Difference between revisions of "CugnyJazzEtRevolution"

Discussion

Jazz and Revolution by Laurent Cugny

Laurent Cugny Sorbonne University - Faculty of Letters Institute for Research in Musicology (IReMus, UMR 8223) International Research Center on Jazz and Audiotactile Music (CRIJMA)

CNED document, 2009.

The biggest difficulty, when we want to deal with a revolution in any field, lies, it seems to me, in the plasticity of the concept. This is necessary from the reading of the subject proposed to us, with the quotation marks and plural affixed to the word "revolutions." The former immediately indicate the embarrassment caused by the award of a label that always seems problematic, questionable. The second marks the multiplicity of occurrences and the difficulty in unifying them under a single concept.

The following characterization only reinforces this indeterminacy: it is suggested that revolutions can go "soft transformation to radical change," "of the gradual exit of a tradition to a real rupture of language", i.e., two palettes delimited by terms in marked opposition. We will therefore try in this text to consider some aspects of this relative indeterminacy, first reasoning abstractly, on the "naked" concept. Then we will examine two other general aspects. The first concerns a privileged field of application of the concept, that of political and social history in that it can serve as a more or less explicit reference for its use in the field of music. The second relates to reception, the mythological burden that the revolutionary idea can carry and its role in the musicological imagination.

These few reflections will be limited to the field of jazz. For this, we will refer mainly to three moments in its history.

1. The birth of this music, which spreads over a relatively long period of time, whose boundaries are nothing less than problematic.

2. The Bebop, a much shorter moment and better located in time.

3. The simultaneous emergence of free jazz and so-called "modal" jazz at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s. We will start with some historical details about these three moments.

Historical reminders

The birth of jazz is a phenomenon spread over time, even though we have a landmark, precise to the day: February 26, 1917. That day is engraved by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band in New York on behalf of the Victor label, which is considered the first jazz record. If the authenticity of the music transcribed on this first disc has been (and sometimes still) debated (they are mainly white musicians recording far from New Orleans), the fact remains that the consensus has been firmly established on the validity of this event as a landmark. From that day on, we are sure that jazz exists. Especially historically, since from that date, the acoustic trace, relistenable, archivable, analysable, becomes available, thus definitively passing the Jazz from an oral regime to a phonographic regime. The absence of this trace before this date is precisely one of the factors that obscures the issue of birth. However, another mark is accepted: the decisive importance of the orchestra of New Orleans trumpeter Buddy Bolden from 1895, which is believed to be the first jazz orchestra, although this award is now based on oral testimonies from all missing persons, no recorded traces remaining from this formation. While it is obvious that, like all phenomena of any impact, it is impossible to assign a date of birth as precise as for proof of existence such as the 1917 registration can constitute one, the problem of documentation (rather than its absence) increases the difficulty.

Like all genealogies, we can trace that of jazz as far as desired. At the arrival of the first black slave on North American soil at the beginning of the 17th century or even before, in the history of African and European music that is the source of new music. While it is clear that the confrontation for more than two and a half centuries of two transplanted and antagonistic population—settlers of European origin and slaves from Africa—forms the crucible from which jazz will eventually emerge, it is nevertheless impossible to talk about jazz before the Emancipation of Slaves whose process lasted from 1865 to 1868. It is also clear that from the latter date, North American music will evolve rapidly, an evolution from which two of the founding music of jazz will emerge: blues and ragtime. With the Negro Spiritual that originates during slavery, the three decisive elements meet for a future fusion into the new object that interests us. We can therefore remember two periods: 1868–1895 and 1895–1917. They will be called here respectively prehistory of jazz and elementary jazz, considering that during the first, jazz is being formed and that in the second, it exists, without, however, having the phonographic trace that would make it possible to comment on it on pieces.

The delimitation of the bebop period is much easier. The date of birth is set at 1944–1945, in a period of a few months during which certain founding events gather, in particular public performances and recordings of the duo of musicians attached to this style: Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. This is the opposite of the previous discussion: we know quite well when the phenomenon begins but less when it ends. Indeed, since it still plays with bebop today, we could legitimately consider that it is a style that is always alive and in perpetuation. But a consensual opinion was imposed, according to which around 1949 the founding period of bebop ended with the appearance of some of these derivatives, first cool jazz and then hard bop, initiated by a second generation of musicians, who sometimes have only a few years younger than the founders.

Our third reference period is two-headed. Within a few months, in 1959 and 1960, two decisive trends appeared: modal jazz and free jazz. The first was in gestation throughout the second half of the 1950s. The initial recording considered as part of the modality in jazz is the "Milestones" engraved by Miles Davis on February 4, 1958. But the founding act retained by jazz stories is the Kind of Blue album by the same Miles Davis, engraved on March 2 and April 22, 1959. Another name is associated with this style, that of John Coltrane and his quartet now called "classical", in operation from 1960.

As for free jazz, its date of birth is even more precise: on December 21, 1960, Ornette Coleman recorded an eponymous album, "Free Jazz," accompanied by a subtitle: "A Collective Improvisation by the Omette Coleman Double Quartet." We generally do not care to draw an end to these two contemporary and parallel movements, so much they have marked and irrigated jazz to the present day. However, they are associated with the entire 1960s, with the emergence of jazz-rock (or jazz fusion) at the edge of the next constituting the beginning of a later stage.

We will come back to this, but we immediately notice that in the collective imagination of the commentary on jazz (historical, journalistic, literary, etc.), the idea of revolution applies more readily to bebop and free jazz than to modal jazz. Regarding the birth of jazz, the question remains more blurred because the phenomenon is itself more difficult to understand.

The Concept

This concept appears to be particularly polymorphic, even paradoxical. His apprehension by common sense supports it with the idea of a large-scale change. and involves the comparison of two successive states, a society, an art, a knowledge or other. This change can be considered from two main angles: the nature, the reality of this change on the one hand, its manifestations on the other.

The tabula rasa does not exist, everything, during a mutation, does not disappear from the old state, parts of the past necessarily remain in any present. The similar and the different always coexist. The discussion then focuses on the respective weights of the persistent and the new. If the first is considered predominant, we will rather talk about evolution. Otherwise, it will begin to be a question of revolution. This is then linked to the idea of a paradigm shift. We no longer act, we no longer think, we no longer judge in the same way beyond the dividing line represented by the revolutionary moment, which thus clearly delimits a before and an after.

Revolution is also often associated by this same common sense with another idea: that of rupture, which comes in two forms. The first concerns its content and is embodied archetypically in the figure of the epistemological leap. The irruption of an idea, often simple, represents a step aside that radically transforms the way of thinking and perceiving. Copernicus reverses an elementary proposition (the sun revolves around the earth) and we no longer think of the world in the same way. Proportionately speaking, Jean-Jacques Nattiez sees a process of this type with the Schenkerian proposal in musical analysis:

“In the history of musicology, we can recognize two major families of analysis of musical structures. The most widespread is the one that, according to various methods and with more or less precision, strives to break down a musical piece into shorter and shorter segments: the exhibition, development and re-exposure in a sonata, the musical phrase with its history and consequent, the theme, the motif, the interval outline, chords, etc. This approach can be described as taxonomic, because it proposes to classify musical segments. [...] And then, at the beginning of the century, in Austria, there was a small revolution in the conception of music theory with Heinrich Schenker [...]. Schenker proposes to follow in tonal works the extension of each of the constituent heights of the harmonic structure. The model is no longer taxonomic but linear, it no longer focuses on what segments, but on the contrary on what binds the musical fabric together.”¹ (Footnote 1: Nattiez 1999, p. 48.)

"Small" revolution, very local certainly, but which deserves its name by the fact that a before and after appear. We no longer think the same, we no longer see the same after the revolutionary event (here Heinrich Schenker's theory). The revolution then has something irreversible, a notion on which the modern, teleological, linear vision of progress is based, as expressed here for music André Hodeir with the metaphor of the staircase:

"One step after another: that's right. A style takes root in the one that preceded it, flourishes freely, and in turn gives birth to a new style. There are, of course, wider steps than others, but none that does not matter in the continuity of time. A steep march, a sudden turn, and the music takes off again, an unexpected direction. It is, at the beginning of the 5th century, Peri and Caccini creating lyrical art, Monteverde upsetting musical language. Here, there seems to be a rupture, and yet this revolution, the greatest in the history of music, has been prepared at length in previous centuries; it does not break out only in Italy, but is unleashed everywhere at once. In England, madrigalists and virginalists set the tone; in France, court air and ballet music will very quickly make us forget the polyphonic songs of the Renaissance. A few more years and there will be little trace of medieval art.”² (Footnote 2: Hodeir 1948, p. 11.)

The revolution is an "abrupt" march, "a sudden turn." But it is still part of a staircase, dependent on the other steps and forming a whole with them.

The second modality of revolutionary rupture is embodied in a cathartic event, often short and violent, located in space and time, (the capture of the Bastille, the capture of the Winter Palace, the fall of the Berlin Wall). In music, it is often particular works that fill this function.

"Then there is the revolution triggered by Schoenberg. Even if Liszt had written "Nuages Gris" (1881), a piece devoid of any precise tonal stability, and Bagatelle, without tone (1885), with an unequivocal title, it was in Schoenberg's "Three Pieces for Piano," Opus 11 (1909), radically atonal, that traditional landmarks are suspended.”³ (Footnote 3: Nattiez 2003, pp. 39–40.)

However, the rupture is not consubstantial with the idea of revolution, which is expressed by a series of expressions such as "quiet revolution," "soft revolution," "silent revolution," which could appear as oxymorons if they were not so commonly used. In this pattern, we move from one state to another, radically different, but gradually, smoothly (the revolution in the means of communication has gradually transformed the world). The epistemological jump is then the effect of a qualitative jump. A process of expansion brought to a certain point sees its object change in nature without being able to really locate a "t" moment for a transmutation that does not manifest itself in the form of a rupture.

Finally, we can note a position that tends to relativize or even deny the very possibility of the revolution. We sometimes refer to the original astrophysical meaning of the word, which refers to a circularity and a return to the starting point (the path travelled in a year by the Earth), therefore identically (the revolver etymology refers to a step backwards). Without going to this end of the return to the same, the revolution can be seen as one moment among others of a non-linear evolution:

But this does not mean that creators are always "going forward" in the search for increasingly radical innovations. Looking more closely, it is obvious that the moments of invention, revolution or rupture, so characteristic of the 20th century, are close to or alternate with phases of extension or return to styles of the past, with periods of renewed attention to the perceptual abilities of listeners. Avant-garde demands can coexist with hedonism... This still seems to be the case in the history of music: in the 14th century, the Ars nova was followed by Burgundian song; Bach's contemporaries did not welcome the complexity of his writing and preferred Handel's "simplicity" to him [...] ; Brahms proposed a kind of romantic "neoclassicism".⁴ (Footnote 4: Ibid., pp. 41–42.)

It is the modern vision of progress that is challenged here. If revolution, in the current sense, obviously cannot be associated with the return to the identical, to immobility, the rupture it creates is sometimes thought of as a jolt, opening up a possible return to the previous situation.

Even when it happens, the cathartic moment is sometimes considered only as an outbreak of fever, an illusion, which can announce a restoration of the ancient state. Here comes the historical debate between the long and short times of history. For the supporters of the first, the short time of the event is always a form of illusion, foam. The changes in the world are the result of very long-term phenomena. This vision can go as far as the "immobile time" dear to some historians:⁵ nothing basically really changes, human action is only agitation. In these two declinations, revolution is no longer associated with the idea of rupture or non-rupture, but of false rupture.

(Footnote 5: "The Braudélien staggering [Fernand Braudel, French historian (1902–1985)] from immobile history to rapid history is in fact a major decision on the respective importance of the different parts of reality studied and on the meaning of causalities. [...] Immobile weather experiences fluctuations, oscillations, in short, it is not really immobile. We remain in the temporality of history. But the concept implies a position in favor of the long term. What is slowly changing is therefore erected as a major determinant, and what is changing rapidly is assigned to the secondary, even subsidiary, regions of history. The bias on time is also a global interpretative party that is better to explain. We see the decisive importance, in the construction of history, of work on time. It is not just an order, a chronological storage, or a structuring in periods. It is also a hierarchy of phenomena according to the rate at which they change. The time of history is neither a straight line, nor a broken line made of a succession of periods, nor even a plane: the lines he crosses make up a relief He has thickness, depth. (Prost, 122–123))

Bebop offers a very typical example of a debate on the revolutionary nature of a phenomenon, in this case very local since concerning music, in music, jazz, in jazz a particular moment. The previous state is swing, a predominant style between about 1935 and 1944. A few years after this last date, we agree that the situation of jazz is radically different, on all levels: idiomatic, social, cultural, etc. The comment on this phenomenon then offers an interesting example of debate. Between evolution and revolution, based on the evaluation of the similar and the different, the persistent and the unprecedented.

Jazz historian Scott DeVeaux, in a book devoted precisely to the birth of bebop, tried to reflect, from this phenomenon, on the difference between evolution and revolution, continuity and discontinuity.

“If we accept "jazz" as a general framework [as in the idea of "jazz tradition"], the question of the origins of bebop goes back to the more limited (and manageable) problem of the transition from one phase of jazz to another [...]. It is not surprising that this view of history favors continuity over discontinuity. Although we cannot fully slip into the distinctive identity of each jazz style, similarities must take precedence over differences if jazz is to show the coherence of a totality. The process of change that connects these styles is seen as a gradual, linear evolution, preserving essential qualities even if it introduces innovations, thus continually affirming the integrity of the whole.

In contrast, let's consider the trope of revolution: bebop as a rejection of the status quo, a clear break with the past, leading to something authentically new, in a word as discontinuity. This aspect of bebop, so obvious in the phrase "the bebop revolution", seems to contradict the evolutionary flow of the jazz tradition. Finally, any disjunction can be justified by modernist rhetoric, which, by its insistence on the need for radical innovation, continues, suggests that the process of growth in a musical tradition is probably punctuated by many such revolutions. [...] </p>

There are two very different avenues to understand Bebop as an historical phenomenon. The evolutionary approach is largely favored by critics, music researchers, musicians—in fact, all those who focus primarily on music itself and for whom Bebop is at the heart of the "jazz tradition." Those who prefer to see music as the manifestation of social or political currents of American culture, tend to consider the trope of the revolution as a more sympathetic and powerful means of explanation.”⁶ (Footnote 6: DeVeaux 1997, pp. 3–4.)

We see that Scott DeVeaux indexes the two envisaged biases—continuity or discontinuity, evolution or revolution—to more general conceptions whose final posture would only be an avatar. But this is another point that seems to me questionable here. For the author, the dividing line would be between, on the one hand, those who postulate a degree of musical autonomy ("criticists, music researchers, musicians"), and on the other, those who limit or deny this autonomy by first considering music as a manifestation of broader and encompassing phenomena, in this case cultural. However, it seems to me that this dividing line is questionable. We can very well, in a musicological vision in the strict sense, designate as decisive the elements of continuity rather than those of discontinuity, or vice versa, and thus lean towards a characterization of evolution or revolution. On the issue of language, it is relatively easy to identify idiomatic elements that exist in swing and remain in bebop. As well as finding others that the bebop invented. The same observation seems to me to be applicable.

To a more culturalist vision of the situation. The landscape of the "jazz world" is different at the time of bebop, but there are obviously some elements already present at that of swing. The dividing line between supporters and opponents of the thesis of bebop as a revolution therefore does not seem to me to cover the very real one that pits the proponents of musical autonomy against more or less radical culturalists7. In reality, it is difficult to distinguish between the discussion on paradigm shift and whether or not there is a break. For Gunther Schuller: These thoughts come to mind when we contemplate the great transition that occurred - as was the case - in the 1940s, and moved jazz from one idiom (called swing) to another (first called rebop or bebop, then just bop, and finally modern or progressive jazz). For what happened then was more an evolution than a revolution, and the similarities and commonalities between the two eras are as great as the dissimilarities. In fact, these developments spread over a substantial period of time - almost a decade, dating back to the late 1930s and not really consumed clearly until 1946 or 1947. Hundreds of individual contributions, large and small, helped to forge this entangled process, which, closely observed in its development day by day, was slow and painful, and met with considerable resistance. »8

It is striking that Gunther Schuller uses the same word "transition" already observed in Scott DeVeaux's quote. In the spirit of the first, it would be intended to avoid or circumvent the alternative evolution - revolution. The question of the level of observation is also asked. If we look closely (in a small dimension would say for example Jan La Rue), the phenomenon, on a daily basis, changes obviously can only be gradual and favor the idea of evolution at the expense of that of revolution. But, in any case, it is indeed an absence of rupture that is privileged here. Lucien Malson's position is a little different: In [19]41, however, this jazz that is now called "classical" begins to turn in circles. [...] Jazz is stalling. [...] An era is dying or rather is about to survive. However, we are on the eve of a revolution even more striking than that of 35, a revolution that will not break with the past but exploit, to their extreme consequences, the possibilities opened by middle-jazz, by the Body and Soul of Coleman] Hawkins, by the capricious solos of Lester Young and Roy Eldridge, by the designs of Cly The records of Christian's formation prove that the boppers in [19145, ending a chapter of jazz, drew a conclusion just as they wrote the introduction to future aesthetics. Bop was a revolution precisely because the musical renaissance took place in jazz settings. He tied the past and the future even as he separated them. »9

It is understood that a whole range of intermediate positions exists.

8 Schuller 1989, p. 846.

9 Malson 1961, p. 15–16.

So there is no break with the past, but "exploitation". It is the idea of the qualitative leap that is expressed here: by dint of being the same, jazz becomes different. The consequences of a situation, drawn to their limits, make it dissolve and transmute into another unprecedented situation, which then makes it possible to speak of a revolution. This position is opposed to that of Scott DeVeaux since the preservation of "jazz executives", from which we do not go out, does not, however, prevent a paradigm shift. The positions of Gunther Schuller and Lucien Maison are therefore close in that they favor the element of continuity while accrediting, especially in the latter, the reality of a revolutionary mutation. No frank break therefore, nor no cathartic moment. This position appears to be rather minority. We have more often spoken of the bebop revolution by accrediting the simultaneity of paradigm shift, rupture and cathartic moment'°

The moment of the appearance of jazz is a completely different situation because it extends over a much longer period of time and in addition, there is no obvious cathartic moment (neither 1895 nor 1917 can be considered as such). It is rather the figure of the "quiet revolution" that is highlighted, for example by Winthrop Sargeant, as early as 1938: Many current writings by "New Orleans style" aficionados give the impression that the North, East and West knew virtually nothing about jazz until the Blacks of New Orleans brought their art to Chicago. This, of course, is inaccurate. By the time "King" Oliver and his companions began to work seriously in Chicago, jazz orchestras had already been abounding in the country from coast to coast for almost a decade.[...] For almost fifteen years, jazz, in one form or another, had made sporadic appearances in the largest American cities. It wasn't called jazz at the time, but it was a kind of music different from what was played in old-fashioned restaurants and hotel orchestras. [...] It was perhaps undifferentiated jazz, a part cluttered with vaudeville clowns, others with an insipid sentimentality. But everyone was talking about a new syncopated musical language. And at the end of the First World War, it became a fairly standardized art form, and assumed the character of a popular musical revolution.

»11

This lack of rupture does not prevent, on the contrary, the idea of the epistemological leap, which is expressed in particular by Robert Goffin: The profound revolution in American musical art is in my opinion as essential as the one that, in the sixteenth century, definitively transformed the polyphonic music expressed by the Walloon school and the famous Roland de Lassus. Jazz is not new music: it is a new design based on total rhythm, while classical composers had mainly been inspired by the power of melody.

»12

10 We should say cathartic moments, in this case the appearance in club of Dizzy Gillespie with Oscar Pettiford in 1944, the recordings of 1944 and 1945, especially the session of November 26, 1945 during which Charlie Parker engraves "Koko". Sargeant 1975, p. 226-227. 12 Goffin 1945, p. 19.

Always involves a part of contingency, and concrete peculiarities necessarily disturb the beautiful order of concepts. >>14

This concept is therefore relatively indeterminate. In my opinion, this contingency implies a form of metaphorization: in a way, any use of the word refers to other uses. The two major revolutionary models, so to speak, are the political and social revolution and the scientific revolution. We know that a whole range of positions are encountered in the question of the evaluation of the role of the context, from the demand for absolute autonomy of the musical freed from any influence of it, to a pure theory of reflection where the effectiveness of the musical is fully denied, reduced that it is to a possible incarnation, among others, of the cultural, social, political or other data of Depending on the position in this scale of recognition of musical autonomy, the revolutionary concept will be used more or less metaphorically and especially with a different reference model. For proponents of maximum musical autonomy, the use of the idea of revolution then focuses on language, on the idiom, entirely circumscribed to the musical field in the strict sense. If there is a revolution, it will rather resemble a scientific revolution, but it is in no way indebted to a state of context. At the other end of the spectrum, a revolution in music may only be seen as a local modality of a revolution necessarily taking place elsewhere than in the musical and which will constitute its ultimate origin. The metaphor will then rather borrow from the model of political and social revolution. These two positions will be called respectively "autonomist" and "culturalist", bearing in mind that they are rarely defended so clearly and that all intermediate shades meet.

Jazz could not help but be culturalist by the evidence of the link with the phenomenon of slavery in North America. No one could have supported a radically autonomist thesis, imagining the emergence of jazz "from nowhere". Jazz, as I have already said, is a revolution of the musical proletariat of performers against the conservative caste of creators. For the first time, in the history of music, the phenomenon of creation is torn from its former masters. He passes into the power of the servants who will give him an upsetting and wild sense of beauty. »15

This quote explicitly invoking the idea of revolution, from the pen of Robert Goffin, one of the first great thurifers of this music and a great defender of the African-American community, is very interesting because it can be read on several levels. In the first degree, the author evokes the reversal of jazz, by which he gets closer to music of oral tradition where performance is more important than the composition serving as his starting point. Goffin, in a metaphorical second degree, assimilates it to a seizure of power by the "musical proletariat of performers" against the "conservative caste of creators", that is, orchestral musicians against composers (and perhaps conductors). Which is of course, to a third degree to be read in filigree, a metaphor or modality of the revolt of African slaves against their white masters. But the double phenomenon of acculturation and dazzling expansion of jazz even after its birth (1910s and 1920s) saw many observers turn away from the question of origins to take an interest in music "in itself". Robert Goffm and Hugh

'Prost 1996, p. 137. 15 Goffin 1945, p. 96.

Panassié, in France, fought with all their strength against this trend by making themselves the lyrical and possessive singers of an essential negritude in their eyes, by making jazz above all the mode of expression of an African-American community, against those who would have forgotten it and would only hear a musical novelty. The rigors of segregation and the opportunities for social advancement offered to African Americans by the success of jazz have pushed the musicians themselves to stay relatively outside this debate. They were primarily concerned with making their music and building their careers, which they could later be criticized. This was the case in particular for Louis Armstrong who, in the eyes of some, would have played a little too complacently the game of the good Black with bright teeth and a touching smile, for a white audience too happy to see this stereotype embodied. This is the accusation of "uncletomism"16. Whatever the way we look at these facts of the early days of jazz, bebop, later, was for many seen and perceived as a kind of "return of politics", in this case as the reappropriation by African-American musicians of music of which they would have been somehow dispossessed by show business, either to their defending body, or that they themselves were accomplices The "be-bop" revolution was as much political as musical. The frenzied hostility to musicians of the "Uncle Tom" genre who, for the first time, divided the community of jazz musicians into factions engaged in violent quarrels, the passionate insistence they put on inventing music so difficult that they - whites who have always managed to draw money from black achievements - will no longer be able to steal it", the They defended a certain conception of the role of the artist and the black intellectual, both in their own world and in that of whites whom they called "ofays" - a term slang derived from cooking Latin and meaning enemy, in itself revealing racial tension. Their music would be as good as that of whites, even in the field of art music, but would be based on black foundations. There was, in this attitude, all the resentment and insecurity of blacks who had tried the old recipe for equality - emigration to the North - and who realized that the further they moved away from Uncle Tom's country, the further away seemed to be the world in which there would be neither whites nor blacks, but only American citizens. Worse still, they were isolated in the black world itself. They had risen, thanks to their talent and work, above the level of simple day laborers who were theirs at the beginning, in any case they hoped to do so, as artists or intellectuals. But they were rejected not only from the white world, but also from the black middle class, this narrow world of gentrified employees and members of the liberal professions who, aware of their impotence, tried to hide it by monkeying the white petty bourgeoisie. It is not surprising that the social behavior of these black artists was finally anarchic and bohemian, their music a gesture of multiple challenge. Paradoxically, these revolutionary efforts were very quickly recognized, but it was mainly thanks to the

16 Expression that refers to Uncle Tom's Box, a novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe, serialized in 1852, which staged all the stereotypes of a paternalistic and angelic vision of slavery.

Whites and not to the black bourgeoisie who ignored them. White trade professionals, always on the lookout for the novelty that pays off, turned the "bop" into a slogan. -17

I don't think things happened so sharply. But in any case, this political vision has been accompanied by the demand for a more culturalist and less purely musical vision of this music. An approach to bebop that focuses more closely on musical style [...] tends to avoid subjects with racial, political or economic ramifications, or at least anything that could distract from the real question: understanding stylistic development. The other subjects are so basic for discipline that they are considered obvious.

Few authors, for example, critically examine the basic data that bebop belongs to a higher category called jazz. They consider that bebop is better seen, not as an isolated phenomenon of popular culture, but as a phase of an artistic tradition whose history can be expressed as a coherent progression encompassing almost a century of continuous innovation, from New Orleans dance music to avant-garde experimentation. "Jazz tradition" [...] is an art form with internal coherence, distinct from the rest of twentieth century American music (not to mention European concert music) and governed by its own logic. »18

There is a fairly simple logic here, which could be summarized as follows: "if we have forgotten the political and cultural claim of this music to see in jazzmen only entertainers or musicians without social conscience, it is precisely because we only listened to the music without wanting to take into account what was around". It will be observed, however, that this culturalist claim manifested itself with a certain discrepancy, expressed more from the 1960s than on the very moment of the bebop phenomenon, namely the mid and late 1940s. In the meantime, free jazz had arrived, which was perceived as flowering, the ultimate deployment of a movement of which bebop would have been somehow the launch. While the bebop musicians themselves had expressed relatively little on these issues, some of the African-American musicians of the 1960s will be much more explicit in their positions, in the discourse on the one hand, but also in various attitudes such as a marked reference to Africa, the creation of collectives, etc. This movement has found its theorists in personalities such as LeRoi Jones (who will later take the name Amiri Baraka) or in France Philippe Carles and Jean-Louis Comolli, who deliver in their book Free Jazz, Black Power an analysis very close to an integral theory of reflection. The "free" of free jazz not only signals the rejection and/or exceeding of a number of musical standards that were those of jazz, it opposes colonized music to music and culture involved in and produced by the anti-imperialist and revolutionary struggle. Situation, at the intersection of the cultural field and the political field, summarized quite well by Archie Shepp: "the new jazz is old jazz. Nothing really

'Newton 1966, p. 82-83. 18 DeVeaux 1997, p. 3.

Again in there, if not a message that had never been formulated until now. [...] Black Americans, for a long time, were imposed a point of view that was not theirs." What happens in the free jazz of properly musical innovations is first and foremost an effect and symptom of a more general change: the relationship of black Americans to their culture, the place it comes to play directly in their political struggles. As we can see, the analysis and valorization of the only musical transformations carried out by free jazz would amount to obscuring what, at the political level, determines them, thus finally obscuring the political body itself. »19

The allusion to the revolution is all the more interesting here because it concerns a social revolution called for by the authors, of which free jazz would be only one of the warning phenomena among others, a pure reflection of this fundamental movement - even though a musical non-revolution is claimed. According to the authors - and saxophonist Archie Shepp, one of the most prominent spokespersons for this trend - if free jazz can appear superficially as musically revolutionary, it is actually only a return to the roots of jazz and its Africanity. A very striking paradox: the social revolution (to come) is of the type of the great historical revolutions, while the musical revolution resembles that of the earth returning to the point of origin after going around the sun. The use of the image of the revolution therefore appears as one of the countless facets of the eternal debate on the link between music and society. The temptation is therefore great to see in the bebop "revolution" an avatar of a more political movement If only one movement in jazz can be considered as reflecting and incorporating the political tensions of its time - the aspirations, frustrations, and subversive sensitivities of an elite of African-American artists at a time of upheaval and rapid change - it was this musical revolution that took shape during and after the Second World War. "We were the first generation of rebels," recalls pianist Hampton Hawes, "playing bebop, trying to be different, going through many changes and coming out different from the process. What do these crazy negroes do to play this crazy music? Wild. Out of the jungle".,>20

Andrew Bowie theorizes the same idea through the notion of norm: Some jazz theory questions can highlight vital problems for a broader study of music. One way to approach these problems is to consider them in terms of the idea of "standards" in competition, i.e. waiting rules governing what is appropriate or inappropriate. Doing so makes it possible to connect historical and social issues to music, seeing how musical norms are linked to social norms. An example of such a connection: certain ways of playing jazz that seem closer to certain standards of classical music - such as part of the swing music of the late 1930s, elegant and very arranged - may end up appearing too formal and "correct" in some contexts. The bebop reacts to

9 Cartes & Comolli 1971, p. 20-21. 20 DeVeaux 1991, p. 542.

This situation by offering this situation a more aggressive and less "classical" musical alternative, often linked to a more affirmative social posture with regard to issues of racial and cultural injustice. At the same time, bebop can also be seen as linked to the social crises around the Second World War, which brought about rapid changes in the nature of music. A similar thing can be observed in the emergence of "free jazz" during the 1960s, which connects jazz to the more openly political posture of the civil rights movement of the moment by rejecting the musical norms of the "cool jazz" of the 1950s, because they can be associated with forms of political and social constraints. -21

Others, remaining in a partially culturalist vision, prefer to broaden the contextual horizon where the phenomenon is born: To understand how the bop revolution was inevitable, we must recognize several factors with profound implications. The upward direction to which I referred above was, again, not an isolated musical phenomenon occurring in a social vacuum. The whole world was torn apart by a global conflict, a political upside down of major proportions. The war had upset not only peoples and nations, but ways of life. The comfortable stability that jazz had finally achieved in the last years of the 1930s, taken in fact as America's one and only popular music, was suddenly broken, never to return in the same way.>>22

Revolution and mythology

Whether we judge, musically, that a phenomenon like bebop is revolutionary or not, whether we see it as a symptom of upheavals - revolutionary or not - of the society that gives rise to it, another point of view must be taken into account: bebop is a revolution because it has been perceived as a revolution. The aspect of reception is as fundamental as a certain objectivity of observing the transformations of the idiom or the link with the contextual situation. In this case, it is undeniable, given the many testimonies that attest to it, that bebop has created a shock for the vast majority of actors and observers. Here appears the symbolic and imaginary dimension of the revolutionary phenomenon. The mythological question enters the same movement: effective or not, revolutions are also dreamed of, an aspect of great importance in their impact. The mythology of bebop begins with a paradigm that is often found: the revolution is first fomented clandestinely by its actors in a conspiracy gesture (Lenin in France and Switzerland, the editors of Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia). In this case, the mythical jam sessions of Minton's Playhouse and Clark Monroe Uptown House fulfill this office. After hours, after official work, revolutionaries find themselves out of sight to foment the new language that, in its time, will come to light. If the repressive threat of power does not enter this picture, the dimension

21 Bowie 2009, p. 180-181.

22 Schuller 1989, p. 845.

Mythical conspiracy, however, works to the full. These are then the mythical moments of seizure of power, and especially the incarnation of the revolutionary movement in galleries of exceptional personalities. For bebop, undisputed leaders Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, but also Thelonious Monk - a character less present in the foreground, but whose action is all the more striking because, difficult to grasp, she also smells of sulfur - the decisive lieutenants, Kenny Clarke, Max Roach, Bud Powell. All the roles of the revolutionary epic are filled here. If the metaphor of the political and social revolution focuses instead on the community and the long time - the revolutionary moment is the realization of large-scale collective movements with deep roots - the mythological aspect puts the spotlight on individuals and their will. But October's power over imaginations also comes from a resumption, more than a century away, of the strongest political representation of modern democracy: the revolutionary idea. This recovery has long been internalized by the Bolsheviks, who have been discussing the previous Jacobin since the beginning of the century. Before the 1914 war, Lenin and his friends were only a small extremist group of the Socialist International. When they are projected to the forefront of current events in the fall of 1917, it is not only because they are victorious. It is because they adorn with the irresistible charm of victory a historical mode of action where the European left recognizes its ancestors, and the right its enemies. Meeting that will be renewed throughout the 20th century, and thanks to which no territory, no country, however distant, exotic, however improbable it may be, will be considered incapable of being the soldier of the universal revolution.

What is so fascinating about the revolution? It is the affirmation of the will in history, the invention of man by himself, figure par excellence of the autonomy of the democratic individual. Of this reappropriation of self, after so many centuries of dependence, the French at the end of the 17th century had been the heroes; the Bolsheviks take over. The strangeness of this unexpected succession does not simply lie in the new dignity of a nation that has never been except on the margins of European civilization. He also wants Lenin to make the October revolution in the name of Marx, in that of the great countries of Europe that is the least capitalist. But, conversely, this contradiction between a belief in the omnipotence of action and the idea of the laws of history may well be what gives October 17 a share of its radiance on minds: to the cult of the will, a Jacobin heritage passed to the filter of Russian populism, Lenin joins the certainties of science, drawn from Capital. The revolution recovers in its ideological arsenal this substitute for religion that it missed so much, at the end of the 16th century, in France. By mixing these two modern elixirs par excellence in defiance of logic, it composes a drink strong enough to intoxicate generations of activists. - "

This mythological aspect of individual will is very sensitive in the first historiography of jazz. The great jazz men will therefore be those who, by their own means, can operate this neutralization. Louis Armstrong is accustomed to this miracle and this constitutes

23 Ferret 1995, pp. 106 –107.

Even the great psychological explanation of its perpetual value. He can, in a few seconds, enter a state of trance and abstract himself completely to let only the powers of his sensitivity speak. "24

The culturalist vision is more embarrassed by this aspect. If her general creed pushes her to minimize the role of individual will to prefer long time and the collective:

Finally, there is the resurgence of collective jazz popular identity, recently produced in a media series25 of romantic stories about remarkable individuals - almost invariably American and male, generally poor, often black, each time unique, natural geniuses - that transcended their humble origins to create very special music that makes America feel good, and the world feels good about America. Obviously, these are romantic fantasies that I find dangerous and that it is necessary to submit to critical examination." 26

Nevertheless, it is also tempted by mythologization27.

Two last points to finish, related to this question of mythology. The first relates to reception. The revolutionary moment is also the one that is perceived as such and remains in people's minds. It is absolutely striking to note the almost unanimity about the shock produced by the first recordings of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. The great oral history book on bebop, Ira Gitler's Swing to Bop, makes a very large number of contemporary bebop musicians speak, some of the major actors, but especially those who were to immediately take over. It is difficult to find a single one that does not express a form of amazement at the first confrontation with the new style, as evidenced by this small anthology of quotations. Frankie Socolow: "[Dizzy Gillespie with Benny Carter] was already in the new thing. It was so wild to hear someone like that. You knew that something new was happening. You knew it. The way he played the agreements. The way its entire design separated from what was happening. »28

Idrees Sulieman: "When we left Kansas City, we left I don't know where in South Carolina. After work, we go to eat and there was a jukebox. Every time he put a play, he played Jay McShann [he sings the solo of "Sepian Bounce"]. Then Porter [Kilbert] said, "It's him!" We: "Who?" "He is the violist". So we listen, and by the time we left the place that night, we knew. When To Wear

24 Goffin 1945, p. 122.

25 The author makes here a Ken Burns documentary series on jazz in which Wynton Marsalis participated.

26 Tucker 2004, p. 248-249. 27 See above the quote from Francis Newton. 28 Gitler 1985, p. 61.

Was back, he played the solo and we asked him to play it again and again. This is the first time I've really understood Bird. »29

Al Haig: "Playing with Dizzy and Bird was sometimes frenetic. It was new, it was grandiose, it was spectacular, it was curious. »30

The same feeling of shock was experienced far from New York, via the records. In California for example: Red Callender: - We played these records, went to a room and lived with them all night. It was incredible. Something from space. Someone comes from space. »31

Zoot Sims: "[... Harold West] sent me all these records, and I was amazed. I really didn't know what... My god, the way they played their instrument, and this music. [...] I can honestly say that there are none of these records that I didn't like, none of them. It was so different. I was amazed at what they were doing. But I couldn't help but love them: it was so musical. »32

Art Pepper. "This record ["Oop Bop Sh'Bam" and "That's Earl, Brother] was the first I heard and I was simply sick of it. Sick in the stomach. I just couldn't believe it. The next record, I think it was - Salt Peanuts", and this other, very fast, "Shaw `Nuff It was so fast, I've never heard anything like that. "My God, it's not possible." »33

As far as France: Charles Delaunay: - As soon as they heard about these records, the musicians began to come at eight o'clock in the morning to listen to them. Django Reinhardt, Stéphane Grappelli, Alix Combelle. Django was still wearing his pyjama top. The musicians came at any time of the day and night to hear them. »34

These testimonies alone would be enough to give a revolutionary dimension to the phenomenon. Bebop was perceived as revolutionary, so it is, one might say, barely abusively. Whether there has really been a paradigm shift, whether there has been a rupture or not, whether mythologies may have distorted the resonance of the event. The second point is of the same order. It is striking, in these same testimonies, to see often return a powerful nostalgia for the human bond created between the actors by the event. Many of them evoke a camaraderie, a form of euphoria, which we really want to attribute to the particular breath of particular stories.

29 Ibid., p. 71. "Sepian Bounce" is a song recorded on July 2, 1942 where we hear one of the first solos engraved by Charlie Parker. "Bird" is Parker's nickname.

30 Ibid., p. 144.

31 Ibid., p. 146.

32 Ibid., p. 152.

33 Ibid., pp. 152–153.

34 Ibid., p. 146. Charles Delaunay alludes here to the premises of the Hot-Club de France at 14 rue Chaptal in Paris, where musicians and amateurs gathered to listen to the novelties of the record that arrived from the United States in very small quantities.

Trummy Young: - I think Dizzy Gillespie took things from Bird and Bird took things from Diz. But every time they met on stage, it was competitive. For both of them. Their eyes were injected with blood every time. They adored each other. But they were trying to extend each other to develop. And for me, it was something fascinating. But they loved each other. »35

Conclusion

In provisional conclusion, one would be tempted to say that a musical movement can be considered revolutionary in some aspects and evolutionary or static under others. It would then be leaning towards a phenomenological rather than ontological apprehension of the concept. I would like to conclude by referring to the almost simultaneous appearance of modal jazz and free jazz, which can, in some aspects, be compared to the situation of scholarly music at the beginning of the 20th century. Free jazz, which was quickly called the New Thing, it seems to me, remains in people's minds, in commentary, in historiography, as if of a more revolutionary character than modal jazz. Why? Both have their mythical figures: Omette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, on the one hand, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, on the other. Both have their mythical moments: the albums Free jazz (Omette Coleman), Expression (John Coltrane) on the one hand, Kind of Blue (Miles Davis), Newport '63 (John Coltrane) on the other. Nor has the issue of reverberation (different from reception) in the sense of Leonard Meyer36, which refers to long-term influence. It seems obvious to me that the two styles have left a substantially equivalent (and very pervasive) mark in the jazz music that has succeeded them, until today. What then made it possible to separate the two movements and to associate the revolutionary idea more readily with free jazz and not modal jazz (Is Arnold Schoenberg more revolutionary than Claude Debussy)? I don't know. Perhaps the speeches of the protagonists: Omette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp were more prolific about the innovative nature of their production37, than Miles Davis, Bill Evans and John Coltrane, who showed less eagerness in this field. I would ultimately lean towards the mythological character: the revolutionary imagination has been more easily grafted on the free jazz object than on its modal contemporary. One last remark in the form of an enigma. As we know, the mythical moment of modal jazz is the album Kind of Blue (1959) and the precursor song "Milestones" of the same, recorded on February 4, 1958. Yet, as early as January 30, 1952, six years ago (an eternity for the history of jazz) Django Reinhardt recorded "Golden Arrow", a piece that bears all the characteristics of future modal jazz, from which Miles Davis might have been inspired for "Milestones"38. Why is this recording never cited as a precursor? I don't know.

Laurent Cugny

35 Ibid., p. 148.

36 Meyer 1967.

37 This is evidenced, for example, by the titles from Ornette Coleman's albums: "Something Else!," "To Who Keeps a Record," "The Art of the Improvisers," "Change of the Century," "Tomorrow Is the Question," "This Is Our Music," "The Shape of Jazz to Come," "Free Jazz" (which can also be translated as "Free Jazz").

38 Cf. Cugny 2006a and 2006b.

Bibliografía

Bowie, Andrew, 2009: « Jazz », An Introduction to Music Studies, Harper-scott, J.P.E., Samson, Jim, ed., Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, p. 176-187.

Caries, Philippe & Comolli, Jean-Louis, 1971 : Free Jazz, Black Power, París, Champ libre.

Cugny, Laurent : - 2006a : « Flèche d'Or : pourquoi ne l'a-t-on pas entendu ? », Les Cahiers du jazz, nouvelle série, n° 3, 2006, p. 82 - 87. - 2006b : «Le solo de Django Reinhardt dans Flèche d'Or», Les Cahiers du jazz, nouvelle série, n° 3, 2006, 213 - 218.

DeVeaux, Scott : - 1991: « Constructing the Jazz Tradition : Jazz Historiography », Black American Literature forum, Vol. 25, n° 3, Literature of Jazz Issue, automne 1991, p. 525-560. 1997: The Birth of Be Bop - A Social and Musical History, Berkeley, University of California Press.

Furet, François, 1995 : Le passé d'une illusion, París, Robert Laffont. Gitler,Ira, 1985: Swing to Bop, Nueva York y Oford, Oxford University Press. Goffin, Robert, 1945: Histoire du jazz, Montreal, Lucien Parizeau. Hodeir, André, 1948 : Introducción a la música de jazz, París, Larousse.

Maison, Lucien, 1961 : Histoire du jazz moderne, París, La table ronde.

Meyer, Leonard, 1967: Music, the Arts, and Ideas, Chicago, Chicago University Press.

Nattiez, Jean-Jacques : - 1999 : La musique, la recherche, la vie, Montreal, Leméac. - 2003 : « Comment raconter le XXe siècle », in Musiques, une encyclopédie pour le XXIe siècle, tome 1, Musiques du XXe siècle, Actes Sud / Cité de la Musique.

Newton, Francis, 1966: Une sociologie du jazz, París, Flammarion, 1966, (trad. franç. de l'édition révisée de 1961, 1 ère éd. en anglais 1959).

Osgood, Henry, 1926: « The Anatomy of Jazz », The American Mercury, abril de 1926, en Koenig, Karl, Jazz Print 1856–1929, an Anthology of Selected Early Reading in Jazz History, Hillsdale, Pendragon, 2002, pp. 466–473.

Prost, Antoine, 1996 : Douze leçons sur l'histoire, París, Seuil.

Sargento, Winthrop, 1975 : Jazz, Hot and Hybrid, Nueva York, Da Capo, 1 ère édition 1938.

Schuller, Gunther, 1989: The Swing Era, The development of Jazz, 1930–1945 Nueva York, Oxford University Press.

Tucker, Sherrie, 2004: « Bordering on Community, Improvising Women Improvising Women-in-jazz», en The Other Side of Nowhere - Jazz, Improvisation, and Communities in Dialogue, Daniel Fischlin, Ajay Heble, ed., Middleton, Wesleyan University Press, pp. 244–267.

NOTES