Editing Bebop (section)

== Musical style ==
Bebop differed drastically from the straightforward compositions of the [[Swing music|swing]] era and was instead characterized by fast tempos, asymmetrical phrasing, intricate [[melody|melodies]], and rhythm sections that expanded on their role as tempo-keepers. The music itself seemed jarringly different to the ears of the public, who were used to the bouncy, organized, danceable compositions of [[Benny Goodman]] and [[Glenn Miller]] during the swing era. Instead, bebop appeared to sound racing, nervous, erratic and often fragmented.

{{Quote|"Bebop" was a label that certain journalists later gave it, but we never labeled the music. It was just modern music, we would call it.  We wouldn't call it anything, really, just music.|[[Kenny Clarke]]<ref name="Music 2">{{cite book
| first= Paul
| last= Du Noyer
| year= 2003
| title= The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Music
| edition= 1st
| publisher= Flame Tree Publishing
| location= Fulham, London
| isbn= 1-904041-96-5
| page= 130}}</ref>}}

While swing music tended to feature orchestrated big band arrangements, bebop music highlighted improvisation. Typically, a theme (a "head," often the main melody of a pop or jazz standard of the swing era) would be presented together at the beginning and the end of each piece, with improvisational solos based on the chords of the compositions. Thus, the majority of a piece in bebop style would be improvisation, the only threads holding the work together being the underlying harmonies played by the [[rhythm section]]. Sometimes improvisation included references to the original melody or to other well-known melodic lines ("quotes," "licks" or "riffs"). Sometimes they were entirely original, spontaneous melodies from start to finish.

Chord progressions for bebop compositions were often taken directly from popular swing-era compositions and reused with a new and more complex melody, forming new compositions (see [[contrafact]]).  This practice was already well-established in earlier jazz, but came to be central to the bebop style. The style made use of several relatively common chord progressions, such as blues (at base, I-IV-V, but 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 compositions.  Bebop chord voicings often dispensed with the root and fifth tones, instead basing them on the leading intervals that defined the tonality of the chord.  That opened up creative possibilities for harmonic improvisation such as [[tritone substitution]]s and use of [[diminished scale]] based improvised lines that could resolve to the key center in numerous and surprising ways.

Bebop musicians also employed several harmonic devices not typical of previous jazz. Complicated harmonic substitutions for more basic chords became commonplace. These substitutions often emphasized certain dissonant intervals such as the flat ninth, sharp ninth or the sharp eleventh/[[tritone]]. This unprecedented harmonic development which took place in bebop is often traced back to a transcendent moment experienced by Charlie Parker while performing "[[Cherokee (Ray Noble song)|Cherokee]]" at Clark Monroe's Uptown House, New York, in early 1942. As described by Parker:<ref name="kubik">Kubik, Gerhard. "Bebop: a case in point. The African Matrix in Jazz Harmonic Practices." (Critical essay) Black Music Research Journal 22 Mar 2005. Digital.</ref>

<blockquote>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.</blockquote>

[[Gerhard Kubik]] postulates that the harmonic development in bebop sprang from the [[blues]], and other African-related tonal sensibilities, rather than twentieth century Western art music, as some have suggested. Kubik states: "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 were both the bedrock and propelling force of bebop, bringing about three main developments:
* 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.
* The reestablishment of the blues as the music's primary organizing and functional principle.<ref>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>

Some of the harmonic innovations in bebop appear similar to innovations in Western "serious" music, from [[Claude Debussy]] to [[Arnold Schoenberg]], although bebop has few direct borrowings from classical music and appears to largely revive tonal-harmonic ideas taken from the blues in a basically non-Western approach rooted in African traditions.<ref name="kubik" /> However, bebop probably drew on many sources. An insightful YouTube video with [[Jimmy Raney]], a jazz guitarist who played with [[Charlie Parker]], describes how Parker would listen to the music of [[Béla Bartók]], a leading 20th century classical composer. Raney describes Parker's knowledge of Bartók and [[Arnold Schoenberg]], in particular Schoenberg's [[Pierrot Lunaire]], and says that a section from Bartók's Fifth Quartet sounded a lot like some of Parker's [[jazz improvisation]].<ref name="raney">Raney, Jimmy and Jamey Abersold. "Jimmy & Jamey Discuss Charlie Parker", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10guXUWGGB4</ref>