Hard Bop

An oft-repeated tale in the annals of modern jazz has it that bebop was born at Minton’s Playhouse in New York City in 1940, where the house band included pianist Thelonius Monk, drummer Kenny Clarke, trumpeter Joe Guy, and bassist Nick Fenton. (See, among other sources, David H. Rosenthal’s fine book, Hard Bop: Jazz and Black Music, 1955-1965, Oxford UP 1992.) Rosenthal quotes at length a passage about bebop from Ross Russell’s novel The Sound (1961), in which Russell writes, “It [bebop] seemed to reflect the turmoil and insecurity of the war years. At the same time it implied a profound contempt for those who had been foolish enough to become involved with the war” (13). If bebop was connected to the wartime mood of the 1940s, and (following Amiri Baraka) with frustrated black hopes in a desegregated America which adhered to the principle of “freedom for all” as well, the post-bebop form of jazz referred to as “hard bop,” emerging in the early years of the Cold War, was influenced by the post-war rise of R&B. Incorporating blues and gospel elements, hard bop, according to jazz expert Michael Jarrett, “combines the melodicism and crisp rhythm attack of r&b with harmonies and minor modes associated with bebop” (Sound Tracks: A Musical ABC, Volumes 1-3, 239). Largely associated with jazz musicians such as Art Blakey, Horace Silver, Cannonball and Nat Adderley, Wayne Shorter, Joe Henderson, and with labels such as Blue Note and Prestige, hard bop “provided bohemians with a soundtrack for living” (239). The first important hard bop recordings roughly coincided with the popularization of rock ‘n’ roll, and 50s hipsters found in hard bop records an alternative soundtrack to the music of pop-oriented Top 40 radio. For those such as myself born in the 50s, hard bop (and cool jazz) formed the soundtrack to many of the television shows that form my earliest memories. For hard bop signified, in the words of Michael Jarrett, “fast cars, loose women, hard drugs, shady deals, and weak or addled minds” (239).

Hey! Ho! Let's Go!

Songs with nonsense syllables serve to remind us that American music since the jazz era always has been more a matter of sound than sense—scat singing is perhaps the prototype in this regard—but the more important issue is the privileging of sound over sense. These types of songs also reveal the difficulty of writing about music, since those critics who find it difficult if not impossible to write about music as music tend to overappreciate the lyrics, especially those lyrics having a so-called “political” theme. Of course, rock was political—but not because of what it said (think of Elvis appearing on the Dorsey Brothers’ Stage Show in 1956 singing “Flip Flop & Fly,” which prompted any number of critics to condemn rock as the sort of music enjoyed by cretinous goons), but because of its revolutionary sound. Indeed, early on, people didn’t even know what to call rock music. As is well known, it was Alan Freed who popularized the use of the term “rock and roll,” but before that the music was often called “bop” (as in Gene Vincent’s “Be-Bop-A-Lula”), after the postwar rise of “bebop” or “rebop” to describe the contemporary form of jazz, these latter words probably derived from “Arriba! Arriba!” (essentially, C'mon! Let’s go!) used by Latin American bandleaders to strike up their bands. The R&B mutation known as “doo-wop” also popularized the use of nonsense syllables, but there are many instances of its use—Lionel Hampton’s R&B hit “Hey! Ba-Ba-Re-Bop” from 1946 is an example—in the years prior to Elvis’s popularization of rock ‘n’ roll in 1956. We musn’t forget Frank Sinatra’s famous scat singing consisting of “dobedobedo,” of course, nor should we forget Scooby Doo’s immortal, “Scooby Dooby Doo!”

Hey! Some Blitzkrieg Bop:

Julie Andrews and Dick van Dyke – Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
The Beatles – I Am the Walrus
The Crystals – Da Doo Ron Ron
The Edsels – Rama-Lama-Ding-Dong
Shirley Ellis – The Name Game
Lionel Hampton – Hey! Ba-Ba-Re-Bop
Little Richard – Tutti Frutti
Barry Mann – Who Put the Bomp (in The Bomp, Bomp, Bomp)
Manfred Mann – Do Wah Diddy Diddy
The Marcels – Blue Moon
The Merry Macs – Mairzy Doats
Roy Orbison – Ooby Dooby
The Police – Da Doo Doo Doo, De Da Da Da
Slim and Slam – The Flat Foot Floogee (With The Floy Floy)
Frank Sinatra – Strangers in the Night
The Ramones – The Blitzkrieg Bop
Gene Vincent – Be-Bop-A-Lula

Saturday, January 16, 1960: Cult of Bop

That grand wild sound of bop floated
from beer parlors; it mixed medleys
with every kind of cowboy and
boogie-woogie in the American night.
--Jack Kerouac, On the Road

According to Barry Miles' The Beat Hotel: Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Corso in Paris, 1957-1963 (Grove Press, 2001), on January 16, 1960 William Burroughs (pictured) had been a boarder at the “Beat Hotel” in Paris, a decaying Left Bank rooming house (closed 1963) at 9 rue Git-le-Coeur, for precisely two years, having moved there on January 16, 1958. Although it had circulated in various drafts prior to his arrival in Paris (from Tangier) two years before, his major work, Naked Lunch, was essentially finished. By January 1960, the novel had been in print just a few months, having been published in Paris by Olympia Press the late summer of 1959, by which time all the important texts written by the Beats were completed: Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (1956), and Gregory Corso’s Bomb (1958) were all in print prior to Naked Lunch, the last of the "Big Four" to see print. Yet unlike the other texts, Naked Lunch is an assemblage of “routines” (Burroughs’ term), meaning it reads more like a codex than a scroll (in contrast to, say, the poems by Ginsburg or Corso, or Kerouac’s On the Road, literally written on a scroll), which is to say Burroughs was open to the creative possibilities made possible through electronic media such as film (the “cut-up” method).

Hence the major works of the Beats were completed or drafted before the popularization of rock and roll (Elvis, 1956) in American culture. The Beats modeled themselves on the post-World World II beboppers or boppers—self-conscious modernists (for a discussion of beboppers as self-conscious modernists, see Chapter 5 of David W. Stowe’s Swing Changes: Big-Band Jazz in New Deal America, 1994). Like the expatriate Americans of the 1920s—“the Moderns”—the Beats settled, at least temporarily, in Paris. Since the Beats perceived themselves as representing everything that was modern (“hip”), Kerouac invoked “That grand wild sound of bop” in On the Road (written 1951). (As many scholars have observed, musical discourse has often provided the language for debating issues of American identity; as the above quotation from On the Road reveals, Kerouac uses a musical metaphor to capture the uniqueness of America.) In a sense, Kerouac had to endorse bop, to associate himself with it, in part to allow for the cultural acceptance of his work. As David Stowe explains:

A romance with the symbols of high culture and learning pervaded the bop subculture. . . . Whatever its utilitarian considerations, the bop dress code seemed lifted from the Parisian avant-garde. . . . [Some] learned Arabic in order to study the Koran. In addition to paying homage to avant-garde European composers, the jazz modernists gave their compositions quasi-academic titles like “Epistrophy” and “Ornithology.” Much was made of bop artists’ ability to converse about intellectual matters; one described [Dizzy] Gillespie as “deep,” and [Charlie] Parker as someone who “could converse on any level about anything.” Gillespie recalled lengthy discussions with Parker about philosophy, politics, “the social order,” “life-style,” Marcantonio, and Baudelaire.” (211-12)

Not surprisingly, given the reputation for drug use by highly visible jazz figures such as Charlie Parker and Louis Armstrong (although Armstrong’s use of marijuana was hardly a true narcotic such as heroin, to which Parker admitted an addiction), early on bop was linked by the media with vice. Stowe cites a Time magazine article from March 1946 that designated as “’the bigwig of be-bop’ singer Harry ‘The Hipster’ Gibson, who with guitarist Slim Gaillard had recorded such reputed bop anthems as ‘Who Put the Benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy’s Ovaltine?’ (which owed far more to Fats Waller than to bebop)” (207).

Slim Gaillard’s appeal to Beats such as Kerouac was in part due to his skills at verbal improvisation and word play (hence his appeal was much like Neal Cassady’s). His routines often employed nonsensical syllables during stream-of-consciousness rap sessions. Hence it is no wonder that there is an homage to one of Gaillard’s performances in On the Road.

Likewise, the neologisms and the distinctive argot of Naked Lunch owes as much to bop—that is, the post-war jazz subculture—as it does to the drug subculture (the more obvious candidate) that would have been familiar to Burroughs, although the language of the two subcultures overlapped to such an extent that it’s difficult to determine from which domain the words first emerged. Words such as “liquefactionist” and “factualist” as well as proper names such as “Mugwump” all ring of hipster culture. And while Burroughs referred to the various sections making up Naked Lunch as “routines,” he might just as well called them riffs, a musical term etymologically related to riffle, one of the meanings of which means to shuffle or rearrange a deck of cards. Care to cut (up) the deck?