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World War II to the Civil Rights Movement

Overview

While no one knows the exact origins of jazz music, many say it began as the result of the first known recorded jazz music was by the Original Dixieland Jass Band, a White band from New Orleans. However, by studying the musical characteristics of the song "Livery Stable Blues (1917)," it's clear they borrowed (or stole) musical techniques practiced by African Americans in New Orleans. Swing music was the first jazz style that proved commercially successful, taking jazz out of the brothels of New Orleans into ballrooms.

Be ready to:

Draw musical comparisons with regard to prominent musical characteristics and performance practices between this lessons' noted jazz styles.

Relate this lesson's noted jazz styles to contemporaneous cultural, social, and political circumstances.

Identify innovators as well as noted performers that further advanced each jazz style.

Explain how certain jazz musicians did not merely see their music as an accompaniment for dancing, but instead as reflective and intellectual music accorded as art music.

Explain why improvisation is central to jazz performance.

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Listening Guides

References

Bebop (Bop) 5

Dizzy Gillespie

During the 1940s, many beboppers adopted a new sense of style reflecting the modernism and intellectualism central to their music. Gillespie's now-iconic horn-rimmed glasses, beret, and goatee are emblematic of this stylistic trend.

Bebop gradually gained the attention of New York's literary and cultural intelligentsia. For example, poet Jack Kerouac encountered bebop for the first time at Minton's Playhouse (MacAdams 2001, 47). As bebop acts began performing along Midtown Manhattan's famed Swing Street, many other young White writers and audiences associated with the burgeoning Beatnik movement became familiar with the music. In her essay "The Problem with White Hipness," Ingrid Monson argues that this context was ripe with a kind of primitivism built on assumptions about race, spontaneity, and masculinity (1995, 398-9). The Beatnik celebration of bebop (and jazz more broadly) as an easily accessible and adaptable source of "authentic" spontaneity partly supports this view.

By the mid-1950s, bebop musicality was prevalent in many jazz contexts in small and big bands. Although rhythm and blues largely replaced Swing Era jazz as America's popular music in the years after World War II, many bebop musicians achieved varying degrees of success in the music industry. Figures such as Gillespie and Miles Davis led extremely successful groups over the following decades.

Many fundamental aspects of bebop were relatively unchanged from preceding trends in the music, such as the prevalence of swing drum rhythms, the "walking" bass line, the "head arrangement" typical in jazz from Kansas City, the dominance of solo (rather than collective) improvisation, and the use of thirty-two-bar and twelve-bar song forms. You can hear most of the musical elements mentioned in the listening guide on the next page in the piece "Shaw Nuff"♫ (1945) by the Dizzy Gillespie All-Star Quintet, featuring Charlie Parker on saxophone and Gillespie on trumpet.

Miles Davis performing in Antibes, France, in July 1963

Heebie Jeebies

Say, I've got the Heebies
I mean the Jeebies
Talking about
The dance, the Heebie Jeebies
Do, because they're boys
Because it pleases me to be joy

Heebie Jeebies

Say, I've got the Heebies
I mean the Jeebies
Talking about
The dance, the Heebie Jeebies
Do, because they're boys
Because it pleases me to be joy