"When bebop was new," writes Thomas Owens, "many jazz musicians and most
of the jazz audience heard it as radical, chaotic, bewildering music."
For a nation swinging to the smoothly orchestrated sounds of the big
bands, this revolutionary movement of the 1940s must have seemed
destined for a short life on the musical fringe. But today, Owens
writes, bebop is nothing less than "the lingua franca of jazz, serving
as the principal musical language of thousands of jazz musicians."
In Bebop,
Owens conducts us on an insightful, loving tour through the music,
players, and recordings that changed American culture. Combining vivid
portraits of bebop's gigantic personalities with deft musical analysis,
he ranges from the early classics of modern jazz (starting with the 1943
Onyx Club performances of Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, Oscar Pettiford,
Don Byas, and George Wallington) through the central role of Charlie
Parker, to an instrument-by-instrument look at the key players and their
innovations. Illustrating his discussion with numerous musical
excerpts, Owens skillfully demonstrates why bebop was so revolutionary,
with fascinating glimpses of the tempestuous jazz world: Thelonious
Monk, for example, did "everything 'wrong' in the sense of traditional
piano technique....Because his right elbow fanned outward away from his
body, he often hit the keys at an angle rather than in parallel.
Sometimes he hit a single key with more than one finger, and divided
single-line melodies between two hands." In addition to his discussions
of individual instruments and players, Owens examines ensembles, with
their sometimes volatile collaborations: in the Jazz Messengers, Benny
Golson told of how his own mellow saxophone playing would get lost under
Art Blakey's furious drumming: "He would do one of those famous
four-bar drum rolls going into the next chorus, and I would completely
disappear. He would holler over at me, 'Get up out of that hole!'"
In this marvelous account, Owens comes right to the present day, with
accounts of new musicians ranging from the Marsalis brothers to
lesser-known masters like pianist Michel Petrucciani. Bebop is a jazz-lover's dream--a serious yet highly personal look at America's most distinctive music.
https://www.amazon.com/-/es/Thomas-Owens/dp/0195106512
No comments:
Post a Comment