Swing and jazz question?

Is it appropriate to regard bebop as the beginning of “modern jazz”? What are musical and sociological factors?

• I'm in a history of jazz class, but to me bebop and swing aren't really that different...I have no idea how I'm supposed to answer this question. If you could help that ...show more

• Answer:

  JazzNuts and Khan have really covrered most of the territory here, so I just want to add a couple asides: Swing was the pop music of its day. As the pop music of its day, the primary purpose of swing was to be danceable and accessible to the masses. Swing is simple, predictable, and has a very steady dance beat. Bop was intended to be the opposite of swing: not predictable, musicians' music not mass consumable music, not for dancing, and definitely not easy to play. Those talented black players were NOT being taken advantage of by the industry: they were being EXCLUDED from the industry. Less-talented white players got hired and made money while black players couldn't even go into the restaurant, much less play in it. So the blacks played their own gigs in the black-only clubs in the black neighborhoods, like Harlem. When some white dude would come wandering in after his high-paying gig and ask to sit in with the band, they'd say "Sure! How about How High The Moon?" Then they'd count off the tune at a ridiculously fast tempo and play Charlie Parker's "Ornithology," which is a bop tune written on the same chord changes as the popular swing tune How High The Moon. The white swing musician would be unable to keep up, and would be shamed off the stage. If you can listen to How High The Moon and then listen to Ornithology, see if you can hear how they have the same chords but different melodies and very different stylistic approaches. HHTM is swing and Ornithology is bop. Although bop's technically-demanding style may have been handy for playing a practical joke on the white swing players, bop's heritage as musician's music is more important. Charlie Parker used to practice 16 hours or more per day. As his technical ability grew, his musical conception did too. As Bird developed a virtuoso level of technique, his soloing became increasingly complex, and it is out of the playing of Charlie Parker that the style known as bebop first began to grow. Other musicians would all come out to see this cat who could make the sax "sing like a Bird." One of those guys was Dizzy Gillespie. Diz himself had an encyclopedic knowledge of music theory and virtuoso technical abilities too. He was one of the few who could understand Bird's playing from the getgo. Diz adopted and furthered the bop style after meeting Bird - Diz was a bandleader; he hired Bird, and they became friends. Diz and Bird collaborated for many years. Diz became well-known as one of the most important players, composers and teachers of bop... all these guys playing bop hung out together, and gigged together, and would go back to Diz's place after the gig and keep playing till 5 or 6 in the morning. Diz would teach the younger players music theory and the ways that jazz players bend those rules. Benny Goodman was a very important person sociologically because as the white bandleader of one of the most popular bands of the day, he broke the color line and hired Charlie Christian, a black man, as his guitarist. Club owners were not happy about it but they were not about to miss the gravy train that a Benny Goodman appearance offered them. Christian is widely regarded as one of the first, if not the first, to begin playing guitar in a "jazz" rather than a "swing" style. In particular, his solos used the harmonic vocabulary of jazz that other players at that time did not use. Listen to his solo on "I Found A New Baby" and you will hear a choice of notes that foreshadows players like Barney Kessel, Wes Montgomery, and Joe Pass. Finally, the term "modern jazz" means so many things to so many people that it really sort of makes the question more difficult to answer precisely. I think of modern as post-bop, pre-cool, as epitomized by the Modern Jazz Quartet (even tho they did play cool and other styles). I think that for the purposes of your question, "modern" means "not traditional." Traditional, or "trad" jazz is New Orleans swing. If is the beginning of rampant improvisation in music, where the player is the composer of a spontaneous melody, as opposed to trying to recreate the vision of a composer (with specific stylistic rules, as in pre-20th century symphonic music and chamber music.) Trad is pretty raucous and busy; swing gets away from that and evolves its own highly-arranged big band style that is predictable and danceable... but provides the perfect bed for a star soloist like Goodman, or Artie Shaw, or Paul Whiteman.