A group of soloists who came to the forefront of American jazz in the late 1930s and early 1940s rise to the role of bebop champions. At Minton’s Playhouse and Monroe’s Uptown House in New York City, a new jazz movement was being defined that would soon find public and critical acclaim.
Henry Minton owner of the club namesake sponsors jam sessions performed by a house band made up of young instrumentalists, drummer Kenny Clarke, pianists Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell, guitarist Charlie Christian, trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, bassist Jimmy Blanton, and, later, alto saxophonist Charlie Parker and drummer Max Roach. Word spreads among the community of local musicians, and several of them show up quite voluntarily to participate in these impromptu meetings, organized especially on Mondays, the day off for the titular orchestras.
It is indicative of the fact that none of the members of this conventicle of musicians were consciously operating a Copernican revolution within jazz. To some extent, some of these had felt the need to go a step further than the “dance” jazz in vogue in earlier years in order to enrich their language through compositional research and technical expression, but certainly this process must be evaluated historically from the perspective of spontaneous action, animated by invective and experimentation.
However, the new canons or formulas elaborated within the jazz lexicon were spreading rapidly among musicians and singers, crystallizing and progressing formally and stylistically. In the manner of instrumentalists, bebopsingers improvise fluid melodic phrases based on harmonic progressions borrowed from songs from the songbook of American music. In doing so, the voice becomes an integral part of the group’s instrumental mix. They figure among the exponents of bebop singing, Sarah Vaughan, Billy Eckstine, Babs Gonzales, Carmen McRae, Betty Carter.
In the process of conceptual definition of bebop, devoted to musical rationalization, aspects of a social nature resulting from the failure of integration between blacks and whites feared in the era of swing between the 1920s and 1930s, when conductors such as Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw had included musicians of African-American descent in the orchestral staff: the former, guitarist Charlie Christian and vibraphonist and drummer Lionel Hampton, the latter vocalist Billie Holiday.
In addition, while on the one hand in those years white swing orchestras played to an audience made up of people of color, on the other hand white audiences were drawn to the “exotic” lure of the provocative sounds of hot music played in Harlem clubs. At the same time impresarios and promoters in line with the general fashion were recruiting black performers for theatrical and revue shows aimed at white audiences.
On the contrary, the early part of the 1940s witnessed a changed relationship between the two communities that inevitably had repercussions in the jazz sphere giving rise to the emancipation of black music from general cultural thought: no longer a popular expression but also a pure art form not culturally determined by the white establishment in its continuing search for “simple” escapist, “commercially expendable” music.
The initiators of bebop and their followers became increasingly aware of their status as misunderstood artists and conversely relegated to the margins of the American system, characterized on the one hand by widespread discriminatory attitudes toward the African American community, and on the other by political, social and customary changes that were as unpredictable as they were incontrovertible.
