No New York - No Bebop, by Buddy DeFranco

 © Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

It’s very rare that socio-cultural change can be attributed to one cause. Usually many influences come together to produce significant alterations in

the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement - literature, music, painting, philosophy - known collectively as “culture.”

So while it would be difficult to affirm that New York City caused Bebop to happen, as the late clarinetist Buddy DeFranco asserts in the following excerpts from A Life in the Golden Age of Jazz: A Biography of Buddy DeFranco by Fabrice Zammarchi and Sylvie Mas [2002], it would have been very challenging for this music to have come into existence elsewhere.

The forces and factors at work during and immediately following World War II came together in a unique way to produce a style of music reflective of the energy and dynamism of that city during those times.

Interestingly, if one were to extend this argument, it might also explain why what came to be known as the Birth of the Cool music by Gil Evans, Gerry Mulligan and Miles Davis took root, not in New York, the place of its “Birth,” but rather, 3,000 miles away in California where socio-cultural conditions there made it an almost natural fit.

"Bebop is, in my opinion, the jazz of New York. It is really a product of this city. Two of its characteristics - the speed of execution and the rapid rhythm - accurately reflect the tension and agitation which reigns in New York. This style couldn't have been born in California, for example, because the mode of life is a lot more tranquil and one takes one's time to do things - but bebop is born of urgency. On the other hand, the earlier styles of jazz have diverse origins, although New York was always a catalyst. The important musicians are not especially from this town.

"Count Basie was born in Red Bank, New Jersey, but he organized his band in Kansas City. Duke Ellington and his first group of musicians came from Washington.

Tommy Dorsey was born in up-State Pennsylvania. Actually his kind of music was formed from Chicago Jazz and his band reflected Midwest and Chicago Jazz, even at the time when I joined his band. It was a Chicago and Kansas City influence originally - it was not New York.

"Then, of course, there is something about New York that attracts everybody in the arts. There is sort of a love/hate relationship you develop with this City - in fact, in many ways I hate New York, but I realize you cannot do without it - it is the focal point of the arts. Without New York, we would never have jazz or any of the arts. Jazz originated in the South, but none of the great jazz artists really matured and made it until they hit New York. Charlie Parker came out of Kansas City, but then he got to New York and began to absorb the flavor of that terrible thing in New York, and that made him great. In the 50's, I loved it, even though I had a closet for a room. You had to fight the elements in those days. Even now, New Yorkers brag about the marvelous apartment they have: three rooms and a kitchen that comes out of the wall - and a bed that comes out of the wall - and even that costs a fortune.

"There is a strange thing about New York that rubs off on everyone. I lived there for eleven years and the love/hate dichotomy is so evident that everybody gets used to yelling at each other. If you go into the average restaurant in New York and calmly say to the waitress 'I'd like a tuna on rye,' she'll yell to the chef in the back: 'Hey! Tuna on rye!' You ask the cab driver, 'Say, are you available?' and he might yell, 'I'm not going that way,' before you even have a chance to say any more. Nelson Riddle and I were at Lindy's, a famous restaurant, years ago. We were having coffee after finishing dinner and dessert, and the waiter came over and said: 'Are you going to sit there all day?' That's it - if you are finished, get out! There's no intentional hatred really; it's just a way of life. And that's sort of like what bebop is to jazz - it's fast and quick and it's a lot of notes and it swings and it's hot - hot and heavy at a fast pace!

"When you go to Los Angeles and sit by a pool in a sunny setting it's a completely different style. That is why a lot of jazz players said that the cool jazz didn't have any soul. That is cruel because a lot of the cool jazz did, but I can understand what they meant, because cool jazz has a lot of the tension taken out of it.

"If you went into a club in New York City to listen to a jazz performance, it was a fast-paced, hard-driving thing - almost hyper. One of the reasons for the tragic demise in jazz in the United States was that musicians just became so frantic they couldn't help it! But that sort of thing happens in all the arts. There hasn't been a phase of the arts that didn't rise and collapse.

"Swing was designed for dancing, even though it was jazz-oriented, but then New York introduced the style called bebop which was ushered in by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie - mostly Charlie Parker -where it was tense, frantic, and fast-paced intellectually - a lot of notes - and there was no way you could hang any kind of a dance on it. Well, they started along with that pace, they started getting the more intellectual chords and much more highly developed structured triads, cadences etc. - and all of a sudden it is no longer the same earthy dancing music because you are playing something that is well-structured. This music no longer had its place in the popular dance halls, which, in New York, were the Savoy Ballroom or Roseland. They couldn't dance to it, so they started jazz clubs. But then the dancers, who had been left high and dry by the beboppers, embraced this infantile music called 'Rock and Roll' out of frustration. Actually it wasn't called 'Rock and Roll' at first - it was called 'Rhythm and Blues' and 'House Rocking Music.'

"It started with some musicians who bordered on dementia but had some degree of talent. But they had the acumen to know that their music was basic and rhythmic and they decided then that the drummers would lay down a hard, strong, simple rhythmic pattern that got to the dancers. Unfortunately, young audiences don't like to sit back and absorb an intellectual experience or even an emotional experience from the stage.

"Those were the worst years for jazz and for me economically, because all the clubs where I had played regularly either closed or turned to Rock and Roll. Everyone was concerned - even stars like Dizzy Gillespie and George Shearing. After eleven years in New York, my favorite town, I went to California to work for the movie studios."