Editing Jazz (section)

===Bebop===
{{Main|Bebop}}
[[File:Sarah_Vaughan_-_William_P._Gottlieb_-_No._2.jpg|left|250px|thumb|[[Sarah Vaughan]] was a jazz vocalist known for her ability to improvise and navigate complex harmonies.]]

In the early 1940s, bebop-style performers began to shift jazz from danceable popular music toward a more challenging "musician's music". The most influential bebop musicians included saxophonist Charlie Parker, pianists [[Bud Powell]] and [[Thelonious Monk]], trumpeters Dizzy Gillespie and [[Clifford Brown]], and drummer [[Max Roach]]. Divorcing itself from dance music, bebop established itself more as an art form, thus lessening its potential popular and commercial appeal.

Composer [[Gunther Schuller]] wrote: "In 1943 I heard the great Earl Hines band which had Bird in it and all those other great musicians. They were playing all the flatted fifth chords and all the modern harmonies and substitutions and Dizzy Gillespie runs in the trumpet section work. Two years later I read that that was 'bop' and the beginning of modern jazz ... but the band never made recordings."<ref>[[Gunther Schuller]], November 14, 1972. {{harvnb|Dance|1983|p=290}}.</ref>

Dizzy Gillespie wrote: "People talk about the Hines band being 'the incubator of bop' and the leading exponents of that music ended up in the Hines band. But people also have the erroneous impression that the music was new. It was not. The music evolved from what went before. It was the same basic music. The difference was in how you got from here to here to here...naturally each age has got its own shit."{{sfn|Dance|1983|p=260}}

Since bebop was meant to be listened to, not danced to, it could use faster tempos. Drumming shifted to a more elusive and explosive style, in which the [[ride cymbal]] was used to keep time while the snare and bass drum were used for accents. This led to a highly syncopated music with a linear rhythmic complexity.<ref name="Floyd, Samuel A. 1995">Floyd, Samuel A., Jr. (1995). ''The Power of Black Music: Interpreting its history from Africa to the United States''. New York: Oxford University Press.</ref>

Bebop musicians employed several harmonic devices which were not previously typical in jazz, engaging in a more abstracted form of chord-based improvisation. Bebop scales are traditional scales with an added chromatic passing note;{{sfn|Levine|1995|p=171}} bebop also uses "passing" chords, [[substitute chord]]s, and [[altered chord]]s. New forms of [[chromaticism]] and [[Consonance and dissonance|dissonance]] were introduced into jazz, and the dissonant [[tritone]] (or "flatted fifth") interval became the "most important interval of bebop"<ref>Joachim Berendt. ''The Jazz Book'', 1981, p. 15.</ref> Chord progressions for bebop tunes were often taken directly from popular swing-era tunes and reused with a new and more complex melody or reharmonized with more complex chord progressions to form new compositions, a practice which was already well-established in earlier jazz, but came to be central to the bebop style. Bebop made use of several relatively common chord progressions, such as blues (at base, I–IV–V, but often infused with ii–V motion) and "[[rhythm changes]]" (I-vi-ii-V) – the chords to the 1930s pop standard "[[I Got Rhythm]]". Late bop also moved towards extended forms that represented a departure from pop and show tunes.

[[File:Ella Fitzgerald (with Ray Brown, Dizzy Gillespie, and Milt Jackson) in 1947 (NPG-B6000130C) (cropped).jpg|thumb|right|200px|[[Ella Fitzgerald]]'s improvisational skill and ability to perform complex scat singing made her a key figure in the bebop movement.]]

The harmonic development in bebop is often traced back to a moment experienced by Charlie Parker while performing "Cherokee" at [[Clark Monroe's Uptown House]], New York, in early 1942. "I'd been getting bored with the stereotyped changes that were being used...and I kept thinking there's bound to be something else. I could hear it sometimes. I couldn't play it...I was working over 'Cherokee,' and, as I did, I found that by using the higher intervals of a chord as a melody line and backing them with appropriately related changes, I could play the thing I'd been hearing. It came alive."<ref name="Kubik">{{harvnb|Kubik|2005}}</ref> [[Gerhard Kubik]] postulates that harmonic development in bebop sprang from blues and [[Traditional sub-Saharan African harmony|African-related tonal sensibilities]] rather than 20th-century Western classical music. "Auditory inclinations were the African legacy in [Parker's] life, reconfirmed by the experience of the blues tonal system, a sound world at odds with the Western diatonic chord categories. Bebop musicians eliminated Western-style functional harmony in their music while retaining the strong central tonality of the blues as a basis for drawing upon various African matrices."<ref name="Kubik"/>

Samuel Floyd states that blues was both the bedrock and propelling force of bebop, bringing about a new harmonic conception using extended chord structures that led to unprecedented harmonic and melodic variety, a developed and even more highly syncopated, linear rhythmic complexity and a melodic angularity in which the blue note of the fifth degree was established as an important melodic-harmonic device; and reestablishment of the blues as the primary organizing and functional principle.<ref name="Floyd, Samuel A. 1995"/> Kubik wrote:

<blockquote>While for an outside observer, the harmonic innovations in bebop would appear to be inspired by experiences in Western "serious" music, from [[Claude Debussy]] to [[Arnold Schoenberg]], such a scheme cannot be sustained by the evidence from a cognitive approach. Claude Debussy did have some influence on jazz, for example, on Bix Beiderbecke's piano playing. And it is also true that Duke Ellington adopted and reinterpreted some harmonic devices in European contemporary music. West Coast jazz would run into such debts as would several forms of cool jazz, but bebop has hardly any such debts in the sense of direct borrowings. On the contrary, ideologically, bebop was a strong statement of rejection of any kind of eclecticism, propelled by a desire to activate something deeply buried in self. Bebop then revived tonal-harmonic ideas transmitted through the blues and reconstructed and expanded others in a basically non-Western harmonic approach. The ultimate significance of all this is that the experiments in jazz during the 1940s brought back to [[African-American music]] several structural principles and techniques rooted in African traditions.{{sfn|Kubik|2005}}</blockquote>

These divergences from the jazz mainstream of the time met a divided, sometimes hostile response among fans and musicians, especially swing players who bristled at the new harmonic sounds. To hostile critics, bebop seemed filled with "racing, nervous phrases".<ref>Joachim Berendt. ''The Jazz Book''. 1981, p. 16.</ref> But despite the friction, by the 1950s bebop had become an accepted part of the jazz vocabulary.