By: Matthew Ruiz
When I took piano lessons back in high school, my teacher Mr. Feldman would always tell me “music is the language of the soul”, which means that music is a way for us to express our emotions and our thoughts. Thoughts and feelings do play an important role in music, whether it be how the music is written or how it is played. The musician’s attitude is very important when they play their music. Looking into the Bebop era of Jazz, one can look into the music and see this idea take place. The musicians of this time used their thoughts, feelings, and ideas in order to create this new genre of Jazz music. In Bebop-style Jazz, the ideas of anti-minstrelsy and anti-clicheness came together to form new music and ideas, which we will see in the performances by Lous Armstrong and Charles Mingus. These two ideas are prominent throughout the history of jazz, revealing the challenges and issues that Jazz musicians had to encounter while putting their thoughts and emotions into their music.
One of the major influences on Bebop-style Jazz was how the musicians viewed the audience. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Jazz performers, particularly Black Jazz musicians, were being held to a standard by their audiences who were mostly rich, White listeners. They held these musicians to the idea of minstrelsy, which is the maintenance of stereotypes of Black Americans. One example of this being seen is in Louis Armstrong’s performance of Shine in the notoriously racist film Rhapsody in Black and Blue. One particular aspect which the Jazz musicians of the Bebop era disapproved of was Armstrong’s “mugging”, which they believed was imitative of a gleeful, minstrel plantation character. This led to the new approach to both music and audience by the musicians, where, according to Ralph Ellison, “the performing artist can be completely and absolutely free of the obligations of the entertainer”(Gottlieb 553). Because of this new approach to Jazz and performance, the Bebop musicians actively broke the constraints of what the audience expected from the Jazz musicians, and the European style sounds, melodies, and rhythms that had begun to infest Jazz. The essence of anti-minstrelsy in Bebop also relates to the miscommunication between the audience and the performer. Listening to the Hard Bop song The Clown by Charles Mingus helps to visualize this conflict. In the song, the clown character wants to make his audience laugh with his acts, but they are indifferent. Then whenever he hurts himself, the audience thinks of it as comedy and laughs. The irony of the clown having to suffer for the audience to laugh is symbolic to how jazz performers in the 1920s and 1930s had to act in a minstrel manner and play according to the audiences desires, appealing to them in a way that harmed the musician. The musicians not only did this through minstrel acts, but also through cliche rhythms and sounds. This was also a major concern that Bebop musicians worked to address in their music.
Like many art forms, musicians in Jazz have actively worked to make new sounds to avoid overusing music styles to the point where it gets bland, but Bebop differentiates from other styles of art and music due to the fact that the anti-clicheness of Bebop was tied into the anti-minstrelsy attitudes. As mentioned, Dizzy Gillespie, one of the pioneers of Bebop, described what they were doing as “creating a new dialogue among ourselves, blending our ideas into a new style of music”(Gottlieb 561). The new style of music featured new chord progressions, rhythms, and a different style of melody and solo which, according to Dizzy Gillespie, “dumbfounded ’the no-talent cats who,’ as Dizzy said, “couldn’t blow at all but would take six or seven choruses to prove it.”(Gottlieb 531). This effort not only helped get rid of the Jazz wannabe’s who were not ideal performers but addressed some of the issues facing Black Jazz performers who were exploited by White musicians who, according to Ralph Ellison, would “lay in the enterprise with which they rushed to market with some Negro musician’s hard-won style.”(Gottlieb 553). This concern had deeply affected the Black musicians who helped to create and build upon Jazz music, and also contributed to the anti-minstrel ideas of Bebop. Ellison states again how the Black Jazz musicians ”wished to receive credit for wht they created, and besides, it was easier to ‘get rid of the trash’ who vrouded the bandstand with inept playing and thus make room for the real musicians, whether white or black.”(Gottlieb 554). Ellison’s statement portrays how the efforts to create a new style of Jazz in avoidance of the cliche came along with the fight of musicians against anti-minstrelsy. These musicians wanted to have something that sounded new, and that transcended the need to appease their audience.
Overall, the combination of the ideas of anticlicheness and anti-minstrelsy had a major influence on the creation of Bebop. These two ideas, although unique in their own purpose, pulled on one another in the 1940s to create Bebop. The continuation of fighting racial attitudes and creating new sounding music comes together in new Jazz styles even after Bebop, in Hard Bop, Free Jazz, and Avant Garde Jazz. Even today, rap artists work to develop new, anticliche music while also trying to combat racist ideas and systems in society, like in Kendrik Lamar’s album To Pimp a Butterfly written to combat the police violence on unarmed Black people. How will these ideas continue to change old music and create new music? Only time will tell what happens next.
Works Cited
Gottlieb, Robert. Reading Jazz: a Gathering of Autobiography, Reportage, and Criticism from 1919 to Now. Vintage Books, 1999.
Ellison, Ralph. Shadow and Act. 1954, cited in Reading Jazz, ed Robert Gottlieb. New York, Pantheon Books, 1996.
Gillespie, Dizzy and Al Fraiser. To Be or Not to Bop. 1979, cited in Reading Jazz, ed Robert Gottlieb. New York, Pantheon Books, 1996.
Blesh, Rudi. Combo: U.S.A. 1971, cited in Reading Jazz, ed Robert Gottlieb. New York, Pantheon Books, 1996.
Unsung86. “Charles Mingus – The Clown.” YouTube, YouTube, 4 Dec. 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-b9I_UrRe4.
gevinque. “Louis Armstrong Performs SHINE.” YouTube, YouTube, 4 Mar. 2011, www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWn5mvD9wuE.
