My days of being scared and nervous – at least about music – were over.
It’s too bad it had to be that way, cutting friends up to make them feel inferior so they could get better. That isn’t what music is about. You play for love and for people to enjoy. It’s okay to show a few feathers, you got to have pride in yourself, but you shouldn’t have to wear boxing gloves and spurs; this ain’t no cockfight or main bout at Madison Square Garden. We’re all brothers, aren’t we? – came up the same way, earned our diplomas listening, picking up, hanging out, nervous, some of us getting busted?
Even Hawes, however, then capitulates to the remorselessly Darwinian logic of the process at work. In a society where the ever-present taint of racism denied their achievements both as people and as musicians, and in which criticism of the new music also flowed from opposite poles of the black community (the older style traditional and swing musicians who put down the new music on one hand, the growing ‘respectable’ black bourgeoisie who were plain anti-jazz on the other), it provided an informal but highly codified means of allowing excellence to ride to the top, at least within the music’s own internal hierarchy. Hawes goes on to finish: ‘Yet when I think back, the system did serve a purpose. Blacks in those days had to bear down hard to handle the shadow that was always haunting them, and the constant challenge was the pressure cooker in which you earned recognition and respect. In the process, the music grew leaner, tightened up; the ones who didn’t have it, who couldn’t contribute, fell away.’
The environment which forged bebop was a tough one, but it meant that the music evolved as a meritocracy rather than a closed shop. That element of competitive muscle-flexing probably played its part in determining both the strengths and weaknesses of the emerging form, with its emphasis on virtuoso soloing, advanced harmonic understanding and crackling tempos, and its underlying structural paucity (the characteristic bebop tunes were simply blowing vehicles on a set of often very familiar chord changes, one of the things which would eventually prove to be a major limitation). Gillespie and his cohorts at Minton’s and Monroe’s were at the heart of that evolution. The musicians would play whenever their paying jobs permitted, and the sympathetic respective proprietors, Henry Minton and Clark Monroe, would often provide food, but no fee. Only the house band, which was led by trumpeter Joe Guy at Minton’s, and included Monk and Clarke, was paid, and the sessions were carried on in defiance of union regulations against sitting-in. The rest of the musicians had to be on their guard against hefty fines for playing without a contract if they were caught by union ‘walkers’, whose job it was to keep tabs on the after-hours proclivities of the members (and as the first black delegate to Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians, Henry Minton was in a more privileged position in that respect, although Gillespie was not alone in seeing the union as ‘just a dues collector’ with little of real benefit to offer the jazz musician). As he wrote in his memoir:
What we were doing at Minton’s was playing, seriously, creating a new dialogue among ourselves, blending our ideas into a new style of music. You only have so many notes, and what makes a style is how you get from one note to the other. We had some fundamental background training in European harmony and music theory superimposed on our own knowledge from Afro-American musical tradition. We invented our own way of getting from one place to the next . . . Our phrases were different. We phrased differently from the older guys. Perhaps the only real difference in our music was that we phrased differently. Musically, we were changing the way that we spoke, to reflect the way that we felt. New phrasing came in with the new accent. Our music had a new accent.
The new rhythmic accents and evolved harmonies of bebop began to take on shape in these jam sessions, most of which went unrecorded. Some private tapes have survived, however, the best known of which is Jerry Newman’s wire recording of May 1941, which has been issued in a number of formats. The music is clearly poised in transition between swing mannerisms and the emerging modernist concept. Gillespie features on three of the tunes, the uptempo ‘Kerouac’ and two versions of Hoagy Carmichael’s famous ballad ‘Stardust’, and while he is not at his best in them, they confirm the evolution in his style which was increasingly evident at this time.
If Gillespie was a prime mover in the emerging new music, so too was the drummer at Minton’s, Kenny Clarke, who adopted the Islamic faith and the name Liaquat Ali Salaam in 1946, but continued to work under his given name. Clarke was born in Pittsburgh on 9 January 1914 (he died in Paris in 1985), and played with Gillespie in both the Edgar Hayes and Teddy Hill bands in the late 1930s. Gillespie rightly credits Clarke with a key role in the developments of the period, arguing that ‘it was Kenny Clarke who set the stage for the rhythmic content of our music. He was the first one to make accents on the bass drum at specific points in the music. He’d play 4/4 very softly, but the breaks, and the accents on the bass drum you could hear. Like, we called them dropping bombs.’
The claim is not entirely accurate, since drummers in the swing era had already experimented with just that kind of more fluid accentuation on the bass drum Dizzy describes, but it was Clarke who transformed the idea into the basis of a fully-developed style. His innovations were crucial to the emergence of the music which became bebop. It is arguable that all revolutions in jazz have been at root a revolution in the rhythmic basis of the music, with an associated harmonic and melodic development built on that new foundation, and that is certainly the case with bebop. The move away from the persistently stated 2-beat and 4-beat emphasis on the bass drum which had sustained all previous jazz styles became a fundamental of the new music.
Clarke himself had been developing a more sparely accented style even in swing band settings; ironically, Teddy Hill had fired him from his own band, disenchanted with what he dubbed Clarke’s ‘klook-mop’ style (a description which became the source of the drummer’s familiar nickname, Klook). Nonetheless, he was astute enough to see that he was the right drummer for the music at Minton’s, and gave him the opportunity to push his experiments even further, abetted by the promptings of Monk and his co-participants at the club, as Clarke explained to his biographer, Mike Hennessey, in Klook: The Story of Kenny Clarke.
I had to change my style to play with this clique. Monk’s using accents and things made me play accents more myself, on the bass drum. And I needed to play lighter because we weren’t using a straight beat. I couldn’t play brushes all the time, so naturally I played the top cymbal and used the bass drum for punctuations. When people came into Minton’s they’d say, ‘Hey, listen to that drummer’s accents on the bass drum; man, I never heard that before!’
Clarke used his bombs more sparingly than his protege, Max Roach, dropping them only every few measures to accent his rolling ride cymbal. His style has not been well served by early recordings, however, which have tended to muddy the detail of his playing, and his cymbal work in particular. In any case, it was Roach who would emerge as the leading drummer of the bebop movement, in part because of his phenomenal talent, and in part because Clarke had been drafted to serve in Europe (he was eventually to settle permanently in Paris in 1956), and was off the New York scene from 1943–46 at a crucial time in the development of the music, although he did have further important contributions to make. An intriguing footnote was added to the Minton’s story in 1997, when plans to re-open the venue as a jazz club were announced as part of a regeneration project in Harlem.
As the 1940s progressed, however, the geographical focus of the emerging music in New York shifted downtown, to 52nd Street. Pilgrims in search of the heartbeat of the bop scene on what was once the legendary ‘Swing Street’ will now find a row of anonymous office blocks on the site of the street that never slept (to borrow the title of Arnold Shaw’s book on the subject), but in the mid-1940s it was a sleazy but vital location, and not just for the beboppers – the great names of the swing era also played the street’s many clubs on a regular basis, sharing the space with comedians and strippers.
The jazz clubs on the street had been operating since the mid-1950s, and peaked in the mid-1940s. Clubland was situated in the block between 5th and 6th Avenues, and its names have become a part of the roll-call of jazz history, and probably
