The record changer (Jan-Dec 1952)

44 bop (Continued from Page 26) music which followed Wagner and Debussy, and ninths and the augmented fourths (jazz musicians call them flatted fifths) appear over and over again in the solos as well as the accompaniments. Bix Beiderbeckc, whose preoccupation with Debussy was echoed by the unusual intervals in his solos, may be a remote ancestor of Bop. The effect on the ear of the older generation, however, is not altogether delightful, and for years Dizzie Gillespie was forced to clown and pretend to be playing "screwy notes" in order to obtain any hearing at all. Melody, in the sense of a tune meant to be whistled, disappeared from Bop, and Armstrong's objection here is well taken. Yet Bop was paradoxically traditional insofar as most of its numbers were based upon the chord progressions of standard and familiar tunes (with I've Got Rhythm and the blues especially favored ) . The original melody, however, could not be heard; Bop consists of variations upon themes which are never stated, although the performers are well aware of them. A complex melody played in unison in the first and last choruses is substituted for the original tune, with which it would harmonize if you could manage to whistle the original at the same time. Armstrong's criticism that Bop has "no beat," or rhythmic drive, also went straight to the heart of the problem, and it affords a clue as to why older musicians were often unable to play Bop. The rhythm became much more subtle and complex. The late Dave Tough, one of the few older drummers who survived the transition, remarked ruefully: "I had to forget everything I ever learned before I could put on that new musical look." He admired Max Roach, one of the foremost drummers of Bop, and pointed out that he could never anticipate when Max was going to "drop a bomb," although it always seemed right afterward. On first hearing Bop, the traditionalist would usually object, "If that drummer would quit banging that cymbal, I'd be able to hear the bass drum." As a matter of fact, there wasn't any regular bass-drum beat to hear. The heavy "chugg-chugg" of the rhythm that Armstrong knew, with its incessant floor-shaking "boom, boom, boom, boom," has disappeared. The 4/4 beat is heard in the flexible and melodic accents of the string-bass alone. The key percussion instrument in Bop is the cymbal, which dominates the rhythm with a continuous, flowing accent that changes phase to fit the counter-rhythms suggested by the soloist, while the bassdrum marks special accents and contributes "explosions" to punctuate the performance as a whole. When the off-beat interpolations of the guitar and piano are added, the result in the best of Bop is a light and delicate rhythm, closely integrated with the improvisation of the soloist. The bewilderment of first-rate jazz musicians when they first heard Bop is illustrated by Tough's story of how he and a gang from Woody Herman's band dropped in on the Cillespie-Pettiford group on 52nd Street in 1944. "As we walked in," said Tough more in wonder than anger, "these cats snatched up their horns and blew. One would stop all of a sudden and another would start for no reason at all. We never could tell when a chorus was supposed to begin or end. Then they quit all at once and walked off the stand. It scared us." A year later, the Herman band was blowing its own version of Bop. The process of assimilation makes a fascinating study, and its conflicts are most dramatically illustrated in the solo's of the great musicians of the thirties — like Benny Carter, Coleman Hawkins, or Benny Goodman— who have had the courage to attempt the new idiom under the critical scrutiny of a younger generation. For example, after flatly condemning Bop in print, Benny Goodman admitted that he couldn't play it, and finally had a change of heart and briefly organized a Bop band. To judge from his playing, he did.n't seem to like it. Meanwhile, " the cliches of Bop, watered down almost past recognition, appear in the arrangements of dance bands all over the country. And one thing is certain: jazz will never be the same. Many years hence, a few of the more simple melodic twists of yesterday's Bop will turn up in the accompaniment to a hit-parade tune played by Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians. As of that moment, Bop will be revolving in its grave. Now that the shouting and the dissonances have largely died, it may turn out to be that Bop's greatest contribution to jazz is rhythm. Why it should have happened is as difficult to explain as the birth of jazz in New Orleans, but one major source can be documented: Afro-Cuban music. In a literal sense, jazz went back to the good African earth for rhythmic inspiration when Dizzie Gillespie borrowed a conga-drummer from another orchestra and featured him in his own band. It was the beginning of a trend. As early as 1940, Gillespie had listened carefully to the rhythms of Mario Bauza's Afro-Cuban band. (It is worth noting that Bauza was one of the first musicians who understood what Dizzie was trying to play Bauza had been with various jazz bands, and it was Bauza who got Dizzie his early job with Cab Calloway.) Later, when the legendary Chano Pozo arrived from Cuba, already famous as a composer and virtuoso drummer, Dizzie heard him and hired him on the spot for his Town Hall concert of 1947. Pozo broke up the concert. Chano Pozo was born in Cuba, though the musicians who grew up with him there say that his grandparents were born in West Africa. In Cuba, Pozo belonged to the Nanigo Secret Society, an African cult whose members speak only in a West African dialect. He never learned English, but that did not interfere with his Inspired drumming. Backed by the Gillespie band, he could hold a large audience entranced for half an hour, while he sang in a dialect full of African phrases and played incredible rhythms on a many-voiced conga drum. The impact was so tremendous that at one such concert at Cornell a woman literally screamed and fainted. Pozo helped bring the Gillespie band to the peak of its performance, made a few records that are now hard to get, and a few years ago stepped in front of several slugs from an automatic pistol in a bar on 111th Street and Lenox Avenue. The murderer was brought to justice; it was the third and last time that Pozo was shot at. With a rhythmic background that he had dreamed up himself, Pozo made one record before he was killed which, when slowed down to half-speed, closely resembled a recording of the Bini tribe made in West Africa by the Straus Expedition and dramatically illustrates the origin of his music. i ! Pozo's influence on jazz drummers was direct and electric. Max Roach, for ex }; ample, goes out of his way to say that he L was fascinated by Pozo. Teddy Stewart, j then the regular drummer with Dizzy I Gillespie, who had to take a back seat f while Pozo was in the limelight, admits it gave him an inferiority complex but insists < nevertheless that "Pozo was the most!" Apparently, Pozo's African rhythms had something in common with the experiments of ',, the Bop drummers and, what is more, . showed them the way to new and limitless possibilities. Pozo was by no means an isolated phenomenon. Later, when Stan Kenton decided that jazz rhythms were too monotonous, he borrowed the entire drum choir from ! Machito's orchestra to furnish a background for his great recording of The Peanut Vendor. Thereafter, Kenton used the Afro-Cuban drummer, Carlo Vidal. At one time or another, Gene Krupa, Woody j Herman, Jerry Wald, and the King Cole Trio employed Afro-Cuban drummers. On the other hand, Bop musicians played with Afro-Cuban bands. Machito and his orchestra performed at the Royal L Roost on Broadway, also known as the 1 Metropolitan Bopera House, along with jazz musicians like Howard McGhee, Charlie Ventura, and Brew Moore as soloists. For years, of course, jazz musicians had played in Afro-Cuban bands and jazz drummers have played dates with various "Spanish" bands in Harlem, but here the two streams , met and merged. The most successful blending of this kind took place in a recording of Mango Mangue by Machito, featuring the solo saxophone 1 work of the greatest bopper of them all, Charlie Parker. The harmony of Machito's accompaniment is elementary, but the rhythmic background is superb and plays a fascinating counterpoint to the rhythmic suspensions ' in Parker's solo. Parker heard the tune exactly twice in the studio be N fore he made the record. When asked about it, his eyes lit up with pleasure and he ',< exclaimed: "That Afro-Cuban rhythm is i real gone! I like to play with those drummers— man, it's so relaxed." Where Parker, L who was born in Kansas City, picked up r his superb sense of timing and his affinity r for African rhythms is another unanswered question among the many which concern the specifically American elements in jazz. At the same time, Bop developed harmonic as well as rhythmic complexity, and a conflict arose between the two. It be 0 came increasingly difficult to improvise along the new harmonic lines without stumbling over the intricate rhythms, and vice versa. Thus the emphasis upon technique. There are very few musicians able : to relax and allow their invention to flow freely while playing Bop. This fact alone would account for the scarcity of first-rate j exponents of the style. | The musical revolution is practically over. A lot of bad music — unorganized, | meaningless, and exhibitionistic — was played and recorded under the banner of ] Bop. That was inevitable, yet the total effect was not unhealthy. Bop established J a precedent for open-minded experimentation and led jazz musicians toward a better ; technique, a broader understanding of musi 1 cal theory, and, above all, a keener appre j ciation of rhythm.