Bop Till you Drop

John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie has said he was playing what came to be called bebop as early as 1936. This is a little like Jelly Roll Morton claiming he personally invented jazz--but as with Morton's boast, there is some truth to Gillespie's claim. Gillespie started as an acolyte of trumpeter Roy Eldridge but kept having new ideas about chords and key changes. Cab Calloway used him as a featured instrumentalist in his big band, but Calloway didn't appreciate some of the modern flights in his solos. He recalls: "I'd say, 'Man listen, will you please don't be playing all that Chinese music up there!' "

Before Calloway fired him (in 1941 over an incident that started with spitballs and ended with Gillespie knifing Calloway in the thigh), Gillespie had been breaking other rules, among them, jamming for the fun of it at various after-hours clubs--which was against union rules and Calloway band policy.

One main joint where Gillespie played was Minton's in Harlem--the legendary birthplace of bebop. Former saxophonist Henry Minton had turned the down-and-out dining room of the Hotel Cecil on West 118th Street into a jazz supper club called Minton's Playhouse. Most accounts of it suggest a smoky basement dive where people shot up in the shadows and crazies on the bandstand made up wild new music. But Miles Davis remembered it differently in his autobiography:

"Minton's and the Cecil Hotel were both first-class places with a lot of style. The people that went there were the cream of the crop of Harlem's black society. People who came to Minton's wore suits and ties because they were copying the way people like Duke Ellington or Jimmie Lunceford dressed. It cost something like two dollars if you sat at one of the tables, which had white linen tablecloths on them and flowers in little glass vases. It was a nice place--much nicer than the clubs on 52nd Street--and it held about a hundred or a hundred and twenty-five people."

It was just another club until January 1940, when bandleader Teddy Hill was hired as manager. He had been at the World's Fair on Long Island, where his band--which included Gillespie and drummer Kenny Clarke--had played at a replica of the Savoy Ballroom. They were fired after a contract dispute over time and money, the band broke up and Hill went to Minton's. His modern friends followed.

Hill hired Thelonious Monk as pianist for the house band.

Monk was born in North Carolina in 1917 but grew up in New York in the West 60s. Before his gig at Minton's he toured with a swinging female evangelist. He was largely self-taught on piano. Jazz historian Leonard Feather points out:

"Monk went his own way, and it was perhaps significant that he rarely worked as an official member of any of the small bop ensembles [as recording units] when that idiom was crystallizing. For the most part he was a loner, making solo stints or leading a trio or small combo clear through the Forties and Fifties. Although his compositions are his most important gift to jazz, he has extended his mastery of an individual piano technique to the point where his harmonic innovations, coupled with the stark, somber quality of his approach and the uniquely subtle use of dynamics, place him among the most important and influential figures in jazz today."

Drummer Art Blakey said it more emphatically: "Monk is the guy who started it all. He came before both Parker and Gillespie."

Gillespie sat in at Minton's when he wasn't on the road with whatever band he was in at the moment. Another Minton's regular was Charlie Christian, then with Benny Goodman. His only competition for the title of first great modern jazz guitar player would be French Gypsy Django Reinhardt.

The electric guitar was an invention of the Thirties and had been relegated to the rhythm section (the joke was that Count Basie's guitarist, Freddie Green, had played more quarter notes than anyone on earth). But Christian started playing single-string melodic lines, treating the electric guitar as another lead instrument.

His career set a world record for brilliance and brevity. Born in Dallas but raised in Oklahoma City, Christian was taught guitar by his father. He played as a kid in "territory" bands and was 20 years old when ubiquitous critic-producer John Hammond heard him and got Christian into the Benny Goodman band in 1939. Clarinetist Goodman was at his jazziest in the small groups--sextets, generally--he assembled for recording sessions, A typical one in October 1940 included Goodman, Christian, Lester Young on tenor sax, Buck Clayton on trumpet, Count Basie on piano and Jo Jones on drums--not bad company for 21-year-old Christian. But in 1941 Christian came down with tuberculosis. He died the next year, helped off this mortal coil by some friends who went to visit him in his Brooklyn hospital and took some wine, a lid of dope and a girl to cheer him up. They probably did.

Jazz critic Barry Ulanov, an editor for Metronome, has said that Christian deserves considerably more credit than he usually gets for helping to invent this new music:

"He played up at Minton's in Harlem in those first experimental sessions, which yielded, in the early Forties, the altered chords, the fresher melodic lines. All of the musicians who played with him then, as did all of us who heard him, insisted on his large creative contribution to the music [bop] later associated with Parker and Gillespie."

Jazz critic Nat Hentoff describes the music this way:

"Bop--the birth of modern jazz--has strong roots in the past but was characterized by much more complex and rapid rhythm, driven by cross-accents, on and off the beat. The melodies, often based on highly enriched chordal patterns, were also careeningly unpredictable."

Minton's usual drummer was Kenny Clarke, generally credited as being the first bop drummer (even though he was inspired by Count Basie's drummer Jo Jones). Clarke had been in the Teddy Hill band with Gillespie, where, like young philosophy students, they bashed heads about theory and chords and progressions. Clarke's nickname was Klook-mop, coined by Teddy Hill for the new-rhythm bombs Clarke dropped while playing. The name was inspired by the scat of one tune called Oop Bop Sh'Bam, a portion of which went "a-klook-a-mop." What Clarke did was shift the timekeeping duties from the bass drum to the lighter sound of the cymbals, freeing the bass drum to play off-rhythms and surprises.

Born in Pittsburgh, Clarke grew up in a musical family. By 1933, at the age of 19, he was playing in a group led by Dizzy's early idol, trumpeter Roy "Little Jazz" Eldridge, another Pittsburgh native just three years older than Clarke. Klook and Dizzy played together off and on until Clarke became one of the founding members of the Modern Jazz Quartet in 1952.

The scene at Minton's and other clubs was the setting for a conspiracy that was plotting musical revolution, with Dizzy as its chief proselytizer. Dizzy was a born teacher, generous with his ideas. Bassist Milt Hinton used to go up on the roof of the Cotton Club with Dizzy, dragging his big fat acoustic bass three floors up a spiral fire escape, so that Dizzy could teach him new rhythms, how to go up and down inside a chord instead of modulating from one to another, how to explore the dimensions and connections of chords. Another Minton's after-hours regular, Texas tenor player Illinois Jacquet, put it this way: "Dizzy started changing the progressions and started playing the whole chord instead of the melody. Play the melody, too, but you can play the chords, and you don't even hear the melody."

This new music sounded pretty weird compared with what had gone before in jazz. But pianist Mary Lou Williams, a longtime member of Andy Kirk's 12 Clouds of Joy, dug it. She was a few years older than these new players. She hung out at Minton's and, like many others, benefited from Dizzy's teaching. She was also friends with fellow pianists Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell. And she felt that for all its experimentation, bop still stayed connected to the source--the (continued on page 112)Bop Till you Drop(continued from page 92) blues. As she said in Dizzy's autobiography: "The blues stayed in [jazz] from the beginning of the spirituals. The blues feeling has always been there. Well, it was still in bop, except it was just millions of notes. When we first heard it during the Forties, it sounded like Dizzy was playing a million notes in one bar."

Dizzy helped add another ingredient to the music: "My own contributions to the new style of music at this point were rhythm--Afro-American and Latin--together with harmony," he said.

He credited himself with introducing polyrhythms into jazz, taking the music back to its polyrhythmic African roots. And again, he wasn't exaggerating much. His bop classic, A Night in Tunisia, written in 1942 but not recorded until 1944 because of the musicians'-union recording ban (and then recorded by everybody), is a great example of this. "The melody had a very Latin, even Oriental, feeling," notes Dizzy. "The rhythm came out of the bebop style--the way we played with rhythmic accents--and that mixture introduced a special kind of syncopation into the bass line."

In 1947, leading his own big band, which Metronome named Band of the Year, Dizzy hired a Cuban conga player named Chano Pozo, who helped teach them more about polyrhythmic playing. Pozo was a hard character, with a bullet still in him from some fray in Cuba. In the late Thirties he was a member of what Leonard Feather describes as "a Nigerian cult, the Abakwa, that provided much of the excitement at the local Mardi Gras celebrations. Soon he became a celebrated figure in Cuba as drummer, dancer and composer." Pozo spoke no English, but on long trips between gigs on the band bus, he'd pass out various drums to the band members and show them how to play polyrhythms. Pozo was with Gillespie only a year before he was shot to death at the Rio Café in Harlem "for what was rumored to be negligence in paying a bill," as critic Ira Gitler put it.

Dizzy saw a historical dimension to his interest in polyrhythms. These rhythms took the music back to Africa via the black Caribbean. Dizzy used to joke that he was descended from the ex-slaves who lived on the islands off South Carolina, whose homogeneity and isolation helped preserve their African culture and musical heritage. But North American slaves weren't allowed to have drums. "We could talk with the drum," wrote Dizzy, "and they figured you could foment revolution with the drums. You can talk to somebody two miles over there and say, 'Let's get these motherfuckers. Get ready!' " The field holler, keeping time with hoes, was one way to compensate, but the sound didn't carry very far. Missing was what Dizzy called "the main instrument, the rhythm maker, the one that you play with your hands. Our ancestors still had the impulse to make polyrhythms, but basically they developed a monorhythm from that time on. We became monorhythmic but the Afro-Cubans, the South Americans and the West Indians remained polyrhythmic."

Dizzy had bounced through a lot of bands in the late Thirties and early Forties before he began leading his own outfits.

As early as 1942, he was being hired to write arrangements for various popular white big bands. "The peculiarity about these things I wrote for bands like Woody Herman and Jimmy Dorsey," wrote Diz, "is that it was just like the current craze, the rock craze. They had to have some bebop in the book. But when I'd bring in these arrangements and songs, sometimes they'd have a hard time playing them." Jimmy Dorsey had to hire Gillespie to show his band how to play the stuff.

But if Gillespie was the head in this speedy new uptown jazz, Charlie Parker, another regular at Minton's, was its heart and soul. If Gillespie brought a brand of technical wizardry to bebop, Parker brought his own, and the blues, too. They played together off and on through the Forties and together put bebop on the map. But who influenced whom isn't clear. Dizzy once said of Parker, "When Charlie Parker came to New York in 1942, the new style of music had already begun, but he made a gigantic contribution, which really added a new dimension to the music. Charlie Parker's contribution to our music was mostly melody, accents and bluesy interpretation. And the notes! He was the other side of my heartbeat." Count Basie said that Gillespie created "seventy-five percent of modern music." According to Miles Davis, "Bird might have been the spirit of the bebop movement, but Dizzy was its head and hands, the one who kept it all together. He looked out for the younger players, got us jobs and shit." Pianist Lennie Tristano said late in the Forties that if Parker wanted to invoke plagiarism laws, he could sue 90 percent of the jazz players then working. Gillespie's and Parker's musical ideas, developed separately, may have simply flowed together like two streams creating a new river.

But nonmusically, they were the odd couple, with Gillespie playing Felix to Parker's Oscar. Dizzy was speedy and orderly, always taking care of business. Parker's life was chaos. Parker was trouble. He was lovable and a constant pain in the ass to everyone who knew him. But on the saxophone, he was a genius--one of a handful in jazz. You have only to listen to Parker play one fluid chorus to understand why people put up with his idiosyncracies. They didn't call him Bird for nothing. Like Louis Armstrong before him, he changed jazz forever.

Parker was born in Kansas City, Kansas in 1920. His family moved across the river to the real K.C. when he was seven. He started playing professionally at 15, was married and had a heroin habit by the time he was 16, was the father of a son at the age of 17. He did everything fast, just like his playing, and managed to live all of 35 years.

He was married four times, but that didn't slow him down when it came to women. Most heroin addicts lose their interest in sex, but Parker was known to make it with three or four women a day--most of them white "band chicks," as groupies were known back then. Drugs. You should have a nickel for every story told about him nodding off on the bandstand or not showing up at all because he was wasted. His drug of choice was heroin. He smoked pot and cigarettes, too . Drinking. Before the first set at a club, he would sometimes line up eight doubles along the bar and down them in a row, just to get straight before going on.

One story told by Miles Davis about a taxi ride sums up Parker's Rabelaisian side. It was 1945, Miles was not even 20, still a kid from the Midwestern sticks, newly in New York to study at Juilliard. He was suddenly befriended by Parker, who either quickly recognized Miles' talent or needed a place to crash, or both. In any case, he glommed on to Miles and moved into his tiny apartment with him, where Miles would sometimes find him zonked, needle still in his arm, bleeding on the sheets. For an upper-middle-class kid from East St. Louis--Miles' father was a dentist--it was an education. Parker wasn't yet well (continued on page 149)Bop Till you Drop(continued from page 112) known by the public but was already a legend in the bebop crowd. Miles had briefly sat in with the Billy Eckstine band in St. Louis a year earlier when one of their trumpeters flaked out, and both Dizzy and Parker were in the group. Hearing and playing alongside them for two weeks turned Miles around, and his desire to go to Juilliard was largely fueled by the fact that Dizzy and Parker's home turf at the time was New York.

Not long after hitting town, Miles found himself in a cab with Parker heading uptown to Harlem from 52nd Street. To Davis' considerable shock, Parker was well fortified for the ride. He had an open bottle of whiskey in one hand and fried chicken in the other, trading off between them while what would have to be called an uninhibited young woman was on her knees in front of him. Miles was grossed out.

It should be added that this was only one side of Parker. He was no idiot savant. Everybody who knew him said he was incredibly smart. He had a photographic memory, learning charts in nothing flat. He was also a voracious reader--though friends wondered how he found the time. One of his favorites was Baudelaire. He was also knowledgeable about modern art and modernist composers--and aspired toward making avant-garde music. Parker played sax in a new way, his style inspired by Lester Young. But Parker took a left turn from him to create something all his own.

Where it came from is a little mysterious. When Parker was 16, newly married, he got a gig to play in a summer resort band in Eldon, Missouri in the Ozarks. While there, he studied with a pianist who taught him basic major and minor chords, seventh an diminished. It got him thinking, and he spent the summer practicing every chance he got. No one had been wildly impressed with his playing before this stint in the Ozarks, but afterward it was different.

During the next couple of years Parker passed through various groups. In 1939 he hoboed to New York to be in on the scene and took a job as a dishwasher to stay alive. In the same restaurant, Art Tatum was playing piano, and his oceanic harmonic concept influenced the young saxophonist Parker.

Here's Parker on his revelation:

I remember one night I was jamming in a chili house on Seventh Avenue between 139th and 140th. It was December 1939. Now, I'd been getting bored with the stereotyped changes that were being used all the time, at the time, and I kept thinking there's bound to be something else. I could hear it sometimes, but I couldn't play it. Well, that night, I was working over Cherokee, and, as I did, I found that by using the higher intervals of a chord as a melody line and backing them with appropriately related changes, I could play the thing I'd been hearing. I came alive.

He started jamming regularly at Minton's, his style so revolutionary that the first time sax player Ben Webster heard him, he ran up to the bandstand, ripped the sax out of Parker's hands and said, "That horn ain't supposed to sound that fast!"

Why were they interested in so radically changing the music and in playing so fast? Partly it was boredom. The beboppers were tired of playing big-band stuff and were looking for something more challenging and more fun.

As Dizzy put it in his autobiography: "Music reflects the times in which you live. My music emerged from the war years, and it reflected those times in the music. Fast and furious, with the chord changes going this way and that way, it might've looked and sounded like bedlam, but it really wasn't."

By December 1941, when the United States got into the war following the Pearl Harbor attack, Hitler had already been charging around Europe, collecting the parts that appealed to him. The Japanese had been nibbling at pieces of Asia since the mid-Thirties. The world map was up for grabs.

For those who stayed home, life in America underwent a tidal change during World War Two. Hardly a family didn't have a son or a cousin heading off to war. Women went to work in unprecedented numbers at previously male jobs--Rosie the Riveter was a popular inspirational character. On the home front, life's basics--from meat and sugar to tires and gasoline--were rationed. There were shortages of everything, so that the arrival of a shipment of Double Bubble at the local drugstore was big news among neighborhood kids.

But tragic as World War Two was, there was also a kind of buzz to it, a strange euphoria, a confidence that because we were America and were on the right side, doing the right thing, we were bound to win. We were America fighting evil, so how could we lose? It's no accident that comic-book artist Jack Kirby dreamed up superhero Captain America, with his flag-inspired costume, during this time.

And the war affected jazz--the musicians, the business, the music itself--just like everything else. The heyday of small-combo jazz on 52nd Street was fueled by the war and ended not long after it was over. A wartime tax on dance clubs further promoted this sit-down form of jazz--it was cheaper to hear. But more important, soldiers and sailors either shipping out or home on leave were looking for a major-league good time in the big city. There were plenty of customers.

Meanwhile, the draft boards kept dropping "Greetings" bombs on all the groups. This disruption of personnel was especially tough on the big bands, which, along with featured soloists, relied on group sections playing as seamless units. It took a while for a replacement to learn the book--if you could find a decent player--and bands folded or dropped down several notches when their former stars left for the service.

The drafting of all these jazzmen was yet another incentive to the small-combo beboppers. You didn't need 20 people to make your music--nor a vocalist. Singers, such as teen heartthrob Frank Sinatra with Tommy Dorsey, were coming to dominate the bands at the expense of the players, and bebop was a reaction against this trend.

The beboppers were hipsters, outsiders, inspiring the first Beats--Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and the rest--long before the term was coined in the late Fifties. Dizzy also pioneered bop fashion, starting with his goatee and shades. After playing in France in 1937, he began wearing a black beret, and other hipsters followed suit.

The beboppers were the first to start thinking about jazz in an academic way. There had been previous jazz musicians who had graduated from college, but these musically educated beboppers in New York gave jazz a spin toward abstraction it had never had back in New Orleans or Chicago. Illinois Jacquet said, "Most of those people in the bands, the musicians, were college graduates or started out to be doctors and started playing music. They were all educated musicians, mostly."

The result was that this new music got so complicated, was played so fast, became so unpredictably interesting to listen to--as opposed to the seamless and predictable dance music of most big bands--that people stopped dancing so they could pay better attention. For better or worse, concert jazz was being born, and jazz was beginning to lose its mainstream dance audience.

The short, brilliant life of the Billy Eckstine Orchestra is a good example. Eckstine, a dapper former vocalist with the Earl Hines band, left Hines in 1943. After a short solo stint on 52nd Street he assembled an orchestra in 1944 that included a who's who of hip things to come in the way of band members: Gillespie and Fats Navarro on trumpets; Gene Ammons and Dexter Gordon on saxes; Tommy Potter on bass; Art Blakey on drums; Tadd Dameron on piano; and Sarah Vaughan, a young vocalist who had won an Apollo Theater amateur contest in 1942 and had spent the following year in the Earl Hines band with Eckstine and Gillespie. She was doing for jazz singing what the rest were doing on their instruments.

Eckstine appointed Gillespie musical director, which, in terms of giving Dizzy's new musical ideas free rein in a big-band context, was a little like handing the fox the keys to the henhouse. With the addition of Charlie Parker, the Billy Eckstine Orchestra was the hippest large aggregation of the mid-Forties, the bebop rebellion in big-band disguise. It didn't last because it was too hip for its audiences, who were expecting standard dance fare instead of Dizzy and company's Chinese modernisms. Leonard Feather said the Eckstine orchestra was "years ahead of its time."

"There was no band that sounded like Billy Eckstine's," Dizzy said in his autobiography. "Our attack was strong, and we were playing bebop, the modern style. No other band like this one existed in the world."

But the would-be dance audiences generally didn't get it.

According to Eckstine: "We didn't have it easy. Our type of music was more or less a concert style of jazz. People would start to dance and then they'd turn around and listen. Sometimes our tempos were not danceable, either. It was at the end of the war, and people weren't ready at that particular time for a concert style of jazz."

Road manager Bob Redcross had a slightly different take: "That was the first band that ever played that people couldn't dance to. Man, they were awed. They would stand there and just go crazy. But nobody was dancing."

On tour the members of the Eckstine band went through the usual racial hassles. The Plantation Club in St. Louis, an all-white club owned by gangsters, featured Eckstine's all-black band in 1944. As Gillespie remembered:

They fired Billy Eckstine's band because we came in through the front door, and they wanted us to come in through the back. A lotta shit happened to us in St. Louis. One time there, in the Club Riviera, Billy punched a guy down the stairs, and this guy had a pistol and everything. All of us had pistols, too, so it didn't make any difference. Everybody in that band had a pistol. If you went down South, you'd better have one, and a lot of ammunition.

Peripatetic Dizzy lasted seven months with Eckstine before moving on--even he hadn't been able to maintain band discipline. Saxophonist and arranger Budd Johnson, his replacement as musical director, said, "Most of the reed section were junkies. And they were messing up, missing trains and whatnot." Parker was soon gone, too, landing with Dizzy on 52nd Street in various aggregations, sometimes in the same group, sometimes in competing outfits.

World War Two ended in 1945, and it was also a big year for bebop. The arrival of Gillespie and Parker on the Street signaled the movement of bebop downtown and its discovery by white audiences. While the first bop record session technically took place in early 1944--a Coleman Hawkins date--it was in late 1945 that the first bop hits were recorded, the most legendary being Ko Ko. Nineteen-year-old Miles Davis was in on these seminal Savoy sessions with Dizzy and Bird and with Max Roach on drums. But Ko Ko, written by Parker, began at such a bat-out-of-hell pace that Miles couldn't handle the introduction, and Gillespie, who'd been playing piano on the session, had to fill in on trumpet. Years later Miles said that he had been asleep and did not hear a note while the others were recording this landmark hit. Jazz historian Martin Williams described Ko Ko as "a torrential, virtuoso improvisation."

These first bop records were snatched up and listened to down to scratches by their fans, but they didn't dent the pop charts. Among the tops Billboard hits in 1946 were Perry Como's Prisoner of Love (number 1), The Gypsy, by the Ink Spots (3) and Five Minutes More, by Frank Sinatra (4). Down the line were South America, Take It Away, by Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters (8) and Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief, by Betty Hutton (12).

But while pop music slept on, Groovin' High and Shaw 'Nuff--both recorded by Parker and Dizzy in February 1945--and other early bop records caused their own furor in the jazz world. You were either for it or against it.

Bebop came out of left field for a lot of listeners, in large part because of the musicians'-union recording ban, which lasted for 18 months from 1942 through 1943 and left a large hole in the recorded documentation of this new style as it developed. If you hadn't been hanging out in the New York clubs, watching it grow, bebop sounded at first like music from outer space.

Some jazz writers, such as Leonard Feather and Barry Ulanov, became almost immediate enthusiasts. But most treated bop as if it were a rattlesnake slithering through jazz. To its credit, bebop became the new menace, debilitator of youth, etc., just as rock and roll would become in the mid-Fifties.

Those championing it often made extravagant claims for its total newness. But as Martin Williams points out in an essay on bebop, virtually everything the beboppers did had strong antecedents somewhere or other in jazz history:

If the advocates of bop were both critically intemperate and defensive, they were also a bit ignorant and naive about the facts of jazz. They spoke of new harmonies, as if bop had suddenly discovered harmony and as if there had been no change since King Oliver; and they compared Bartok and Stravinsky to Parker, as though the latter's harmonic conception were based on theirs. They mentioned Lester, but not Bix and Trumbauer. They spoke of the new melodic role of drummers like Kenny Clarke and Max Roach as if Baby Dodds' work had not also been comparable in this respect. They spoke of the boppers as having invented the practice of composing new melodic lines on old chord sequences--a practice as old as ragtime. And the practice of improvising on chord sequences rather than themes is as old as the blues and was almost standard by the mid-Thirties.

Oddly enough, those who hated it felt the same way as the enthusiasts, except that they found it too new, too far from New Orleans and Chicago jazz.

On another front in the jazz world--also separate from the dominant mainstream big bands--there had been a resurgence of traditional jazz, with older players rediscovered and giving concerts in their earlier styles.

It became a huge controversy, bop versus trad. Longtime hipster, saxophonist and former purveyor of the best marijuana in Harlem, Mezz Mezzrow was one of the traditionalists' main spokesmen. He was even to the right of big-band swing. He felt that if it wasn't played in small-group New Orleans or hot Chicago style, it wasn't jazz. John Hammond even jumped in against it: "To me, bop is a collection of nauseating clichés, repeated ad infinitum." One writer said, "Bebop soundsto me like a hardware store in an earthquake." Fletcher Henderson said, "Of all the cruelties in the world, bebop is the most phenomenal." Louis Armstrong claimed that "bop is ruining music, and the kids who play bop are ruining themselves." Someone on the boppers' side called the traditionalists "moldy figs," and the name stuck.

But for a while, until bebop burned itself out as a musical fad around 1950, the boppers were ascendant. After a fashion and from a historical perspective, bebop is again very much alive in the work of Terence Blanchard, Bran-ford Marsalis and Marlon Jordan.

According to Miles Davis, in 1945 the police shut down some of the clubs on 52nd Street, putting a lot of musicians out of work. It was something the police did fairly often until the right payoffs were made. But this time the shutdowns lasted longer than ever before. Miles believed that the closings were racially motivated, that the arrival of the black bebop groups on 52nd Street brought black people from Harlem who wanted to hear them--and the police didn't like that. He also felt that the eventual reopening of these clubs had a lot to do with the fact that Parker, with whom he'd been playing on the Street, simply moved his band up to Minton's and carried on--carrying the audiences and their money with him. Miles said that the white club owners on 52nd Street couldn't stand seeing all that money going to blacks and greased the police to open up the Street again.

As Arnold Shaw says in 52nd Street, his excellent history of the scene there, racism got worse, not better, shortly after World War Two. A lot of white soldiers and sailors were from the South and were not used to seeing the easier mingling of races that went on in the 52nd Street clubs.

Shaw quotes Dizzy about one night after work when he was standing outside the RKO Theater with bassist Oscar Pettiford, who was drunk, and Bricktop, a light-skinned redhead who was a singer at a club called Tony's (and who had been the toast of Paris in the Thirties). A white sailor came along and, thinking she was white, started giving them a lot of shift. "What you niggers doin' talkin' to this white woman?" Pettiford took a swing at him but was so drunk he missed and fell over, and Dizzy pulled his trusty knife--this one a sharp linoleum cutter with a curved blade. By then several othe sailors had joined in. He slashed at one of them but cut only the uniform, and somehow managed to et himself and Pettiford into a cab. But the cabbie wouldn't take them up to Harlem, and the sailors kept at it. Dizzy and Pettiford ran for the subway, Pettiford leaping the turnstile and leaving Dizzy as rear guard. Dizzy stumbled, dropped his knife and had seven or eight of the guys beating on him. "I was ducking, trying to protect my chops and my head," said Dizzy. "I finally got away and went over the turnstile and ran onto the catwalk. They were right behind me. But only one could come out onto that narrow ledge at a time. And I as waiting with my horn, ready to clobber them. Finally the shore patrol came and took them away. And I took the subway home."

Late in 1945, Dizzy got an offer t o put a small group together to play at a club in Los Angeles. There was one kicker.Club owner Billy Berg insisted that Charlie Parker be part of the group, and Dizzy by then was sick of putting up with his flaky behavior. But everybody has to eat, so Gillespie agreed to try it

It was a total bust. Samuel Charters and Leonard Kunstadt noted that "the Los Angeles papers savagely attacked their music, most of the audience at the club was openly hostile and the management of the club sided with the customers." A s Robert Reisner put it: "The audience reaction varied from apathy to hostility, and Parker became upset and unstable." The situation was exacerbated by the fact that in postwar Los Angeles heroin was harder to come by than in New York. His Moose the Mooche was written during this time, named for his heroin connection. Parker found himself even more over his head than usual and spent more time hustling to score than he did playing. At the end of the Billy Berg gig early in 1946, Dizzy paid out the band, including airfare back to New York, but Parker cashed in his ticket and stayed in L.A.

Here Miles Davis enters the picture again. Miles had decided to drop out of Juilliard, feeling it was "too white" to be of any use to him. But he didn't want to spring it on his father without warning, so he had taken the train home to East St. Louis to talk with him. His father proved characteristically understanding, and Miles, always something of a golden boy, had a bit of luck on this trip. Benny Carter was playing the Riviera in St. Louis and needed a trumpeter. Miles joined the group largely because it was based in L.A. and was working its way home--to where Dizzy and Parker were. Miles called Parker and said he was on the way, once more chasing Bird. So Miles showed up in California as part of the Benny Carter band and looked up Parker. His timing, as usual, was good. He stayed with Cartero for a while, but Bird was putting together a small combo and wanted Miles on trumpet. According to Davis, he didn't have the chops that Dizzy had, but Parker liked that-- Miles' playing was more of a complement than competition.

They got a gig at the Finale Club in Los Angeles' Little Tokyo, an area where the racial mix had been changing. The Finale Club had been a low-ceiling, second-floor Japanese restaurant and was now being run by trumpeter Howard McGhee and his white wife. (According to Miles, the McGhees were always being hassled by the police, largely for being a racially mixed couple.)

Trouble followed Charlie Parker. His heroin habit kept him so broke he'd moved into the McGhees' garage. At the Finale he attracted the usual cloud of dealers, pimps and hustlers that formed around him wherever he went. This in turn attracted even more attention from the police. The owner padlocked the place in April 1946, saying he'd been shaken down by the cops once too often. Then Parker's connection got busted. Parker tried to go cold turkey in the McGhees' garage by turning up all his other habits a few notches. As Miles Davis remembered it:

He started going through severe withdrawal. When Bird gave up heroin, he only switched t o drinking more heavily. I remember him telling me once that he was trying to kick heroin and that he hadn't had any for a week. But he had two gallons of wine on the table, empty quart whiskey bottles in the trash can, bennies spilled all over the table and a crowded tray overflowing with cigarette butts.

The owner was persuaded to reopen the Finale in May, and Parker got himself together enough to form a new band--but hired McGhee instead of Miles as trumpeter, possibly more of Miles' good luck. By July Parker was a total wreck again. On the 29th he had a recording session but was too messed up to play. The accounts vary as to what happened that night. But back at his hotel he somehow managed to set fire to his room, probably by smoking in bed, and was found wandering naked in the streets--and was taken to Camarillo State Hospital, California's version of Bellevue. Parker spent seven months there. Part of the therapy included shock treatments. Doris Sydnor, who was to become the third Mrs. Parker, visited him three times a week: "There were a lot of people there who spent all their time going to the edge of the hospital grounds and staring out into space. Charlie used to laugh at them, but he got like that, too. Just standing out there, staring. The place looked like statues had been placed all around." One of the first tunes he recorded after his release in February 1947 was called Relaxin' at Camarillo.

Coincidentally, pianist Bud Powell, arguably the most brilliant of the bop piano players, also did time in mental institutions, where he was also given shock treatments. Powell was a native New Yorker, born in 1924 . As a child he studied classical music for seven years before starting his jazz career at the age of 16, gigging at Coney Island dance pavilions. He had been another regular at Minton's when bop was evolving. His 1945 stay in Pilgrim State Hospital on Long Island was the first of many trips to mental institutions for Powell in the next ten years. In Miles Davis' opinion, his weird behavior had its beginnings a few years earlier, when he'd shown up at the Savoy one night with no money, demanded to get in free and had his head bashed in by the bouncer:

Bud started shooting heroin like it was going out of style, and he was the last person who should have, because it made him crazy. He started drinking like it was going out of style, too. He started throwing fits and going for weeks not speaking to anyone. Finally his mother sent him over to the Bellevue psychiatric ward. Alter them shock treatments, Bud wasn't ever the same. Bird survived his shock treatments, Bud didn't.

It was one of life's little ironies that while Parker was inside Camarillo State, he was becoming famous, thanks to the handful of records he cut before being institutionalized--chief among them a March 1946 septet session that included Miles and produced Yardbird Suite, Ornithology and A Night in Tunisia.

So Parker was broke and inside a mental institution when he won an Esquire New Star award for 1946 (Miles would win the same award the next year). By the time Parker returned to New York in April 1947, bebop was solidly on the map as the hot new thing in jazz, and he was its star.

Miles was then in Dizzy Gillespie's successful big band. After he had stopped playing with Parker, Miles remained in Los Angeles long enough to become tight with bassist Charlie Mingus, who was four years older and had toured for a couple of years with Louis Armstrong. Miles taught Mingus how to play this new music, which Mingus would eventually take even further.

During the summer of 1946, Billy Eckstine's band had hit Los Angeles, and B, as they called him, talked Miles into joining. Miles was inheriting the throne. They toured California for a couple months and then worked their way back to New York via Chicago in the fall. Miles made his usual Christmas trip home. The group was in New York for the first two months of1947, but then Eckstine broke up the band--his last. Miles wasn't out of work long. Gillespie asked him to join his big band, which was playing for a couple weeks at the McKinley Theater in the Bronx when Parker hit town in April. Parker was hired immediately for Dizzy's band but he lasted exactly one night--having resumed his heroin habit after leaving Camarillo State--and nodded out on the bandstand. Dizzy fired him while the band was still playing: "Get that motherfucker off my stage!" Parker then began putting together his own small group and wanted Miles on trumpet. Miles' musical loyalties had always been more with Bird than with Dizzy, so he left Gillespie. Their first gig was at the Three Deuces on 52nd Street. "I was really happy to be playing with Bird again," Milessaid, "because playing with him brought out the best in me at the time."

The years 1947 to 1950 were bebop's golden era, at least as a commercial enterprise. The style reached maturity and was easily available live and on record. Boppers were winning both critics' and readers' polls in Downbeat, Metronome and Esquire. In 1949 the long-lived jazz club Birdland opened in New York-- named, of course, for Charlie Parker, who was only 29 at the time. It was a tangible recognition of his genius, and it would be the last place he played before his death in March 1955.

Another sign of bebop's legitimization was the success of impresario Norman Granz ' Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts. Starting in 1944 Granz put together jazz supergroups for fancy theatrical venues such as Carnegie Hall and Los Angeles' Philharmonic Auditorium, from which Jazz at the Philharmonic took its name. He was also the first major impresario to refuse to book any place--theater, dance hall, whatever--that discriminated against blacks.

In 1948 Dizzy's big band toured Europe and found the audiences there very receptive. In 1949 Miles Davis and Charlie Parker were invited to play at a summer jazz festival in Paris--another sign that bebop had arrived. It was the first trip to Europe for many of them. Miles and Parker took separate quintets.

Miles' quintet included Tadd Dame-ron on piano. Dameron was from Cleveland and was nine years older than Davis. He was better as a composer and arranger than he was as a player. James Moody was on tenor sax. He was with Gillespie in 1947 but migrated to Paris in 1948, where he became an expatriate jazz musician. Kenny Clarke, the old man at 35, was on drums.

In the recordings of the Davis quintet at the Paris Festival, you can hear the beginning of other dimensions of modern jazz. On most tunes, such as Allen's Alley and Ornithology, Miles plays bebop a la Gillespie, almost as if he were trying to prove that he could play at Dizzy's breakneck speed and high register. But then on ballads such as Embraceable You, you can hear the beginnings of the haunting, laconic, space-filled sound that Miles was developing as his own voice--the birth of the cool.

Part of it had begun a year or two earlier in the one-room basement apartment of Gil Evans, then an arranger for the Claude Thornhill band. The apartment was on West 55th, just three blocks from the Street, and musicians would come by before or after work, or simply move in for a while. It was a cross between a crash pad and an intellectual salon. "You had to go down a short flight of stairs," vocalist Dave Lambert recalled in Milestones, "pass a Chinese laundry, through a boiler room, and there it was--home." Composer George Russell was another regular, along with Miles, Parker, Gillespie, pianist John Lewis (who would become a founding member of the Modern Jazz Quartet), saxophonist Lee Konitz and baritone sax player Gerry Mulligan. Russell said, "A very big bed took up a lot of the place. There was one big lamp and a cat named Becky. The linoleum was battered and there was a little court outside. Inside, it was always very dark. The feeling of the room was timelessness. At all hours, the place was loaded with people who came in and out" and discussed music theory night and day. A considerable amount of what would become Fifties jazz was cooked up in this little basement pad.

Evans and Davis had met in 1947. Evans was 14 years older than Miles, white, had Australian parents and grew up on the West Coast. But he and Miles discovered that their ideas about where music ought to go were remarkably close. Soon, Davis joined the crowd in the basement apartment.

The result was Miles' landmark, if ephemeral, nonet, which played together live for only two weeks at the Royal Roost in September 1948. It was a nine-piece group put together along the theoretical lines that were evolving in Evans' salon. The magic number nine--the usual bop quintet plus French horn, tuba, trombone and baritone sax--had been worked out by Evans and Mulligan before Miles started coming around. But it was Davis who turned these ideas into a real group. Most of them, of course, came from the Evans salon--among them Miles as leader, Gerry Mulligan on baritone sax and Lee Konitz on alto. Kai Winding played trombone, Al Haig was on piano and Max Roach was the drummer. The three recording sessions took place months after they'd broken up and scattered, so some of the seats had to be taken by others--including John Lewis on piano, Kenny Clarke on drums and jazz-critic-to-be Gunther Schuller on French horn.

Along with the unusual instrumentation, the nonet played arranged music, mostly ensemble style--three significant departures from the usual bebop way of doing things. In a way, it was more counterrevolutionary than revolutionary, going back to the carefully arranged ensemble playing that was a staple of the Thirties big bands. But it incorporated musical ideas from bebop, classical music and beyond. One casualty was the freewheeling improvisation that characterized bebop--though Miles and the others rip off some wonderful solos on the 12 songs the nonet recorded in 1949 and 1950, finally collected on a 1957 album called Birth of the Cool.

It was ultimately more sedate than be bop and more carefully thought-out. In stead of plunging into the chasm and somehow miraculously making it to the other side, as Charlie Parker did nigh-after night, Miles' nonet built careful, in tricate bridges.

At a time when most of the big band were calling it quits because of economic pressures and changing musical tastes the leading edge of jazz was turning intochamber music, leavingits dance-bane origins far behind. It was becominj harder and harder for big bands to stay afloat financially--and for 20 years they had been the providers of dance music to the country.

The move of jazz to sit-down concer style, along with the collapse of big; bands, lefta dance-music void in the early Fifties that would soon be filled by rock and roll, since teenagers always need something with a good beat to dance to. It's an interesting if easy iron" that one of the tunes recorded by Milesynonet in 1950 was a Gerry Mulligai' composition called Rocker.

The nonet recordings didn't make the splash in the jazz world that the first bop records did, largely because they were recorded and released over a two-yea period. But by 1950, when most of then had been released, jazz had changed ye one more time, and Miles was the leader

"Hey, eh eee ooo bop sh-do, always reminds me of you. Eh eh eee eee ooo ooo uh ooo, I'm beboppin' too."--Dizzy Gillespie, 1949

"They didn't call him Bird for nothing. Like Louis Armstrong before him, he changed jazz forever.

"An uninhibited young woman was on her knees in front of Charlie Parker. Miles was grossed out."