European Jazz Develops Differently Than The American Model

Though an American form, jazz, of course, does have practitioners outside the United States. France, especially, has embraced jazz since its earliest days; it can  be said that it all began there with Django Reinhardt in the thirties. Ending France's isolation during World War II, the American troops arrived in 1944, and the first bebop records were not long in following. For more than fifteen years there was no safe haven outside of bebop or New Orleans orthodoxy. Such rare exceptions as Martial Solal or Andre Hodeir only proved the rule.

Django Reinhardt

With the explosion of free jazz, however, everything suddenly became possible. In Europe it became fashionable to reject the criteria of' 'old-fashioned jazz' at the same time that 'bourgeois' art was being decried.

Mike Westbrook

Throughout Europe, those rare big bands that were still active abandoned formal dress for blue jeans and left their platforms to mix with each other in an informal alignment that sometimes moved into a fanfare to the audience.

Willem Breuker

The roles inside the band were also called into question, and some small groups went so far as to do without a rhythm section altogether, others reduced themselves to a duo. If such changes were a response to the economic difficulties free jazz - which was not very marketable - encountered, they were also one way of exploring special affinities on a more intimate dramatic scale. With such musicians as Mike Westbrook and Willem Breuker, these 'stagings' sometimes took on true dramatic form.

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West Coast And Cool Jazz Are Not The Exclusive Property Of White Musicians

Lester Young

In the Hollywood the sublime duels of the black saxophone players Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray were recorded in June 1947. They shared the cult of Lester Young with there white colleagues, but their sound was more expressionistic, the flow of their phrases more consistent with the demands of bebop, and their intention more aggressive. When they gave themselves fully to the indolence of phrasing 'like Lester', they did so with much more sensuality.

Dexter Gordon

On the other hand, other black musicians, on the West Coast and elsewhere, developed a taste for muffled and refined tones. When 'hard bop' which arose in the 1950s, was at its hottest, Miles Davis was continuing to cultivate a restrained cool style of playing. What he obtained, however, was not so much an effect of relaxation as impression of controlled violence that would provoke a feeling of tension in the listener.

Wardell Gray

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How It Become Bebop (opening)

Evolved in part from spirituals sung by slaves, jazz is the only truly American musical form. It was created by blacks, for blacks. For years, it was considered to be mere entertainment, but with the advent of bebop in the 1940s, young jazz musicians joined the avant-garde: bop opened the door to modern jazz, the privileged expression of a growing number of artists, strangers to its origins.

Manhattan 52nd Street Sign

In the small clubs of Manhattan's 52nd Street, small experimental bebop groups revolutionized jazz. At the time, New York was the capital of the artistic avant-garde , of intellectual excitement. Literature, theater and painting were being enthusiastically discussed in the city's living rooms.

However, the arranger Gil Evans, recently arrived in New York to rally for the cause of bebop, did not have a living room. One simple room near 52nd Street was enough for him, and it attached a crowd, day and night. The leaders of black music gathered around a turntable there, playing recordings of sax players Lester young and Charlie Parker as well as such European composers as Alban Berg and Maurice Ravel. They met in that room to listen and to talk with each other - and with young white musicians as well.

By the 1940s jazz was no longer the exclusive property of the African-American community. Bop made jazz into a language accessible to all musicians and music lovers in search of a well-informed mode of expression that was free and more physical than Western classical music.

Manhattan's 52nd Street Night View of 1949

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