JAZZ HISTORY

Rip It Up, Issue 25, 1 August 1979, Page 14

JAZZ HISTORY

By J Dix Part 3

Excepting the defiance of boxer Jack Johnson in the second decade ' of the century, American blacks who found themselves in the public eye endeared themselves to white society by "keeping their place" and acting like good little niggers. Joe Louis and Louis Armstrong, the two most famous negroes of the Thirties both kept up the Uncle Tom role. Then along came the be-boppers and shot the hell out of that concept of the servile negro.

Be-bop was much more than a musical revolution, it was the birth of black consciousness as we now know it. It was Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and later Miles Davis and Charlie Mingus, who paved the way for the Black Panthers, Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali twenty years later. Although eventually white musicians were accepted as formidable bop players (notably Al Haig and Red Rodney), in the early years there was a deliberate attempt to exclude whites from the music. The be-boppers created their own hep language, adopted the Islamic religion, dressed in an outrageous fashion and, of course, played a form of jazz so fast, intricate and advanced that the swing musicians had no option but to sit back and watch jazz progress without them. If you accept the thesis that there is a major cultural upheaval every seven or eight years (to enable each new generation to found their own heroes and institutions) then the bop rebellion was inevitable. Although almost all of the hoppers gained their initial experience in the swing bands, it was not their bag. There was a growing movement, as yet un-named and without direction or leadership, which invaded the big bands of the early Forties. The be-bop founders, notably Parker and Gillespie, all had bad reputations for insubordination, continually being reprimanded for clowning around on the stand, playing confusing experimental solos, being sloppily attired or displaying a distinct lack of interest. When the Earl Hines Band fell apart in 1943, Hines' vocalist, Billy Eckstine, formed a big band utilising the 'modernist' school of players, including Parker and Gillespie. But there was a definite lack of discipline with so many rebels in tbe one band and it soon disintegrated (later Gillespie would overcome the problem of a bop big band). By 1945 Parker and Gillespie had formed their own combo and established themselves at the vanguaTd of the bop movement (I’ll return to these two in later columns). While Bird and Dizzy were experimenting with the Eckstine band, there were other musicians making groundwork for the forthcoming revolution. Mintons', a club on New York’s Fifty-

second Street, had a house band which included two bop pioneers, drummer Kenny Clarke and pianist Thelonius Monk. The policy at Minton’s was for visiting musicians to drop in for the after-hours jam sessions to see if they could compete with the regulars. Virtually every instrument had its revolutionary practitioner with the rise of bop:drummers Clarke and Max Roach shifted the ground beat from the bass drum to the ride cymbal; pianists Monk and Bud Powell placed more emphasis on the right hand; the bassist, influenced by Ellington’s Jimmy Blanton, pushed the instrument more to the fore; the electric guitar found prominence in the hands of Charlie Qhristian; and, of course, every trumpet-player wanted to play like Dizzy, while everybody, on every instrument dreamt of blowing like Bird. Because of a Musicians’ Union ban on recording between 1942-44 there are, unfortunately, very few records available to trace the formative years of the bop players. So the bulk of the classic bop recordings were made from 1945 up to the Fifties, by which time the limitations of the form had run its course. Some of the boppers went on to dominate Fifties jazz, notably Miles Davis (who served his apprenticeship with the Parker Quintet) and Monk. The late Ralph Gleason, one of the great jazz critics, said, “The be-bop era was not a beginning but a brilliant ending to a style.’’ Maybe, but while Miles, Mingus and Monk would now turn their back on pop music as vehicles for their music, they did owe bop something important. For if the original jazzmen played for fun and the'swing-men played for entertainment, the boppers were the first to play jazz for art’s sake. RECOMMENDED LISTENING Dizzy Gillespie The Greatest Of, (RCA LPM-23'98) Charlie Parker The Complete, (BYG 529 129) Various Artists Jazz At Massey hall (Fantasy 86003) NEXT MONTH: MODERN JAZZ