The Amazing Bud Powell. Guthrie P. Ramsey

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СКАЧАТЬ racial discrimination and stereotyping” existing side by side with “a radical trend toward racial integration.” These clubs were among the first to feature integrated bands and audiences, and by the 1940s some of them had become the city’s first black-owned nightclubs.⁴⁴ This social frontier in race relations highlighted the fear of miscegenation as once segregated audiences began to fill with black (and white) hipsters (or “zombies,” as they were also called). Zoot-suited, long-haired, and reefer-smoking, these black hipsters quite publicly undermined the Street’s entrenched “white bachelor subculture” by openly dating and showing authority over white women. As Burke points out, not all blacks and bebop musicians were hipsters on the Street, and some of the musicians were white. But the bebop movement was closely associated with this hipster subculture, and as Burke, Ingrid Monson, Robin D. G. Kelley, and other observers have noted, its reputation turned on troubling primitivist notions of black masculinity.⁴⁵

      As real or imagined sexual threats to white superiority, black bebop musicians became embroiled in a battle of subcultures, sometimes marked by violent episodes. Miles Davis, for example, recalls a specific kind of racial tension surrounding bebop’s Midtown move—one that was an age-old and volatile reason for Jim Crow in the first place. For him, the increased visibility of black male musicians dating white women in Midtown, together with the insider’s dress code and colorful vocabulary, fanned the flame of intolerance: “[Whites] thought that they were being invaded by niggers from Harlem.”⁴⁶ Uptown invaded Midtown with a dissonant, polyrhythmic, and uncompromising vengeance. Indeed, bebop’s beginnings in Harlem’s insular woodsheds and heroic cutting contests, together with the language of conquest used to characterize its move to the commercial and sexual territories of the Street, sharpened the music’s experimental, masculinist edges. But bebop was only one side of a multifaceted world of black artistic experimentation at midcentury.

      CRITICAL INQUIRY: JAZZ CRITICISM AT THE CROSSROADS

      Although scholars have been among its most ardent advocates, the idea that jazz is an art music did not first emerge in the plodding pages of academic journals, but rather in a messy, noisy, free-for-all atmosphere in which musicians, critics, entrepreneurs, club owners, and publicists battled for cultural turf, prestige, and a slice of the commercial pie. Motivated to varying degrees by self-interest, artistic experimentation, and the politics of American social life, these historical actors established the jazz-as-art idea in what Bernard Gendron has called an “aesthetic discursive formation.”⁴⁷

      Jazz critics were especially dominant forces in these discourses—many of which borrowed from the western art music world—that laid the groundwork for jazz becoming serious art and, with that, a genre separate from other popular music styles. It should be noted that jazz criticism was a primarily white enterprise in the 1940s, and the bebop musicians themselves primarily African American.⁴⁸ The amalgamation of social worlds is only part of the story’s complexity, however. Other aspects include primarily journalistic debates in which key ideas—usually oppositional—established a conceptual framework in which jazz would transform its pedigree from folk and mass culture into art. Such debates investigated genres and brand names; art and commerce; folklore and European high culture; progress and the new; standards, techniques, and schooling; affect and antics; and fascists and communists.⁴⁹ Many of these ideas formed binary constructions that galvanized the debates. (As we learned above, even the early cultural spaces in which bebop could be heard can be viewed as a dichotomy between the after-hours Harlem and 52nd Street nightspots.)

      As Gendron points out, two literary factional wars in the 1940s, the first between swing and the revivalist Dixieland movement, and the second pitting bebop against the two former styles, created a new way to look at jazz. What emerged from this war of words was “a set of agreed-upon claims about the aesthetic merit of various jazz styles . . . [and] a grouping of concepts, distinctions, oppositions, rhetorical ploys, and allowable inferences, which as a whole fixed the limits within which inquiries concerning the aesthetics of jazz could take place and without which the claim that jazz is an art form would be merely an abstraction or an incantation.”⁵⁰

      Thus a language developed for valuing jazz as art, a strategy contingent upon the notion of the music’s organic growth and development.⁵¹ In this framework, a boundary between jazz and other popular forms was drawn. For Gendron, bebop represents an early form of postmodernism because its emergence marked the first time that “popular culture abandoned its previously passive, almost unwitting, engagement with high culture, to become an initiator and even an aggressor.”⁵² This claim is instructive, especially in its implications for a gendered reading of bebop and jazz’s generic shift, as we shall witness below.

      The musicians in this saga negotiated this emerging, contentious art world primarily through their sonic experimentations, although Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, the two iconic figures of early bebop, issued public statements in interviews that critics used to validate one position or another. How can we interpret and understand their cultural work— indeed, their insurrection—as masculinist, aggressive, and transformative? The following commentary identifies some of the ground on which these meanings were fought out.

      The journalists who wrote about bebop left behind a trail of print in the popular and trade press documenting a colorful and instructive controversy. With titles such as “How Deaf Can You Get?” (1948) and “Do You Get It?” (1949), many of these articles range in tone from bewilderment to hostility to outrage at bebop. In a record review, Charles Miller writes as if peer pressure had forced him to deal with the new music: “Although I’m less than enthusiastic about a style of jazz called bebop, I feel that it’s worth writing about because it’s attracting an increasing number of listeners and because it might some day make more sense than it does now.”⁵³ His description below, particularly his choice of such words as “weird,” “neurotic,” and “foreign,” allows us to experience a bit of the distancing effect bebop had on some contemporaneous listeners. Interestingly, these terms function—perhaps unwittingly—to emasculate the work of bebop musicians, especially the embedded innuendo that they were not involved in serious creative acts and seemed to be just “fooling around”: “Bebop isn’t easy to define, but I think it’s safe to call it highly experimental. Bebop musicians like to fool around with weird sounding chord effects and unusually complex melodic and rhythmic patterns, producing stuff that’s comparatively foreign to many ears. For my money, it’s an intensely neurotic style, and except for occasional passages that show imagination and beauty, I want no part of it.” Miller goes on to rehearse a wisecrack about the style: “Bebop is just a bunch of guys covering up their mistakes.”⁵⁴ Wilder Hobson adopts a similar tone when reviewing a Dizzy Gillespie recording, using the opportunity to expound on the virtues of earlier jazz and to ridicule bebop. While generally dismissive, he compliments bebop musicians for being “incredibly agile” and reluctantly admits that the recording has a certain arresting and eerie quality.⁵⁵ In his listening experience, bebop was “a miss.”

      The mainstream press also took note of the controversy. A Time article from 1948, “Bopera on Broadway,” about the Royal Roost, a New York club that was among the first to feature bebop exclusively, notes: “Bebop has been around for seven or eight years, and something of a fad for two, but experts still disagree as to what it is, and whether it will last.” To this writer, the music was “shrill cacophony” and “anarchistic.”⁵⁶ The article also mentions that clubs featuring bebop customarily maintained a no-dancing policy, which forced audiences either to listen to or ignore the music. A Newsweek article of the same year, “B. G. and Bebop,” responding to Benny Goodman’s experimentation with bebop in his group, polls several of Manhattan’s leading jazz critics. The most negative comment comes from the influential jazz critic and entrepreneur John Hammond, then vice-president of Mercury Records: “To me bop is a collection of nauseating clichés, repeated ad infinitum.”⁵⁷

      By 1949, the public recognized Gillespie and Parker as leading figures in bebop, and the musicians issued public statements about the music in the press. СКАЧАТЬ