Gone are the (good) old days when jazz history presented a reassuring and rather high-minded progression from traditional to swing and on to bebop and beyond.
Musically, his career blazed a long and brilliant trail from bebop with Charlie Parker to epoch-making cool jazz, orchestral suites with arranger Gil Evans and landmark quintets which launched such young stars as John Coltrane and Herbie Hancock.
Mr DeVeaux concludes that bebop is "both success and failure...an art that touches on both the best and the worst of what it means to be an American"—an ambitious pronouncement borne out in the perceptive, far-reaching terms of his inquiry.
Yet even he only enjoyed, in the title of the book's final chapter, a "short stay in the sun".This fine history of jazz takes the story only as far as 1945, to the appearance of the first full-blown bebop recordings.
Swing and big-band had calcified into music for the parents; even bebop and hard bop were ceding ground to the unbounded explorations of John Coltrane and others.
He died at the age of 34, though the doctor who attended him thought he was twice as old; the year was 1955, when the paths of jazz and pop music were already fast diverging.One musician who did make a commercial success of bebop was Parker's canny cohort, trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, who led both big and small bands and presented himself as jester as well as virtuoso.
Some may prefer, say, New Orleans jazz to the less regional schools of bebop or free jazz, but nobody would seriously argue for the superiority of one over the other.
Good jazz and bebop, from American broadcasts, could not be picked up in much of the island.
Black musicians still found it harder to win reward and recognition than their white colleagues, though the author refuses to begrudge the success of such white groups as Woody Herman's dynamic First Herd.In addition, there were problems inherent in the reception of bebop among black audiences, who preferred the more straightforward appeal of rhythm and blues.
Suggest he was influenced by the pelting, intellectual strain of bebop that took over jazz in the 1940s, and he would say nope, he didn't listen to it; he only ever wanted to do his own thing.
In his teens, the budding master of bebop memorised Lester's solos, before bursting on the scene with a style of boggling complexity and fluency which virtually created modern jazz.
