Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  Even in peacetime, a few singles aside, ‘bop’ happened just out of earshot. It wasn’t evident on jukeboxes or radio stations; nor was it played in most jazz clubs, at least until the early 1950s (by which time its main proponents had moved on). So the ‘bop’ movement was both one of the most dramatic revolutions in twentieth-century American popular music; yet also a purely academic debate which took place in the pages of the jazz press.

  At rare moments in music history, there has been such a shift in grammar and language that it is almost impossible for an outsider to understand what has happened. Here are some pertinent quotes about the theory behind the move towards chromatic harmony from Donald Maggins’s 2005 excellent biography of bop’s prime mover, Dizzy Gillespie:

  ‘In chromaticism, chords can14 be built on all twelve of the notes, not just seven. This greatly expanded the improviser’s resource and made his or her task considerably more complex.’

  ‘The path into the chromatic universe was discovered by moving up into the second octave … There one found the “higher intervals” – the ninth, eleventh and the thirteenth – of the chord.’

  ‘The crucial interval for Dizzy [etc.] – the key that unlocked the door to chromaticism – was the eleventh, which, to avoid dissonance, was sharpened.’

  ‘The beboppers discovered that: Any major scale built on a note a flatted fifth away from another contains all five of the chromatic notes missing from the first scale and vice versa; and, Using the scales in partnership makes fully harmonic the five notes that were non-harmonic in the diatonic system.’

  ‘In other words, using the flatted fifth to find two scalar routes to the same resolution enables the improviser to build chords on all twelve notes of the octave instead of just seven. The improviser now had a full rainbow of musical colours to work with instead of just the basic hues.’

  That is both a brilliant summary of bop theory, and a signal that this was not a style for the untutored. Performing in a dance band and, hence, a jazz band usually required the ability to read music as well as play it; each band had its ‘book’ of arrangements which were unique to its own repertoire, even if the basic melodies were shared by every other orchestra on the circuit. The difference between bop and previous changes in jazz music was that only those who understood the theory could fully appreciate its magnitude. The musically ignorant, who comprised the vast majority of bop’s potential audience, might relish the new colours that bop brought to the palette, but not grasp exactly what made them so spectacular.

  The ‘adult responsibilities’ demanded by that Metronome editorial did not equate with adult respectability, the aim of earlier attempts to alter the face of popular music. By teaming jazz with classical music, Paul Whiteman, George Gershwin, Igor Stravinsky and Artie Shaw had all hoped to persuade the doyens of the art establishment that jazz was worthy of their consideration. With bop, however, nobody cared about any kind of establishment, or any audience. Dizzy Gillespie and his co-conspirators were exploring the limits of the music: creating new rules, not attempting to squeeze inside the old ones.

  Ray Charles, who became a professional musician in the late 1940s, felt that bop sold the jazz public short: ‘The one thing which bothered15 me about some jazz players I met around that time was their strange attitude. They’d say to a crowd, “This is my music. If you like it, cool. If not, fuck it!” I thought that was wrong. People give you their bread and are entitled to some kind of musical return on their dollar. I don’t mean you got to give them exactly what they want. But you do have to keep them in mind.’ To which Dizzy Gillespie could have replied (as he said in 1990): ‘With gusto I dissected16 individual chords, turned them inside-out, upside-down. I gradually began to realise that the harmony in our popular music was pretty limited … and I started to think that I could create something much richer than that.’

  While Charlie Parker has garnered the legend – he took drugs, he died young, and he played the saxophone, which is a sexier instrument (bigger, deeper, earthier) than the trumpet – his friend and sometime collaborator Dizzy Gillespie was bop’s key protagonist. It was he who provided the first recorded evidence of chromatic playing (or at least the first to be consciously that way) on Lionel Hampton’s 1939 side ‘Hot Mallets’. Parker extended the technique in 1940, as he medleyed ‘Honeysuckle Rose’ and ‘Body and Soul’, but only for private consumption. It was Gillespie who fashioned the initial bop anthem, ‘Salt Peanuts’, in 1941 (although it wasn’t recorded until 1945), and who delivered the first bop solo on a commercial disc, ‘Jersey Bounce’ by Les Hite’s orchestra. He also wrote and arranged Woody Herman’s May 1942 tour de force, ‘Down Under’, on which the entire band had bop in mind.

  Dizzy and Bird played alongside each other in the 1944 big band fronted by the soon-to-be-famous baritone crooner Billy Eckstine, predictably alarming his fans with their exotic harmonies. By contrast, Donald Maggins reported the reaction of jazz drummer Thad Jones, who was with the army in Guam when he heard the Gillespie/Parker collaboration ‘Shaw ’Nuff’ on forces radio: ‘We went out of our minds!17 … It was something we were probably trying to articulate ourselves and just didn’t know how. And Dizzy and Bird came along and did it. They spoke our minds.’ Somewhere in the gulf between a style that alienated its public, and an invention that fulfilled the wildest dreams of a musical generation, bop inaugurated the most creative, progressive period in the history of jazz: one which twisted and divided and reinvented the music to the point where it was no longer a single genre but a dozen, many of them unrecognisable to those who had worshipped the ODJB or Louis Armstrong. There would be commercially successful jazz records after bop, but jazz would no longer be the premier vehicle for popular music, as it had been between 1918 and 1945. That task would fall upon styles and musicians representing opposite extremes of tone, volume and ethos, but sharing one vital quality: the art of appealing instantaneously to their audience.

  The increasing specialisation18 which has taken ‘jazz’ out of the ballroom and almost on to the concert platform has presumably meant that fewer music lovers now buy ordinary dance records, and that in turn probably accounts for the increasing space given to the vocal.

  Gramophone magazine, January 1947

  First it was symphonies19, concerti and tone poems which were raided for themes on which to build swoony love songs or dripping, sentimental ballads. Now it’s songs and concert or salon pieces … To me, these indicate an admission by popular music writers that the creative wells are running dry.

  American Music Lover magazine, January 1947

  After the rush of victory, there was an assumption that the British entertainment business would resume where it had laid down its instruments in 1939. The public, bandleader Joe Loss declared, needed ‘bright and melodious music20 in perfect tempo’. To his horror, some of Britain’s leading outfits attempted in a single bound to catch up on a decade of musical development in America. The nation’s first home-grown bebop record was probably Harry Hayes’s ‘Scuttlebutt’, and even amongst jazz fans, there was little market for so shocking an innovation. But Britain was finally ready for the swing explosion that had hit America a decade earlier. Isolated pockets of the UK population had been introduced to the big bands at their most intense either via wartime concerts, or American Forces Network radio. The traditionally minded critics described ‘modernistic swing21’ as ‘a choking creeper that is poisoning the body of jazz … It is not jazz – not even bad jazz – and it must be smashed up and killed if jazz is to live.’ But from 1945 onwards, there were swing nights at the Adelphi Theatre in London with Jack Hylton’s band, and also at the Palladium, with Ted Heath.

  ‘Each fortnight22,’ the Daily Mirror blared, ‘[Heath’s] powerhouse band lets off steam to an alternately rapt and rowdy audience of 3,000’, reprising the reception given to Benny Goodman in 1935. ‘I was quite uncompromising23 in my determination to play a very modern form of dance-music’, Heath declared in his autobiography, by which he meant
the style epitomised by the Glenn Miller Orchestra with its ‘beautifully disciplined precision and power’. The BBC were dubious, and dropped him from their dance music schedule in 1947 because, they said, middle-aged listeners found the band’s music ‘incomprehensible’. The manager of the Palladium, Val Parnell, was equally perturbed: ‘He’d heard about swing24 fans’, Heath recalled. ‘They were, he felt, more than a little on the rowdy side and given to jitterbugging and other noisy and even destructive forms of exhibitionism.’ After what they had endured during the war, young Britons could perhaps have been excused their response to the most thrilling music ever heard here – a wall of noise, brass to the fore, each section of the band standing up in unison for its chorus in the spotlight, the entire orchestra operating like a supercharged, thrillingly dangerous machine.

  There were other attractions to a band such as Heath’s. ‘While swing fans25 are in the majority,’ the Daily Mirror explained, ‘many girls go to hear Paul Carpenter. Paul, once a Canadian war correspondent, is Britain’s Frank Sinatra. A flutter of Paul’s eyelids will launch a thousand sighs, and girls fight for his autograph more fiercely than for nylons.’ Carpenter soon left to concentrate on an acting career, and his place was taken by a shy young man named Richard Bryce. Heath renamed him Dickie Valentine, which appealed to the band’s increasingly passionate female following, and sentimental, guileless songs such as ‘All the Time and Everywhere’ ensured that he was rewarded with, as a pop annual of the period put it, ‘one of the biggest fan followings26 of any British singer among the country’s teen-agers’. Heath’s singers were not the only local rivals to Sinatra: such long-forgotten names as Benny Lee, Denny Dennis and Steve Conway captured female hearts in the post-war years.

  Romance had to be taken where it could be found in the mid-1940s. Britain might have won the war, but peace carried a ruinous cost: unemployment, inflation, shortage of fuel for cars and heating, power cuts, rationing of food and clothing, and an infrastructure that had been bombed, disrupted and drained of cash. By the end of 1946, the musicians’ paper Melody Maker was predicting: ‘We face a slump27 in general theatre and dance-hall business, which is entirely due to economics.’

  The situation for American dance bands was equally parlous. The Benny Goodman Orchestra, which before the war could sell out any theatre in the land, could now only pull a hundred people to a 1,000-capacity New York venue. Some of the biggest names in the business were winding up their bands, or cutting them down to supper-club size: among them Harry James, Woody Herman and Tommy Dorsey. In the 1920s, vocalists had been a minor attraction in a band’s armoury; in the 1930s, they were featured more heavily but still subjugated their personalities to their bandleader. The enduring success of Bing Crosby, and then Frank Sinatra’s dramatic break with the Dorsey orchestra in 1942, encouraged other performers to go it alone: among them Perry Como, his voice so silky that it made Bing sound abrasive, Jo Stafford and Dinah Shore. Gone were the days when a singer would have to wait ninety seconds or longer for their cameo appearance on a dance-band disc: orchestras that had once been distinctive and experimental were now reduced to providing syrupy instrumental support for the personality vocalist of the moment.

  In a telling switch of emphasis, the once-youthful sirens and crooners of the pre-war era were now sounding like mature adults addressing their own kind. With Sinatra, it was evident when he greeted the end of the AFM strike in 1944 with a swinging rendition of ‘Saturday Night is the Loneliest Night of the Week’, which anticipated his triumphs with Nelson Riddle arrangements a decade ahead. Doris Day, as versatile a singer as Sinatra but with Bing Crosby’s velvet tone, delivered ‘Sentimental Journey’ with the dignity of someone who knew that for many of her audience, a loved one’s journey might already have reached a premature close. Then there were earthier adult pleasures, signposted with joy by Betty Hutton’s sex-charged ‘Stuff Like That There’, and with pain on Billie Holiday’s ‘Lover Man’, which on feel alone deserves to be considered the first ‘soul’ record. Even those old enough to be grandparents had a representative, as Al Jolson returned to the best-sellers lists in 1947 with the Italianate ‘The Anniversary Song’, and an affectionate revival of ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’ with Bing Crosby.

  Of all these figures, Sinatra seemed best able to explore a world that was short on innocence after the ordeal of war, and the discovery of unimaginable horrors in German camps. He it was who dared to explore the limits of democracy in a society still riven by racial prejudice, in the film, and the song, ‘The House I Live In’; to envisage not just the prime of adulthood but the certainty that it would pass, in ‘September Song’; and to confront the vocal and emotional rigour of the ‘Soliloquy’ from the Broadway show Carousel.fn2 Like Oklahoma! (1943), Carousel (1945) was written by the team of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. Both soundtracks were issued as ‘albums’ – first as a book of 78 rpm singles, and later on long-playing discs – inaugurating an era in which almost every adult record collection was dominated by stage shows (and, subsequently, their film equivalents). Beyond the stage and movie musical, however, the popular song was in steep decline, as naked commercialism triumphed in post-war America’s search for rapid economic expansion.

  The popular songs of the day28, they’ve become so decadent, they’re bloodless … I’ve been looking for wonderful pieces of music in the popular vein – what they call Tin Pan Alley songs. You cannot find any … The songwriter in most cases finds he has to prostitute his talents if he wants to make a buck.

  Frank Sinatra, 1948

  Right now, everyone29 is aware of the fact that popular music is going through one of the most depressing, retrogressive, uninspired and totally uncreative stages in its glittering history … Singers can also help. The stagnation is in part our fault. If we’d refuse to do the lousy material being handed to us by the publishers (and I’m as guilty as anyone of accepting and recording at least a few pieces of junk), then the world would be a better place in which to sing.

  Mel Torme, 1950

  The Salt Lake City disc jockey Al ‘Jazzbo’ Collins was so disgusted by the success of Art Mooney’s 1948 pop hit ‘I’m Looking Over a Four-Leaf Clover’ that he devoted his two-hour jazz show to playing it, over and over again, ‘in gleeful anticipation30 that his hip fans would howl in protest’. Instead, he fielded dozens of phone calls congratulating him ‘for playing something good, for a change’, and sales of the song soared the following day. ‘I never knew they were31 so square’, said Collins of his audience. But he gained so much publicity that when he moved to New York, he repeated the stunt with the Chordettes’ ‘Mr Sandman’.

  Mooney’s hit answered the question Jack Kapp had posed in the Decca studios before the war: ‘Where’s the melody?’ Brass, woodwinds, strings and what sounded like the entire membership of a big city glee club offered the melody and nothing but the melody: no syncopation, harmony or variation, merely the simplest and most memorable of tunes, with corny lyrics to match. Mooney was not alone: three months earlier, the biggest record in America had been Francis Craig’s ‘Near You’, another tavern singalong which opened with a honky-tonk ‘tack’ piano, redolent of the Old West (or at least its Hollywood equivalent).

  The country had been thrown headlong into one of the strangest eras in its musical history: a time when nothing counted more than novelty, unless it was the most basic form of nostalgia. Benny Goodman was reduced to declaring ‘Give Me Those Good Old Days’, with the vocal combo the Sportsmen requesting a return trip to ‘the golden past … when the boys played the melody’. Another singing group, the Pied Pipers, dredged the lake of banality to its bottom for ‘Ok’l Baby Dok’l’ and T. Texas Tyler introduced the world to the convoluted metaphor that was ‘Deck of Cards’. Eventually, even the likes of Frank Sinatra would be dragged into the mire. He was forced by his producer, Mitch Miller, to record ‘Mama Will Bark’, a novelty duet with TV glamour girl Dagmar, on which the one-time teen idol was required to bay like a ho
und. ‘I guess it sold32,’ Sinatra conceded, ‘but the only good it did me was with the dogs.’

  This, some jaundiced jazz writers complained, was the world that bebop had built: one in which an entire generation (or more, as these records sold to youngfn3 and old alike) had turned its back on the genre’s need for constant reinvention in preference for safer pleasures. This was a moment for nostalgia and simplicity, the two qualities not always coinciding. No sooner had swing been declared dead in America than it was back. Disc jockey Martin Block had hosted his Make Believe Ballroom radio show throughout the swing boom, and now he rejuvenated it in New York, prompting similar showcases across the country. Soon there were biographical movies about Glenn Miller (played by James Stewart) and Benny Goodman (Steve Allen in the lead role). The acetate discs of Goodman’s Carnegie Hall concert from 1938 were unearthed and spruced up for release. Returning to this music twelve years later, Metronome decided, ‘marks a kind of infantile34 regression which is more important psychologically than musically’. Meanwhile, as Glenn Miller wasn’t available to cash in on his posthumous fame, other men competed to carry his torch. The Miller estate initially gave his former sideman, Tex Beneke, the right to lead the orchestra after Glenn’s death, but withdrew permission in 1950, because he was shifting away from the original arrangements. So Beneke formed his own band in Miller’s image, as did other leaders keen to exhibit their willingness to stay in the past, such as Ralph Flanagan, Jerry Gray and Ray Anthony. After the biopic, the estate allowed another Miller alumnus, Ray McKinley, to resurrect the band.