African American Music – Nursing Writings
African American Music – Nursing Writings
“Dizzy Atmosphere”: The Challenge of BebopAuthor(s): Eric PorterSource: American Music, Vol. 17, No. 4 (Winter, 1999), pp. 422-446Published by: University of Illinois PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3052658Accessed: 04/03/2009 15:09
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ERIC PORTER
“Dizzy Atmosphere”:The Challenge of Bebop
The development of bebop in the 1940s is crucial to understandingjazz as we know it. A product of jam sessions, big bands, small com-bos, and countless hours of “woodshedding,” the musical languageof bebop included rapid tempos, dissonant chords and melodic lines,tritone and other chordal substitutions, extensive chromaticism, off-beat piano accompaniment (“comping”), walking bass lines, poly-rhythmic drumming, and, perhaps most important, a focus on extend-ed, improvised soloing on the front-line instruments. Swing-eraheavyweights such as Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Roy Eldridge,Art Tatum, Duke Ellington, Jimmy Blanton, and Walter Page had pre-viously explored aspects of this language in the 1930s, but they came
together in spectacular fashion in the work of Charlie Parker, JohnBirks “Dizzy” Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk, to name a handful of
bebop’s best-known practitioners.1Bebop continues to be a core element of the language of jazz. It in-
forms the work of most contemporary players, and many stylistic andtechnical innovations created in the 1940s remain integral parts of jazzeducation. Bebop marked the ascendance of the small combo as thebasic performing unit of jazz (which remains the case today) and its
production and reception transformed the meanings associated with
jazz and its place in American culture. Coming to prominence at theend of World War II, amid rising African-American political demandsand increasingly visible American youth cultures, bebop garnerednew capital for jazz as a music that spoke to observers of social and
Eric Porter is an assistant professor of American studies at the University ofNew Mexico. His book, tentatively titled Out of the Blue: African AmericanMusicians and the Idea of Jazz, is forthcoming from the University of Califor-nia Press.
American Music Winter 1999? 2000 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
Eric Porter
cultural resistance. At the same time, bebop also gave jazz unprece-dented capital as art music and signified its move into its current, al-beit precarious, position at the intersection of high art and popularculture.
Bebop was also a product of a 1940s African-American social, cul-tural, and intellectual milieu, as well as a critical juncture in African-American musicians’ ongoing public conversation about jazz. Build-
ing on recent scholarship on bebop that has sought to understand, aswell as complicate, the relationship between bebop and its historicalcontext, I reconsider the place of the music in African-American life.
Rejecting assessments that view the music as an aesthetically and
ideologically consistent project, I maintain that bebop, precisely in its
varying musical expressions and in musicians’ differing interpreta-tions of its meanings, was a product of a collective orientation, if nota cohesive movement. Not only did the development of the music it-self reflect the forward-looking, worldly perspectives of many of its
practitioners, but their public responses to the idea of bebop (wheth-er they embraced or rejected the term) also spoke of the refusal of theartistic and social boundaries that inspired their music. Ultimately,bebop marked an important moment in African-American musicians’critical conversation about jazz, an intellectual history rooted in mu-sicians’ aesthetic projects and social experiences and created in dia-
logue with general currents in African-American thought and thebroader conversation about jazz. I do not believe we will have a full
understanding of jazz and the meanings surrounding it until we have
explored fully this particular trajectory of ideas.2
“The World Was Swinging with Change”In recent years, bebop has become a test case for rethinking jazz his-
tory. Much writing about jazz, as Scott DeVeaux suggests, presentsthe music as a self-contained progression of styles that are divorcedfrom their social context. Consequently, some write about bebop asif it is merely another chapter in the aesthetic development of the id-iom. Others pay closer attention to social context and, in so doing,describe bebop as a cohesive aesthetic movement with a seamlessnessbetween the formal qualities of the genre and the ideological orien-tations and social positions of musicians and their audience. Suchnarratives explain how bebop mirrored transformations in black life,attitudes, and politics in the crucible of urban American during WorldWar II. By creating a new music, adapting a renegade style, assertingtheir intelligence, and demanding to be treated as artists, young Af-rican-American musicians forged a cultural politics that challengedall at once the banality of popular swing music, the complacency of
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older musicians, and a system of economic exploitation and culturalexpropriation by whites in the music business. In doing so, theyhelped forge a subculture that distanced itself from and challengedthe mainstream. We see this approach in Amiri Baraka’s Blues People,where the author argues that bebop music and styles represented an“anti-assimilationist” challenge to black middle class and whitesociety, and more recently in Eric Lott’s description of how bebop’s“aesthetic of speed and displacement” reflected, albeit indirectly, thepolitical demand of the “Double V” campaign and the militant aspi-rations of its youthful, working-class audience.3
Still, other studies challenge both types of narratives. Reexaminingbebop’s place in the artistic development of jazz and interrogatingassumptions about its political significance are staples of recent work.Bernard Gendron suggests that the construction of bebop in high cul-tural terms and as political expression was facilitated less by any in-herent meanings in the music than by a preexisting modernist dis-cursive field surrounding it. David Stowe argues that the perceivedschism between swing and bebop is a product of the political mean-ings imposed on the music rather than a radical departure on behalfof the musicians themselves. Iaking on Baraka’s analysis, Stowe re-jects the notion that bebop was a significant expression of black mili-tancy. Bebop’s interracial audience was more threatening than was themusic as a symbol of race pride, Stowe argues, and many swing-eramusicians were involved in more explicit political activism than wereany of the beboppers. According to Stowe, it was the cultural styleof bebop that shaped the perspective of later commentators, who readthe politics of bebop’s reception into the music itself.4
DeVeaux challenges Baraka’s and Lott’s assessments of bebop in hisown recent book on the topic. He welcomes Baraka’s attention to his-tory and is convinced by his insistence that bebop must be understoodin the context of “the sense of resentment” that African Americans feltduring World War II, when they encountered unyielding racism at amoment that offered promise for change. Similarly, he agrees withLott’s assertion that “militancy and music were undergirded by thesame social facts.” “But what, exactly,” DeVeaux asks, “constitutes the‘intimate if indirect relationship’ of music to politics?” He character-izes bebop musicians’ relationship to politics as “oblique” at best andproblematizes their relationship to a black mass audience, which atthe height of bebop’s popularity turned its attention toward rhythmand blues. Ultimately, DeVeaux argues, the emergence of bebopstemmed less from the political orientation of its practitioners andaudience than from a series of aesthetic and career decisions made byyoung, professionalized, primarily African-American musicians, whowere inspired by a variety of artistic challenges and frustrated by a
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Eric Porter
music industry that provided some opportunities but was also rifewith discrimination. Eventually, this led a number of musicians to fore-go the restrictive atmospheres of the swing big bands in favor of therelative artistic and social freedoms that small-combo jazz afforded.5
This recent work by DeVeaux, Gendron, and Stowe complicatessome of the claims other scholars have made about the politicalsignificance of bebop, which ultimately say as much about observ-ers’ interpretations of the music as they do about the orientations ofmusicians. Yet I believe there is room for exploring further the “so-cial facts” of African-American life in the 1940s and their relationshipto the emergence of bebop and the meanings later ascribed to it. Evenif bebop should not be read as a direct expression of black militancy,we can understand it as a product of a worldly intellectual orienta-tion and experimental aesthetic sensibility I term critical ecumenical-ism. The music may not have represented a particular, class-specificideological stance, but it did reflect changing orientations and per-spectives among African Americans, especially black youth andyoung adults.
Most considerations of bebop touch upon Minton’s Playhouse asone of its points of origin. Located on 118th Street in Harlem andowned by Local 802 delegate Henry Minton, the nightclub was thesite of lengthy jam sessions where many of the musicians instrumen-tal to the consolidation of bebop developed their techniques andmusical ideas. Minton’s club catered to African-American musicians,although others patronized the establishment as well. Pianist TeddyHill took control of the club’s music policy in 1940, hiring a houseband and making jam sessions a prominent part of the club’s opera-tions. The Monday night buffet dinners, given in honor of whoeverwas performing at the Apollo Theater, brought together musiciansfrom across the country.6
Looking back on these Monday night dinners and the jam sessionsthat followed them during the early war years, Ralph Ellison evokedan atmosphere that resonated with expectancy, camaraderie, and anelement of the unknown:
They were gathered here from all parts of America and they brokebread together and there was a sense of good feeling and prom-ise, but what shape the fulfilled promise would take they did notknow, and few except the more restless of the younger musicianseven questioned. Yet it was an exceptional moment and the worldwas swinging with change…. For they were caught up in eventswhich made that time exceptionally and uniquely then, and whichbrought, among the other changes which have reshaped theworld, a momentous modulation into a new key of musical sen-sibility; in brief, a revolution in culture.7
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What can we make of such memories? On one level, the ambiguityof Ellison’s comments suggests that the atmosphere at Minton’s, and
by extension the emergence of bebop, did not simply reflect the po-litical and social struggles of the war years. Indeed, later in the pas-sage Ellison carefully distinguished artists’ concerns from those of
sociologists and historians, as he maintained that musicians and fansalike went to Minton’s to seek sanctuary from the war and social ten-sions around them. But what, then, do we make of the “needs of feel-
ing” that brought people to the club, the “promise” that society heldout to them, musicians’ kindred spirit of exploration, and a “world
swinging with change”? And just how did these elements relate tothis “revolution in culture”?
Musicians who participated in the movement have been similarlyresistant to make direct connections between bebop and political ac-tivism. Drummer Kenny Clarke expressed an ambiguous account ofthe relationship of bebop to its moment. Asked if he was making astatement about the world around him, Clarke responded, “Yeah ina way. The idea was to wake up, look around you, there’s somethingto do. And this was just a part of it, an integral part of our cultural
aspect.” If there was a message to African Americans, Clarke contin-ued, it was this: “Whatever you go into, go into it intelligently. As sim-
ple as that.”8 Dizzy Gillespie also made it clear that there was no di-rect connection between music and politics: “We didn’t go out andmake speeches or say, ‘Let’s play eight bars of protest.’ We just playedour music and let it go at that. The music proclaimed our identity; itmade every statement we truly wanted to make.” Yet Gillespiethought that he and other beboppers were on the “vanguard of so-cial change.” What he remembered was a collective will to artisticexcellence and a sense of African-American pride joined with a re-fusal of social, creative, and even national boundaries. Speaking to
charges that beboppers expressed unpatriotic attitudes, Gillespie re-marked, “We never wished to be restricted to just an American con-text, for we were creators in an art form which grew from universalroots and which had proved it possessed universal appeal. Damn
right! We refused to accept racism, poverty, or economic exploitation,nor would we live out uncreative humdrum lives merely for the sakeof survival.”9
Bebop emerged at a crucial moment in African-American life. The1940s witnessed an acceleration of migration, proletarianization, ur-banization, and immersion in mass culture that had begun earlier inthe century. The war economy and the political climate around theconflict also contributed to changing cultural tastes and shifts in class,gender, and race relations. The ideological war against the white su-
premacist Nazi regime made the enduring racism in American soci-
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ety all the more glaring. African Americans’ sense of group identitywas augmented by a widespread belief that the expanding wartime
economy, and an anticipated democratization of American society,would lead to greater access to jobs, housing, and education. This col-lective sense of expectancy translated into the overt political demandsof A. Philip Randolph’s March on Washington Movement, whichpromised a June 1941 march on the nation’s capital if discriminationin defense industries did not subsist. The march never materialized,but the threat was enough to pressure Pres. Franklin Roosevelt into
issuing Executive Order no. 8802, forbidding discrimination by thegovernment and defense industries, and subsequently establishing theFair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) to enforce the order. Thehopes of black Americans during World War II were also evident inthe Pittsburgh Courier’s December 1941 call for a “double victory” cam-paign “to declare war on Japan and against racial prejudice in ourcountry”; early civil rights lawsuits; the growth of black union partic-ipation; struggles against housing discrimination; and the subtle, in-dividual struggles for respect and equal treatment in public spaces likestreetcorners and buses. When social freedoms did not materialize, orwhen acts of resistance were met by government intransigence (theFEPC ultimately did little to end discriminatory practices) or violentresponses by the state or unruly white mobs, African-American soli-darity was fused with anger and growing militancy.10
The climate of militancy and expectancy in urban centers was ac-companied by reconfigured racial affiliations and identities in flux.For our purposes, the relationship of this growing, politicized, Afri-can-American consciousness to black culture and intellectual life iscritical. Writing in 1943 about New York, Roi Ottley discussed thedevelopment of African-American solidarity and what might be calleda popular culture of black nationalism. This collective feeling cutacross class lines; it could be found in the thoughts of Garveyites,highbrow cultural critics, religious leaders, historians, and journalists.“Black nationalism,” Ottley wrote, “torn from its circus aspects, andmade more palatable to a wider section of the Negro population, per-meated every phase of Negro life.” This orientation was also a prod-uct of Pan-Africanist sentiment and the development of feelings ofkinship with other people of color within the United States andthroughout the globe. African Americans expressed internationalistaffinities in their support for Ethiopia during the Italo-Ethiopian warfrom 1935 to 1941, and as Penny Von Eschen has recently shown, thesesentiments were also evident in the internationalist orientation of Af-rican-American politics and popular culture in the 1940s, as well asin the treatment of African affairs by the African-American press.Moreover, George Lipsitz argues that the racist propaganda directed
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American Music, Winter 1999
toward Japan, and the internment of Japanese Americans, helped gen-erate domestic interethnic affiliations among people of color.1
Not only did African Americans see themselves in an internation-alist context but, as Von Eschen illustrates, the Pan-Africanist “pop-ular discourse” of the 1940s was based not on biology but on a his-torical awareness of divergent yet shared experiences under Europeanand Euro-American domination. Historical knowledge of these expe-riences helped forge a widespread understanding of the “construct-ed nature of race,” which was paralleled by a growing, publicly stat-ed distrust among African-American intellectuals of a biologicallydetermined, undifferentiated concept of race as a marker of cultural
identity and basis for political affiliation. Among the texts that inter-
rogated the idea of a static “Negro” identity in the early 1940s wereW.E.B. DuBois’s autobiography Dusk of Dawn (1940), Zora Neale Hurs-ton’s autobiography Dust Tracks on the Road (1942), and Alain Locke’s
essay, “Who and What Is ‘Negro’?” (1942).12At the same time, a collective sense of African-American pride dur-
ing the war facilitated cultural sharing across class boundaries in Af-rican-American urban communities. While we should not play downthe structural aspects of class stratification in these communities, this
period saw a loosening of cultural distinctions. Although class lineshad been broached in the 1920s, they were further challenged in the1940s as a result of the economic dislocation of the Great Depression,the cultural leveling of the New Deal, the impact of left-wing politi-cal ideas, and the rapid growth of African-American urban society.Ottley identified the emergence of a “Cafe au Lait Society,” a profes-sional and intellectual middle class with liberal political beliefs andfewer social pretensions than the “traditional” black bourgeoisie.Their existence and consumption of popular entertainment (includ-ing jazz) was symbolic of the cultural sharing between distinct groupsof African Americans.13
Rising black consciousness and militancy, combined with shiftingclass relations, an internationalist perspective, and a dissatisfactionwith some of the limitations of racial identities, fostered a certain kindof oppositional consciousness among African Americans from differ-ent social backgrounds during the 1940s.14 On the musical front, thisoften translated into a critical ecumenicalism, as many artists main-tained a strong sense of identity as African Americans while embrac-
ing a cosmopolitan approach to life and art. Musicians bristled at the
primitivist stereotypes to which they were expected to conform. Theyalso resisted cultural boundaries, whether based on high-brow “le-
gitimacy,” race, or national identity; often rejected the generic cate-
gories that separated jazz from other kinds of music; and, at times,refused to accept the political meanings ascribed to their craft. Elli-
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Eric Porter
son’s evocation of a community based on “feeling,” and his attemptto celebrate the artistry of bebop while rejecting the militant intentascribed to the music, may be read as a description of a cultural ex-
pression that spoke of group affirmation and demand, yet resisted theconfines of blackness as a racial category. Gillespie’s refusal of cre-ative and social boundaries also resonates with this ethos, as doesClarke’s description of bebop as a call to “wake up” and approachthe world “intelligently.”
“Now’s the Time”
As mentioned earlier, DeVeaux carefully documents how the “birthof bebop” was in part a function of the simultaneous freedom andrestriction the wartime music industry presented to young African-American musicians. Turning to ideological motivations, he offers an
interesting discussion of beboppers’ vexed relationship with the blues.
Although some of Charlie Parker’s earliest recorded musical accom-
plishments-for example, his 1944 work on Tiny Grimes’s “RedCross” and “Tiny’s Tempo”-stemmed from his ability to fuse “bluesy‘rice and beans’ gestures” with the “esoteric arabesques of the impro-vising virtuoso,” many beboppers saw the blues as a symbol of thelimitations placed on their lives as musicians and as African Ameri-cans. Not only was the harmonic structure of most blues tunes fairlysimple compared to original modern jazz compositions, the bluescame to symbolize the primitivist expectations of a white audienceand culture industry that wanted to pigeonhole black music. It also
represented a rural cultural past with which “upwardly mobile pro-fessional musicians” no longer wanted to be associated. Drawing in
part from a passage in Gillespie’s autobiography, DeVeaux argues that
many beboppers were “ashamed” of the blues, just as were manymembers of the African-American cultural and political elite. Themusical limitations were rather easily transformed, but the social im-
plications of the blues were harder to change. Musicians knew theyhad an obligation to a black audience that demanded the blues, and
they often found these performances inspiring. Yet they also saw theblues less as a cultural essence or birthright than as “point of ex-
change, between artist and audience.” In keeping with a “progressive”ethos that linked musical experimentation and racial uplift, musiciansoften looked to bebop as a way out of the blues, and they tried to“educate their audiences” in the process.15
DeVeaux is correct in describing the blues as a symbol of social andmusical restrictions for young African-American musicians. Howev-er, I want to build on his work by situating this response to the bluesand the bebop movement in general in the African-American cultur-
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430 American Music, Winter 1999
al and intellectual context sketched out above. One can read the pas-sage from Gillespie’s autobiography as evidence of both the anxietyand affirmation that came from interclass cultural sharing. A few lineslater he discusses how he defended his own explorations of the bluesto other musicians: “Man, that’s my music, that’s my heritage,” hetold them, adding that Charlie Parker was a “real blueser” as well.
Ultimately, the young musicians in DeVeaux’s analysis in some waysremain more rooted in an early century, Washingtonian doctrine ofracial uplift rather than in a more fluid, forward-looking ethos andacute awareness of identity stemming from the cultural and intellec-tual ferment of the 1940s. I say this not to deny the professionalismof these musicians, some of their middle-class orientations, or the leg-acy of uplift ideology, but to emphasize that beboppers’ rejection ofthe blues may also be understood as a product of a collective ethos
involving exploration, aversion to categories, mental acuity, grouppride, and an understanding that racial categories and assumptionsbe called into question. Speaking in 1948, Dizzy Gillespie’s arrangerGil Fuller suggested that earlier forms of music were simply no longerrelevant as African Americans moved into the future: “Modern lifeis fast and complicated…. We’re tired of that old New Orleans beat-beat, I got the blues pap.”16
Bebop’s style politics reflected this broader ethos, as intellectual
practice and sartorial display coincided for musicians and their au-diences. Although Eric Lott’s assessment of bebop ultimately de-scribes a cohesive and rather narrowly defined cultural and aesthet-ic politics-the meaning of which seems dependent upon a dominant
reading of the subculture that accompanied the music-his descrip-tion of bebop’s “style” calls attention to the way that musicians andfans alike engaged in serious mental endeavors that responded to theworld around them. “Bebop,” he writes, “was about making disci-
plined imagination alive and answerable to the social change of itstime,” and the style “was where social responsiveness became indi-vidual expression, where the pleasures of shared identity met an in-tolerance for racist jive.” Beboppers and their fans even adopted the
personae of intellectuals; goatees, berets, and horned-rimmed glass-es became the uniform of the subculture.17 The adoption of this rega-lia of the intelligentsia not only distanced musicians from the main-stream but challenged racist ideologies that were based in part on abelief in African-American mental inferiority. We may also understand
bebop style as a signifier of musicians’ collective search for a better
understanding of music theory and the world around them.
Beyond style, African-American musicians’ artistic projects, activi-ties, and ideas give insight into the deployment of their critical ecu-menicalism. Musicians involved with bebop after the war pursued
Eric Porter
their creative goals and their professional careers while negotiatingthe growing, albeit precarious, popularity of the genre and occasion-
ally the discourse surrounding it. By the late 1940s bebop had cometo symbolize, among other things, juvenile delinquency, black mili-
tancy, masculine assertion, serious artistic expression, and intellectu-alism.18 For a brief moment bebop seemed to be a vehicle for makingserious, black jazz artistry respectable and remunerative. And itseemed as if this legitimacy might come from either or both its po-tential to enter smoothly into the realm of high culture and its oppo-sitional capital as avant-garde expression. Yet bebop was never quiteable to escape its association with social deviance. As bebop was in-stitutionalized as black creative expression and intellectual work in
contradictory ways, musicians achieved a certain degree of voice toarticulate their aesthetic visions and their concerns about their livesin the music industry. Musicians’ words give further evidence that
bebop was not a unified ideological and aesthetic movement, but infact an artistic challenge that was understood in a variety of ways inits social, cultural, intellectual, and creative context. These commentsillustrate how an ethos of critical ecumenicalism helped fuel the de-
velopment of the idiom and eventually caused some musicians to re-
ject bebop as an inadequate description of a broader musical and in-tellectual endeavor.
When Gil …
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