As Gendron points out, two literary factional wars in the 1940s, the first between swing and the revivalist Dixieland movement, and the second pitting bebop against the two former styles, created a new way to look at jazz. What emerged from this war of words was “a set of agreed-upon claims about the aesthetic merit of various jazz styles . . . [and] a grouping of concepts, distinctions, oppositions, rhetorical ploys, and allowable inferences, which as a whole fixed the limits within which inquiries concerning the aesthetics of jazz could take place and without which the claim that jazz is an art form would be merely an abstraction or an incantation.”50
Thus a language developed for valuing jazz as art, a strategy contingent upon the notion of the music’s organic growth and development.51 In this framework, a boundary between jazz and other popular forms was drawn. For Gendron, bebop represents an early form of postmodernism because its emergence marked the first time that “popular culture abandoned its previously passive, almost unwitting, engagement with high culture, to become an initiator and even an aggressor.”52 This claim is instructive, especially in its implications for a gendered reading of bebop and jazz’s generic shift, as we shall witness below.
The musicians in this saga negotiated this emerging, contentious art world primarily through their sonic experimentations, although Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, the two iconic figures of early bebop, issued public statements in interviews that critics used to validate one position or another. How can we interpret and understand their cultural work— indeed, their insurrection—as masculinist, aggressive, and transformative? The following commentary identifies some of the ground on which these meanings were fought out.
The journalists who wrote about bebop left behind a trail of print in the popular and trade press documenting a colorful and instructive controversy. With titles such as “How Deaf Can You Get?” (1948) and “Do You Get It?” (1949), many of these articles range in tone from bewilderment to hostility to outrage at bebop. In a record review, Charles Miller writes as if peer pressure had forced him to deal with the new music: “Although I’m less than enthusiastic about a style of jazz called bebop, I feel that it’s worth writing about because it’s attracting an increasing number of listeners and because it might some day make more sense than it does now.”53 His description below, particularly his choice of such words as “weird,” “neurotic,” and “foreign,” allows us to experience a bit of the distancing effect bebop had on some contemporaneous listeners. Interestingly, these terms function—perhaps unwittingly—to emasculate the work of bebop musicians, especially the embedded innuendo that they were not involved in serious creative acts and seemed to be just “fooling around”: “Bebop isn’t easy to define, but I think it’s safe to call it highly experimental. Bebop musicians like to fool around with weird sounding chord effects and unusually complex melodic and rhythmic patterns, producing stuff that’s comparatively foreign to many ears. For my money, it’s an intensely neurotic style, and except for occasional passages that show imagination and beauty, I want no part of it.” Miller goes on to rehearse a wisecrack about the style: “Bebop is just a bunch of guys covering up their mistakes.”54 Wilder Hobson adopts a similar tone when reviewing a Dizzy Gillespie recording, using the opportunity to expound on the virtues of earlier jazz and to ridicule bebop. While generally dismissive, he compliments bebop musicians for being “incredibly agile” and reluctantly admits that the recording has a certain arresting and eerie quality.55 In his listening experience, bebop was “a miss.”
The mainstream press also took note of the controversy. A Time article from 1948, “Bopera on Broadway,” about the Royal Roost, a New York club that was among the first to feature bebop exclusively, notes: “Bebop has been around for seven or eight years, and something of a fad for two, but experts still disagree as to what it is, and whether it will last.” To this writer, the music was “shrill cacophony” and “anarchistic.”56 The article also mentions that clubs featuring bebop customarily maintained a no-dancing policy, which forced audiences either to listen to or ignore the music. A Newsweek article of the same year, “B. G. and Bebop,” responding to Benny Goodman’s experimentation with bebop in his group, polls several of Manhattan’s leading jazz critics. The most negative comment comes from the influential jazz critic and entrepreneur John Hammond, then vice-president of Mercury Records: “To me bop is a collection of nauseating clichés, repeated ad infinitum.”57
By 1949, the public recognized Gillespie and Parker as leading figures in bebop, and the musicians issued public statements about the music in the press. When he was asked the question “What is bebop?” Dizzy Gillespie answered that it is “just the way I and a few of my fellow musicians feel about jazz. It’s our means of expressing ourselves in music just as, years ago, the Chicagoans and the Dixielanders expressed themselves.”58 At face value, his words seem to defend his artistic right to experiment, to achieve artistic manhood. But he was probably also connecting bebop to earlier, more popular styles because he was fighting to keep his career afloat and his bank account in the black. Gillespie, known for his demonstrative, antic-filled stage manner, had a modernism that was an unabashedly commercial endeavor.
For his part in the “debate,” Charlie Parker chose another tactic. In Oedipal fashion, he claimed that bebop had developed apart from the older styles of jazz, stressing his music’s distance from the musical past.59 Bebop, for Parker, was rhythmically radical, and he wanted to wear that distinction on his sleeve. Gillespie countered in the October 7, 1949, issue of Down Beat that Parker was wrong: Bebop was an interpretation of jazz and certainly a part of its tradition.60 This debate was about more than a casual exchange of abstract ideas for these musicians. They were engaged in a public struggle for their commercial lives and, by extension, their social lives, in a context in which they exercised little control over the public meaning and discursive dissemination of their work. The critics, although not culturally powerful outside of the jazz community, ruled over these domains.61
Like jazz criticism, photographs of jazz musicians became an expressive domain that informed the ways in which bebop’s pedigree circulated in the public sphere. The diligence and artful sensibilities with which photographers began to frame jazz musicians had political as well as commercial implications. As Benjamin Cawthra argues: “Jazz photography . . . did its best to bring jazz into a mainstream of American culture. In this mainstream, jazz could function as an ambassador for American values while subtly—but with increasing intensity over time and in the eyes of particular photographers—offering a critique of those values via the presentation of African American virtuosity. Jazz itself existed as a kind of critique of a society divided racially, and its photographers made that critique visible while publicizing and selling the music.”62 The photographs of Bud Powell in this book allow us to see an influential modality in which the idea of his genius—and, by extension, bebop’s artistic constitution—was consumed by his public and in history. Indeed, the photographs, Cawthra insists, “shaped that history, making arguments through visual means for the significance of African American musical culture, the meaning of jazz in American history, and the moral necessity of a politics of equality, even though these goals themselves were complicated by the racial dynamics of jazz itself.”63 Bebop visuality, it seems, asserted just as much force in American culture as the music’s sonic aspects.
Bebop has certainly traveled considerable critical distance since the days when it was described as “a bunch of guys covering up mistakes” and as “shrill cacophony” and “nauseating clichés.” While certainly rooted in the bodily excesses of the dance floor, Powell’s music has risen to the lofty status of “head” music. Even the hip dress and speech patterns of bebop musicians, treated routinely in sensationalist terms by the contemporaneous press, seem benign and safe by today’s standards.
RACE, COMPLEXITY, AND “THE” JAZZ AUDIENCE