Bebop
Time period: 1940 - 1955
- Bebop had the effect of removing jazz from the mainstream of popular music
- Art music instead of entertainment
- Completely black invention
- Music for listening instead of dancing
- Centered in New York City
Performance Practice
- A small-group music, e.g., quintet of trumpet, saxophone, and rhythm section
- A music designed for improvisation
- Virtuoso music
- Trimmed down music
- few introductions, endings, interludes, backgrounds
- complex unison melodies
- Melodies and improvisations inextricably linked
- Use of the contrafact (tunes based on the chord changes to other tunes)
- a chance to improvise on familiar changes
- obviates the necessity for paying royalties
- No duplication in the rhythm section
- The music is instrumental in nature: rangy, angular, chromatic, rhythmically complex, virtuosic
- Extremely chromatic music
- The rhythm section is a modification of the 1938-39 Count Basie rhythm section
(Basie, Walter Page, Freddie Green, and Jo Jones)
- Tune sources:
- blues
- I Got Rhythm
- standards
- contrafacts
- originals
- Bebop gives jazz its basic musical vocabulary; this style is the common practice period for jazz
- The two most important figures in Bebop were Charlie Parker (1920-1955) and Dizzy Gillespie (1917-1993)
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