"Dizzy Atmosphere": The Challenge of Bebop

Abstract

The development of bebop in the 1940s is crucial to understanding jazz as we know it. A product of jam sessions, big bands, small combos, and countless hours of woodshedding, the musical language of bebop included rapid tempos, dissonant chords and melodic lines, tritone and other chordal substitutions, extensive chromaticism, offbeat piano accompaniment (comping), walking bass lines, polyrhythmic drumming, and, perhaps most important, a focus on extended, improvised soloing on the front-line instruments. Swing-era heavyweights such as Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Roy Eldridge, Art Tatum, Duke Ellington, Jimmy Blanton, and Walter Page had previously explored aspects of this language in the 1930s, but they came together in spectacular fashion in the work of Charlie Parker, John Birks Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk, to name a handful of bebop's best-known practitioners.' Bebop continues to be a core element of the language of jazz. It informs the work of most contemporary players, and many stylistic and technical innovations created in the 1940s remain integral parts of jazz education. Bebop marked the ascendance of the small combo as the basic 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 the end of World War II, amid rising African-American political demands and increasingly visible American youth cultures, bebop garnered new capital for jazz as a music that spoke to observers of social and