Bebop

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This article is about the genre of music, for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles character see Bebop and Rocksteady. For the anime series, see Cowboy Bebop

Bebop is a form of jazz characterized by fast tempos and improvisation based on harmonic structure rather than melody. It was developed in the early and mid-1940s. It first surfaced in musicians' argot some time during the first two years of the Second World War. Hard bop later developed from bebop combined with blues and gospel music.

1 History
2 Musical Style
3 Specific Harmonic Vocabulary
4 Instrumentation
5 Bebop's influence
6 References
7 Samples
8 Videos
9 Bebop musicians

[edit] History

The 1939 recording of "Body and Soul" by Coleman Hawkins and His Orchestra, which captured Hawkins' unique idiom, known to concert goers for years, is one important ancestor of be-bop. Hawkins' willingness to stray - if briefly - from the ordinary resolution of musical themes, and his playful jumps to double-time signaled something new in jazz. The album was a hit, but more importantly, Hawkins was an inspiration to jazz players around the United States, including Charlie Parker, who was already experimenting with chromatic scales and rapid blasts of notes in his home town of Kansas City, a stopover for every traveling jazz band of the depression era.

In the 1940s, bop expanded on improvisational themes of swing, which had dominated the 1930's. Young musicians including Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, and Thelonious Monk, were influenced by adventurous soloists of the preceding generation, such as pianist Art Tatum, tenor saxophonists Hawkins and Lester Young, and the trumpet player Roy Eldridge. Gillespie and Parker, as well as Stan Getz and Red Rodney, had traveled with some of the pre-bop masters, including Jack Teagarden, Earl Hines, and Jay McShann. These musicians had begun exploring more advanced harmonies, complex syncopation, altered chords, and chord substitutions, and the boppers continued this exploration with more freedom and a purposefully arcane approach.

Minton's Playhouse in New York served as a workout room and experimental theater of sorts for early bebop players, including the Benny Goodman Orchestra's guitarist, Charlie Christian, who'd already hinted at the bop style in innovative solos with Goodman's band, as well as bassists Jimmy Blanton and Oscar Pettiford, and the pianist Monk. Monk's personality epitomized the "hip" counter-cultural element of bop style. His comping (accompaniment) and solos seemed almost intentionally awkward, beautifully discordant meanderings, and his original compositions comprise one of the first bodies of work written for bebop, making him one of the form's most highly regarded contributors.

Freed from the demands of the big band arrangement, bebop quartets, quintets and sextets allowed close communication which facilitated free flowing improvisation by all the musicians, a new direction for jazz. It was not essentially for dancing, but for listening. The steady swing held tight by a bassist, drummers began to improvise more with their left hands on snare and right foot on bass. Max Roach, Philly Joe Jones, Roy Haynes and Kenny Clarke began to support and respond to soloists, almost like a shifting call and response, using rhythmic accent ("dropping bombs") to create another layer of music. This style of drumming has its roots in the second-line drumming of early 20th and late 19th century marching bands. Bebop lost listeners with tempos too hot for dancers and melodies that sounded incoherent to the untrained ear.

[edit] Musical Style

Bebop differed drastically from the straightforward compositions of the swing era, and was instead characterized by fast tempos, complex harmonies, 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, and often fragmented. But to jazz musicians and lovers in the public, bebop was an exciting and beautiful revolution in the art of jazz.

While swing music tended to feature scripted big band arrangements, bebop music was much more free in its structure. Typically, a theme (a "head", often the main melody of a pop or jazz standard of the swing era) would be presented in unison at the beginning and the end of each piece, with improvisational solos based on the major chords making up the body of the work. Thus, the majority of a song in bebop style would be free 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 ("allusions", or "riffs"). Sometimes they were entirely original, spontaneous melodies from start to finish.

Bebop music extended the jazz vocabulary by exploring new harmonic territory through the use of altered chords and chord substitutions (using a different chord than originally composed, such as a diminished or flattened fifth, the "blue note"). While this produced a more colorful and rich harmonic sound than past jazz styles, it also required a highly trained musician to execute well. Melodies grew in complexity from those of swing jazz, and began to twist, turn, and jump rapidly to follow quickly-changing chord progressions.

As bebop grew from its swing-era roots, these progressions often were taken directly from popular swing-era songs and reused with a new and more complex bebop melody, forming new compositions known as a contrafacts. While contrafaction was already a well-established practice in earlier jazz, it came to be central to the bebop style. Musicians and audiences alike were able to find something familiar in this new exotic sound, but perhaps more importantly, small record labels such as Savoy, often avoided paying copyright fees for pop tunes.

[edit] Specific Harmonic Vocabulary

Melodically the predominating contour of improvised be-bop is that it tends to ascend in arepggios and descend in scale steps. While a stereotype, an examination of Charlie Parker solos will show that this in fact is a key quality of the music.

Ascending arpeggios are freqently of diminshed seventh chords, which function as 7b9 chords of various types. Typical scales used in be-bop include the be-bop major, minor and dominant (see below), the harmonic minor and the chormatic.

The half-whole diminished scale is also occasionally used, and in the music of Thelonius Monk especially, the whole tone scale.

Of the modes of the ascending melodic minor, such as the altered scale and lydian dominant beloved of many modern jazz educators, there is little or no sign - it is widely thought that John Coltrane was among the first to use them, but as with many things in Jazz history, it's hard to be certain.

Be-bop frequently elaborates arpeggios with extra chromatic and scalar passing notes, some of which seem peverse. The flattened seventh is frequently added to major seventh arpeggios, the major to dominant chords and minor chords. Pharses frequently terminate on the 9th of the chord - traditionally dissonant tone.

This palette of melodic materials seems to accord closely to the teaching of Barry Harris who is regarded by many as the one of the most important surviving links to this era.

Bebop was also heavily characterized by melodic use of the flatted fifth. The flattened fifth, one of the two strong dissonances on the diatonic scale, was a relatively new addition to popular music at the time. Although it had occasionally been used for passing chords or special harmonic effects in the 20s or 30s, and is an intrinsic member of the "blues" scale derived from African music, the feature had never played an integral role in the foundation of a style to the extent it does in bebop. After roughly a decade, the flattened fifth would become a blue note just as common as the undetermined thirds and sevenths in traditional blues.

This is related to the harmonic technique of tritone substitution, popularised during the pre war era by the pianist Art Tatum. Here, the familiar series of perfect cadences is replaced by chromatic motion of the root. Thus, the standard "IIm7 - V7 - I" sequence, a building block of the 20th century popular song, is reconstructed as "IIm7 - bII7 - I". A bebop pianist, confronted with a chord marked as G7 (G dominant seventh) resolving to C, would often replace it with Db7 (Db dominant seventh). The tritone substitution could also be used within a standard dominant (V7) chord: for example, the G7 chord above could be a Db7 chord with G as the bass (another example of a flatted fifth).

Later codifications of bebop harmony emerged, notably in the teachings of pianist/educator Barry Harris, who encouraged players to learn "bebop scales" for improvising such as the Bebop Dominant 7th Scale (1 2 3 4 5 6 b7 7 8) and the Bebop Major Scale (1 2 3 4 5 #5 6 7 8) (although Barry himself refers to them by a different name.) A feature of these scales is that when they are played in 8th notes, up or down, players automatically play a tone featured in the corresponding chord on every 4/4 beat. These scales are often disguised by playing them through segments of an octave, changing direction on chord tones, or enclosing chord tones with a chromatic tone above and below the chord tone. Both of these techniques allow the improviser to embellish the bebop scale without sacrificing the effect of chord tones on every 4/4 beat.

Another impotant technqiue is anticipation - where a chord is expressed before it appears, and expansion, were the improvisors holds on to it into the next chord. Again Parker's recorded solos have many examples of this technique, which creates proulsive dissonance.

Many be-bop progressions and solos make heavy use of tonicization, but this is typical of harmonic jazz in general.

Overall, be-bop seems to have taken much of the materials of swing and freed them up or liberated them - harmony and rythm became more freely treated, and improvisers embraced this new freedom with relish.

[edit] Instrumentation

The classic bebop combo consisted of saxophone, trumpet, bass, drums, and piano. This was a format used (and popularized) by both Charlie Parker (alto sax) and Dizzy Gillespie (trumpet) in their 1940s groups and recordings, sometimes augmented by an extra saxophonist or guitar, occasionally adding other horns (often a trombone), or other strings (usually fiddle or 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 harmonically-tethered style, but the capacity to improvise over a complex sequence of altered chords is a fundamental part of any jazz education. Bebop requires a mathematical and problem-solving mental agility, leading mastery of this language to be something of a requisite rite of passage for serious musicians.

[edit] Bebop's 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 avant-garde forms of development from the likes of George Russell.

Bebop style also influenced the beatniks whose spoken-word style drew on jazz rhythms, and who often employed jazz musicians to accompany them, as well as rock and roll, which contains solos employing a similar form as bop solos, and hippies, who, like the boppers had a unique, non-conformist style of dress, a vocabulary incoherent to outsiders, a communion through music, and an idea of being "hip" or "cool". Fans of bebop were not restricted to the USA; the music gained cult status in France and Japan.

More recently, Hip-hop artists (Tribe Called Quest, Guru) have cited bebop as an influence on their rapping and rhythmic style. Bassist Ron Carter even collaborated with Tribe Called Quest on 1991's The Low End Theory, and vibraphonist Roy Ayers and trumpeter Donald Byrd were featured on Jazzmattazz, by Guru, in the same year. Bebop samples, especially bass lines, ride cymbal swing clips, and horn and piano riffs are found throughout the hip-hop compendium.

[edit] References

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.
Gidden, 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, 1955-1965. New York : Oxford University Press, 1992.
Verve History of Jazz page on Bebop