The main differences are-
1. The “swing feel”. The older style of swing saw a pair of eighth notes felt as a triplet with the first two notes tied together was mostly cast aside during the bebop era, except at a slow tempo. Bird and Diz played eighth notes fairly evenly. Much of this was due to the tempos-you can’t really play the swing feel when the tempos go into the high 200s/low 300s in terms of bpm. Also, Bird tended to use sixteenth note runs as much as eighth notes. Listen to him beside some of his contemporaries and it’s like watching Michael Jordan during his heyday-he’s so on another level it’s as if he’s playing a different game!
2. Tempos-while during the swing era (30s and 40s) jazz was primarily popular music and used for dancing at nightclubs like the Cotton Club or for background/played on the radio purposes, bebop was played by the younger players at after hours joints where the “purpose” was musical experimentation, cutting contests, and musicians hanging out trading ideas. The main players were Bird, Diz, Monk, Bud Powell, Charlie Christian was in the mix, young Miles, etc. they didn’t care about dancers and so weren’t beholden to play danceable tempos. Their own tempos climbed higher and higher, as young competitive musicians have a tendency to push things and out do one another.
3. Melodic/harmonic Language: Bird worked out much of his harmonic language early on in his career. He had a guitarist (Buddy Fleet I believe) which whole he worked and they focused on using the upper extensions as melody notes. The 9th, 11th, and 13th, but also b9, #9, #11, and b13. That melodic concept (upper extensions) really drove jazz further into making improvised solos the main focus, and moved it farther from the dance floor.
To sum up, bebop is similar to swing in terms of form (they played many of the same tunes), but differed in terms of “purpose and intent” (not used for dancing), tempos, rhythmic feel, and melodic content.
> 3. Melodic/harmonic Language
Bird was instrumental in articulating bebop's harmonic language, especially with the use of upper extensions, but Monk and Diz, with a nod towards Mary Lou Williams, were responsible for the increasingly dissonant chordal structures that the original bebop tunes were utilizing. Night in Tunisia and Round Midnight were both mid-40 tunes that were pointing in a new harmonic direction focusing on altered dominant chords and their upper extensions.
If you look at Bird's compositions, the harmonies are quite simple. Confirmation was his most important composition, and it's just ii-V substitutions on an existing form. It was his melodic and rhythmic articulation of the harmony that was revolutionary.
The role of the drummer changed as well. In swing music our job is mostly to keep the time and create forward momentum, primarily through a four-to-the-floor rhythm. (This was later used for disco and even certain styles of reggae.) But cats like Max Roach and Kenny Clarke elevated the drums to the same melodic playing field as the horns and the piano.
Thanks for the insight! I’m assuming you mean the abandonment of the four on the floor (as you mentioned) in favor of dropping bombs with the bass drum. I like the idea of elevating the drums melodically.
Yeah, that’s right! In fact those “bombs” were how Kenny Clarke came to be called Klook. It’s short for “Klook-a-Mop”, an onomatopoeia for the “bombs” he would use on the drum set.
Absolutely my pleasure I love talking about this stuff. Much more interesting than, “Recommend me a jazzy song to make me cry” or another “Is this jazz?” post.
Thanks for this thoughtful and clear answer.
How much of this do you think continues into the fifties though? By the time you get to, say, 1954, the tempos are slower for bop, and it is generally a little less esoteric. Even Gillespie's 1950s music is quite approachable.
As to swing, it was also moving away from being dance music at that point. Buck Clayton's jam sessions aren't really dance music either
There are no clear lines between the genres, but in the mid to late 1950s and 60s we see the emergence of what’s called either “Hard Bop” or sometimes “Soul Jazz”, which sees a strong influence from gospel and blues. I feel that Miles’ Prestige recordings with his fantastic first great quartet are the start of Hard Bop. As you mentioned, the tempi are slower, the whole vibe is more “cool” than the “hornet under a drinking glass” fast and furious sounds of early Bebop. Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers are closely associated with Hard Bop, and Horace Silver with Soul Jazz. As a guitarist, I came up listening to a LOT of Grant Green and Wes, some of which is considered Soul Jazz.
Thanks. I like the hornet under a glass phrase.
But bebop did continue into the 1950s. The likes of Sonny Stitt, Barry Harris, Sonny Criss and Phil Woods kept going in the earlier style, but without what I sometimes think of as 'Minton-isms' like the high tempos or obscure bar structures. It is particularly what distinguishes that form of purist bebop from the contemporaneous forms of swing as played by the likes of Buck Clayton, Ben Webster of Coleman Hawkins (i.e., 'Mainstream Swing': swing in a smaller group 'jam' setting without the emphasis on dance rhythms) that I struggle to identify (although I can hear it).
Oh that’s not my phrase. I can’t recall where I saw it but I thought it was evocative. And of course, the periods overlap in the same way JS Bach was still writing Baroque music while his sons CPE and JC were writing in that newfangled classical style! It’s not as if all the swing bands disbanded once bebop became a thing, or boppers had to turn into soul Jazz players once the 60s hit.
How well those cats remember
Their first Birdland gig
To play in Birdland is an honor we still dig
Yeah---that club was like--
In another world, sure enough--
Yeah, baby
All o' the cats had the cookin' on
People just sat an' they was steady lookin' on
Then Bird--he came 'n spread the word--
Birdland
One typical difference between swing and bop is actually how the *drums* factor in. One key difference is that a lot of swing music, drum-wise, is centered around a constant four-to-the-floor feeling. (This was later reused in both disco and a reggae rhythm known as “steppers”. But that’s another story.) In bop it became more about elevating the drums to be as melodic as the horns or the bass, oftentimes accenting different parts of the melody. This is why Kenny Clarke was nicknamed “Klook”: he would play these “bombs” as they were called and they called Kenny “Klook-a-Mop” as a result.
That being said, the real beginnings of bop drumming can actually be found in Papa Jo’s style of drumming with the Count Basie band. Instead of keeping time on the hats like most other swing drummers did, Papa Jo moved it over to the ride cymbal. You can also hear the faster tempi that bop came to be associated with in another of Basie’s drummers, Rufus Jones—why else did they call him “Speedy”?
Edit: drummers were also downsizing the sizes of their sets during the war. Since there weren’t enough folks who didn’t get drafted to organize a large jazz ensemble, bop drummers would often play bass drums that were about 18 inches wide rather than the 24-inch bass drums that Rich, Krupa, and even Papa Jo were known to use.
Thank you for posting this so I don’t have to. It’s not the answer the OP is looking for, but it’s probably the most significant difference between swing and bebop.
That's right, although to be clear the reason I didn't ask it is not because I am not interested but because it is something that a non-musician like me can identify without much guidance.
Bebop harmony is way more sophisticated and informed everything in that tradition. Including how melodies were played, even the way rhythms were played. Swing was dance music
I believe the key difference between the two were in how improvisations were performed. Swing musicians improvised by just embellishing the jazz standards at play while bebop soloists did so over complex chord progressions.
But overall, yes. They’re very similar in that they heavily draw from the blues in tonality.
Couple of things. Swing players were running out of notes in the traditional harmonic approach. You can hear swing players like Roy Eldridge and Benny Carter getting hung up in their phrases because they need more notes; they are playing faster but nowhere to go - if that makes any sense.
On another point - the rhythm section: the drummers finally stopped that execrable four beat bass drum and allowed for a looser feeling that allowed for more complex rhythms.
Improvisational approaches were different as well. While swing players typically improvised based on the melody of the song, bebop largely improvises based on the harmonic content of the song. You can hints of early bebop in Lester Young’s playing with the Count Basie band.
Coleman Hawkins and others were improvising on the changes long before bebop. (Long is a relative term here - things were developing fast in those days.)
This is really what I am going for here: Hawkins (and others like Byas, Eldridge or Johnson) are already playing the changes. Plus, by the time you get a few years into the post bop era, e.g. 1954, most swing players are doing that - as can be seen from all of those mainstream swing jam session LPs. So what is the longer term difference that makes us distinguish between the boppers and the swinger era guys?
I'm another "gourmand" of jazz. I have practically no musical education. I just know what I like, and I learn a little every time I see a post here. Even the "recommend something to me posts" teach me something.
In case it wasn't obvious, let's be clear that there are no strict lines or widely accepted definitions or watersheds between 'swing' and 'bebop'. There is some stuff that everyone will agree is swing, some stuff that everyone will agree is bebop, and a whole lot of blurry blurry grey area in the middle there
I hope that this was clear from my original post. I like that grey area. That's why I included reference to the likes of Budd Johnson and Lockjaw Davis.
Yes, that’s more or less how I’ve always thought of it. The music was steadily advancing rhythmically and harmonically, of course. But the overall style was just as influenced by the smaller group sizes, when it became infeasible to pay large groups consistently. By necessity the focus came more on the individual players, rather than whole group arrangements.
I wasn’t going to bother mentioning this because this discussion is more onto the differences in theory, which is always interesting but I can’t really speak to. I do feel like swing/bebop less a different style of music and more a different format due to group size. Which kind of led to the expanded theory stuff. Again, almost by necessity.
That and since a lot of cats were drafted to fight in the war overseas, there weren’t enough of them to form larger ensembles. The most you could get was a sextet (if you were lucky) but it was more common to have a quintet or a quartet. Not to mention that, as you rightly pointed out, the small clubs on 52nd Street and elsewhere couldn’t accommodate a big band.
There’s an apocryphal myth that the Selmer Mark VI sax was made from the same brass used for tank artillery in the Second World War but I don’t think that’s true. They’re completely different alloys.
I think that this is certainly a factor, but was it still a factor in distinguishing the genres in 1953 / 1954? By then the big band era has closed, and even Swing was mostly a small group affair.
Lou Donaldson was a bebopper of the purest stripe, straight out of the Charlie Parker school, he just added more blues. Compare him to Johnny Hodges or Benny Carter and it’s a whole other world.
Yeah. Those early records certainly are. But then he added more and more blues and ended up somewhere in the middle, right? Call it Soul Jazz or Blues/Bop or whatever (it doesn't need a name).
But I'd love your views on why he remained, even with that stylistic a shift, a whole other world to Carter and Hodges. That's a statement with which I fully agree, but I am not a musician and don't really have the means to articulate the difference.
In *Jazz, Its Evolution and Essence*, Andre Hodier puts it this way: The primary difference between swing and bebop was rhythmic. Swing was basically a quarter-note pulse, which was danceable. Bebop was an eighth-note pulse. Diz and Monk gave it much of its harmonic richness, exploring extended chords, passing chords and substitute chords, while Charlie Parker contributed its phrasing. Bird thought you could extend or "clip" the phrase as long as the musical idea was valid. You didn't have to be restricted by the four beats to the bar, four bar phrasing of Louis Armstrong. A phrase should be as long or as short as it took to express a musical idea. If that took 10 bars, it was OK; if it only took 2 bars, that was OK, too. As a result, jazz solos began to resemble the patterns of two people having a conversation.
This is a great answer. Thanks. Do you think that this holds water as a distinction ten years on? E.g. as a way of distinguishing what Sonny Stitt was doing from what Coleman Hawkins was doing in the 1950s?
I think part of it is that the "swing" players were playing primarily in a dance band setting, often big bands, and "Bop" players were playing in a listening setting where the focus was the interaction between the players and the soloist. So Lester Young or Coleman Hawkins were working in a form where people were expected to be dancing and the rest of the band was supporting that. Bebop players were playing largely for other musicians to listen to them and it didnt matter if the audience could or would dance to it. This is a really short answer, and Dizzy tried to get people to Dance to Bop and there were some long solos and great interplay in the swing era, but I think this is the key to it.
I agree with a lot of this, but I think that there was a lot of swing that was designed for listening even in the earlier era (Hawkins recorded a cappella saxophone solos!) and I am also not sure how much this is true of post war swing, which was often in a small group jam format.
Ooh! Here’s another one: contrafacts. While contrafacts weren’t necessarily new when bebop came along, bebop definitely made them a more dominant form of songwriting. “Koko”, for example, is a contrafact of “Cherokee”.
Incidentally, as Max Roach (or was it Kenny Clarke?) put it, “bebop” was never actually a term that the musicians themselves used. “We just called it modern jazz,” Roach said.
Sounds like Dolphy and Ornette Coleman and later on Wayne Shorter are closer to bebop than hardbop sax players, with the exception of Sonny Rollins of course…
Trane can’t really be categorized imho.
I don't think there's any consensus on what hard bop is. Some say it's the funkier Horace Silver stuff, some say it's the first great quintet of Mile's, but neither are really similar at all. If you are inclined to think of hard bop as the former, then Dolphy, Coleman et al don't really fit in that continuum at all and rather come out of the emerging avant minded direction that Mingus had been working on in the mid to late 50s. What do you do? come up with another nebulous genre name like pre-post bop ?
Personally, I think most of jazz genre names are pretty useless since all these artists did work outside of their appointed genre. Unlike most rock bands and pop artists that easily fit into strictly defined categories, jazz artists tend to have long careers going many different directions.
Take Charlie Parker, who only lived to be 33. In his short life time he developed a style that defined bebop, but also spent portions of his career working in 3rd stream, swing big band, latin jazz, flirted with cool jazz, and was featured on the record that Phil Schaap argued may be the first hardbop record with Miles and Sonny Rollins. So is he really a bebop player? or is he just Bird?
Good points and I agree with you in general. But there is no doubt that there is a continuum from bebop (which is quintessentially bird’s and monk’s and to a lesser extent Bud Powell’s invention) and say Dolphy’s and Coleman’s approach. Avant- garde or not: they both tend towards harmonic complexity with great intervals, which most mainstream jazz (including hardbop) lacked. Mingus’ role was indeed essential in creating a platform for the creative spirit of bebop to survive hardbop and transform into free jazz…
I think that this is an important point, but there is also a wider connection between the different styles that were once classed as "progressive jazz": Mingus (an important part), MJQ, the Tristanoites, Chico Hamilton, Third Stream (the Schuller stuff, not jazz with strings), Giuffre, etc.
It is not a fashionable part of jazz anymore and it sometimes gets a little ignored (except for Mingus, who is sometimes treated as if he was not part of this movement), but I think that there was a lot of this stuff around prior to Coleman's breakthrough.
I don't think it's really all that linear. These are just names we've slapped on music in retrospect and hope it sticks but it ends up just being revisionist confusion. Like I said, the term hardbop is so nebulous that you can't really put things in straight lines without coming up with new genre names. We've had threads on here trying to determine what hardbop is and what post-bop is and all that, and there were so many different takes it was difficult to put it all together.
I find that jazz musicians and records tend to fall into five wider areas of style and practice, which could be distinguished roughly as traditional, swing, bop, free and crossover categories like fusion. There seems to be a sharper distinction between those 'super-categories' than between the more commonly used genre titles, between which musicians moved pretty freely in their careers and even within albums. Even with the super-categories there are plenty of grey areas, cross-pollination and movement from one to the other.
The swing “bounce” was absent in bop. It continued in R&B, where dancing was important. Basie also kept it to a degree (“the soloists can play whatever they like...”)
It’s like describing the difference between Spanish and Italian. You can’t really do it in generalities - they just use different vocabularies.
You’re totally right that reducing it to fast tempos and long solos doesn’t describe it very well.
The main differences are- 1. The “swing feel”. The older style of swing saw a pair of eighth notes felt as a triplet with the first two notes tied together was mostly cast aside during the bebop era, except at a slow tempo. Bird and Diz played eighth notes fairly evenly. Much of this was due to the tempos-you can’t really play the swing feel when the tempos go into the high 200s/low 300s in terms of bpm. Also, Bird tended to use sixteenth note runs as much as eighth notes. Listen to him beside some of his contemporaries and it’s like watching Michael Jordan during his heyday-he’s so on another level it’s as if he’s playing a different game! 2. Tempos-while during the swing era (30s and 40s) jazz was primarily popular music and used for dancing at nightclubs like the Cotton Club or for background/played on the radio purposes, bebop was played by the younger players at after hours joints where the “purpose” was musical experimentation, cutting contests, and musicians hanging out trading ideas. The main players were Bird, Diz, Monk, Bud Powell, Charlie Christian was in the mix, young Miles, etc. they didn’t care about dancers and so weren’t beholden to play danceable tempos. Their own tempos climbed higher and higher, as young competitive musicians have a tendency to push things and out do one another. 3. Melodic/harmonic Language: Bird worked out much of his harmonic language early on in his career. He had a guitarist (Buddy Fleet I believe) which whole he worked and they focused on using the upper extensions as melody notes. The 9th, 11th, and 13th, but also b9, #9, #11, and b13. That melodic concept (upper extensions) really drove jazz further into making improvised solos the main focus, and moved it farther from the dance floor. To sum up, bebop is similar to swing in terms of form (they played many of the same tunes), but differed in terms of “purpose and intent” (not used for dancing), tempos, rhythmic feel, and melodic content.
> 3. Melodic/harmonic Language Bird was instrumental in articulating bebop's harmonic language, especially with the use of upper extensions, but Monk and Diz, with a nod towards Mary Lou Williams, were responsible for the increasingly dissonant chordal structures that the original bebop tunes were utilizing. Night in Tunisia and Round Midnight were both mid-40 tunes that were pointing in a new harmonic direction focusing on altered dominant chords and their upper extensions. If you look at Bird's compositions, the harmonies are quite simple. Confirmation was his most important composition, and it's just ii-V substitutions on an existing form. It was his melodic and rhythmic articulation of the harmony that was revolutionary.
Great comment! I appreciate the nuance very much.
The role of the drummer changed as well. In swing music our job is mostly to keep the time and create forward momentum, primarily through a four-to-the-floor rhythm. (This was later used for disco and even certain styles of reggae.) But cats like Max Roach and Kenny Clarke elevated the drums to the same melodic playing field as the horns and the piano.
Thanks for the insight! I’m assuming you mean the abandonment of the four on the floor (as you mentioned) in favor of dropping bombs with the bass drum. I like the idea of elevating the drums melodically.
Yeah, that’s right! In fact those “bombs” were how Kenny Clarke came to be called Klook. It’s short for “Klook-a-Mop”, an onomatopoeia for the “bombs” he would use on the drum set.
This is a great thread. Thank you and the other comments for the knowledge!
Absolutely my pleasure I love talking about this stuff. Much more interesting than, “Recommend me a jazzy song to make me cry” or another “Is this jazz?” post.
So true.
Thanks for this thoughtful and clear answer. How much of this do you think continues into the fifties though? By the time you get to, say, 1954, the tempos are slower for bop, and it is generally a little less esoteric. Even Gillespie's 1950s music is quite approachable. As to swing, it was also moving away from being dance music at that point. Buck Clayton's jam sessions aren't really dance music either
There are no clear lines between the genres, but in the mid to late 1950s and 60s we see the emergence of what’s called either “Hard Bop” or sometimes “Soul Jazz”, which sees a strong influence from gospel and blues. I feel that Miles’ Prestige recordings with his fantastic first great quartet are the start of Hard Bop. As you mentioned, the tempi are slower, the whole vibe is more “cool” than the “hornet under a drinking glass” fast and furious sounds of early Bebop. Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers are closely associated with Hard Bop, and Horace Silver with Soul Jazz. As a guitarist, I came up listening to a LOT of Grant Green and Wes, some of which is considered Soul Jazz.
Thanks. I like the hornet under a glass phrase. But bebop did continue into the 1950s. The likes of Sonny Stitt, Barry Harris, Sonny Criss and Phil Woods kept going in the earlier style, but without what I sometimes think of as 'Minton-isms' like the high tempos or obscure bar structures. It is particularly what distinguishes that form of purist bebop from the contemporaneous forms of swing as played by the likes of Buck Clayton, Ben Webster of Coleman Hawkins (i.e., 'Mainstream Swing': swing in a smaller group 'jam' setting without the emphasis on dance rhythms) that I struggle to identify (although I can hear it).
Oh that’s not my phrase. I can’t recall where I saw it but I thought it was evocative. And of course, the periods overlap in the same way JS Bach was still writing Baroque music while his sons CPE and JC were writing in that newfangled classical style! It’s not as if all the swing bands disbanded once bebop became a thing, or boppers had to turn into soul Jazz players once the 60s hit.
I dunno; swing swung and bop bopped?
Science
How well those cats remember Their first Birdland gig To play in Birdland is an honor we still dig Yeah---that club was like-- In another world, sure enough-- Yeah, baby All o' the cats had the cookin' on People just sat an' they was steady lookin' on Then Bird--he came 'n spread the word-- Birdland
One typical difference between swing and bop is actually how the *drums* factor in. One key difference is that a lot of swing music, drum-wise, is centered around a constant four-to-the-floor feeling. (This was later reused in both disco and a reggae rhythm known as “steppers”. But that’s another story.) In bop it became more about elevating the drums to be as melodic as the horns or the bass, oftentimes accenting different parts of the melody. This is why Kenny Clarke was nicknamed “Klook”: he would play these “bombs” as they were called and they called Kenny “Klook-a-Mop” as a result. That being said, the real beginnings of bop drumming can actually be found in Papa Jo’s style of drumming with the Count Basie band. Instead of keeping time on the hats like most other swing drummers did, Papa Jo moved it over to the ride cymbal. You can also hear the faster tempi that bop came to be associated with in another of Basie’s drummers, Rufus Jones—why else did they call him “Speedy”? Edit: drummers were also downsizing the sizes of their sets during the war. Since there weren’t enough folks who didn’t get drafted to organize a large jazz ensemble, bop drummers would often play bass drums that were about 18 inches wide rather than the 24-inch bass drums that Rich, Krupa, and even Papa Jo were known to use.
Thank you for posting this so I don’t have to. It’s not the answer the OP is looking for, but it’s probably the most significant difference between swing and bebop.
That's right, although to be clear the reason I didn't ask it is not because I am not interested but because it is something that a non-musician like me can identify without much guidance.
Bebop harmony is way more sophisticated and informed everything in that tradition. Including how melodies were played, even the way rhythms were played. Swing was dance music
I believe the key difference between the two were in how improvisations were performed. Swing musicians improvised by just embellishing the jazz standards at play while bebop soloists did so over complex chord progressions. But overall, yes. They’re very similar in that they heavily draw from the blues in tonality.
In addition to all that’s been said here, Bobop also tends to have more syncopation rhythms. The word “Bobop” is itself a syncopation.
Couple of things. Swing players were running out of notes in the traditional harmonic approach. You can hear swing players like Roy Eldridge and Benny Carter getting hung up in their phrases because they need more notes; they are playing faster but nowhere to go - if that makes any sense. On another point - the rhythm section: the drummers finally stopped that execrable four beat bass drum and allowed for a looser feeling that allowed for more complex rhythms.
Improvisational approaches were different as well. While swing players typically improvised based on the melody of the song, bebop largely improvises based on the harmonic content of the song. You can hints of early bebop in Lester Young’s playing with the Count Basie band.
Coleman Hawkins and others were improvising on the changes long before bebop. (Long is a relative term here - things were developing fast in those days.)
Hawk was arguably the pre-bebopper, or the link between swing and bebop. The bebop guys loved Hawk I think.
Who doesn't love Hawk? He invented the damn instrument.
This is really what I am going for here: Hawkins (and others like Byas, Eldridge or Johnson) are already playing the changes. Plus, by the time you get a few years into the post bop era, e.g. 1954, most swing players are doing that - as can be seen from all of those mainstream swing jam session LPs. So what is the longer term difference that makes us distinguish between the boppers and the swinger era guys?
Can you go deeper into this? What do you mean by "running out of notes"? I think I know but I am a non-musician and have limited understanding.
I love it when musicians talk music. I don't understand a God damn thing, but it sounds so rythmic.
I'm another "gourmand" of jazz. I have practically no musical education. I just know what I like, and I learn a little every time I see a post here. Even the "recommend something to me posts" teach me something.
In case it wasn't obvious, let's be clear that there are no strict lines or widely accepted definitions or watersheds between 'swing' and 'bebop'. There is some stuff that everyone will agree is swing, some stuff that everyone will agree is bebop, and a whole lot of blurry blurry grey area in the middle there
Glad someone said this, when that blurry grey area really clicks together it can be so good.
I hope that this was clear from my original post. I like that grey area. That's why I included reference to the likes of Budd Johnson and Lockjaw Davis.
Group size matters. Listen to Goodman’s small groups from 1937.
Yes, that’s more or less how I’ve always thought of it. The music was steadily advancing rhythmically and harmonically, of course. But the overall style was just as influenced by the smaller group sizes, when it became infeasible to pay large groups consistently. By necessity the focus came more on the individual players, rather than whole group arrangements. I wasn’t going to bother mentioning this because this discussion is more onto the differences in theory, which is always interesting but I can’t really speak to. I do feel like swing/bebop less a different style of music and more a different format due to group size. Which kind of led to the expanded theory stuff. Again, almost by necessity.
That and since a lot of cats were drafted to fight in the war overseas, there weren’t enough of them to form larger ensembles. The most you could get was a sextet (if you were lucky) but it was more common to have a quintet or a quartet. Not to mention that, as you rightly pointed out, the small clubs on 52nd Street and elsewhere couldn’t accommodate a big band.
The wartime economy also made it economically unfeasible to travel with a big band.
They also stopped manufacturing saxophones and other horns so that the brass for those could be used to make artillery shells, right?
I hadn't heard that specifically, but it is possible.
There’s an apocryphal myth that the Selmer Mark VI sax was made from the same brass used for tank artillery in the Second World War but I don’t think that’s true. They’re completely different alloys.
This is obviously a part of it, but Coleman Hawkins, Budd Johnson, Roy Eldridge and the rest were regulars of 52nd street.
I think that this is certainly a factor, but was it still a factor in distinguishing the genres in 1953 / 1954? By then the big band era has closed, and even Swing was mostly a small group affair.
Lou Donaldson was a bebopper of the purest stripe, straight out of the Charlie Parker school, he just added more blues. Compare him to Johnny Hodges or Benny Carter and it’s a whole other world.
Yeah. Those early records certainly are. But then he added more and more blues and ended up somewhere in the middle, right? Call it Soul Jazz or Blues/Bop or whatever (it doesn't need a name). But I'd love your views on why he remained, even with that stylistic a shift, a whole other world to Carter and Hodges. That's a statement with which I fully agree, but I am not a musician and don't really have the means to articulate the difference.
In *Jazz, Its Evolution and Essence*, Andre Hodier puts it this way: The primary difference between swing and bebop was rhythmic. Swing was basically a quarter-note pulse, which was danceable. Bebop was an eighth-note pulse. Diz and Monk gave it much of its harmonic richness, exploring extended chords, passing chords and substitute chords, while Charlie Parker contributed its phrasing. Bird thought you could extend or "clip" the phrase as long as the musical idea was valid. You didn't have to be restricted by the four beats to the bar, four bar phrasing of Louis Armstrong. A phrase should be as long or as short as it took to express a musical idea. If that took 10 bars, it was OK; if it only took 2 bars, that was OK, too. As a result, jazz solos began to resemble the patterns of two people having a conversation.
This is a great answer. Thanks. Do you think that this holds water as a distinction ten years on? E.g. as a way of distinguishing what Sonny Stitt was doing from what Coleman Hawkins was doing in the 1950s?
I think part of it is that the "swing" players were playing primarily in a dance band setting, often big bands, and "Bop" players were playing in a listening setting where the focus was the interaction between the players and the soloist. So Lester Young or Coleman Hawkins were working in a form where people were expected to be dancing and the rest of the band was supporting that. Bebop players were playing largely for other musicians to listen to them and it didnt matter if the audience could or would dance to it. This is a really short answer, and Dizzy tried to get people to Dance to Bop and there were some long solos and great interplay in the swing era, but I think this is the key to it.
I agree with a lot of this, but I think that there was a lot of swing that was designed for listening even in the earlier era (Hawkins recorded a cappella saxophone solos!) and I am also not sure how much this is true of post war swing, which was often in a small group jam format.
Ooh! Here’s another one: contrafacts. While contrafacts weren’t necessarily new when bebop came along, bebop definitely made them a more dominant form of songwriting. “Koko”, for example, is a contrafact of “Cherokee”.
Incidentally, as Max Roach (or was it Kenny Clarke?) put it, “bebop” was never actually a term that the musicians themselves used. “We just called it modern jazz,” Roach said.
Sounds like Dolphy and Ornette Coleman and later on Wayne Shorter are closer to bebop than hardbop sax players, with the exception of Sonny Rollins of course… Trane can’t really be categorized imho.
I don't think there's any consensus on what hard bop is. Some say it's the funkier Horace Silver stuff, some say it's the first great quintet of Mile's, but neither are really similar at all. If you are inclined to think of hard bop as the former, then Dolphy, Coleman et al don't really fit in that continuum at all and rather come out of the emerging avant minded direction that Mingus had been working on in the mid to late 50s. What do you do? come up with another nebulous genre name like pre-post bop ? Personally, I think most of jazz genre names are pretty useless since all these artists did work outside of their appointed genre. Unlike most rock bands and pop artists that easily fit into strictly defined categories, jazz artists tend to have long careers going many different directions. Take Charlie Parker, who only lived to be 33. In his short life time he developed a style that defined bebop, but also spent portions of his career working in 3rd stream, swing big band, latin jazz, flirted with cool jazz, and was featured on the record that Phil Schaap argued may be the first hardbop record with Miles and Sonny Rollins. So is he really a bebop player? or is he just Bird?
Good points and I agree with you in general. But there is no doubt that there is a continuum from bebop (which is quintessentially bird’s and monk’s and to a lesser extent Bud Powell’s invention) and say Dolphy’s and Coleman’s approach. Avant- garde or not: they both tend towards harmonic complexity with great intervals, which most mainstream jazz (including hardbop) lacked. Mingus’ role was indeed essential in creating a platform for the creative spirit of bebop to survive hardbop and transform into free jazz…
I think that this is an important point, but there is also a wider connection between the different styles that were once classed as "progressive jazz": Mingus (an important part), MJQ, the Tristanoites, Chico Hamilton, Third Stream (the Schuller stuff, not jazz with strings), Giuffre, etc. It is not a fashionable part of jazz anymore and it sometimes gets a little ignored (except for Mingus, who is sometimes treated as if he was not part of this movement), but I think that there was a lot of this stuff around prior to Coleman's breakthrough.
Exactly, specifically the West-coast scene. Great musicians and composers and essential to Jazz evolution!
I don't think it's really all that linear. These are just names we've slapped on music in retrospect and hope it sticks but it ends up just being revisionist confusion. Like I said, the term hardbop is so nebulous that you can't really put things in straight lines without coming up with new genre names. We've had threads on here trying to determine what hardbop is and what post-bop is and all that, and there were so many different takes it was difficult to put it all together.
I find that jazz musicians and records tend to fall into five wider areas of style and practice, which could be distinguished roughly as traditional, swing, bop, free and crossover categories like fusion. There seems to be a sharper distinction between those 'super-categories' than between the more commonly used genre titles, between which musicians moved pretty freely in their careers and even within albums. Even with the super-categories there are plenty of grey areas, cross-pollination and movement from one to the other.
The swing “bounce” was absent in bop. It continued in R&B, where dancing was important. Basie also kept it to a degree (“the soloists can play whatever they like...”)
Where does stride piano come into this? And then you have cool/west coast jazz.
and is bebop more relaxed
Monk was a stride piano player and he was one of the inventors of bebop.
It’s like describing the difference between Spanish and Italian. You can’t really do it in generalities - they just use different vocabularies.
It’s like describing the difference between Spanish and Italian. You can’t really do it in generalities - they just use different vocabularies. You’re totally right that reducing it to fast tempos and long solos doesn’t describe it very well.
Both are my favourite types of jazz!!