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Bebop: The Music and Its Players

1995; Music Library Association; Volume: 52; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/899071

1534-150X

Dave Oliphant, Thomas Owens,

Music History and Culture

When bebop was new, writes Thomas Owens, many jazz musicians and most of jazz audience heard it as radical, chaotic, bewildering For a nation swinging to smoothly orchestrated sounds of big bands, this revolutionary movement of 1940s must have seemed destined for a short life on musical fringe. But today, Owens writes, bebop is nothing less than the lingua franca of jazz, serving as principal musical language of thousands of jazz musicians. In Bebop, Owens conducts us on an insightful, loving tour through music, players, and recordings that changed American culture. Combining vivid portraits of bebop's gigantic personalities with deft musical analysis, he ranges from early classics of modern jazz (starting with 1943 Onyx Club performances of Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, Oscar Pettiford, Don Byas, and George Wallington) through central role of Charlie Parker, to an instrument-by-instrument look at key players and their innovations. Illustrating his discussion with numerous musical excerpts, Owens skillfully demonstrates why bebop was so revolutionary, with fascinating glimpses of tempestuous jazz world: Thelonious Monk, for example, did everything 'wrong' in sense of traditional piano technique....Because his right elbow fanned outward away from his body, he often hit keys at an angle rather than in parallel. Sometimes he hit a single key with more than one finger, and divided single-line melodies between two hands. In addition to his discussions of individual instruments and players, Owens examines ensembles, with their sometimes volatile collaborations: in Jazz Messengers, Benny Golson told of how his own mellow saxophone playing would get lost under Art Blakey's furious drumming: would do one of those famous four-bar drum rolls going into next chorus, and I would completely disappear. He would holler over at me, 'Get up out of that hole!' In this marvelous account, Owens comes right to present day, with accounts of new musicians ranging from Marsalis brothers to lesser-known masters like pianist Michel Petrucciani. Bebop is a jazz-lover's dream--a serious yet highly personal look at America's most distinctive music.