Reading Texts
 
 
 
 

ISSUES:

MUSIC

RACE

CULTURE

Around 1946, jive-ass stories about “beboppers” circulated and began popping up in the news.  Generally, I felt happy for the publicity, but I found it disturbing to have modern jazz musicians and their followers characterized in a way that was often sinister and downright vicious.  This image wasn’t altogether the fault of the press because many followers, trying to be “in,” were actually doing some of the things the press accused beboppers of and worse.  I wondered whether all the “weird” publicity actually drew some of these way-out elements to us and did the music more harm than good.  Stereotypes, which exploited whatever our weaknesses might be, emerged.  Suable things were said, but nothing about the good we were doing and our contributions to music.

 Time magazine, March 25, 1946, remarked: “As such things usually do, it began on Manhattan’s 52nd Street.  A bandleader named John (Dizzy) Gillespie, looking for a way to emphasize the more beautiful notes in ‘Swing,’ explained: “When you hum it, you just naturally say bebop, be-de-bop….’

“Today, the bigwig of bebop is a cat named Harry (the Hipster) Gibson, who in moments of supreme pianistic ecstasy throws his feet on the keyboard.  No. 2 man is Bulee (Slim) Gaillard, a skyscraping zooty Negro guitarist.  Gibson and Gaillard, have recorded such hip numbers as ‘Cement Mixer,’ which has sold more than 20,000 discs in Los Angeles alone; ‘Yeproc Heresay,’ ‘Dreisix Cents,’ and ‘Who Put the Benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy’s Ovaltine?’”

The article discussed a ban on radio broadcasts of bebop records in Los Angeles where station KMPC considered it a “degenerative influence on youth” and described how the “nightclub where Gibson and Gaillard played” was “more crowded than ever” with teen-agers who wanted to be bebopped.  “What bebop amounts to: hot jazz overheated, with overdone lyrics full of bawdiness references to narcotics and doubletalk.”

Once it got inside the marketplace, our style was subverted by the press and music industry.  First, the personalities and weaknesses of the in people started becoming more important, in the public eye, than the music itself.  Then they diluted the music.  They took what were otherwise blues and pop tunes, added "mop, mop" accents and lyrics about abusing drugs wherever they could and called the noise that resulted bebop.  Labeled bebop like our music, this synthetic sound was played heavily on commercial radio everywhere, giving bebop a bad name.  No matter how bad the imitation sounded, youngsters and people who were musically untrained liked it, and it sold well because it maintained a very danceable beat.  The accusation s in the press pointed to me as one of the prime movers behind this.  I should’ve sued, even though the chances of winning in court were slim.  It was all bullshit.

Keeping in mind that a well-told lie usually contains a germ of truth, let’s examine the charges and see how many of those stereotypes actually applied to me.