MUSIC – Bud Powell - John’s Abbey
This is “__________” – a celebration of Blue Note Records on its 75th anniversary. I’m
Susan Stamberg. In this segment we’ll talk about finding jazz in the oddest places.
MUSIC – Bud Powell - John’s Abbey
There’s a game people play in their heads. If you don’t do it now, you probably will as
you get older. In it, you try and imagine what people’s lives were like in the past. I’m not
talking about the ancient Greeks or the Puritans. I mean your parents or your grandparents.
How they acted when they were young. What they liked to do – the movies they went to, the
music they liked. I can’t tell you about your specific family, but the story’s clear for a lot of
Americans your parent’s age or your grandparent’s age. For them, the cars were American. The
pictures were in black and white. And the music was jazz.
MUSIC – Bud Powell - John’s Abbey
For a lot of people, when they say “jazz” this is what they’re talking about. This kind of
jangling, improvisational, small-group sound from the late 1950s and early 1960s. There was a
name for this kind of jazz. They called it “Bebop.” Blue Note Records is the label that’s most
closely associated with Bebop. It’s current head is Don Was.
WAS: It’s a radical conception when you’re doing it first and there’s no one’s footprints to
follow.
MUSIC – Miles Davis – Weirdo
Bebop can be jarring to listen to. Where’s the melody? Which instrument should I pay
attention to? Where’s the music going next? According to jazz writer Dan Ouellette (wuh LET),
for bebop players, that was the whole point.
OULETTE: Their focus on was, #1, playing fast and #2, expressing themselves on their
instruments.
MUSIC – Dizzy Gillespie - Dizzy Atmosphere
OULETTE: The people who were involved in bebop wanted to have an individual expression
where they as artists could speak through their horns. Speak through their pianos et cetera.
MUSIC – Ornithology – Bud Powell
With a lot of music, people are content to hear it while it’s on in the background. With
bebop, though – to really know what’s going on – you have to listen.
OULETTE: Then you can start to hear how maybe the piano player is playing some notes and
the bass player is having a conversation with him. You can start hearing those conversations
which is pretty cool.
MUSIC - Somethin' Else - Cannonball Adderley
OULETTE: The exciting thing about jazz is there’s an element of surprise, surprise and mystery.
One person will play something and then all of a sudden the other person responds. They
respond in surprising ways that surprise each other.
MUSIC OULETTE: All of a sudden I started going, “Oh wait, I want to tell you a story about this.”
That’s what these guys do but they do it on their instruments. It’s pretty amazing.
MUSIC
Jazz wasn’t always like this.
MUSIC - Moonlight Serenade - Glenn Miller Orchestra
This is what jazz sounded like in the years right before bebop. It was smoother. More
predictable. When the change-over came and jazz shifted to bebop,
OULETTE: It’s really similar to what happened during the rap generation where people broke
out of the forms of just singing pretty songs and they started to express themselves vocally, and
with an incredible cadence, an incredible rhythm.
And that’s not the only connection between bebop and rap. Because bebop was new and
untested, there were people who had to take a chance in order to bring it to the public. The
people at Blue Note Records did that in the early 1950s. That makes Blue Note a lot like another
record label – the one that first took a chance on rap in the 1980s. Jazz piano player Jason
Moran explains.
Jason Moran: I think of it like the same way that maybe Def Jam was once it first started. Def
Jam being this hip-hop label that kind of was really defining the, the, the newest, most vibrant
community of hip-hop music and giving them the platform and them putting it out, and then
watching it blow up.
MUSIC – [some bebop thing]
While Blue Note quickly became known for its bebop recordings, it actually wasn’t the
first record label to catch on to the trend. In fact, it came to it kind of late. Richard Havers
(HAY vers) is writing a book about Blue Note called Uncompromising Expressions.
HAVERS: Other record labels recorded Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, the beginning of
bebop. This was not something that Alfred Lion was particularly interested in at the time.
Alfred Lion was Blue Note’s founder. While he was slow to get on board with bebop,
Havers says,
HAVERS: Lion quickly realized that jazz was moving in a different direction, and the first of the
new wave of artists that he recorded was Thelonious Monk, who he absolutely adored.
MUSIC - Straight No Chaser - Thelonious Monk
Thelonious Monk played music that a lot of people just didn’t understand. And
according to Michael Cuscuna (cuss KOO nuh), who helped run Blue Note in the 1980s, Alfred
Lion took an enormous risk by putting out Monk’s music.
Michael Cuscuna: He signed Monk, in 1947, and he did three sessions. He recorded like 18
tunes before he even put out one 78, so he was really going out on a limb...financially, because
you know, there is a, it was a little label, and had no money.
Monk, today is recognized as a musical genius. And he’s not the only one Alfred Lion
found a promoted on Blue Note. There was drummer Art Blakey.
Michael Cuscuna: He was just one of the most exciting, swingingist, most exciting musicians in
the world.
MUSIC – Stretching - Art Blakey
Blakey stretched musical boundaries on the drums while – according to Dan Outlette –
Clifford Brown did the same thing on the Trumpet.
OULETTE: Clifford Brown was very important, because he was playing the trumpet in a
different way than anybody had ever heard it before.
MUSIC – Easy Living – Clifford Brown
And there were other radicals who Alfred Lion brought on-board. Here’s Don Was.
WAS: Larry Young completely reinvented organ playing with an album called “Unity.”
MUSIC - Beyond All Limits – Larry Young
Michael Cuscuna: The phenomenon really exploded when, when Lee Morgan came back to
music actively in the end of 1963.
Morgan had been recording with another record label, but he came over to Blue Note that
year and made an album, where, Michael Cuscuna says,
CUSCUNA: One of the tunes was this 24 bar blues called “The Sidewinder.”
MUSIC – THE SIDEWINDER – LEE MORGAN
Michael Cuscuna: It exploded. The day it came out, it exploded. The 45 of it was in jukeboxes
everywhere. It was on TV commercials. It was all over the place.
MUSIC – THE SIDEWINDER – LEE MORGAN
Even though this music was at its most popular during your grandparents’ era, there are
still plenty of young people who are re-discovering and playing it today. Godwin Louis (loo EE)
is a saxophone player. He came to jazz from listening to Charlie Parker’s great 1949 bebop
version of “White Christmas.”
MUSIC – CHARLIE PARKER –WHITE CHRISTMAS
LOUIS: It was sort of like “Wow! The liberties! It’s not quite the melody but it’s following some
kind of shape that’s – it goes with the melody and it’s – it makes sense, but I just don’t know
what it is. I want to be able to play like that.”
It the complexity of bebop, added to that feeling of “I want to be able to play like that” –
that’s what keeps attracting young musicians to the music. Jason Moran says that’s what did it
for him.
MORAN: If you had to practice piano as a kid, OK. So now we’re going to put on Bud Powell,
and listen to this guy play piano. “Oh, wow! OK.”
MUSIC – Bud Powell - Buster Rides Again
MORAN: If you play drums in the marching band, “OK. Now I’m going to give you Art
Blakey.” “Oh, wow!”
MUSIC – Art Blakey and The Afro-Drum Ensemble - Ife L’ayo (There Is Happiness in
Love)
MORAN: If you play clarinet or saxophone, “OK. So now I’m going to give you Wayne Shorter
to listen to.” “Oh, wow! That sounds crazy,” you know?
MUSIC – Wayne Shorter - Juju
MORAN: I appreciate excellence. I think if we want to teach a kid anything about excellence
than they have to be able to recognize it, not only within the things that they’re interested in, but
the things that they don’t understand as well. If they’re able to pick that part up of their brain, if
they’re able to get that inline, then they’ll be OK.
So it’s great for that. But also, it’s great for playing that mind game I mentioned earlier –
thinking about the people who came before you – what they were like and what they liked to do.
Picture your grandfather as a young man, in his bachelor apartment, turning on his new record
player and dropping the needle on an album of Blue Note jazz. He’s getting ready to go out with
that new girl he’s seeing. He doesn’t know yet that they’re going to get married. They just met.
For now, he’s listening and waiting as the bell rings, he opens the door and their eyes meet.
There’s bebop in the background and they both know, without a doubt, this is something special.
MUSIC – Wayne Shorter - Juju
Thanks for listening. I’m I’m Susan Stamberg for ArtsEdge, an education program of the
John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.