Band members had been drafted into the army and they were replaced by young players, like Stan Getz, who was still a teenager, dance venues had to pay more entertainment taxes and closed their doors, and conflicts arose over royalties. But more importantly, a growing number of musicians were dissatisfied with the commercially motivated artistic demise of (big band) jazz.
Dissatisfaction with mainstream jazz
The music they made was not for dancing, but for listening (“musicians’ music”). They established small ensembles, usually consisting of saxophone (alto or tenor), trumpet, piano, guitar, double bass and drums. This musical development . I’ll show you an example of what it sounded like. It is Allen’s Ally (song by Coleman Hawkins (1946) played by Stan Getz, Dizzy Gillespie and Sonny Stitt in 1958
Characteristics of bebop
Practitioners of bebop set high artistic standards and had to be proficient with their instrument. The main characteristics of bebop are:
– A piece of music has a wider collection of sounds than a usual melody line.
– The sequence of notes forms a complex pattern, dissonances were not shunned.
– The tempo is fast; sometimes up to 200 counts per minute. Go dance to that!
– The rhythm section often connects the different improvisations, or they flow into each other through a kind of dialogue.
– Starting points for new songs are sometimes themes borrowed from existing pieces of music extended with complex harmonies.
– The original theme is often played at the beginning and at the end, with improvisations by all band members alternating in between.
Artists
Key figures of this genre included alto saxophonist Charlie Parker; tenor saxophonists Dexter Gordon, Sonny Rollins and James Moody; clarinetist Buddy DeFranco; trumpeters Fats Navarro, Clifford Brown, Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie; pianists Bud Powell, Barry Harris and Thelonious Monk; electric guitarist Charlie Christian; and drummers Kenny Clarke, Max Roach and Art Blakey.
Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie recorded one of the first bebop records with the Billy Beckstine Orchestra in 1944. You can still hear many features of big band jazz in this, but the melody is more complicated.
Jazz standards
Standards composed by bebop musicians include: Gillespie’s “Salt Peanuts” (1941) and “A Night in Tunisia” (1942; recording 1981), Charlie Parker’s “Yardbird Suite” (1946) and “Scrapple from the Apple” (1947), and Monk’s “‘Round Midnight“, currently the most recorded jazz standard composed by a jazz musician. You can listen here to Parker’s “Anthropologie” (1946), played by the NDR big band in 2020, Parker’s 100ste birthday.
Audience reception
The prevailing opinion of the public was that bebop no longer is music, which you listen to with pleasure, but consisted of runaway, nervous, erratic and often fragmented sounds, in which hardly any melody can be recognised. Nor did most jazz musicians see in bebop the promised restoration of the artistic level of jazz. After all, listeners need to experience artistry, and artistry is much more than virtuosity.
From bebop to cool jazz
Charlie Parker and Miles Davis performed together as bebop musicians from 1944 – 1948, but Miles Davis began to feel increasingly uneasy with the songs they were playing. He formed a band of his own and experimented for two years with like-minded colleague. They felt that their music should contain a rich palette of harmonies. The sounds of the wind instruments had to blend rather than oppose each other. They also reduced the tempo. Eventually, this experimentation did lead to a trend-setting album, “The birth of the cool”, in 1957. The recordings were made by a ‘nonet’ (a nine-piece band). The full recording of this album can be listened to here. Below you will find a recording of one of the songs, “Venus of Milo” composed by Gerry Mulligan, played by the Frankfurt Radio Big Band.
Characteristics of cool jazz
– The pieces are more strongly arranged and contain less improvisation than was the case with bebop.
– As with bebop, existing themes are often starting points; they are sometimes borrowed from classical works.
– Nervous energy and tension of bebop gives way to a tendency towards calmness and softness through the choice of long, linear melodic lines.
– The interplay of instruments is mainly focused harmony, rather than melody.
– Strives for brighter tones, subtlety and learning from other musical genres.
Chet Baker
Chat Baker, singer and trumpeter, is considered a great innovator within cool jazz and was dubbed the “Prince of Cool” for it. He joined Gerry Mulligan’s quartet in 1952. They developed a unique style: Instead of playing identical melody lines as solos, both complemented each other by anticipating what the other was going to play. He also received rave reviews in the 1950s for his singing, for instance here on his record “It could happen to you” (1958)Â
His musical career was erratic (see the episode dedicated to him in this series) and was interrupted by long periods of drug addiction and imprisonment. He picked up his career again in late 1970.
Top of the list of 1930s jazz standards is the song “My Funny Valantine”, from the musical “Babes”. This song appears on more than 1,300 albums and has been performed by 600 different artists. One of the most intriguing versions is Chat Baker’s (1987) one year before his death. You can listen to this one now.
Modern Jazz Quartet
A special contribution to the development of cool jazz was made by the Modern Jazz Quartet, also because of its unusual composition: piano, vibraphone, bass and drums. The four original members formed the rhythm section of Dizzy Gillespie’s band in the late 1940s. This group created its own niche in the cool jazz movement. They played elegant, understated music that often involved classical fugues. You can hear that here in the 1956 song Django on the album of the same name, named after Belgian jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt.
Others who contributed to cool jazz were Dave Brubeck, Bill & Gill Evans, Stan Getz and John Coltrane. Charlie Parker also started playing more melodically in the 1950s
On the following episodes
From the 1950s, the number variants within and between  genres increased. The coming episode of this series  will deal with three trends, some of which occurred and are still occurring in parallel, each encompassing different genres. The first is the creation of music with a minimum of melodic and harmonic conventions. We then speak of avant-garde or free jazz (issue 4/11). The second is seeking enrichment through crossovers to other musical styles, ranging from pop, blues, funk, hip hop and others. We summarise this under the name fusion (episode 5/11). The third trend is the search for the assumed true nature of jazz. I summarise these attempts under the name back to basics (episode 6/11).Â
Incidentally, you will come across some musicians in every genre. These are musicians who constantly sought innovation such as Miles Davis and John Coltrane.
Music: Listen, Look and Enjoy 