RUNNING THE CHANGES

A HISTORY OF BEBOP RECALLS THE DAYS WHEN SWING TIME GAVE WAY TO MODERNITY

Author: By Bob Blumenthal

Date: SUNDAY, January 11, 1998

Page: F1

Section: Books

Bebop is generally viewed as the point at which jazz made the transition from commercial entertainment to art form, and consciously cultivated characteristics (musical and otherwise) that reinforced its African-American origins. One of the great strengths of DeVeaux's approach is the way in which it qualifies these familiar cliches of jazz history. He makes the invaluable point that, in the context of America's racial climate, musicians like Duke Ellington and Art Tatum were highly skilled and well-paid professionals, and that the developments that came to be called bebop tended to reinforce this elite status. At the same time, even the most complex innovations emerged within an economic context where music remained first and foremost a livelihood for those who played it, and the tensions between originators and imitators were often subsumed in an atmosphere of mutual discovery and common purpose.

Coleman Hawkins, jazz's first great tenor saxophonist and one of the few classic stylists to engage directly with young modernists during the war years, plays a pivotal role in DeVeaux's story. Hawkins was a proud, sophisticated man and an instrumental virtuoso who, like most of his contemporaries, adopted a more creative approach after contact with Louis Armstrong. Where others focused primarily on Armstrong's definitive feeling for the blues, Hawkins was inspired by the harmonic implications of the trumpeter's solos. After working with Armstrong in Fletcher Henderson's band during 1924, Hawkins became one of the supreme practitioners of ``running'' chord changes, a more complex solo style than mere melodic embellishment. At the same time, Hawkins had neither the talent nor the inclination to ``entertain'' in the Armstrong manner, and, after leaving Henderson, pursued the then-novel route of surviving as a featured instrumental soloist. This led him to Europe for five years, and then to unexpected popular success when he returned to the United States and recorded ``Body and Soul'' in 1939.

For DeVeaux, Hawkins is the proto-bebopper because his particular skills left him with few other options. He was too dignified to sing or othewise ingratiate himself with a mass audience, and not organized enough as a businessman to succeed in leading a big band, the role that other stars were expected to fill. At the same time, Hawkins welcomed, and his early triumphs often anticipated, the harmonic complexities that younger musicians like Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker were pursuing in Harlem jam sessions.

The bands Hawkins led on New York's 52nd Street during the war years, often featuring younger players like Thelonious Monk and Oscar Pettiford, thus provided a downtown counterpart to the uptown action at such legendary haunts as Minton's and Monroe's. From the standpoint of the music business, Hawkins's combos provided a glimpse of things to come as yet unavailable to young modernists like Parker and Gillespie, who continued as a matter of economic necessity to cling to the big-band jobs that Hawkins had abandoned.

DeVeaux also has much to say regarding the impact of the war on the music industry and hence on musical style. He emphasizes how shellac shortages and a musicians' union recording ban combined to limit documentation of the new sounds between 1942 and '44, and he emphasizes how gasoline shortages and other restrictions on touring were felt more keenly by black bands. The difficulties that undercut Billy Eckstine's orchestra, where several of the most talented young players were featured, are contrasted with the success of white bandleader Woody Herman's First Herd, where many of the same innovations were absorbed secondhand. Yet DeVeaux is determined not to view bebop's birth as a story of whites' cashing in on black innovation, and points out how Gillespie welcomed the exposure his music received through writing assignments from Herman and Boyd Raeburn.

Gillespie's ingenuity in getting his music heard, and in ultimately assembling his own big band and becoming bebop's public figurehead, provides a telling contrast to the less ambitious and ultimately more limiting experience of Hawkins. Ultimately, however, DeVeaux's focus on these musicians presents only part of the bebop story. Hawkins may have been a kindred spirit harmonically, as the author emphasizes in numerous musical examples; but his approach to rhythm and the use of space showed less flexibility, and bebop was as much a rhythmic as a harmonic revolution. And Gillespie, who (unlike Hawkins) was more than willing to lead and to entertain, was an anomalous temperament in a generation of musicians that tended to be aloof and intimidating. DeVeaux would have provided a more comprehensive picture of the era with greater emphasis on Charlie Parker and Lester Young, and on the political and social tensions that made these saxophonists such important figures in a nascent counterculture that included both blacks and whites, musicians and non-musicians.

In telling his story, DeVeaux is as likely to cite Thomas Kuhn's ``The Structure of Scientific Revolutions'' and Peter Burger's ``Theory of the Avant-Garde'' as ``The Encyclopedia of Jazz'' or Gillespie's autobiography. This can make for turgid exposition, particularly when economics are at issue. (We are told, for example, that ``What distinguishes improvisation from composition in a modern capitalist economy is that the improviser . . . renounces the intention of transmuting creativity into published commodity.'') DeVeaux's musical analyses, with their detailed harmonic terms, will also test the patience of the non-player. Yet these stretches should not keep readers from ``The Birth of Bebop,'' which takes us beyond the familiar early Gillespie and Parker masterpieces to important performances by Hawkins and pianist Clyde Hart, and which reminds us that the most legitimate musical advances often have the most tangled parentage.