In mijn vorige bespreking over het boek Inside Jazz van Leonard Feather gaf ik aan dat ik opnames in huis heb van bebop-jazzgitarist Charlie Christian. Het eerste nummer op dat album heet Swing to Bop en dat is de inspiratie én de titel van dit boek van jazzcriticus en -historicus Ira Gitler. Vooruit, de ondertitel heet An Oral History of the Transition in Jazz in the 1940s, maar dat swingt beduidend minder.

De titel dekt de lading want net als in het boek van Leonard Feather gaat dit boek over de overgangsperiode van de swingmuziek naar de bebop. Anders dan het boek van Feather is dit geen theoretische en/of musicologische verhandeling (leest u in mijn bespreking van zijn boek wat bebop ook al weer was), maar bestaat het uit louter interviews met muzikanten uit die tijd (vanaf ongeveer de jaren ’40 van de vorige eeuw) die de periode meegemaakt en vormgegeven hebben. Daarmee is het wat mij betreft een veel interessanter boek. Het telt 319 pagina’s maar die lezen door de vertelstijl prima weg.

Gitler schrijft zelf korte stukjes tussen de interviews door, zoals over de roots van de bebop. Daarin noemt hij de grote namen als Charlie Christian, Charlie Parker en Dizzy Gillespie, maar vertelt ook dat er talloze artiesten zijn die een rol hebben gespeeld in de opkomst van de bebop, maar die geen opnames hebben gemaakt, niet doorbraken, een andere richting kozen of jong overleden. Dat is meteen de charme van dit boek, een groot aantal van die artiesten krijgt hier hun verdiende aandacht. Zo werd er in die tijd regelmatig een verdienstelijk tenorsaxofonist opgetrommeld met de naam Al Greenspan. Hij zou later de voorzitter worden van het Federal Reserve System, het centrale bankensysteem van de Verenigde Staten.

Maar Gitler laat vooral de musici aan het woord. Zo vervulde drummer Kenny Clarke (bijnaam ‘Klook’) een belangrijke brugfunctie tussen de swing en de bebop. Hij speelde net even anders dan de gevestigde orde en dat beviel bebop-frontman Dizzy Gillespie zeer. Kenny Clarke;

I played a long time with Diz, from 1938 to 1942. Then I left for the Army, and during my absence, Dizzy, who plays the drums well, taught all the other drummers my way of playing. He would say to them: “You have to do it like Klook. Do something with your left hand, anything, but you have to do something!” When I got out of the service, I noticed that in New York, like in Chicago, all the drummers played like me. Dizzy was the one who showed them, as Max Roach informed me. That style was adopted by all the young players, and it is still strong today.

Uiteraard staan er talloze verhalen in over altsaxofonist Charlie Parker, maar zoals gezegd ook over minder bekende goden zoals jazztrompettist Tommy Enoch. Iedereen geeft hoog op over hem maar blijkbaar raakte hij in de greep van de drugs, gaf het spelen op en verdween in een fabriek. Als u goed zoekt kunt u wat opnamen terugvinden van hem. Dat is al lastiger voor altsaxofonist Henry Pryor, ofwel “Hen Pie”. Hij werd doodgeschoten door een agent in een drugsgerelateerde zaak. Het nummer Hen Pie op het album George Burns! van jazzgitarist George Freeman is aan hem opgedragen.

Zo zijn er veel mooie ontdekkingen te doen in dit boek. Ik wist van het belang voor de bebop van pianisten als Bud Powell en Thelonious Monk, maar uit dit boek wordt duidelijk hoe belangrijk de pianiste Mary Lou Williams weer voor hén was. Miles Davis behoeft weinig introductie, maar dit boek leert ons hoe een jonge Davis nauwgezet trompettist Freddie Webster kopieert. Trompettist Bennie Bailey;

I happen to know for instance that on the recording of “Billie’s Bounce,” which Miles made with Charlie Parker, his solo was exactly the one Freddie played for this particular blues. Evidently Miles said he was nervous on the date and couldn’t think of anything to play, so he did Freddie’s solo note for note.

Los van de muziek gaat Gitler ook in op de omgeving en omstandigheden waaronder de bebop tot stand komt. Qua omgeving kunnen we dan niet om 52nd Street heen in New York. Daar zitten de clubs waar de jonge garde van die tijd kind aan huis is. De omstandigheden? Vaak drank en drugs, waarvan, weer, Charlie Parker het trieste voorbeeld is. Hoewel hij het niemand aanraadde, kreeg hij in zijn verslaving talloze navolgers, waarvan sommigen net als Parker jong zouden overlijden. Gelukkig staat het boek ook vol met prachtige anekdotes over het leven als jazzmuzikant.

Bandleider Benny Carter die een taxichauffeur met een pistool dwingt hem ergens naar toe te rijden, vibrafonist Terry Gibbs die door bandleider Buddy Rich achtergelaten wordt in de woestijn of de onmogelijke fratsen van baritonsaxofonist Serge Chaloff. Terry Gibbs over Chaloff;

…we checked into a hotel, if he was on the ninth floor, I would go to the hundredth floor…

Met Chaloff was het altijd hommeles, maar dat leest wel erg prettig weg. Dat geldt dus voor het hele boek, waarin u uit de eerste hand te horen krijgt hoe de bebop tot stand kwam en wat het belang ervan is. Jazzpianist Lou Levy vat het nog even voor u samen;

Bebop is the equivalent in jazz what Bach was in classical music. It’s a total melodic line, done in the most logical way, and very rhythmically…But the thing is to – time over time crossing over bar lines. Bach did that, the counterpoint thing, whatever it is. Bach was sent to us, he was the first to me in jazz ( )

Oral History is a particularly fruitful and enlightening endeavor in jazz studies because we get to hear directly from the musicians, the people most familiar with the touch of the instrument, the craft of playing, and the abstract emotional and intellectual sensations that comprise the essence of the music. Ira Gitler (d. 2019) came of age in the early 1940s as the so-called Swing Era was giving way to ‘modern’ jazz, and enjoyed a long career as a reviewer, journalist, chronicler and producer. He famously coined the phrase ‘sheets of sound’ to describe John Coltrane’s playing in the late 1950s. In the late 1970s, he began interviewing musicians who were active from the late 1930s to the early 1950s—arguably the most consequential period in jazz history—then compiled and published the interviews as Swing to Bop in 1985.

Swing to Bop is one of the great books in the jazz bibliography. From the musicians we learn that the big-band era provided the setting and the stimulus for the development of bebop. In the late 1930s, when big-band jazz dominated popular music, musicians hoped to make a name for themselves by travelling the country with a well-known band. Gitler wisely begins with the endlessly fascinating stories of musicians’ experiences on the road and rails. Milt Hinton tells of how the itinerant life of musicians raised the suspicions of provincial folk, who saw slickly-dressed, jive-talking jazzmen as interlopers out to steal the local women. Across the South, crowds frequently shouted down jazz bands, demanding earthier, hip-shaking blues for dancing (the Saturday Night Function, per Albert Murray). The Jim Crow South was particularly inhospitable to black musicians, of course, as we hear from Dexter Gordon and Charlie Rouse. Despite the vagaries of life on the road, though, the big bands provided a kind of mobile laboratory for new forms of musical expression. Musicians in constant motion around the country had the chance to rub shoulders with their peers; itinerant players interacted with the locals, after-hours jam sessions fostered and propagated new ideas. When musicians tired of the repetitive arrangements and lack of solo space allowed in the big-band programs, the time was ripe for something new.

Gitler and his interlocutors make clear that bebop did not emerge in a particular instance from a singular source. It was, rather, a matter of musicians influencing each other, through ‘a cross-pollination of thoughts and sounds.’ Venturous players translated innovations on one instrument to other instruments, or developed techniques for stretching the sound of an instrument in unconventional ways. Musicians began to change the way they played, and the way they played together. Billy Taylor hears Charlie Christian’s influence in Jimmy Blanton’s melodic bass playing, which Oscar Pettiford then extended with the Charlie Barnet band and in New York jam sessions with Kenny Clarke and Thelonious Monk. Pettiford credited pianist Clyde Hart as the first to play with a ‘modern’ left hand, establishing chord changes instead of a straight steady rhythm. Accomplished bass players freed the piano from holding down the low end, melodic lines grew longer, and Clarke and Monk introduced surprising rhythmic variations. The line of influence from Frank Trumbauer to Lester Young to Charlie Parker is well known, and Gitler makes a case for the crucial role of Mary Lou Williams (the only women interviewed in Swing to Bop): the last eight bars of the second chorus in her arrangement of “Walkin’ and Swingin’” (for Andy Kirk in 1939) are carried into the modern period in Al Haig’s “Opus Caprice,” Sonny Stitt’s “Symphony Hall Swing,” and Thelonious Monk’s “Rhythm-a-ning.” Billy Taylor says that Williams tutored Monk and Bud Powell on the piano in her apartment in Harlem.

The gravitational pull of New York was strong, particularly on 52nd Street and in the Village, but we also here of modern jazz rising in Kansas City, Philadelphia, Chicago and Detroit. The West Coast was slow to embrace bebop, despite the presence of a number of enthusiastic young players like Hampton Hawes and Sonny Criss. The fabled run of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker at Billy Berg’s in Los Angeles coincided with the shuttering of jazz clubs along Central Avenue (ostensibly as crime-prevention, but also as a stop to race-mixing). When Gillespie left to go back east, Parker stayed behind and played with Howard McGhee at a club downtown in the short-lived Bronzeville neighborhood (formerly “Little Tokyo,” but at the time devoid of Japanese-Americans, who had all been relocated to an internment camp at the Santa Anita racetrack). The response to Parker’s music illustrates the response to bebop more generally: musicians either slapped their hands over their ears and turned away, or, according to Chico O’Farrill, they suddenly realized how limited and constrained was their own playing.

Bebop began to seep into the big-band world just as the big-band era was on the wane. Band leaders like Woody Herman, Boyd Raeburn and Gene Krupa began hiring younger musicians with the bebop sound, but Earl Hines and Billy Eckstine were first to feature arrangements based on the new chords and harmonic concepts of bebop. The new arrangements ‘ruined a lot of musicians who had been bullshitting before,’ according to Eckstine, and only a handful of critics had sympathetic ears for the first ‘jarring’ steps from swing to bop (Leonard Feather, an early promoter of bebop, initially criticized Eckstine’s band for being ‘out of tune’). Gitler says that the 1945 recordings by Red Norvo and His Selected Sextet (with Gillespie and Parker) helped a lot of musicians understand the modern jazz and changed a lot of minds.

The bustle and tumult among musicians coming to terms with modern jazz, in combination with conditions imposed by wartime regulations and the evolving music business, contributed to the decline of the big-band era. As rubber and fuel rationing made travel in large groups less feasible, and local musicians’ unions discriminated against out-of-towners, managers and record companies began to promote singers and smaller ensembles. More and more musicians became freelancers, according to Max Roach, after the government levied a 20% war tax on all entertainment excepting instrumental playing, effectively limiting the profitability of large venues and ballrooms with public dancing. Finding work required a musician to hone his chops so as to stand out in the competition for scarcer gigs. The uncertainty and insecurity of the jazz life likely contributed to a rise in the use of hard drugs around the time of World War Two, says Gitler.

Swing to Bop, by allowing the musicians to tell their own stories, helps us see how bebop evolved from the big bands, on bandstands and in the after-hours jam sessions, in many parts of the country. Different people heard different things and took off in different directions, but there was no abrupt break in the form; the new sounds jes’ grew. Some musicians saw bebop as the end of an era, others saw a beginning, but it’s clear in hindsight that bebop expanded the conception of jazz, extending the harmonic and rhythmic possibilities of the music. It’s clear also that the Great-Man theory of punctuated equilibrium is a contrivance by critics; too many people were involved in making the music, too many ideas ricocheting around, to still believe that each generation requires a genius to move the music ahead. Bebop may have supplanted established styles temporarily, but in the end the bebop moment made possible the coexistence of every imaginable approach to the music. Just listen.

For some ineffable reason, I found this book the most readable on the subject and I highly recommend this work to any jazz-understanding reader. Mr. Gitler is a devoted chronicler of post -1942 Jazz . ( )