Big Band Bebop

With Dizzy Gillespie's big band,especially on 'Cubana Be' and 'Cubana Bop',the revolutionary nature of bebop language exploded on wider scale.

Dizzy Gillespie's Big Band

In his quest for modernity Dizzy Gillespie chose his collaborators judiciously. Among them, Tadd Dameron created a sensation. A composer-arranger trained in the school of swing, Dameron allied himself very early with the bebop aesthetic through the daring of such tunes as 'Hot House'. He begrudged his white colleagues on the West Coast nothing.

Gladly citing French composer Maurice Ravel among his influences, he attached equal importance to the resonant beauty of the whole and to the melodic quality of each part, at a time when many others were concerned only with the lead voice.

Tadd Dameron & Fats Navarro

Dameron's skill in preserving melody through even the most 'dissorted' harmonies was shared by one of his closet friends, trumpet player Fats Navarro. A soloist who use uncommon imagination to avoid the harmonic traps of bebop, Navarro chiseled melodic lines of such density and pertinence that they were a decisive influence on future generations.

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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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