Bebop was jazz you weren't supposed to dance to
In the 1940s young jazz players walked away from the dance floor. Bebop swapped the big swing orchestras for small combos, sped the tempos up and piled on dissonant harmony, turning jazz into music that demanded to be listened to. Even its name probably began as scat nonsense.
Swing bands of the era ran to 16 or 18 players reading tightly arranged charts, and the public loved the bouncy, orderly sound of Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller. Bebop groups were small: typically saxophone, trumpet, piano, double bass and drums, the line-up Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie made standard, sometimes with guitar or an extra horn added. The band stated a tune's melody, called the head, then each player soloed over its chords before everyone returned to the theme. Most of a performance was improvised, held together only by the harmony underneath.
Much of that harmony was borrowed. Boppers often took the chords of a familiar swing-era song and laid a new, knottier melody on top, a device called a contrafact. The chords of I Got Rhythm, known as rhythm changes, and the blues were favourite frameworks. Players leaned on substitutions that stressed sharp dissonances such as the flat ninth and the tritone, and pianists often left out a chord's root and fifth. Many trace the harmonic leap to Parker playing Cherokee at Clark Monroe's Uptown House in New York in early 1942.
Nobody agrees where the word came from. It shows up as scat syllables on a McKinney's Cotton Pickers record from 1928 and again in 1936, with the variant rebop appearing in 1939. Thelonious Monk said it came from Bip Bop, his original title for what became 52nd Street Theme. Gillespie credited audiences who, not knowing the titles of his tunes, simply asked for bebop. Another theory links it to Latin bandleaders shouting arriba to their players.
To listeners raised on swing, the new music could sound frantic and broken up. By the 1950s the bopper had become a stock figure in jokes, overlapping with the beatnik. The style's leading lights, from Parker and Gillespie to Bud Powell and the drummer Max Roach, were mostly composers as well as performers.
Source: Bebop
