What was bebop primarily used for

Tempos are often much faster although the Bebop style can be played at any tempo. Bebop melodies are more intricate and difficult to play than swing melodies. Bebop musicians improvise far more complex solos than those of the Swing Era. Bebop requires musical virtuosity and artistry to play it. Whereas Big Band Swing was considered entertainment i. Two of the most important Bebop musicians were: alto saxophonist Charlie Parker his nickname was "Bird" trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie. Scat singing AKA "scatting" is a type of singing whereby the vocalist imitates the style of Bebop jazz solos as played by instrumentalists using nonsense syllables.

Scat solos, like their instrumental counterparts, are improvised. One of the most important scat singers was Ella Fitzgerald. Cultural Implications of Bebop. Student Handout. Not infrequently they appropriated the rights to the pieces themselves: Often this was not even done with direct deceitful intent, but rather to spare the often somewhat unworldly musicians financial difficulties.

Nevertheless, the door was naturally opened to abuse in this way. In Charlie Parker's career, this problematic role came to agent Billy Shaw and producer Ross Russell - his future biographer. After a large part of the Bebopper, due to precarious working conditions and the massively widespread heroin addiction in the scene , was in constant financial need, more shrewd musicians for their part often appropriated the rights to the compositions of their colleagues [3].

Many of these "fraud cases" have only come to light over the past few decades. In this way it turned out, for example, that many compositions by Miles Davis for a long time were actually written by members of his various bands. However, Davis looked back on the worst possible experiences, as his notoriously unreliable band leader Charlie Parker had cheated out of the rights to most of his early pieces.

In order to be able to afford the dose of heroin that he needed to be fit for an upcoming recording session, he sold his dealer all rights to the original composition that he would play on this occasion. The play still bears the cover name of Parker's drug supplier in the title , namely Moose The Mooche.

The vague definition of the term bebop head mentioned at the beginning, together with the tendency of jazz musicians to use private languages, which has also been described, means that certain topics in the nomenclature of many musicians are not primarily classified in this category. Under harmonic, rhythmic and stylistic aspects are compositions that may otherwise seem quite similar, and various other subgenres attributed [5].

It should be emphasized once again that the distinctions are sometimes made arbitrarily and the boundaries are fluid. A chord progression that was disproportionately popular with bebop musicians was that of George Gershwin's composition I Got Rhythm. Pieces that are based on their harmonies or modifications thereof play such an important role in the repertoire that they are given the title Rhythm Changes. A composition like Duke Ellington's Cotton Tail from , which already has all the characteristics of the emerging bebop, would be called rhythm changes , but not bebop head, since Ellington is usually not assigned to this style.

In the audio example, both melodies sound simultaneously, so that it becomes clear how both interlock with chord accompaniment and bass line. For a related chord progression in minor the misleading term Minor Rhythm Changes is still used.

However, this term is not used: consequently, for example, a well-known composition by Charlie Parker about these harmonies segment , also under the title Diverse would nowadays be generally referred to as bebop head. In addition to the rhythm changes, the blues was the bebopper 's second extensive harmonic field of experimentation.

The traditional aesthetics and tonality of the blues were so strongly reshaped in this process with the musical innovations of the time that in pieces like Sippin 'At Bell's by Miles Davis , Dance Of The Infidels by Bud Powell or Blues For Alice again by Charlie Parker the themes are almost completely lacking in an immediately recognizable blues character.

Despite this dominance of the bebop sound, compositions of this genre are initially always referred to as blues. Since the emergence of bebop, jazz musicians have composed more pieces than before that only reflect the harmony of pop songs in an alienated, abstract form, without completely abandoning the underlying elements. In any case, pieces of this genre, such as those composed in large numbers by Thelonious Monk or Tadd Dameron , are immediately written as jazz compositions and immediately recognizable as such.

Similar to the Broadway songs, however, new lines were laid over particularly grateful harmony schemes: Miles Davis' Half Nelson , for example, is a further development of Dameron's Ladybird.

No less curious is the fact that precisely those pieces in which the bebop musicians went completely new ways are hardly subsumed under the name bebop head at all. For example, compositions such as Dizzy Gillespie's A Night in Tunisia and Manteca or Bud Powell's Un Poco Loco developed into classics, which young jazz musicians still consider a challenge today, due to their then unheard-of amalgamation of Afro-Cuban rhythms , novel harmony structures and complex melodic gestures.

This genre was quickly given the label Cubop from cuban bebop. Nowadays the name is Latin Jazz more common, and many traditionally oriented bebop musicians only marginally deal with the rhythms that were so inspiring to the founding generation of this music. The remaining bebop compositions are now called bebop heads in the narrower sense. In the roughly decade-long period that made up the heyday of bop mids to mids hundreds of lines were written to songs on Tin Pan Alley , a few dozen of which are still part of the repertoire today.

The next section provides an overview. In view of the large number of compositions, the following overview can by no means claim to be complete. It also takes account of the relative presence in today's repertoire. Bebop heads were written by instrumentalists for the usual quintet line-up.

Even with this stipulation, they are usually difficult to perform technically, and they still serve as studies for budding jazz musicians to this day. The Scat -Gesang on nonsense syllables belongs generally to the tradition of almost all African-American musical styles. The bebop musicians sang the phrasing of certain rhythmic figures to each other in this way while rehearsing their new pieces. The word "bebop" itself was most likely created as a sound painterly description of typical eighth-note figures as at the beginning of Groovin 'High.

Especially Dizzy Gillespie, who was the only member of the "founding generation" to have a certain show talent, had enough humor and self-confidence to present his singing live and on records.

With such performances, however, Gillespie underlined - with his typical irony and ambiguity - his actual conviction, namely that bebop is not music for singers. In spite of this, the first vocalists could be found as early as the late s who had meanwhile acquired the musical knowledge and techniques to perform scat improvisations in the manner of bebop instrumental solos including Sarah Vaughan , Babs Gonzales and Ella Fitzgerald.

The vocalese technique emerged in the s : singers began to underlay the bebop heads with mostly self-written lyrics. A first star of this new generation of singers was King Pleasure with his versions of bebop themes Parker's Mood and even improvisations Moody's Mood For Love. The texts of these vocalese interpretations are usually extremely verbose, as the bebop heads contain a particularly large number of notes due to their compositional technique.

Stylistically, they draw heavily on the slang of the jazz scene jive talk and the closely related tone of the Beat Generation poets. The contents of the vocalese range from the conventional love song Skeeter Spights version of Parker's Confirmation to the lyrical reflection of the music Jon Hendricks' text to Gillespie's Night In Tunisia , also under the title And The Melody Still Lingers On to absurd and humorous commentary on current contemporary issues as in Annie Ross' text on Wardell Gray's Twisted , which caricatures psychoanalysis.

The sheer wealth of words and the complex rhythm of these "songs" resulting from shifting accents - in combination with the abstract melody - lead vocalese to extremes of singing technique:.

Only a relatively small group of singers could come up with results that met with widespread artistic recognition. The musicians of cool jazz wrote compositions using standard harmonies, which "on paper", that is, in notated form, can hardly be distinguished from the original bebop heads. For the interpreter of the composed melody, the difference to the models, mainly Charlie Parker, lies in a fundamentally different but not fixable in the musical notation conception of the instrumental sound, as well as in an extremely straight, "European-classical" phrasing.

In addition, the themes are no longer played exclusively in unison, rather the second wind player occasionally plays a contrapuntal line to the main melody, which is sometimes composed, but just as often can also be improvised. Measure ad performance. Select basic ads. Create a personalised ads profile. Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights. Measure content performance. Develop and improve products.

List of Partners vendors. Michael Verity. Michael Verity is a jazz musician, writer, and photographer and a regular contributor many music industry niche sites.

Updated April 16, Featured Video.