By Ed Enright
The jazz language changed drastically with the emergence of bebop in the early to mid 1940s. A gutsy group of musicians that included Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Max Roach, Kenny Clarke, Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk invented bebop in an outright attempt to create something new and challenging.
Recognizing bebop as a musician’s music that demanded instrumental virtuosity and a sophisticated knowledge of harmony, jazz players caught on quickly. They wrote melodies that zigzagged and spun over chord changes of increasing complexity. Soloists incorporated dissonant scale tones in their improvisations, giving the music a more exotic, edgier sound. A fascination with syncopation resulted in unprecedented accents. And the tempos began to burn faster and faster.
Bebop played best in a small-group format; quartets and quintets proved ideal for both economic and artistic reasons. The music thrived in urban jazz clubs, where audiences came to listen to inventive soloists rather than dance to their favorite hits. In short, bebop musicians made jazz into an art form that appealed not only to the senses, but the intellect as well.
New jazz stars emerged from the bebop era, among them trumpeters Clifford Brown, Freddie Hubbard and Miles Davis, saxophonists Dexter Gordon, Art Pepper, Johnny Griffin, Pepper Adams, Sonny Stitt and John Coltrane, and trombonist J.J. Johnson.
In the 1950s and ‘60s, bebop went through several mutations: hard-bop, West Coast, cool-jazz and soul jazz among them. Bebop’s small-group format of one to three horns, piano, bass and drums remains the standard jazz combo instrumentation to this day.
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