Introduction
In 1939 there was a recording by Coleman Hawkins in his song the Body and Soul which made inspirations to people like Charlie Parker. The other famous artists were Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie. Famous pianist Art Tatum and Earl Hines, saxophonist Lester Young and Roy Eldridge who was a trumpeter, these music players were exposed to complex syncopation, harmonies, chord substitutions and altered chords. People like Louis Armstrong were against the creation of bebop because to him it was noisy and didn’t involve a lot of swinging. This led to the change of jazz music to art. The Bop made both the musicians and the audiences differentiate jazz as more of art. The musicians were not interested in the amount that the bop produces in terms of their wallets but in advancing its aesthetic qualities. (DeVeaux, 1999)
Main text
A music professor, DeVeaux in his book tries to show the advent of bebop in evolution and revolution schools. He continues to say that the bop music had a rejection of the status quo. This is because there was discontinuity, as there was a split between the past and the genuinely new. In evolution he said it privileged continuity but not discontinuity. He further writes that the revolution of the bop was outside the jazz tradition. This is viewed as the criticism by musicians on commercialism and against market dominance of their independence.
It was also used by the African Americans as a way to show that it was black-oriented. This was prompted by musicians: Parker, monk and Gillespie. Hence, it was a black musician’s rebellion against capitalist hegemony. Through their distancing themselves from the jazz they viewed the bop as a way to have their own stable niche in future marketing of their music. (DeVeaux, 1999)
Later, the artists who were associated with bop started receiving huge rewards in terms of pay and large audience. But, it later affected the musician after they diverted from the main course in terms of social mainstream and turned to drug abuse. The commonly abused drug was the heroin. Before, someone understands jazz they must have first had to listen to bebop. (Baillie, 1987)
Summary
Even though they were successful, the racist remarks by the people like Jim Crow made them humiliated everywhere they went and were faced with a lot of hardships, this was through exclusion from the entertainment areas as hotels and was not allowed to perform in these areas. They went to an extent that they didn’t eat at these hotels or sleep. There was also the negative effect of banning in recording that took place in 1942 which involved American Federation of Musicians. The banning which took a period of two years made many musicians change the types of songs to sing. Also at this time there was the increase in fuel prices and its control by the government which made the singers have no means of movement. The few jobs that were related to jazz were left for the white populace who by then had advantage because of racial discrimination (Gioia, 1997).
Works Cited Source
Baillie, Harold. Swing to Bop: An Oral History of the Transition of Jazz in the 1940s. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Deveaux, Scott. The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
Gidden, Gary. Celebrating Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker, New York City: Morrow, 1987.
Gioia, Ted. The History of Jazz. New York: Macmillan Company, 2000.
Rosenthal, David. Hard bop: Jazz and Black Music, 1955-1965. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.