Being bop

Abstract

As the 1940s turned into the 1950s the popular image of the jazz musician shifted. The patriotic soldier jazzmen and wholesome mass entertainers of the war years were replaced by a new conception of the jazz musician as a radical who stood apart from conventional tastes, a non-conformist, a deviant. Focusing on Down Beat and Metronome, this essay examines how this image was created in the popular jazz press of the late 1940s. The way these publications responded to the music and words of the young black musicians at the forefront of bebop helped shape an image of the bebop musician as one who stood outside conventional musical and social norms, and which stood in contrast to the more respectable elements of 1940s swing. Carried to others through the press, bebop’s style and image served as a model antidote to the conformity of the early years of the Cold War, and as bebop was entrenched as the basis of post-war jazz, what had been associated with just one section of the jazz community soon became associated with its whole. In this way, the styles the press had associated with bebop ceased to define a subculture of black musicians but came to embody and express a certain discontent with mainstream American society.