clubs, however, provided the breeding ground for the momentum launched at Minton’s and Monroe’s (which relocated to 52nd Street in 1943), and the music moved to a higher level at places like The Onyx, The Famous Door, The Three Deuces, The Spotlite, The Yacht Club and its successor, the original Downbeat. The street also housed the Dixieland stronghold of Jimmy Ryan’s, and Kelly’s Stable, where Coleman Hawkins laid down his famous pre-war marathon versions of ‘Body and Soul’, while the Sunday afternoon jazz sessions attracted the bebop crew.
The modernists and the traditionalists eventually went to war, just after the real one had finished, in a blinkered, partisan debate about old versus new that has remained with jazz ever since, conducted in a hail of disparaging remarks that did neither side much credit, and the cause of jazz as a whole little good. It did at least serve to remind people that new things were happening in the music, and a lot of the put-downs doubtless had at least one eye on the commercial benefits of the publicity which a bit of controversy brought to the musicians and clubs concerned. For a while, though, the concentration of music in the narrow brownstone basements of 52nd Street was the epicentre of the bebop earthquake. Historian and critic James Lincoln Collier described it thus in The Making of Jazz.
The phenomenon was an old one. We have seen the concentration of jazz places in the honky-tonks of Storyville, Chicago’s South Side, the nightclubs of Kansas City, the big show spots of Harlem. 52nd street was another such. It provided economic support for a lot of musicians, a place to practice their trade, and a confluence of musical ideas. It was easy for a man working the street to walk a few doors down on his break and find out what his friends and enemies were doing. 52nd street was not, of course, the only jazz location; there were several clubs in Greenwich Village, others in Harlem, and still others in other cities, notably Chicago. But 52nd Street became the symbolic headquarters of jazz, the jazz center of the world. At the time it appeared that the big bands were the major movement in the music, at least to the casual observer; but it was clear to jazz buffs then, and obvious to us today, that the most important developments in the music were taking place on 52nd Street and in similar places.
Collier’s assessment of the Street is echoed by pianist and educator Billy Taylor, who recalled the cut and thrust atmosphere which prevailed there for Shapiro and Hentoff’s famous (if not always very reliable) oral history, Hear Me Talkin to Ya, published in 1955 when the memories were still relatively fresh.
The cutting sessions there were just fantastic. With all of the musicians regularly working on The Street and with all those sitting in, astonishing sessions were inevitable. There were nights with five trumpets on stand and five saxophones . . . A man faced with the kind of challenge you get in a sitting-in session is not so prone to imitate. He’s apt to concentrate on building better and more original solos. Because, if after the third chorus at a free session, a man is still imitating, the guys there who are playing original lines will make him sound pretty sad. So that was one of the very good things about The Street – the practice of sitting in all the time and the challenges that came out of it.
Over time, the sitting-in sessions began to diminish, partly as a consequence of greater emphasis on preparation within the bands, and partly as a result of increasing pressure to hang on to the jobs that were around. In Taylor’s view, though, the real death-knell came from familiar sources.
The Street sort of folded gradually. The decline had begun around late 1946 and 1947. Why? Well, with so large a number of hangers-on around, those hangers-on were finding a lucrative market for all the vices – drugs, et cetera – and were preying on the school kids and others who came down . . . And the club owners didn’t help much either, because of their own greed and the fact that they didn’t police their clubs better. By their greed, I mean the small tables and the big cover charges didn’t build up good will. And the owners got into booking wars. If Dizzy were working at the Onyx, The Deuces would have Roy Eldridge and Charlie Shavers. Or if Bird were at one club, another club would get all the other alto men available – like Pete Brown and fifteen others. That sort of thing was wonderful for listeners, but it didn’t help music, having that kind of battle of attractions.
The Street’s reputation for sleaze began to eclipse the music, the striptease joints began to take over from the clubs, and the scene moved again when new clubs like The Royal Roost (where disc-jockey Symphony Sid Torin’s broadcasts helped popularise the music, and earned the venue – which later moved to become the even bigger Bop City – the nickname ‘the house that bop built’) and Birdland opened their doors to bebop on Broadway, offering larger capacities and plusher surroundings.
While the music was developing fast on the Street, though, the progress in documenting it was slower. It is one of the great frustrations of jazz history that the recorded evidence for the evolution of bebop is not as complete as it might have been, partly as a result of a recording ban which lasted through 1942–43, and was then exacerbated by wartime shortages of shellac, although it is unlikely that record companies fixated on commercial returns would have rushed to record the beboppers at this stage in their development anyway.
As the examples of 1939–42 suggest, the music was picking up considerable momentum at that crucial stage, and a fuller discography might have made the development from swing to bop seem less abrupt, bringing its evolutionary aspects into greater balance with its revolutionary face, which emerged as if from another planet in the immediate post-war years, with Gillespie and Charlie Parker in the vanguard of the movement.
The two men first met in Parker’s hometown of Kansas City in 1940, while the trumpeter was on the road with the Calloway band. Parker had been developing his own version of the music, both in Kansas and in New York, as his recordings with Jay McShann demonstrate. Their historic collaborations still lay ahead of them at this point, however, and following his split with Calloway, Dizzy worked briefly with a number of leaders, including Ella Fitzgerald, Coleman Hawkins, Benny Carter, Charlie Barnet, Les Hite, and, very briefly and tantalisingly, Duke Ellington. His solo on Lucky Millinder’s ‘Little John Special’ in 1942 has some claim to being the first fully formed bop solo on record, and contained what would become the famous ‘Salt Peanuts’ riff, although Gunther Schuller has argued in his monumental study The Swing Era that the figure had already surfaced on a recording of ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’ by the John Kirby Sextet in 1939, a reminder of the informal nature – or at least origin – of many bop compositions.
An important association in this period arrived with Gillespie’s tenure in the big band led by Earl Hines, which the trumpeter joined in late 1942. By all accounts, the pianist’s band was a strange amalgam of players firmly rooted in the swing style, and the emerging beboppers. Gunther Schuller has worked out that in March and April of 1943, the band briefly included Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Wardell Gray, Bennie Green, Benny Harris, Sarah Vaughan and Billy Eckstine from the evolving modernist camp. Dizzy recalled that Earl ‘had a lotta young guys who all wanted to play in the modern style’, and described the unit as ‘a beautiful, beautiful band’. He admired (and learned from) Hines’s class and professionalism, and it was at this time that he began to form a close relationship with Parker, who had also been recruited to play tenor in the band – Diz claims each was lured into the band by being told the other was planning to join up.
I guess Charlie Parker and I had a meeting of the minds, because both of us inspired each other. There were so many things that Charlie Parker did well, it’s hard to say exactly how he influenced me. I know he had nothing to do with my playing the trumpet, and I think I was a little more advanced, harmonically, than he was. But rhythmically, he was quite advanced, with setting up the phrase and how you got from one note to another. How you get from one note to another really makes the difference. Charlie Parker heard rhythms and rhythmic patterns differently, and after we had started playing together, I began to play, rhythmically, more like him. In that sense he influenced me, and all of us, because what makes the style is not what you play but how you play it.
Too much has been made at times of that implied distinction between the two men’s harmonic and rhythmic
