Bebop: a Controversial Transition to Modern Jazz

The second generations of Jazz musicians were some like Joe “King” Oliver, Kid Ory, and Jelly Roll Morton. These people formed a small band and started to reshape the way the original Jazz music was played. They have made it into a different style with more complications and twists and turns. And so it became known as “Hot Jazz”. King Oliver found a young artist by the name of Louis Armstrong. He soon grew to become the greatest Jazz musician anyone has known. He is still a big star in the world today. By the 20th Century, African-American musical styles became the dominant force.

Bebop Jazz is the subgenre of jazz that has its origins during the early to mid - 1940’s in the United States. Bebop Jazz is characterized by its instrumental expertise, complex chord progressions that change rapidly, a naturally fast tempo, a diverse amount of key changes, and improvisation based on a combination of harmonic structure, and the use of many scales and infrequent connections to the melody. Bebop Jazz is one of the many major foundations responsible for shaping and creating the modern jazz present today.

From its inception, Jazz has applied both innovative approaches in different degrees and boundless configuration. And has continually amplified, progress, and modify music through various distinctive episodes of growth. So, an all-encompassing denotation of jazz is likely vain. Additionally, jazz as a music whose prime attribute was “improvisation,” for example, revealed to be too regulated and chiefly false. Meanwhile composition, adaptation, and ensembles have also been imperative constituent of Jazz (for most of its backstory). Furthermore, “syncopation” and “swing,” often viewed as important and distinctive to jazz, are certainly lacking the genuineness of it, whether of the 1920s (or of later decades). However, the prolonged perception that swing could not transpire without syncopation was utterly refuted when trumpeter Louis Armstrong often produced vast swing while playing repeated, and unsyncopated quarter notes (Armstrong, L., Fitzgerald, E., & Middleton, V. (1988). Satchmo. Gong.)

Out of the streets of New Orleans, a new form of music arose. This new type of music was not known as African or European, but simply American. It was jazz. In 1900 jazz first developed, but it wasn’t until the

Louis Armstrong, one of the most influential figures in jazz music, enjoyed a career that spans across 50 years, and through different eras of jazz. Nicknamed” Satchmo”, “Pops”, and” Ambassador Satch”, Armstrong could do it all, he sang, occasionally acted, composed music, but was most famous for his cornet and trumpet playing. Although Armstrong is well known for his amazing trumpet play, he also influenced the direction that jazz music during his time was headed. Over the course of this paper I will concisely go over his early life, and focus more on his music career.

Music is often known as very important part of African-American culture. In the mid-1940s, there was a new jazz that revolutionized called bebop. In African-American culture, bebop is as significant as the Harlem Renaissance. Bebop was to a large extend, a revolt against swing and the way African-American music had been taken over and diluted by whites. In “Sonny’s Blues,” the narrator relates more to the old Jazz music while Sonny is more interested in the new and upcoming version of bebop. Sonny was very offended when his brother mentioned Louis Armstrong’s name and he immediately corrected him after he was asked about a musician he admired. Sonny quickly told him “Bird! Charlie Parker! Don’t they teach you nothing in the army?” (125) However, in this story the difference between Armstrong and Parker represent something more than just a different type of jazz. It seems as if Sonny prefers someone like Parker because they both suffered from a similar downfall,

During the early 1900’s, a new style of music began to take shape in the colorful city of New Orleans. People from all over the world came to exchange stories, conversation, and music. Although it is a very hard genre of music to define, it is said that Jazz is the combination of European and African music that was brought in via the ports. With mostly an African American population, the musicians shared their music in Storyville - a cultural melting pot, and began to spread the “New Orleans Sound”. They contributed to what would soon be known as Jazz in 1917. The spontaneous nature of Jazz’s syncopation and sound makes it a very humanistic style of music and makes every performance original. Every day we improvise, whether it is in conversation or spur of the moment decisions. These truly unique elements caused Jazz to become a symbol of America, and changed music forever.

In the middle of the 19th century, Congo Square became a center of musical expression. On these Sunday afternoons, a new form of music was born. Pioneered by those on the bottom of a society full of slavery and segregation, the origin of jazz was less a singular event than an evolving movement. None of those pioneers, however, could have anticipated the future of their developing art form. None could have foreseen that their informal rhythmic gatherings would eventually lead to nationally recognized big bands with more than 20 musicians and celebrity band leaders. The trajectory of jazz history is complex and rich, flowing from style to style and from region to region. Each step along the way from the early brass bands to the bebop bands

One of the most tactlessly forgotten musicians of that time is a man that went by the name of Dizzy Gillespie. John Birks Gillespie, known to most as Dizzy Gillespie, stood as one of the most imaginative artists in the history of jazz. He rose to fame during the bebop period of the jazz culture, taking place in the 1940s and 50s. One can even say that this type of fast-tempoed music came into being because of Dizzy Gillespie and his fellow musicians, Charlie Parker and Theolonius Monk. When Dizzy was born in South Carolina, no one expected they were looking at someone who would form a new style of jazz.

In the 20th century, Jazz was one of the most expressive forms of music around, as it was just starting out and was born in a time where victims of oppression were beginning to stand up and rebel. In comparison to classical music, Jazz is a very new genre of music. It’s evolution is vividly evident in it’s contrast of instrumentation, dynamics, and the introduction of modal jazz which I will discuss later on in this essay. One of the first jazz virtuoso’s that appeared and had a significant influence on jazz, was Sidney Bechet, on clarinet and saxophone.

In the world of Jazz there are known to be only two time periods in jazz: before Charlie Parker and after Charlie Parker. Charlie Parker has become an American icon and extremely important to the world of jazz. He had many successes throughout his life, but I want to find; how did Charlie Parker’s fast pace improvisation solo style effect the creation of bebop? Carlie Parker’s complex harmony and rhythms he integrated into his improvisation solo style laid the groundwork for the creation of a new jazz style known today as bebop.

Jazz is consider one of the most influential types of music an America History. Some of the greatest artist in the world have contribute to the success jazz have had not only on America History but throughout the world. This paper will explain the history of jazz, where it all came from and the effect it has had on the America Culture.

No one ever just becomes famous, right? Right. Lennie Tristano established a trio with a bassist and guitar player, and it was not long before he was performing with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. A jazz critic named Barry

“Walkin”, was a swaggering blues piece informed by the extended harmonies of bebop was a shift from cool jazz and announced the arrival of hard bop (Sales, 1992:171). Hard bop was the evolvement and development from bop during the 1950s and 1960s, often regarded as a reaction to the restraint and intellectualism of cool jazz (Kingman, 1990:389).

The mystery of Jazz and its powerful impact on the music community can be explained largely by the context of it’s creation. Jazz was born in the United States, and because of this, many have referred to Jazz as “America’s music.” Like America, Jazz has a balance between structure and spontaneity. It capitalizes on the fluidity of the musicians, having several different instruments with independent spirits, coming together as one to form a great piece of music. Unlike other styles of music, Jazz has a certain way about it that makes it stand-alone in the world of genres. It improvises, moves, and transforms itself in a moment’s notice based on the musician’s intuition. Just as America harbors democracy, so too does a jazz ensemble, showing both the responsibility to a larger group, yet still allowing room for individual freedom. It all comes down to how well others can respect the overall framework and structure of the jingle.