Bebop

Bebop is the small-group jazz idiom that reorganised the music in the mid-1940s. Tempos run from 160 to 300 BPM and the standard format is a quintet of trumpet and saxophone with piano, bass and drums. After a tight unison statement of a short, angular theme (typically based on the chord changes of a standard like I Got Rhythm or Cherokee), each soloist improvises through one or more choruses of the form. The harmonic vocabulary is dense — extended dominants, tritone substitutions, chromatic passing chords, half-step approach tones — and improvisations run as eighth-note streams that outline the underlying changes in detail. Drummers shift the timekeeping function from the bass drum to the ride cymbal, freeing the snare and kick for accents (dropping bombs).

Bebop emerged from after-hours jam sessions at Minton's Playhouse in Harlem and Monroe's Uptown House between 1940 and 1945. The originators were Charlie Parker (alto saxophone), Dizzy Gillespie (trumpet), Thelonious Monk (piano), Kenny Clarke and Max Roach (drums) and Bud Powell (piano). The 1942–44 musicians' union recording ban means many of the formative moments went undocumented; the first commercial bebop releases — Parker and Gillespie's Salt Peanuts, Hot House, Ko-Ko — date from 1945. Parker's death in 1955 at age 34 ended his recording career; the idiom split afterwards into hard bop (Art Blakey, Horace Silver), cool jazz and the modal experiments that led to Kind of Blue.

The head statement is dense and brief — a few seconds of intricate unison, then immediately into solos. Listen to how Parker and Gillespie outline each passing chord in their eighth-note lines rather than playing scalar runs. Kenny Clarke's and Max Roach's drumming distributes timekeeping to the ride cymbal — bass drum and snare interject sharp accents (the bombs) rather than maintaining a steady pulse. The bassist's walking line is the harmonic ground from which the soloists work.

Charlie Parker's Ko-Ko (1945) is three minutes of bebop in its purest form. For an album, the Savoy and Dial recordings (compiled as Bird: The Complete Charlie Parker on Savoy and Dial) are essential. Bud Powell's The Amazing Bud Powell Vol. 1 (1949–51) is the piano-trio masterpiece. Sonny Rollins's Saxophone Colossus (1956) is the second-generation extension.

Parker died at age 34 in the New York apartment of his patron the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, of a combination of cirrhosis, pneumonia and heart disease — the attending coroner estimated his age at between 50 and 60 from the state of his body. Graffiti reading Bird Lives appeared on Manhattan walls within days.