"The most important contribution you can make to the tradition is to create your own music, create a new music."
                                                                      -- Anthony Davis

Jazz grew out of a cultural and social revolution similar to that which spawned the Harlem Renaissance. While the newly freed African Americans of the 1870's and beyond found few means for open rebellion against an oppressive political and social system, artistic rebellion was an option which brought little resistance; from the slave spirituals sung in the fields developed an art form unlike any other. In examining the American social setting of 19th century America, we find an appropriation by the ethnic majority (Euro-Americans) of the labor, pride, and very souls of the ethnic minority (African Americans). An empowering contrast, jazz is the appropriation, by the minority, of musical traditions belonging to the majority. In an attempt to define this complex and rich musical tradition as a social rebellion, one critic has written that: Jazz is a form of art music that originated in the United States through the confrontation of blacks with European music. The instrumentation, melody, and harmony of jazz are in the main derived from Western musical tradition. Rhythm, phrasing and production of sound, and the elements of blues harmony are derived from African music and from the conception of American blacks. (i) Though originated by African Americans, by the 1930's in America, jazz was a cross-cultural phenomenon, prevalent in all aspects of American life, including capitalism. Swing, the big band style which emerged out of Kansas City due to artists like Count Basie and Bennie Moten, became the "greatest music business of all time and the word 'swing' itself was used to market everything from cigarettes to women's clothing." (ii) What was most disturbing to the young jazz musicians of the time was the art's seizure by Euro-American band leaders like Artie Shaw, Glenn Miller, Woody Herman, Fletcher Henderson, and Benny Goodman and its exploitation in establishments like the famous Cotton Club, whose clientele were limited to Euro-Americans, if not by law, then by price.

Many Bop musicians felt an estrangement from mainstream American life as almost all were black and grew up poor, forced to remain socially complicit. Ornette Coleman, a native of Fort Worth, Texas, worked an entire summer during his junior high school years to save enough money to buy his first saxophone, a gold plated Conn. (iii) Miles Davis's blunt explanation serves to illuminate the situation for most Bop artists clearly: My father was from Arkansas. He grew up there on a farm that his father, Miles Dewey Davis I, owned. My grandfather was a bookkeeper, so good at what he did he did it for white people and made a whole lot of money. He bought five hundred acres of land around the turn of the century. When he bought all that land, the white people in the area that used him to straighten out their financial matters, their money books, turned against him. Ran him off his land. In their minds, a black man wasn't supposed to have all that land and all that money. He wasn't supposed to be smart, smarter than them. It hasn't changed too much: things are like that even today. (iv) Plainly, many Bop artists felt themselves outside of the realm of American idealism, considered themselves outcasts, forced to comply with the rules of society while denied all the rewards. For people with few true freedoms in life, music offered an open road for experimentation, a place to express oneself without fear of recrimination.

Most of the "founding fathers" of Bop received their musical education during the Swing Era, a particularly disturbing era for black musicians, when white European band leaders were appropriating jazz rhythms and riffs and exploiting them as their own. As one jazz critic explained at the time, "The emotional...bias in favor of blacks and black low-life has always been extremely strong among serious jazz lovers...The desire to become a 'white negro'...is merely the most extreme form of the attitude." (v) Thomas Litweiler explains the Bop rebellion: Bop emerged during the national despair of World War II, when socially the art of jazz was surviving in a vicious atmosphere of racial and economic exploitation...Out of the anguish of "Parker's Mood" arises a statement of faith - a generation's faith that its lyric creation redeemed its personal tragedies. (vi) In an act of defiance, Bop artists struggled to create a music that could not be imitated, a music which was owned solely by its creator, the black musician. This new attitude in jazz was even noticeable in performance mannerisms. Swing musicians would often "walk the bar," (1) collecting tips from bar patrons along they way. Bop musicians, however, were far more introverted during performance, often turning their backs to the audience completely. (vii)

The ease with which Americans accepted Swing is probably explained by the notion that Swing was not a significant break from European musical traditions. Swing relies on standard European forms (usually aaba or abac), and incorporates instrumentation similar to that of the classic concert band, but on a smaller scale. The most prominent contrast between the two musical styles is that classical European music creates tension by contrasting movements of a piece, juxtaposing the melancholy and the aggressive, creating tension through formalized structures. (viii) Swing, on the other hand, creates tension within each piece rhythmically so that the rhythm section will emphasize very square beats and the instrumentalists will rely on syncopation, or the emphasis of off beats. In any case, this difference is less a break from European musical tradition than it is the transposition of the musical element we call tension.

Perhaps it is this parallelism with the classic European tradition which allowed so many men of European descent to dominate the Swing Era. Euro-American band leaders like Artie Shaw, Glenn Miller, Woody Herman, and Benny Goodman (dubbed "King of Swing"), produced music with an easy melodic quality and clean, classical intonation, allowing for a greater mass appeal. Artists like Duke Ellington and Count Basie broke the color line, also becoming commercial success stories. In the case of Ellington at least, the cause is somewhat attributable to his connections with the European world than a growing social acceptance of the African American. Ellington has often been accused of coming too close to European music. This assertion may not be far fetched when considering his penchant for the larger musical forms (the Suite, for example), and that most of his tunes were later arranged for orchestras by a Euro-American composer in the classical tradition, Ferde Grofe. (ix) Indeed, Ellington is recognized most for is innovations in tonal color, as determined by instrumentation (a concern of the great European musical tradition), rather than any dramatic discoveries in rhythm, form, or theme.

The appropriation of Swing by Euro-American band leaders, its commercialization, and its ensuing move towards the cliché inspired a group of young musicians to experiment with the form. These artists, Parker, Gillespie, Coleman, and others, would create a music that contrasted sharply with anything the American public had known, a music called Bop.

The Bebop "revolution" was primarily rhythmic; while Swing tunes were built in a solid, four beat foundation and relied on instrumentation for texture, Bebop groups experimented with creating texture and complexity through rhythmic layerings. (x) Drummers began to use the ride cymbal to maintain a constant beat which they punctuated with syncopated snare shots, rim shots, or bass-drum strokes and pianists became more than melodic accompaniment. Bebop pianists developed a style known as "comping," where the pianist plays occasional rhythmic punctuations. Finally, the tunes themselves began to reflect this rhythmic complexity. Composers like Charles Mingus and Thelonius Monk wrote songs whose lilting, jarring rhythms were landmarks in music history. Monk's In Walked Bud and Mingus's Jump Monk were so untraditional as to be called unmusical by the musical establishment.

Bop was an advance in more than just the rhythm section, however, as the very foundation of the music, its form, was altered dramatically. The form of the first Bop compositions was very standard, either a derivative or a direct lift of Swing standards. For example, the theme and form of Charlie Parker's Hot House were derived from the Cole Porter tune, What Is This Thing Called Love. Yet, as Bop matured, it began to create its own musical forms, forms so complex that they were hardly recognizable as such. Many critics accused the new Bop musicians of creating music without structure, lacking in discipline, but most tunes were solidly, if not complexly constructed. The form of Gillespie's Salt Peanuts was such a target for critics. (2)

Perhaps the most bewildering aspect of the new Bop music was its theoretical complexities. In Bebop, harmonies are varied just as melodies were the basis for variation in traditional jazz. (xi) So, in Bop tunes, it is not unusual to find the purposeful use of harmonic dissonance, extremely elaborate chordal structures, or frequent key changes. Rapid and complex chord structure were a trademark of tenor saxophonist John Coltrane. His tune Giant Steps is famous for the incredible rapidity with which it modulates keys.

Finally, one last element that differentiated Swing and Bop was the arrangement. Bop groups were small, usually just a trumpet or sax, piano, bass, and drums. With such a small group of musicians, it was not possible to achieve the same distinctive tone colors through instrumentation. In Bop, then, the focus shifted from complexly arranged melodic unisons to simply arranged solo passages and the fostering of "dialogue" between instruments. (3) The extended spontaneous solo is perhaps Bop's greatest contribution to jazz. The solo brings the artist one step closer to the listener, removing the composer from the schema. As one jazz historian has noted: Much of the enchantment of jazz results from its similarities to conventional spoken language. Although not lacking in errors and hesitations, spoken language is often more dynamic than the cautious, elaborated written form. We can compare normal conversation to jazz improvisation through its individualism, creativity, endless possibility, spontaneity, thematic continuity, and inherent imperfection. (xii) Bop, the first jazz style refined and complex enough to be called a fine art, was wildly independent and its invention was received by the public "like a space ship landing on the lawn of the White House."xiii Although its complexity puzzled the public, what Bop artists had created was a music which seemed free from the musical constraints of Swing, while maintaining an intellectual integrity.

Conclusion

What is most important to remember when considering Bop and the Harlem Renaissance artists is that the literary revolution and the Bop artist's rebellion were both expressions of protest, a protest against the isolation of and appropriation of their personalities and their art forms. The results were controversial, but prolific, thrusting each into an international limelight. Then it is not surprising that Bop is almost always associated with the Renaissance, even though it developed years later. What remains to be seen, however, is how these two art forms will shape the literature and music of decades to come.

Appendix

• "Brick Shit House" Construction of Gillespie's "Salt Peanuts"
• Introduction (16 measures) -- 8-measure drum solo, ending with playing of rhythm in main theme; then 8 measures by the quintet
• Chorus 1 (32 measures) -- unison theme statement
• Interlude (8 measures) -- unison phrase in the more complex bebop melodic style
• Chorus 2 (32 measures) -- theme, with Parker and playing the first two measures of the riff and Gillespie comically singing "salt PEA-nuts, salt PEA-nuts" in response
• Interlude 2 (16 measures) -- 8 measure piano solo; then another complex unison phrase, then a two measure solo break by pianist
• Chorus 3 (32 measures) -- Piano solo
• Chorus 4 (32 measures) -- Parker's solo
• Interlude 3 (10 measures) -- 6-measure dialogue between Parker and Gillespie; then 4 measure solo break by Gillespie
• Chorus 5 (32 measures) -- Gillespie's solo
• Half-chorus 6 (16 measures) -- Drum solo
• Coda (16 measures) -- a reprise of the introduction, everyone singing "salt PEA-nuts" figure at end