Hoewel het maar een boekje is van 102 pagina’s, verwachtte ik wel iets van Inside Jazz door Leonard Feather (1914-1994). Hij was een jazzpianist, componist en producer, maar vooral bekend om zijn artikelen, publicaties en jazzkritieken. In 1949 publiceerde hij het boek Inside Bebop en dat werd in 1977 heruitgegeven als Inside Jazz. Of die verwachting wordt ingelost, daarover later meer.

Feather wil met het boek uitleggen waar de bebop vandaan komt en hij laat een groot aantal van haar uitvoerders voorbij komen. Hij laat ook zien dat de scheidslijn niet zo zwart-wit is tussen de jazz oude stijl ofwel de swing en de bebop. Toch was er wel sprake van strijd, zeker toen Feather met Barry Ulanov de redactie voerde van het maandelijkse magazine Metronome;

The feud between beboppers and the so-called “moldy figs” (advocates of the traditional New Orleans jazz played by veteran trumpeter Bunk Johnson, clarinetist George Lewis and others of the revivalist movement that became active around the same time as bebop) was aggravated by the fact that instead of just advocating our own cause, Barry and I also wasted time making fun of the figs, whose movement would eventually collapse of its own weight. Our satires on the old time jazz aficionados, particularly those I wrote under the name of Professor McSiegel, infuriated the traditionalists, who lambasted modern jazz in general and bop in particular.

Het geeft aan dat er iets aan de hand was in de jazzwereld en dat Feather de nieuwe stroming bebop een warm hart toedraagt. In zijn voorwoord geeft hij aan dat er al veel over bebop is geschreven maar dat het veel over de uiterlijke kenmerken van de uitvoerders gaat en maar weinig over de technische aspecten van de muziek. Die omissie wil hij met dit boekje rechtzetten.

Allereerst, nog even toelichten wat bebop dan ook weer is, want Feather zelf geeft geen definitie daarvan. Het is een muziekstijl in de jazz met complexe ritmes en harmonieën. Vaak wordt er een thema gespeeld, waarna de instrumentalisten de kans krijgen om te soleren en te improviseren, waarbij de dynamiek tussen de verschillende bandleden cruciaal is. De nadruk ligt op virtuositeit, harmonische complexiteit en tempowisselingen. Tegenstanders doen het vaak af als muziek waar dus niet op te dansen is, anders dan de traditionele swingmuziek die door de bigbands zo vaak gespeeld wordt.

Feather deelt zijn boek op in drie delen. Deel één behandelt een paar van de pioniers van het bebop-genre. Deel twee is een technisch deel met muzikale notenvoorbeelden en deel drie geeft een aantal zeer beknopte biografieën van bebop-muzikanten.

Deel één kan u interesseren als u bijgepraat wil worden over altsaxofonist Charlie Parker en trompettist Dizzy Gillespie. Mij bracht het weinig nieuws na het lezen van hun biografieën. Interessant is wel het belang van tenorsaxofonist Lester Young. Die wordt niet gezien als bebop-muzikant, maar wel als iemand die de weg bereidde voor die nieuwe stroming. Een reden waarom ook saxofonist Coleman Hawkins in het boek genoemd wordt. Ik vond het leuk om gitarist Charlie Christian tegen te komen en met name zijn opnames in Minton’s Playhouse, een bekende jazzclub in New York, waarvan ik zijn opnames al even in huis heb.

Het technische deel is eigenlijk voer voor musicologen. Dat ben ik niet dus de termen en notenvoorbeelden in dat hoofdstuk gingen wat ver voor mij. Interessant is wel het deel waarin nummers worden opgevoerd die van belang zijn voor de bebop. Zo wordt een jazzstandard als How High The Moon ineens een boegbeeld van de bebop en Feather legt uit hoe dat komt. Ook handig is een tabel met bebop-nummers die goed laat zien op welke akkoordenschema’s van welke jazzstandard ze gebaseerd zijn. Dan zie je ook hoe vaak How High The Moon terug komt.

Het laatste deel met korte biografieën is met name handig voor die muzikanten die ik nog niet in andere boeken toegelicht zag. Het pluspunt van dit boek is dat je een paar voorbeelden direct uit de praktijk opgediend krijgt. Feather zit dicht op de materie en heeft Parker (ofwel ‘Bird’) en Gillespie (ofwel ‘Diz’) zelf gesproken. Hij concludeert ook dat bebop geen duidelijk afgebakend terrein is;

One concluding thought: don’t ever be scared, in playing bop, that you are breaking the rules, or that a certain passage is not strictly bop. Be a pragmatist. Remember that as far as Diz and Bird were concerned, rules were only made to be broken; moreover, some of their most successful effects have been achieved by the contrasting insertion of non-bop passages such as the intro and coda on Shaw Nuff, the comedy vocals on Salt Peanuts and When I Grow Too Old To, and the special rhythms in Night In Tunesia, Manteca and many others.

Zo is er wel het één en ander uit dit boekje te halen, maar werden mijn verwachtingen toch niet echt ingelost. Voor iemand die zo veel over jazz heeft geschreven en er zo veel van af weet, vind ik de inhoud te mager. Ook de doelgroep is mij niet duidelijk. Voor een deel heeft u weinig tot geen kennis nodig en wordt u aardig geïnformeerd, voor het technische deel heeft u wel degelijk wat kennis nodig. Een minpuntje is ook het ontbreken van een namenindex achterin. Aan ruimtegebrek ligt dat niet, want er staan wel 12 blanco bladzijden achterin het boek. Ik heb meer verwachtingen van het boek dat ik nu ga lezen over dezelfde materie, Swing to Bop, van de jazzcriticus en -historicus Ira Gitler. ( )

Originally titled Inside Bebop when it was published in 1949. This was Leonard Feather's riposte to the 'moldy figs.'

The story of bebop, like that of swing before it, like the stories of jazz and ragtime before that, has been one of constant struggle against restrictions imposed on all progressive thought in an art that has been commercialized to the point of prostitution; of struggle against reactionaries who resent anything new which they can neither understand nor perform themselves.

When Inside Bebop was published, not many commentators were prepared to embrace the new jazz style, and not a few Dixieland and Swing musicians took offense at the so-called ‘modern’ jazz. (In the Introduction to the 1977 edition, Feather relates how the publisher changed the name of the book to Inside Jazz soon after its initial publication because of the pejorative connotation of the term ‘bebop’). Undaunted, Feather featured the leading figures in bebop—Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie—as firmly in the jazz tradition, reinforcing the notion that the music was an organic consequence of creative evolution, not the outrageous abandonment of all that was sacred and dear, as the square critics imagined.

Feather begins with his own succinct summation of the Swing Era. Before Benny Goodman’s orchestra became popular, big-band jazz had been played by Negro orchestras. By the late 1930s, Goodman’s band (using the arrangements of Fletcher Henderson) had shown that a big, commercial white orchestra could play ‘uncommercial’ jazz successfully. Goodman and others (the Dorseys, Artie Shaw, Harry James, Gene Krupa, et.al.) led bands that played popular songs in a rhythmic, swinging style, and began to compete for lucrative jobs in hotel ballrooms, network radio shows and the recording business. Racial discrimination prevented the big bands of Henderson, Chick Webb and Teddy Hill from attaining the same level of exposure, though racial animus among musicians seemed less starkly pronounced.

In the second half of the 1930s, jazz music attained great popularity, but, writes Feather, some musicians felt constrained by the rhythmic, melodic and harmonic limitations of the prevalent form (12-tone chromatic scale and the associated chord progressions, popular melodies, simple syncopations, four-beats-to-the-bar). Gradually, and in various parts of the country, musicians began to find ways out of this ‘musical straightjacket.’ What emerged was a synthesis of many ideas, the work of many players, ‘some not even conscious of doing anything startlingly new.’ Looking back from bebop, there appear musicians whose idiosyncratic styles contributed to its development, like Lester Young and Charlie Christian, and others who were more deliberately experimental, including Kenny Clarke and Tadd Dameron. In the early 1940s, New York City became the locus of this innovative music. Jam sessions among a group of young musicians at the Hotel Cecil in Harlem (where a dilapidated dining room had been converted to a nightclub by Henry Minton, the first Negro delegate to the Local 802 musicians’ union) became a kind of laboratory for developing new technical approaches to playing jazz. To prevent amateurs and the unprepared from crashing the jam sessions, the core group developed new chords and more elaborate sequences and complex changes and accelerated tempos, insuring that only the most committed players were able to stick around.

In his Introduction to the 1977 edition, Feather says that Inside Bebop became the most plagiarized book in jazz history, particularly the section on Charlie Parker. Feather relates Parker’s musical apprenticeship in 1930s Kansas City, his first job with Jay McShann’s band, his work as a sideman for Earl Hines and Billy Eckstine, and his busy years in New York—at each stage cultivating new influences, developing new ideas, eventually transcending his surroundings and impressing a whole generation of musicians looking for the next new thing. By the late 1940s, Parker was already a living legend, writes Feather, not only for his music, but for the physical and mental decline that was increasingly apparent. Feather was a habitué of the New York jazz world (as a musician, composer, and journalist) and so knew Parker and had interviewed him for Metronome magazine; in Inside Bebop, he attributes Parker’s troubles to the lingering effects of his adolescent exposure to the ‘lurid’ and ‘vicious’ elements in the Kansas City underworld and to his experience of insecurity and racial discrimination.

Feather devotes even more space to Dizzy Gillespie, who he first worked with on a 1941 recording session for Benny Carter. As a teenager, Gillespie had visited Europe with Teddy Hill’s band (Feather saw the London concert, paying little attention to the third trumpet, played by Gillespie) then played with Lionel Hampton and Cab Calloway, and jammed at Minton’s and on 52nd Street where he crossed paths with Parker. Gillespie began to write tunes based on some of the improvisations that came fast and furious in the off-hour sessions, helping to develop the unison ensemble style that came to define small-band bebop. By the mid-1940s, says Feather, ‘most of us who were around Dizzy and his contemporaries began to be conscious that there was a musical genre sufficiently distinct to have earned a special name.’ The onomatopoeic term bebop—conjuring a frequently-deployed staccato two-note rhythm phrase—came to be applied as a descriptor for the music played by Dizzy and his cohort.

Feather presents conflicting observations on the relationship between bebop and pre-bop jazz in the late 1940s. A ‘climate of hostility’ against bebop prevailed among aficionados of Dixieland and big dance bands, though swing greats like Teddy Wilson and Red Norvo played dates with Parker and Gillespie, and bandleaders like Woody Herman hired arrangers to incorporate bebop solos and cross-rhythms into their sound. The black big bands led by Erskine Hawkins, Lucky Millinder, Andy Kirk and others were reluctant to abandon their established styles and embrace something as ‘radical’ as bebop. “At the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem, once regarded as the mecca of the best in jazz, the manager glumly reported that his patrons did not go for bop and were more interested in danceable music.” In 1948, both Time and Life magazines printed long articles dismissive of bebop, even as music business insiders like Symphony Sid, Monte Kay and Jack Robbins promoted the music as an antidote to the stagnation that had overtaken Swing Era jazz. In New York City, bebop had migrated from the small 52nd Street clubs to larger rooms along Broadway. Feather himself served as the producer for a concert by the Dizzy Gillespie band at Carnegie Hall.

Feather claims that Inside Bebop was the first book on jazz with technical data written by an author using empirical evidence drawn from his own experience as a musician and composer. For the musicologically inclined, Feather demonstrates that bebop was an extension rather than an abandonment of established forms. Harmonically, bebop builds upon the basic blues pattern characteristic of ragtime and the earliest jazz: a 12-bar theme, which could be played in any key, with a 3-chord harmonic structure and a 4-note melody in that particular key (W.C. Handy is usually credited with first writing down the blues form and introducing it to the general public). By the 1930s, musicians were using more complicated ‘riffs,’ some four beats long rather than two, fitting three times into a regular 12-bar pattern rather than six. Most bebop improvisation sticks to a simple harmonic pattern, says Feather, but with deviations, or implied changes, that give bop its harmonic subtlety. Such deviations may include additional flatted chords, or ‘passing’ chords and half-tones adjacent to the expected key. Melodic phrasing and construction also distinguish bebop from earlier jazz styles: “ghosted” notes, double-time accents for contrast, the blend of staccato and legato phrasing, notes cut short, leaps up or down the scale, and the use of unusual intervals. Bebop places a greater demand on the ear and the brain of the listener, writes Feather, to follow the imagination of the musician and to resolve what the soloist may only imply.

Bebop opened up a world of rhythmic possibilities in jazz. The general change from ‘hot’ to ‘cool’ was effected in what Feather calls a ‘lag-along’ style, slightly behind the beat of the rhythm section. A new flavor of swing came out of key alterations to the jazz rhythm section, first of all in the style of drumming. Bebop drummers use the top cymbal rather than the bass drum to establish the beat, ‘one beat merging into another legato-style as the cymbal vibrates throughout an entire chorus.’ The bass drum, high-hat cymbals and snare drum then become available for a variety of rhythmic and tonal accents that ‘punctuate’ the chorus and provide stimulus for the soloist. The change in drumming style transformed the whole rhythm section: the evolution from steady-swinging left hand to melodic interjection changed the function of the piano; the guitar deployed like a piano, ‘feeding’ soloists by ‘comping’ with irregularly accented chords; the string bass holding down the low end, with steady four-to-the-bar tones and occasional melodic fills. Bebop gave the rhythm section a greater role in emphasizing certain aspects of the melody, and the whole sound of jazz changed.

Feather makes clear that the evolution in jazz during the 1940s was primarily driven by the musicians, with audiences and critics slowly coming around, if at all. Big-band swing was largely depleted; traditionalists were trying to revive old-time New Orleans jazz, but the resurrection of the past was doomed to fail, as Roger Pryor Dodge pointed out at the time. At a crucial moment when the path forward was unclear, Feather embraced the achievements of the ‘modern’ players, insisting that ‘the advances made by bebop have made so much that preceded it seem unimaginative and trite by comparison.’ In light of what has happened in jazz since the 1940s, a strong case can be made that bebop—with its harmonic, melodic and rhythmic innovations—was necessary for the music to go forward. Anything is possible in jazz now, but the latch had to be jimmied and the treasure chest pried open. Leonard Feather was there to hear it.