put his hands up in my chest and pulled me up, getting ready to hit me. He didn’t know I was getting ready to kill him. Oh, yes, I nicked him. He turned me loose, quick. When he saw that blood, nobody had to tell him to turn me loose. Milt Hinton grabbed my hand to keep me from really injuring him. I coulda killed him, I was so mad. It was a serious fight, a very serious thing, and somebody could’ve gotten really hurt because I’m a firm believer in non-violence when it comes to me.
Musically, though, the most significant events of his years with Calloway were happening elsewhere. Teddy Hill had disbanded his outfit (following, according to Dizzy, a falling out with the mob-backed promoters at the Savoy Ballroom) and in 1940 became the booking agent for a Harlem nightspot named Minton’s Playhouse, where he instituted a series of after-hours jam sessions. The musicians who gravitated to these sessions at Minton’s (and the slightly later scene which emerged at Clark Monroe’s Uptown House) were the ones with the most progressive ideas on the contemporary jazz scene of the day – Dizzy himself, Thelonious Monk, Kenny Clarke, Charlie Parker, Charlie Christian and numerous others, including many of the major soloists of the swing era.
Of those swing era soloists, Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young had the greatest influence on the emergence of bebop. In his exemplary study of the social and musical roots of the music, The Birth of Bebop, Scott DeVeaux looks in detail at Hawkins’s contact with and influence on the bop generation. As part of that examination, he considers the respective qualities which Hawkins and Young bequeathed to bebop.
Coleman Hawkins’s music was built on the principles of continuity and certainty. The certainty derived from the precision with which he understood the workings of tonal harmony. Each note of his improvisations finds its place within the framework of tonal relations implied by the tune . . . The appropriate rhetorical mode is thus continuity: an earnest, relentless building of intensity.
Bebop relied on these principles as well – at least as the underlying thread for most passages. But more broadly, it made striking use of the contrary principles of ambiguity and discontinuity. These qualities are notably absent from Hawkins’s music but salient in the music of Lester Young.
Hawkin’s approach ‘represents a narrowing of the possibilities open to a soloist’, since the ‘tendency is always to fill in, to flesh out, to maintain the illusion of harmonic movement even where it is absent’, while Young takes an opposite tack, preferring ‘to reduce the harmonic implications, often to the point of appearing to ignore harmonic movement altogether’, a strategy which created both an ambiguity in harmonic relationships, and allowed a greater rhythmic freedom.
An illustrative aside which provides a colourful description of Young’s attitude to harmonic movement is recounted in a memoir by pianist Bobby Scott. Scott recalled arriving at a club where Young was playing to be greeted by the saxophonist with the following complaint: “Oh, Socks, baby, I’m glad to see you here! This boy playin’ piano plays very well. But he puts eight changes where there ought to be two! You know me, Socks. Somethin’ like “These Foolish Things”, I mean, I like the E-flat chord, the C-minor, the F-minor seventh, the B-flat nine. You know. Shit. I can’t play when there are eighty-nine motherfuckin’ changes in the bar!”
Hawkins was the dominant model for the bebop players, but both he and young had their part to play in the evolution of the style, as DeVeaux suggests.
The bebop pioneers were, on the whole, too deeply invested in the orthodoxies of the time – the ‘progressive’ fascination with chromatic harmony, the professional advantage associated with overt displays of virtuosity – to model their style directly on Young’s understated approach. (It was not until considerably later, in the 1950s, that a younger generation of musicians would do so.) Nevertheless, they saw in Young’s example a way of extending the legacy of Coleman Hawkins and other harmonic improvisers in new and unexpected directions.
Minion’s became a forcing ground for the subsequent evolution of bebop. Many stories have been circulated about the exclusivity of the scene there. It has been said, for example, that Dizzy, Monk and Clarke operated a system designed to exclude white musicians from proceedings. If there was a bar in operation, however, it was not a matter of colour: the musicians have admitted many times that they would call tunes with difficult or unusual changes in order to weed out those players who could not handle the musical demands made on them. In an interview with this writer in 1989, Gillespie answered the charge that Monk in particular would try to scare off newcomers with his music by asserting that ‘the music wasn’t meant to keep nobody away, man, it was just plain hard’.
Trumpeter Johnny Carisi was one white regular able to hang in with the challenges, and as such was always welcome on stage, while the most notorious denizen of Minton’s was an apparently awful but unshakeably persistent black saxophonist from Newark known as The Demon, whom Dizzy dubbed ‘the first freedom player – freedom from harmony, freedom from rhythm, freedom from everything’.
Nonetheless, it would be foolish to ignore the racial dimension implicit in the developments at Minton’s. From the outset, black musicians had made the major creative explorations in jazz, while white musicians had won wider recognition and better rewards, usually on the back of those musical innovations. In 1917, the all-white Original Dixieland Jazz Band made the first jazz records, drawing on black forms (and in an even more ironic twist, it is said that trumpeter Freddie Keppard turned down the chance of that historic landmark because he was afraid other musicians would steal his ideas); in the 1920s, it was Paul Whiteman who was crowned King of Jazz, not Armstrong, Oliver, or any of the New Orleans pioneers; in the swing era, it was Benny Goodman who was dubbed King of Swing, not Duke or Basie or Fletcher Henderson or Jimmie Lunceford.
That pattern extended to jobs – the white bands played the best residences in the best hotels. The accumulation of bitterness implicit in all this bubbled under in the scene around Minion’s, which was less commercially-directed than on 52nd Street, and where many of the musicians saw themselves as engaged in creating a music which those outside of the circle could not readily imitate (a process which Charles Mingus characterised as the innovators being ripped-off by copyists ‘singing their praises while stealing their phrases’), or could only do so if they had the ‘chops’ and musicality to handle its ferocious challenges. The inner circle of bebop was also based on drug use to a large extent, but at root it was down to ability and had a brutally competitive edge, a point made by the bop pianist Hampton Hawes (whose own contribution to the music will be considered in a future volume). In his autobiography, Raise Up Off Me, the pianist recalls his first experience in New York in the 1940s.
One night at Minton’s, a club in Harlem where there were all-night sessions, somebody recognized me and said, ‘There’s a cat from California supposed to play good, let’s get him up here’. Now at that time there were a lot of East Coast musicians who thought it slick to try to shoot down anyone new on the scene who was starting to make a reputation. It was like an initiation, a ceremonial rite (chump, jump or I’ll burn you up, you don’t know nothin’), calling far-out tunes in strange keys with the hip changes at tempos so fast if you didn’t fly you fell – that’s how you earned your diploma in the University of the Streets of New York.
For a week I had watched these cats burning each other up, ambushing outsiders, fucking up their minds so bad they would fold and split the stand after one tune. Surprised by their coldness because they were so friendly off the stand. I peeked that I wasn’t quite ready, maybe they could get me; you don’t want to be a poopbutt but sometimes it’s better to pass, wait for a better hand. I knew I wouldn’t flop, but neither would I win acclaim. No point in selling tickets if you don’t have a show.
The challenge lifted me a few notches – I knew I had to go out and tighten my hand – and when I came back that way a couple of years later, strung out, five albums under my belt and a lot of playing with Bird, I was ready for them; they couldn’t make me feel funny anymore and left me alone after that. A drummer paid
