JAZZ AND BEBOP

When Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and others made their historic Savoy recordings in 1945 which have been called the first true bebop recordings, most of the older swing musicians felt the new music to be utterly foreign to jazz.  A few of the more adventurous jazz critics, along with a minority of record collectors, embraced bop from the start.  Since that time, the music has generally been accepted as the inevitable development of jazz music.   The idea that bop is a style of jazz, rather than a music distinct from it, is almost universally accepted as true.  You are about to read a contrary opinion.

It is my contention that jazz and bebop are two distinctly different forms of American music.  There are many reasons for making this clear distinction.   Let us consider each in turn.

First of all, there is the issue of improvisation.  While both jazz and bebop performers employ improvisation, jazz musicians realize that the song is the melody and must always be visible in some way or another, even during solos.  Jelly Roll Morton insisted that the musicians should always keep the melody going.  Boppers, by contrast, play “lines” rather than melodies, and once the soloing begins, totally forget about the “line” and simply run harmonic changes around it.  Their success is invariably judged in terms of technical proficiency and also by their ability to modify and alter given chordal structures.  Often, boppers seem oblivious to those around them, so inwardly directed that the joy present in jazz disappears and the performance becomes uncompromisingly cerebral rather than emotional.

Next is the harmonic structure of the two musics.  Bebop relies on complicated chords which enable the soloist to expand on them and also to substitute all kinds of chords for the ones intended.  Jazz musicians do not forget the melody and harmony of a given song and rarely alter the given chord structures.

Counterpoint is also conspicuously absent from bebop.  The polyphony of early jazz, as manifested in the interplay between three and even four horns, is rarely present in bebop.  This is one of bebop’s main failings as an art form; its players are so intent on creating new substitute harmonies and lines that the idea of collective improvisation simply does not enter the picture.  The genius of the early jazz performers lies in their ability to perform different lines simultaneously while never tripping over one another.  The New Orleans Rhythm Kings, although very young, had mastered this style by the early 1920s.  Collective improvisation, if introduced in bebop, invariably sounds cluttered and muddy.

While there is some crossover between jazz and bebop, just as there was when jazz succeeded ragtime, the fact that the two are distinct styles of music can also be seen in the fact that jazz musicians rarely attempt bop, just as boppers rarely play jazz.  The songs are different, the harmonic focuses are different, the rhythms are different, and the overall styles and focuses are different.

In addition, the audiences are also different; although there are rare exceptions, one who goes to a traditional jazz concert is unlikely to attend a bop concert, and vice versa.  Jazz audiences feel the joy of the music and are apt to get up from their seats and dance; jazz music has always been a dance music.  The pulse of the music is infectious and, combined with recognizable melodies and contrapuntal improvisation, engages the audiences and makes them feel as if they are a part of the performance.  By contrast, bebop fans rarely leave their seats, contenting themselves with sitting quietly while the performers onstage engage in musical acrobatics and self-absorption that take little or no account of the audience.   Dancing is never seen at bebop performances; the rhythm is too jerky and the overall atmosphere not conducive to dancing.

In closing, ragtime and jazz have much more in common than do jazz and bebop, yet no one makes the mistake of calling ragtime jazz.  Ragtime and jazz are based on similar chord patterns and both employ improvisation (there were ragtime competitions at the turn of the century during which, in addition to introducing new material, competition between performers were increasingly fierce and many pianists, if they wanted to remain relevant, learned to improvise variations on older works).  In every significant way, jazz and bebop are two distinctly different forms of music.

Nobody says that ragtime is jazz, although it is similar to it in many ways.  Likewise, it is high time that we should recognize that bebop is not jazz.  Ragtime is a precursor to jazz, and bop a successor to it.