Writers who valued beboppers’ achievements borrowed critical rhetoric from the most prestigious and status-building model available to them—the modernist strain of western art music. But where did this leave Powell and his associates? Did the rhetoric of elite modernism serve well their aspirations?
One important writer believed it did not. Martin Williams, the influential jazz critic and compiler of the landmark anthology The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz, writes that Charlie Parker helped renew jazz “simply by following his own artistic impulses.”5 Williams argues that bebop musicians made a self-conscious effort to change the social function of jazz. But he characterizes the result of this effort as a kind of “dream deferred,” questioning its success because although social dancing is, for the most part, not done to modern jazz, “for a large segment of its audience it is not quite an art music or a concert music. It remains by and large still something of a barroom atmosphere music. And perhaps a failure to establish a new function and milieu for jazz was, more than anything else, the personal tragedy of the members of the bebop generation.”6
Williams writes in the same essay that although Parker and others “repudiated what they thought of as the grinning and eye-rolling of earlier generations of jazzmen. . . . [they] courted a public success and a wide following that were defined in much the same terms as the popular success of some of their predecessors.”7 Naturally, the process of elevating bebop to this lofty new pedigree meant critically endowing the musicians themselves with artistic autonomy. But at the same time, Williams seems to recognize that jazz was not completely free from its social roots, that it seemed stuck between aesthetic discourses. So what is the truth about modern jazz’s pedigree?
Bebop musicians such as Powell did represent an elite group, and my discussion of his music will show that he merits this claim. But his elite status, like the pedigree of bebop itself, is quite a complex matter. At one time the word elite described “someone elected or formally chosen”; by the end of the nineteenth century, however, the term “became virtually equivalent with [the] ‘best.’”8 Writers have framed beboppers’ achievements in this latter sense, and more specifically, as an elitism within the framework of western art music. Yet I believe it is important to show that bebop retained powerful connections to black communal values and to the commercial, popular music industry. Ultimately, I wish to show through Powell’s music that any argument about bebop as fine art should take into account its dynamic relationship to art discourses, black culture, and commerce.
In order to parse this relationship, one has to move beyond the sonic. Bebop was, of course, sound, but it also embodied a look composed of the berets, goatees, and thick horn-rimmed glasses that were popular among the postwar “Museum of Modern Art set.”9 The clothing worn by the beboppers represented an “intellectualized” adaptation of the zoot suit, the dress code for World War II–era hipsters.10 Photographs of bebop musicians show that many chose to chemically straighten their hair in the “conk” style popular among many urban black males in the 1940s. Along with the look came an insider language. Trumpeter Miles Davis is only one of many who recalls that early beboppers cultivated a colorful vocabulary that grew out of black slang or jive talk, a popular dialect in the jazz world during the late 1930s and early 1940s.11
The bebop look and language gave the popular press an image to promote (or denounce) and lent more than a dash of human interest to the scene. Both Life and Ebony magazines featured articles in the late 1940s that focused primarily on these features. These seemingly peripheral aspects of bebop culture reveal much about the music’s political import. Robin D. G. Kelley argues that clothing such as the zoot suit (and variations thereof) does not carry a direct political statement in itself, but its cultural context renders it into a statement. Bebop musicians belonged to a larger underground culture of black working-class youth, in which the “zoot suit, the conk, the lindy hop, and the language of the ‘hep cat’ [were] signifiers of a culture of opposition among black, mostly male, youth.”12 Such acts have traditionally allowed the construction of a collective identity that challenges dominant stereotypes and forms insularity.
Consider, for example, Miles Davis’s account of Dexter Gordon coaching him in the art of “bebop hipness” in 1948. Gordon urged Davis to buy new clothes and to try to grow a moustache or a beard to affirm his affiliation with the bebop subculture—onstage and off. Davis recalls that after he had saved enough money, he purchased a big-shouldered suit that felt much too large for him. Gordon’s response upon seeing Davis in the suit resembles an initiation rite: “Now you looking like something, now you hip. . . . You can hang with us.”13 Bebop dress negotiated a musician’s identification as an insider of bebop subculture.
Kelley connects bebop’s sonic language to the hipster vocabulary that Miles Davis refers to above. Young black males, he writes, “created a fast-paced, improvisational language that sharply contrasted with the passive stereotype of the stuttering, tongue-tied sambo.”14 Dizzy Gillespie also recognized the relationship between the spoken words of the hipster and the musical rhetoric of bebop: “As we played with musical notes, bending them into new and different meanings that constantly changed, we played with words.”15 Gillespie’s “play” represents some important cultural work, firmly situating bebop within the priorities of black vernacular culture.
Moving back to the musical, how do we interpret bebop’s artistic pedigree through the lens of its sonic complexity? Did its intricate approach to harmony and rhythm and its virtuosic solos situate it outside the realm of black popular culture? Certainly this notion of complexity is crucial among those who believe that western art music is superior to other musical forms. Ethnomusicologist Judith Becker has argued that many believe “that Western art music is structurally more complex that other music; its architectural hierarchies, involved tonal relationships, and elaborated harmonic syntax not only defy complete analysis but have no parallel in the world.”16 And many jazz writers believe this sentiment to be true because a good deal of jazz literature assigns jazz prestige by arguing that it is just as complicated (and that it is complicated in the same way) as western art music. As I will show later, Powell’s music certainly embodies a good deal of melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic complexity—so much so that it would seem to support a perception of bebop as art music. Yet we will also see how Powell’s early career in swing grounds the music in the repertory, not to mention the social histories, of other 1940s black popular music. (This is not a new point by any means; it is simply amplified in the specific case of Powell.)
Susan McClary has made clear how “within the context of industrial capitalism, two mutually exclusive economies of music developed: that which is measured by popular or commercial success and that which aims for the prestige conferred by official arbiters of taste.”17 The bebop-as-fine-art notion seems to have moved jazz from McClary’s first musical economy to the latter. The much-promoted idea that jazz is “America’s classical music” seems to suggest that philosophy. But successful music making in the United States has always depended on attracting and satisfying the needs of paying customers, and bebop was no exception.18 Beboppers worked under these assumptions, as Gillespie himself has pointed out: “We all wanted to make money, preferably by playing modern jazz.”19
The bebop