Bebop's Origins

In typical accounts of the beginnings of bebop—the first "modern" jazz style, which was originated in the 1940s by Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Thelonious Monk, among others—commercialism plays an important, though indirect, role. By the early 1940s, according to these histories, jazz had reached an impasse. The reigning jazz style, swing, a formulaic popular music undergoing "death by entropy," a "billion-dollar rut."

These metaphors, sampled from various writings on jazz, echo the "crisis theory" of twentieth-century European classical music. Classical music history textbooks commonly impute the eruptions of modernity in the early 1900s to classical music's stubborn failure to move beyond the language of tonality worn out from overuse in the nineteenth century. Something music itself built up pressure resulting in the eruption of a new musical modernism.

But phrases like "billion-dollar rut" clearly suggest that these writers believe that the real culprit is commercialism—the commingling of art and commerce that had for a time allowed swing to become both an authentic jazz expression and a national fad. Even after swing had run its course, the theory goes, the machinery this process—in it jazz became "art," declaring its autonomy by severing forever its ties to commerce.

This insistence that bebop is anticommercial may suit the needs of contemporary jazz discourse, but it is a poor basis for historical inquiry. It idealizes the circumstances of artistic creation and represses the unpleasant reality that commercial relations permeate all realms of musical entertainment. For the musicians who originated bebop, mass-market capitalism new point of engagement with it—one that would grant them a measure of autonomy and recognition.