. The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1999.

Giddins, Gary. Celebrating Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker. New York City:
Morrow, 1987.

Gioia, Ted. The History of Jazz. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Baillie, Harold B. Swing to Bop: An Oral History of the Transition of Jazz in the 1940s.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Rosenthal, David. Hard bop: Jazz and Black Music, 19551965. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1992.

Tirro, Frank. "The Silent Theme Tradition in Jazz". The Musical Quarterly 53, no. 3 (July
1967): 31334.

External links
Jazz portal

Verve History of Jazz page on Bebop

for a summary of Bebop's influence today

Bebop Basics for Guitar

Charlie Parker bebop solo licks

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