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The rise of modern jazz—or “bebop” as it was called—dramatically changed the landscape of the music in the 1940s, transforming the genre into a truly progressive and experimental idiom. But this came at a cost, marking a shift from jazz’s predominance as a popular music, and turning it into an art music addressing a much smaller audience. This chapter looks at the innovations of the leading bebop musicians, especially Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk. Other artists addressed include Bud Powell, Lennie Tristano, Sarah Vaughan, and Dave Brubeck. The chapter concludes with an assessment of big band jazz during the post–World War II era, including the work of Woody Herman and Stan Kenton.

By the 1920s, jazz music was being recorded more or less regularly. And if those who heard the past legendary musicians claim that the records by Fletcher Henderson or King Oliver or Bix Beiderbecke were a shadow of the reality, at least the records were there and in some quantity. A more recent legendary event, the appearance of Charlie Parker-Dizzy Gillespie quintets in the early forties, is now regarded as much a part of jazz tradition as Oliver's Creole Band. Finally, a 1953 concert in Toronto did get recorded and now reappears on Fantasy, “Jazz At Massey Hall.”

This chapter looks at the life of Dizzy Gillespie, the trumpeter of Cotton Club Dance Orchestra. Gillespie's entry into the trumpet section did not fit into the framework that Cab Calloway had established for himself and his men, either socially or musically. Gillespie's aim was for a more complex style of his own. His performance then became subpar with the live performances of the band. He was also accused of having a hot temper and unstable character.

Clifford Brown sought new opportunities in Philadelphia. He had been playing at jam sessions for quite a while and had established himself strongly enough so that he thought about forming his own group. Dizzy Gillespie contacted Max Roach, who had established himself as the leading drummer of the new bebop school. Roach had played on Charlie Parker and Gillespie's classic bebop recordings and later with Miles Davis. In September 1949, Brown went back to school on a new campus and totally new environment. Maryland State College, again an all-black school, had an excellent music department, and there was an active jazz scene. On the evening of June 6, 1950, after a particularly successful outing, Brown and three of his cohorts were involved in a car accident. After a year of recuperation, Brown resumed playing the trumpet. Soon he found employment, and his fattest paychecks soon began rolling in, albeit from an unlikely source—a rhythm ‘n’ blues pop star named Chris Powell.

This chapter discusses the popularization of bebop jazz music through the band Diz and Bird on Fifty-second Street. The jazz audience considered bebop a terrible dissonance and a frantic assault on decency and good taste. Dizzy Gillespie teamed up with Oscar Pettiford, with pianist George Wallington, saxophonist Don Byas, and Charlie Parker to form the band Diz and Bird on Fifty-second Street. They conducted their first performance of bebop jazz at Three Deuces club where many listeners found bebop jazz enticing.

Ross Russell was an American jazz producer and writer, as well as the founder of Dial Records. After World War II finished, he opened Tempo Music Shop, his own jazz record store, in Hollywood. He founded Dial Records in 1946 for him to record with Charlie Parker, who was living in Los Angeles during that period. He also recorded with Dizzy Gillespie, Erroll Garner, Howard McGhee, Dodo Marmarosa, Dexter Gordon, Wardell Gray, and Earl Coleman. As an artist, he loved Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong, and he wrote an essay on James P. Johnson.

This chapter discusses the story and musical contributions of jazz musicians that belong to the third generation described in the previous chapter. It includes discussions on Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Herbie Nichols, Oscar Peterson, Stan Getz, Woody Herman, Al Cohn, Art Pepper, Sonny Stitt, Jackie McLean, Sonny Rollins, Hank Mobley, Tina Brooks, Clifford Brown, Max Roach, Philly Joe Jones, Horace Silver, Lee Morgan, Donald Byrd, Blue Mitchell, Bill Evans, Keith Jarrett, Gary Burton, Pat Metheny, Frank Zappa, McCoy Tyner, Wayne Shorter, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Roscoe Mitchell, Evan Parker, and the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra.

This chapter focuses on the subculture of young African Americans who developed forms of social dancing to bebop music as recounted to the author in oral history interviews with self-identified bebop dancers and as documented by Russian modern dancer/choreographer Mura Dehn in her film The Spirit Moves and in her drafts for an unfinished study on jazz dance. Dehn’s work reveals fascinating creative adaptations to bebop’s accelerating tempos and complex melodic structures in new and expanded dances such as the applejack, Jersey bounce, and bop lindy. Through these developments, dancers engaged in intricate metric and hypermetric play with bebop music—which they refer to as dancing “off-time”—while also embodying bebop’s “cool” aesthetic and the emergent cynicism and radicalism that shaped postwar African American political culture. Their experiences, and Dehn’s work to document them, demand a re-examination of the discursive work performed by bebop’s reputation as a music innately hostile to social dancing, a label that has less to do with the music’s difficulty than with a desire to position bebop as “art” rather than “entertainment.” The chapter closes with a discussion of “the problem of Dizzy Gillespie” to highlight and explore the historiographic challenges that discussion of social dance poses to canonic narrative positionings of bebop. It suggests that bebop is better understood as part of a contiguous spectrum of Black popular culture that thrived alongside, rather than in opposition to, rhythm & blues and other popular music genres.

This chapter discusses various ways the Caribbean and Latin American music styles continued to share a common history with jazz from the 1940s to the 1960s, intersecting, cross-influencing, and at times seeming inseparable, as each has played seminal roles in the other’s development. Three case studies are discussed: the collaboration of Dizzy Gillespie and Chano Pozo, the Jazz Samba recording by Charlie Byrd and Stan Getz, and Mongo Santamaría’s “Watermelon Man” recording. In much of the jazz literature, these musicians and their seminal roles have been diminished or downright ignored. This chapter explores the reasons for these omissions and the systematic “othering” of Latin jazz. It examines the forces at play in their continued exclusion; explores how this omission is tied to the economic marginalization of jazz, racism, nationalism, tensions between art and popular music, and canon construction; and identifies what is at stake when Latin jazz is included.

This chapter examines the relationship between African America, Latin America, and the Caribbean through the music and its associated performance practices realized on the stage of the Apollo Theater in Harlem from 1934 to the early 2000s. Through the lens of race, nation, and ethnicity, the complex and often tenuous relations among the diverse peoples who colluded and collided on the stage of the Apollo to produce some of the most significant and influential contributions to popular cultural expression in the United States throughout the twentieth century are explored. Though the Apollo is considered one of the most significant and influential venues in the twentieth century for African American music, studying the discourse and historical narratives concerning the theater’s history and traditions reveals that the venue was also one of the most important Caribbean and Latin American stages in the United States during that time. Situated just blocks from one of the most vibrant Caribbean and Latin American neighborhoods in North America, Spanish Harlem or El Barrio, the Apollo Theater was and continues to be a nexus for intercultural exchange between African American, Latin American, and Caribbean musics.

Chapter 2 begins with an overview of Parker’s fully composed 32-bar rhythm changes compositions. Parker is strongly associated with improvising on rhythm changes (the chord changes of “I Got Rhythm,” by George and Ira Gershwin), but there are only six such pieces, and they are all in B♭ major: “Red Cross,” “Shaw ’Nuff,” (co-composed with Dizzy Gillespie), “Moose the Mooche,” “Thrivin’ from a Riff,” “Dexterity,” and “Passport.” This allows for convenient comparison among them. Among the various conclusions, the analyses show that despite being contrafacts on rhythm changes—all in the same key and using straightforward bebop harmony—these pieces are satisfyingly different.

In 1952, Clifford Brown met someone with the unlikely name of Tadley Ewing Peake Dameron. Born in Cleveland in 1917, Dameron had written arrangements for Dizzy Gillespie's big band, and his major orchestra piece, “Soul-phony”, was premiered by the band at a Carnegie Hall concert in 1948. That same year, Dameron led a group in New York that featured Fats Navarro. In 1952, he was involved with various groups in the New York–Philadelphia area and had become an important figure for jazz record producers. In the last weeks of May 1953, Brown became suddenly more active on the bebop scene. He was being besieged by leaders to record and appear with them, but it was Dameron's band that interested him the most. A recording date with Dameron's band was scheduled for June 11. Meanwhile, altoist Lou Donaldson, under contract to Blue Note Records, had long sought out Brown for a record date, slated for June in New York.

This chapter describes the funeral of Charlie Parker, also known as “Yardbird” or “Bird”, an American jazz saxophonist and composer considered as a leading figure for the development of bebop—a form of jazz. His funeral was attended by the musicians, critics, and a coterie of enthusiasts whom he influenced greatly. Among them were Jay Mcshann, Dizzy Gillespie, Red Rodney Dizzy, and Buddy De Franco. All of them acknowledged that Parker was a leader of a new and distinctly American music.

This chapter describes the many things that happened after Nina last played the Queen Mary Room at the Rittenhouse Hotel—so many that she might have forgotten her free performance at a 1957 benefit for disabled children. The officers at the Mildred Malschick Fuhrman Charities, however, hadn't. They were sponsoring the first annual jazz festival at Philadelphia's Academy of Music March 13, and they wanted Nina. This time she would be paid $2,000 for two performances as the headliner, even though the Dizzy Gillespie quintet, the Four Freshmen, and Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers were also on the bill. A few days before the event, Nina sat down with Frank Brookhouser of the Bulletin, who was still writing his “Man About Town” column, and together they traced her trajectory from child star in the church to acclaimed jazz singer.