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Jazz as “the music that large groups of people have called jazz at particular moments in history” – Krin Gabbard
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Emerged in the early 20 th century
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Blending ragtime, blues and European brass band tradition
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This blend influences its structure (eg 12 bar blues), repertoire, instrumentation and the importance of improvisation
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Popularised in the 1920’s (Fitzgerald’s “jazz age”) and 1930s
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New Orleans, New York, Chicago
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As it becomes more popular, becomes more professionalised, also more pre-arranged – written scores, trained musicians, broader audiences

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Mid 1930s - Big band ‘swing’ becomes the mainstream popular music in the US
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Emphasis on the bandleader
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Racial inequalities / opportunities?
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Collapses in the mid 1940s
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Rise of the ‘soloist’
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Louis Armstrong: “Louis played the St Louis
Blues and I saw something I’ll never forget as long as I live. When he finished, even the band in the pit stood up and applauded for him”
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Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins

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Ralph Ellison Bop is “a most inadequate word” which “throws up its hands in clownish self-deprecation before all the complexity of sound and rhythm and self-assertive passion which it pretends to name”
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Emerged in the 1940s
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Evolution in the ‘jazz tradition’ or revolution?
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Townsend vs Peter Belgrad vs
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DeVeaux – bebop as the first modern jazz form
• ‘shock’ factor increased by recording ban from 1942-44 – it was perceived as revolutionary
• Importance of historical context: legacy of the swing era, jam sessions, racial and economic marginalisation:
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“the twin child of optimism and frustration, of ingenuity and despair”

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New style: musicians pushing the boundaries with new levels of complexity in harmonic / melodic improvisation, frantic tempos
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New make up – smaller groups
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Difficult to play, difficult to listen to, even harder to dance to?
Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and
Thelonious Monk
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Geniuses (genii?)
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Importance of Minton’s in NY
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Incredibly hard working

Bop had lifted jazz to new levels of complexity, but still constrained / limited in certain ways, especially in its written material - still reliant on fairly limited structures – Charlie Parker used 32 bar standard blues and twelve-bar blues.
Emergence of new groups of musicians, whose point of departure was bop, but who sought to expand its boundaries or forge new styles

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Reaction to bop
• “a kind of music formerly stereotyped as hot and hectic was purposefully cooled down and slowed down. In the process it became a matter of intellectual and, for some, spiritual inquiry.” – Richard Williams
• Importance of Gil Evans and his Manhattan basement
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“everyone seemed to gravitate to Gil’s place” – Gerry Mulligan
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Meeting point for musicians
– Birth of the Cool album stems from these discussions

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‘Cool jazz’ seen as based in L.A– laidback,
Californian
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Chet Baker , Dave Brubeck, Modern Jazz
Quartet
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Problematic definition –
– " On alto saxophone, Frank Strozier from
Memphis, Tennessee. On piano, Russ Freeman from Chicago, Illinois. Our trumpeter is Conte
Candoli from Mishawaka, Indiana. On bass,
Monte Budwig from Pener, Nebraska. I'm
Shelley Manne from New York City. We play
West Coast jazz."
– Simplistic dichotomy of East / West , True /
Arranged , Masculine / Feminine , Black /
White

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Played in bebop bands with Charlie Parker and a
‘swing’ band
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Started collaborating with Evans in 1948
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Also influenced by George Russell’s ‘vertical polymodality’ – challenge the harmonic boundaries of jazz
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Went to France and did a film score for Louis
Malle – permitted a conceptual shift
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No set length or structure
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Milestones – first dedicated attempt to replace chord patterns with cycles of scale-based mode

• Recorded in two sessions in spring 1959 in a converted church in Manhattan
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Composed as a series of ‘modal sketches’ : wanted musicians to “go beyond themselves”
• Influenced by Sinatra’s ‘concept albums’ earlier in the decade
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Miles Davis – trumpet
• ‘Cannonball’ Adderley – alto sax
• Paul Chambers – double bass
• John Coltrane – tenor sax
• Jimmy Cobb – drums
• Wynton Kelly / Bill Evans - piano

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Apparently the best selling jazz record of all time
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The re-invention of modern music?
– Extremely important in jazz: Coltrane and A Love Supreme
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Also inspired everyone from the Velvet Underground to the Grateful Dead
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Captured the mood of the time
– “there had never been anything that so carefully and single-mindedly cultivated an atmosphere of reflection and introspection, to such a degree that the mood itself became an art object”
– Reflects the uncertainty of human existence in 1950s America, a moment of self-reflection and questioning
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Also reflecting the ‘modern’ moment “ what had happened to chairs and buildings – a simplification of outline and surface concealing a complex response to the modern world – was about to happen to music, and Davis was to be its principal agent”

Cultural Transmission during the decade
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Soundtrack
– The Beats : John Clellon Holmes, 1958: “modern jazz is almost exclusively the music of the Beat Generation, as poetry (at least until Kerouac’s novel) is its literature.”
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Jackson Pollock
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Influence :
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Compositional form: Kerouac – write like a bop musician
• “ in the sense of, say, a tenor man drawing a breath and blowing a phrase on his saxophone, till he runs out of breath, and when he does, his statement’s been made…that’s how I therefore separate my sentences, as breath separations of the mind”

Cultural Transmission:
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Critic of Swing
– visitors to the black belt” in the 1930s – a critique of white voyeurism –
“You can say jazz on the South Side
To me it’s hell
On the South Side”
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Bebop as inspiration :
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“Montage of a Dream Deferred”: “this poem on contemporary Harlem, like be-bop, is marked by conflicting changes, sudden nuances, shape and impudent interjections, and passages sometimes in the manner of the jam session, sometimes the popular song, punctuated by the riffs, runs, breaks and distortions of the music of a community in transition”

Cultural Transmission:
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Bebop and race:
“ “You must know where Bop come from” said Simple, astonished at my ignorance.
“I do not know,” I said. “Where?”
“From the police,” said Simple.
“What do you mean, from the police?”
“From the police beating Negroes’ heads,” said Simple. “Every time a cop hits a Negro with his billy club, that old club says ‘BOP! BOP!..
BE BOP!.. MOP!.. BOP!...’
…
“ A dark man shall see dark days. Bop comes out of them dark days.
That’s why Bop is mad, wild, frantic, crazy – and not to be dug unless you’ve seen dark days too.”

• Reflect and shape changes in society:
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Eg The ‘modern’ moment
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Race : Integration or appropriation? Or somewhere in between?
• Commercialism and the conflicts between art and commodity

Race
• “The musical techniques that set jazz apart from European art music are precisely those that derive from black American musical folkways (and ultimately from Africa)”

Race
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Cultural integration
– “Jazz,” Stanley Crouch writes, “predicted the civil rights movement more than any other art in America.”
– Charles Black, a member of the defence’s lawyers for the Brown vs Board of Education case,
1954, recalled seeing Louis Armstrong in his hometown of Texas in 1931, and the impact this had:
• “he was the first genius I had ever seen…It is impossible to overstate the significance of a sixteenyear-old southern boy's seeing genius, for the first time, in a black. We literally never saw a black then in any but a servant's capacity. It was just then that I started toward the Brown case where I belonged
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Meritocracy over race
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“America’s classical music” - a category into which racial difference and the political turmoil it entails finally disappear
– Dizzy gillespie, charlie parker, miles davis all worked with white musicians and producers – importance of Gil Evans for example

Race
- Baraka – jazz as the ‘great music robbery’
“You must know where Bop come from” said Simple, astonished at my ignorance.
“I do not know,” I said. “Where?”
“From the police,” said Simple.
“What do you mean, from the police?”
“From the police beating Negroes’ heads,” said Simple. “Every time a cop hits a Negro with his billy club, that old club says ‘BOP! BOP!.. BE BOP!.. MOP!.. BOP!...’
…
“ A dark man shall see dark days. Bop comes out of them dark days. That’s why Bop is mad, wild, frantic, crazy – and not to be dug unless you’ve seen dark days too.”
- Langston Hughes

Commercialism
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Rudi Blesh, jazz historian in 1946 said
“commercialism [is] a cheapening and deteriorative force, a species of murder perpetrated on a wonderful music by whites and by those misguided negroes who, for one or another reason, chose to be accomplices to the deed... commercialism is a thing not only hostile, but fatal to jazz”
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Especially bebop – often construct a binary of bebop vs commercialism
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Swing just represents ‘corporate liberalism’ (Belgrad)

Commercialism
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For DeVeaux black jazz musicians in the 1930s and 1940s saw capitalism as a ‘system of transactions that defined music as a profession and thereby made their achievements possible’
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Importance of jazz as profession
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Economic and social status : desire for credibility
– musicians like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie
“willed something like a new musical subculture into being. But they were not trying to disengage from the
‘commercial’ music world so much as to find a new point of engagement with it – one that would grant them a measure of autonomy and recognition”

Commercialism
• reality of economic marginalisation
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‘Commodification’ – something talked about by
Dizzy Gillespie about bop, Ted Gioia about West
Coast jazz
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Define by difference