More than fifty major figures in jazz preserve for posterity their recollections of how jazz moved from the big band era in the late 1930s and 1940s into the modern jazz period.
Surveys the entire field of jazz during the 1970s, with nearly fifteen hundred biographies providing information about and assessments of the musicians and composers who shaped the first half-decade's jazz world.
This indispensable book brings us face to face with some of the most memorable figures in jazz history and charts the rise and development of bop in the late 1930s and '40s. Ira Gitler interviewed more than 50 leading jazz figures, over a 10-year period, to preserve for posterity their recollections of the transition in jazz from the big band era to the modern jazz period. The musicians interviewed, including both the acclaimed and the unrecorded, tell in their own words how this renegade music emerged, why it was a turning point in American jazz, and how it influenced their own lives and work. Placing jazz in historical context, Gitler demonstrates how the mood of the nation in its post-Depression years, racial attitudes of the time, and World War II combined to shape the jazz of today.
Back in the early 1940s, late at night in the clubs of Harlem, a handful of jazz musicians began to experiment with a style that no one had ever heard before. The music was fast, complicated, impossible to play for many of the older musicians—but it soon became the lingua franca of jazz music. They called it bebop, and as the years went by, it became even more popular. Today it reigns as perhaps the best-loved style of jazz ever created. Ira Gitler conveys the excitement of this musical birth as only someone who was there can. In The Masters of Bebop, Gitler traces the advent of what was a revolution in sound. He profiles the leading players—Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillepie, Max Roach—but also studies the style and music of the first disciples, such as Dexter Gordon and J. J. Johnson, to reveal bebop’s pervasive influence throughout American culture. Revised with an updated discography—and with a new chapter covering bebop right up through the end of the twentieth century—The Masters of Bebop is the essential listener’s handbook.
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