Giant Steps: Bebop and the Creators of Modern Jazz, 1945-65

Giant Steps

Bebop and the Creators of Modern Jazz 1945–65

First published in Great Britain in 1999 by Payback Press, an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1TE

Copyright © Kenny Mathieson 1999

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 86241 859 3

eISBN 978 0 85786 617 2

Typeset by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd, Falkirk, Stirlingshire

This digital edition first published by Canongate in 2012

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Contents

Preface

Dizzy Gillespie

Charlie Parker

Fats Navarro

Bud Powell

Max Roach

Thelonious Monk

Charles Mingus

Sonny Rollins

Miles Davis

Herbie Nichols

John Coltrane

Selected Listening and Further Reading

Preface

Jazz is the great musical invention of the 20th century, and as that century reaches its end, it is a form which has evolved to provide a rich and complex history. Giant Step is the first in a planned series of books which will examine the music and its most important creators. It begins with the emergence of bebop, taking the music of Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Fats Navarro, Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk as its starting point, then moves through the subsequent extensions and developments within jazz composition, modal jazz, and free jazz reflected in the work of Charles Mingus, Max Roach, Sonny Rollins, Miles Davis, Herbie Nichols and John Coltrane.

The music of each of these great masters is examined in some detail, but in a fashion which will be accessible to the reader with no technical knowledge of music. Some basic technical matters are raised but readers should be aware that there are many ramifications to even apparently simple subjects in the realm of music theory, and even more so in practice. Happily, those interested in exploring these topics are well served with technical books and transcriptions covering all aspects of the subject.

The series grew out of a conviction that there existed a substantial gap in the bookshelves. Jazz has generated a great deal of writing over the decades, from fan-ish anecdote to impassioned polemic, the wildly impressionistic to the technically rigorous. The jazz fan now has an unparalleled choice of reading matter, with a mounting stack of reference works, histories and fast-multiplying guides to jazz on CD on the one hand, and copious biographies, reminiscences and scholarly critical studies on the other. What seemed to be missing, though, was a series of books able to offer both the curious general reader and the more committed jazz specialist considerably more substance than even a long entry in a general history or reference book could hope to do, but which would also provide an overview of a particular period, rather than focus on a biographical or analytical study of a single musician. The present series was conceived to fulfil that need. The last roughly comparable venture I am aware of is the Jazz Masters series originally published by Macmillan in the mid-1960s, focusing by decade on the major jazz figures. The fact that these books are still in print is testament to the appeal of the idea, but they are now thirty years old, and much has changed in our knowledge and understanding in the ensuing decades.

The present books will be organised by musical styles rather than chronology, and I will confess at the outset that any such ordering principle brings a certain arbitrariness with it. Stylistic definition is notoriously tricky in jazz, and some musicians allocated to a particular book would clearly fit just as well in another, while others would find a niche within more than one of the subject areas. Such arbitrariness will have to stand as a given of the series, as will the inevitable focus on the recordings of these musicians, something which will rankle with those who believe that jazz on record is only a pale shadow of the real thing. Nonetheless, the records are all that most listeners can now hope to have – no one much under seventy can have heard Charlie Parker in the flesh in his prime, and no one much under fifty will have experienced John Coltrane live, other than through the recorded or filmed legacy of long-gone performances.

Having entered these caveats, we hope these books will do several things, in addition to complementing the material already out there. For those coming fresh to the music, they will provide a substantial purchase on the work of the major figures involved in its creation (and I am painfully aware of the claims of those who will be left out), building volume by volume into a wide-ranging overview of the music, while the seasoned jazz listener will find them substantial enough to merit attention, even in discussion of artists as much written-about as most of those included in Giant Steps.

Having laid down the central spine of modern jazz in this book, the series will move into less comprehensively covered territory in the subsequent volumes, addressing topics such as hard bop, cool and mainstream jazz, the post-bop and modal developments of the 1960s, and free jazz, to cite only those currently mapped out. These books will contain shorter but still very substantial essays on figures who have received rather less attention than Bird or Miles or Trane, but who have played their own significant parts in creating some of the most exciting music of the 20th century.

The next book, Cookin’: Hard Bop and Soul Jazz, will look at the work of familiar names like Art Blakey, Horace Silver, Lee Morgan and Cannonball Adderley, but also at less widely written-about musicians such as Booker Ervin, Elmo Hope, Tina Brooks and Gigi Gryce, figures on whom little is readily available at this level of scope and accessibility.

I am indebted to my editors at Canongate, Jamie Byng and Colin McLear, not only for their work on the book, but also for their sympathetic and enthusiastic acceptance and support of this project. I am also deeply grateful for the support of my wife, Maggie, who is no jazz fan, but has learned to live with my obsession. The book is dedicated to the memory of my mother, Helen Mathieson, who died shortly before its completion and who gifted me – among many other things – both the desire to be a writer and the beginnings of my love of jazz.

It would be remiss not to make at least a general acknowledgement of the various publications which have featured my work over the years, and also the influence of the many fine writers on both sides of the Atlantic who have informed my understanding and enhanced my enjoyment of jazz. I hope that this book and its successors can give readers the same kind of pleasure, inspiration, elation and provocation as I have had from hearing, studying, writing about, and – above all – enjoying this great music.

Kenny Mathieson

Dizzy Gillespie

Unlike Charlie Parker, who burned with incandescent brilliance and died young, Dizzy Gillespie carved out a lengthy career and became a respected elder statesman of the music, which is an unhip thing to do in jazz mythology. In the birth of bebop, though, his pyrotechnic brilliance was the perfect foil for Parker’s own, and was underpinned by a more thorough understanding of harmonic theory than many of his contemporaries routinely possessed. If Dizzy is assured immortality on the strength of his contribution to the emergency of bebop alone, his place in the history of 20th-century music will rest on a considerably wider achievement.

Dizzy also enshrined what many saw as a contradiction. Like Louis Armstrong, he was both a great innovator and a great entertainer, a man who did previously undreamed-of things on trumpet, but at the same time was ready and willing to mug furiously on stage, and, even worse, send up his own artistic inventions in songs like ‘He Beeped When He Should’ve Bopped’. His clowning antics have been held against him by those who saw them as either Uncle Tom-style servility or a betrayal of the sacred torch of musical revolution, but Gillespie was a natural showman as well as a brilliant musician, and is one of the select band of jazzmen who have become household names. Unlike Armstrong, he was no great singer and yet even on these novelty tunes his scatting was always highly inventive and musically sophisticated, a mixture of extraordinary skill and zaniness which is partly a reflection of his natural ebullience and partly a shrewd awareness of more practical necessities.

That combination of high artistic aspiration and street-smart commercial wisdom is reflected again and again in his life and work, and surely lies at the root of his complex personality. In later years, he became increasingly aware of the importance of his African roots and of the civil rights campaigns in America, and even ran for President in 1964 (and again, briefly, in 1972). Being Dizzy he did so under a ‘politics ought to be a groovier thing’ banner but behind the fun there lay a serious concern over the way things were run, especially from the perspective of black Americans.

Those qualities were formed early. As a child, he tells us in his memoirs, ‘mischief, money-making, and music captured all of my attention’, and he was to develop all three capacities in the course of his long life in jazz. He remained unapologetic about his antics throughout his career, from the zany dancing and novelty chants through to a routine which became a staple of his live shows, his announcement that he wanted to introduce the band, followed by his starting to introduce the musicians to each other. Dizzy was a natural comedian, and even though you knew it was coming, it was hard not to smile at his cornball schtick. In his autobiography, Dizzy – To Be Or Not To Bop, he claims there was also a more pragmatic purpose to his routines. (All quotations from Dizzy in this chapter are from that book, unless otherwise stated.)

People always thought I was crazy, so I used that to my advantage to attract public attention and find the most universal audience for our music. I fell back on what I knew. While performing modern jazz, I emphasized certain inimitable parts of my own style . . . Comedy is important. As a performer, when you’re trying to establish audience control, the best thing is to make them laugh if you can. That relaxes you more than anything. A laugh relaxes your muscles; it relaxes muscles all over your body. When you try to get people relaxed, they’re more receptive to what you’re trying to get them to do. Sometimes, when you’re laying on something over their heads, they’ll go along with it if they’re relaxed.’

He was born John Birks Gillespie in Cheraw, South Carolina, on 21 October, 1917, the youngest of nine children. His father was a part-time musician, but died when John was only ten. He began to teach himself trombone a couple of years later, then trumpet and cornet. His musical prowess earned him admission to the progressive Laurinburg Institute in North Carolina in 1933, where he played in the school band and continued to teach himself music, adding piano to his accomplishments. He quit school in 1935 and joined his family in Philadelphia, where he launched his professional career in a band led by Frankie Fairfax.

It was at this point that he acquired the nickname Dizzy, bestowed by another player in the trumpet section, Fats Palmer, on account of his habitual antics. That trumpet section later featured Charlie Shavers, one of the formative influences on Gillespie’s early style. Through copying Shavers, Dizzy also absorbed stylistic elements from the man to whom he owed the greatest debt as an influence at this formative stage of his career, Roy Eldridge. It was appropriate, then, that when he made his next move, to New York in 1937, he should end up occupying the lead trumpet chair in the Teddy Hill band, which Eldridge had held until earlier that year.

Indeed, Dizzy was allegedly hired largely because he could sound uncannily like Eldridge, notably in his speed and facility in the high register. His first recorded solo, on Hill’s version of ‘King Porter Stomp’ from a May session that year, bears out that suspicion. Gillespie has always acknowledged the debt, but what he went on to make of it was very much his own thing, as he developed an increasingly original musical conception over the next decade. As is always the way of it when something new happens along, some players put his harmonic innovations down to his playing wrong notes, but since he built one of the greatest careers in jazz on that foundation, I guess they must have been the right wrong notes.

Having established his presence on the competitive New York scene, including working with the Cuban band-leader Alberto Socarras, he was invited to join Cab Calloway’s successful outfit in August 1939, with a little help from another eminent Cuban musician, trumpeter Mario Bauza. These associations established an interest in Afro-Cuban music which would bear rich fruit in due course, but he was already developing into a formidable musician at this stage.

It has been argued that Lionel Hampton’s ‘Hot Mallets,’ cut on 11 September 1939 with a ten-piece all-star band which included Dizzy alongside swing era giants like Benny Carter, Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster, was the first recorded example of the emerging bebop style. That would certainly overstate the case, but it is another clear indication of the way Gillespie was moving; Hampton, who was then working regularly with Benny Goodman, recalled the circumstances in his autobiography, Hamp.

Diz was just coming up then. I’d heard him for the first time at the Apollo Theater a few days before. I went to the Apollo a lot – we all did. That was where you heard real black music. I was sitting behind the stage, and I heard this guy playing trumpet in a different style than I or anyone else had ever heard before. It was the new bebop style, and I said, ‘Man, I got to get this guy on my next recording session’. Some say that it was on those recordings we made, especially ‘Hot Mallets’, which I wrote, that early bebop was first recorded.

The two years the trumpeter spent with the Calloway orchestra were important ones, but his relationship with his employer turned sour when, in a famous incident, Calloway accused him of throwing a spitball at him on stage. It escalated into a backstage confrontation, and an indignant Dizzy, who was genuinely innocent on this occasion, pulled a knife and cut his accuser, which seems as good a way as any to lose a job. It could have been an even more serious matter.

He put his hands up in my chest and pulled me up, getting ready to hit me. He didn’t know I was getting ready to kill him. Oh, yes, I nicked him. He turned me loose, quick. When he saw that blood, nobody had to tell him to turn me loose. Milt Hinton grabbed my hand to keep me from really injuring him. I coulda killed him, I was so mad. It was a serious fight, a very serious thing, and somebody could’ve gotten really hurt because I’m a firm believer in non-violence when it comes to me.

Musically, though, the most significant events of his years with Calloway were happening elsewhere. Teddy Hill had disbanded his outfit (following, according to Dizzy, a falling out with the mob-backed promoters at the Savoy Ballroom) and in 1940 became the booking agent for a Harlem nightspot named Minton’s Playhouse, where he instituted a series of after-hours jam sessions. The musicians who gravitated to these sessions at Minton’s (and the slightly later scene which emerged at Clark Monroe’s Uptown House) were the ones with the most progressive ideas on the contemporary jazz scene of the day – Dizzy himself, Thelonious Monk, Kenny Clarke, Charlie Parker, Charlie Christian and numerous others, including many of the major soloists of the swing era.

Of those swing era soloists, Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young had the greatest influence on the emergence of bebop. In his exemplary study of the social and musical roots of the music, The Birth of Bebop, Scott DeVeaux looks in detail at Hawkins’s contact with and influence on the bop generation. As part of that examination, he considers the respective qualities which Hawkins and Young bequeathed to bebop.

Coleman Hawkins’s music was built on the principles of continuity and certainty. The certainty derived from the precision with which he understood the workings of tonal harmony. Each note of his improvisations finds its place within the framework of tonal relations implied by the tune . . . The appropriate rhetorical mode is thus continuity: an earnest, relentless building of intensity.

Bebop relied on these principles as well – at least as the underlying thread for most passages. But more broadly, it made striking use of the contrary principles of ambiguity and discontinuity. These qualities are notably absent from Hawkins’s music but salient in the music of Lester Young.

Hawkin’s approach ‘represents a narrowing of the possibilities open to a soloist’, since the ‘tendency is always to fill in, to flesh out, to maintain the illusion of harmonic movement even where it is absent’, while Young takes an opposite tack, preferring ‘to reduce the harmonic implications, often to the point of appearing to ignore harmonic movement altogether’, a strategy which created both an ambiguity in harmonic relationships, and allowed a greater rhythmic freedom.

An illustrative aside which provides a colourful description of Young’s attitude to harmonic movement is recounted in a memoir by pianist Bobby Scott. Scott recalled arriving at a club where Young was playing to be greeted by the saxophonist with the following complaint: Oh, Socks, baby, I’m glad to see you here! This boy playin’ piano plays very well. But he puts eight changes where there ought to be two! You know me, Socks. Somethin’ like These Foolish Things, I mean, I like the E-flat chord, the C-minor, the F-minor seventh, the B-flat nine. You know. Shit. I can’t play when there are eighty-nine motherfuckin’ changes in the bar!

Hawkins was the dominant model for the bebop players, but both he and young had their part to play in the evolution of the style, as DeVeaux suggests.

The bebop pioneers were, on the whole, too deeply invested in the orthodoxies of the time – the ‘progressive’ fascination with chromatic harmony, the professional advantage associated with overt displays of virtuosity – to model their style directly on Young’s understated approach. (It was not until considerably later, in the 1950s, that a younger generation of musicians would do so.) Nevertheless, they saw in Young’s example a way of extending the legacy of Coleman Hawkins and other harmonic improvisers in new and unexpected directions.

Minion’s became a forcing ground for the subsequent evolution of bebop. Many stories have been circulated about the exclusivity of the scene there. It has been said, for example, that Dizzy, Monk and Clarke operated a system designed to exclude white musicians from proceedings. If there was a bar in operation, however, it was not a matter of colour: the musicians have admitted many times that they would call tunes with difficult or unusual changes in order to weed out those players who could not handle the musical demands made on them. In an interview with this writer in 1989, Gillespie answered the charge that Monk in particular would try to scare off newcomers with his music by asserting that ‘the music wasn’t meant to keep nobody away, man, it was just plain hard’.

Trumpeter Johnny Carisi was one white regular able to hang in with the challenges, and as such was always welcome on stage, while the most notorious denizen of Minton’s was an apparently awful but unshakeably persistent black saxophonist from Newark known as The Demon, whom Dizzy dubbed ‘the first freedom player – freedom from harmony, freedom from rhythm, freedom from everything’.

Nonetheless, it would be foolish to ignore the racial dimension implicit in the developments at Minton’s. From the outset, black musicians had made the major creative explorations in jazz, while white musicians had won wider recognition and better rewards, usually on the back of those musical innovations. In 1917, the all-white Original Dixieland Jazz Band made the first jazz records, drawing on black forms (and in an even more ironic twist, it is said that trumpeter Freddie Keppard turned down the chance of that historic landmark because he was afraid other musicians would steal his ideas); in the 1920s, it was Paul Whiteman who was crowned King of Jazz, not Armstrong, Oliver, or any of the New Orleans pioneers; in the swing era, it was Benny Goodman who was dubbed King of Swing, not Duke or Basie or Fletcher Henderson or Jimmie Lunceford.

That pattern extended to jobs – the white bands played the best residences in the best hotels. The accumulation of bitterness implicit in all this bubbled under in the scene around Minion’s, which was less commercially-directed than on 52nd Street, and where many of the musicians saw themselves as engaged in creating a music which those outside of the circle could not readily imitate (a process which Charles Mingus characterised as the innovators being ripped-off by copyists ‘singing their praises while stealing their phrases’), or could only do so if they had the ‘chops’ and musicality to handle its ferocious challenges. The inner circle of bebop was also based on drug use to a large extent, but at root it was down to ability and had a brutally competitive edge, a point made by the bop pianist Hampton Hawes (whose own contribution to the music will be considered in a future volume). In his autobiography, Raise Up Off Me, the pianist recalls his first experience in New York in the 1940s.

One night at Minton’s, a club in Harlem where there were all-night sessions, somebody recognized me and said, ‘There’s a cat from California supposed to play good, let’s get him up here’. Now at that time there were a lot of East Coast musicians who thought it slick to try to shoot down anyone new on the scene who was starting to make a reputation. It was like an initiation, a ceremonial rite (chump, jump or I’ll burn you up, you don’t know nothin’), calling far-out tunes in strange keys with the hip changes at tempos so fast if you didn’t fly you fell – that’s how you earned your diploma in the University of the Streets of New York.

For a week I had watched these cats burning each other up, ambushing outsiders, fucking up their minds so bad they would fold and split the stand after one tune. Surprised by their coldness because they were so friendly off the stand. I peeked that I wasn’t quite ready, maybe they could get me; you don’t want to be a poopbutt but sometimes it’s better to pass, wait for a better hand. I knew I wouldn’t flop, but neither would I win acclaim. No point in selling tickets if you don’t have a show.

The challenge lifted me a few notches – I knew I had to go out and tighten my hand – and when I came back that way a couple of years later, strung out, five albums under my belt and a lot of playing with Bird, I was ready for them; they couldn’t make me feel funny anymore and left me alone after that. A drummer paid me the ultimate compliment after a set: ‘We been hearin’ about you out on the coast, you a bad motherfucker’. My days of being scared and nervous – at least about music – were over.

It’s too bad it had to be that way, cutting friends up to make them feel inferior so they could get better. That isn’t what music is about. You play for love and for people to enjoy. It’s okay to show a few feathers, you got to have pride in yourself, but you shouldn’t have to wear boxing gloves and spurs; this ain’t no cockfight or main bout at Madison Square Garden. We’re all brothers, aren’t we? – came up the same way, earned our diplomas listening, picking up, hanging out, nervous, some of us getting busted?

Even Hawes, however, then capitulates to the remorselessly Darwinian logic of the process at work. In a society where the ever-present taint of racism denied their achievements both as people and as musicians, and in which criticism of the new music also flowed from opposite poles of the black community (the older style traditional and swing musicians who put down the new music on one hand, the growing ‘respectable’ black bourgeoisie who were plain anti-jazz on the other), it provided an informal but highly codified means of allowing excellence to ride to the top, at least within the music’s own internal hierarchy. Hawes goes on to finish: ‘Yet when I think back, the system did serve a purpose. Blacks in those days had to bear down hard to handle the shadow that was always haunting them, and the constant challenge was the pressure cooker in which you earned recognition and respect. In the process, the music grew leaner, tightened up; the ones who didn’t have it, who couldn’t contribute, fell away.’

The environment which forged bebop was a tough one, but it meant that the music evolved as a meritocracy rather than a closed shop. That element of competitive muscle-flexing probably played its part in determining both the strengths and weaknesses of the emerging form, with its emphasis on virtuoso soloing, advanced harmonic understanding and crackling tempos, and its underlying structural paucity (the characteristic bebop tunes were simply blowing vehicles on a set of often very familiar chord changes, one of the things which would eventually prove to be a major limitation). Gillespie and his cohorts at Minton’s and Monroe’s were at the heart of that evolution. The musicians would play whenever their paying jobs permitted, and the sympathetic respective proprietors, Henry Minton and Clark Monroe, would often provide food, but no fee. Only the house band, which was led by trumpeter Joe Guy at Minton’s, and included Monk and Clarke, was paid, and the sessions were carried on in defiance of union regulations against sitting-in. The rest of the musicians had to be on their guard against hefty fines for playing without a contract if they were caught by union ‘walkers’, whose job it was to keep tabs on the after-hours proclivities of the members (and as the first black delegate to Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians, Henry Minton was in a more privileged position in that respect, although Gillespie was not alone in seeing the union as ‘just a dues collector’ with little of real benefit to offer the jazz musician). As he wrote in his memoir:

What we were doing at Minton’s was playing, seriously, creating a new dialogue among ourselves, blending our ideas into a new style of music. You only have so many notes, and what makes a style is how you get from one note to the other. We had some fundamental background training in European harmony and music theory superimposed on our own knowledge from Afro-American musical tradition. We invented our own way of getting from one place to the next . . . Our phrases were different. We phrased differently from the older guys. Perhaps the only real difference in our music was that we phrased differently. Musically, we were changing the way that we spoke, to reflect the way that we felt. New phrasing came in with the new accent. Our music had a new accent.

The new rhythmic accents and evolved harmonies of bebop began to take on shape in these jam sessions, most of which went unrecorded. Some private tapes have survived, however, the best known of which is Jerry Newman’s wire recording of May 1941, which has been issued in a number of formats. The music is clearly poised in transition between swing mannerisms and the emerging modernist concept. Gillespie features on three of the tunes, the uptempo ‘Kerouac’ and two versions of Hoagy Carmichael’s famous ballad ‘Stardust’, and while he is not at his best in them, they confirm the evolution in his style which was increasingly evident at this time.

If Gillespie was a prime mover in the emerging new music, so too was the drummer at Minton’s, Kenny Clarke, who adopted the Islamic faith and the name Liaquat Ali Salaam in 1946, but continued to work under his given name. Clarke was born in Pittsburgh on 9 January 1914 (he died in Paris in 1985), and played with Gillespie in both the Edgar Hayes and Teddy Hill bands in the late 1930s. Gillespie rightly credits Clarke with a key role in the developments of the period, arguing that ‘it was Kenny Clarke who set the stage for the rhythmic content of our music. He was the first one to make accents on the bass drum at specific points in the music. He’d play 4/4 very softly, but the breaks, and the accents on the bass drum you could hear. Like, we called them dropping bombs.’

The claim is not entirely accurate, since drummers in the swing era had already experimented with just that kind of more fluid accentuation on the bass drum Dizzy describes, but it was Clarke who transformed the idea into the basis of a fully-developed style. His innovations were crucial to the emergence of the music which became bebop. It is arguable that all revolutions in jazz have been at root a revolution in the rhythmic basis of the music, with an associated harmonic and melodic development built on that new foundation, and that is certainly the case with bebop. The move away from the persistently stated 2-beat and 4-beat emphasis on the bass drum which had sustained all previous jazz styles became a fundamental of the new music.

Clarke himself had been developing a more sparely accented style even in swing band settings; ironically, Teddy Hill had fired him from his own band, disenchanted with what he dubbed Clarke’s ‘klook-mop’ style (a description which became the source of the drummer’s familiar nickname, Klook). Nonetheless, he was astute enough to see that he was the right drummer for the music at Minton’s, and gave him the opportunity to push his experiments even further, abetted by the promptings of Monk and his co-participants at the club, as Clarke explained to his biographer, Mike Hennessey, in Klook: The Story of Kenny Clarke.

I had to change my style to play with this clique. Monk’s using accents and things made me play accents more myself, on the bass drum. And I needed to play lighter because we weren’t using a straight beat. I couldn’t play brushes all the time, so naturally I played the top cymbal and used the bass drum for punctuations. When people came into Minton’s they’d say, ‘Hey, listen to that drummer’s accents on the bass drum; man, I never heard that before!’

Clarke used his bombs more sparingly than his protege, Max Roach, dropping them only every few measures to accent his rolling ride cymbal. His style has not been well served by early recordings, however, which have tended to muddy the detail of his playing, and his cymbal work in particular. In any case, it was Roach who would emerge as the leading drummer of the bebop movement, in part because of his phenomenal talent, and in part because Clarke had been drafted to serve in Europe (he was eventually to settle permanently in Paris in 1956), and was off the New York scene from 1943–46 at a crucial time in the development of the music, although he did have further important contributions to make. An intriguing footnote was added to the Minton’s story in 1997, when plans to re-open the venue as a jazz club were announced as part of a regeneration project in Harlem.

As the 1940s progressed, however, the geographical focus of the emerging music in New York shifted downtown, to 52nd Street. Pilgrims in search of the heartbeat of the bop scene on what was once the legendary ‘Swing Street’ will now find a row of anonymous office blocks on the site of the street that never slept (to borrow the title of Arnold Shaw’s book on the subject), but in the mid-1940s it was a sleazy but vital location, and not just for the beboppers – the great names of the swing era also played the street’s many clubs on a regular basis, sharing the space with comedians and strippers.

The jazz clubs on the street had been operating since the mid-1950s, and peaked in the mid-1940s. Clubland was situated in the block between 5th and 6th Avenues, and its names have become a part of the roll-call of jazz history, and probably even more of jazz myth (the reality was way grubbier and more tawdry than the legend). Those clubs, however, provided the breeding ground for the momentum launched at Minton’s and Monroe’s (which relocated to 52nd Street in 1943), and the music moved to a higher level at places like The Onyx, The Famous Door, The Three Deuces, The Spotlite, The Yacht Club and its successor, the original Downbeat. The street also housed the Dixieland stronghold of Jimmy Ryan’s, and Kelly’s Stable, where Coleman Hawkins laid down his famous pre-war marathon versions of ‘Body and Soul’, while the Sunday afternoon jazz sessions attracted the bebop crew.

The modernists and the traditionalists eventually went to war, just after the real one had finished, in a blinkered, partisan debate about old versus new that has remained with jazz ever since, conducted in a hail of disparaging remarks that did neither side much credit, and the cause of jazz as a whole little good. It did at least serve to remind people that new things were happening in the music, and a lot of the put-downs doubtless had at least one eye on the commercial benefits of the publicity which a bit of controversy brought to the musicians and clubs concerned. For a while, though, the concentration of music in the narrow brownstone basements of 52nd Street was the epicentre of the bebop earthquake. Historian and critic James Lincoln Collier described it thus in The Making of Jazz.

The phenomenon was an old one. We have seen the concentration of jazz places in the honky-tonks of Storyville, Chicago’s South Side, the nightclubs of Kansas City, the big show spots of Harlem. 52nd street was another such. It provided economic support for a lot of musicians, a place to practice their trade, and a confluence of musical ideas. It was easy for a man working the street to walk a few doors down on his break and find out what his friends and enemies were doing. 52nd street was not, of course, the only jazz location; there were several clubs in Greenwich Village, others in Harlem, and still others in other cities, notably Chicago. But 52nd Street became the symbolic headquarters of jazz, the jazz center of the world. At the time it appeared that the big bands were the major movement in the music, at least to the casual observer; but it was clear to jazz buffs then, and obvious to us today, that the most important developments in the music were taking place on 52nd Street and in similar places.

Collier’s assessment of the Street is echoed by pianist and educator Billy Taylor, who recalled the cut and thrust atmosphere which prevailed there for Shapiro and Hentoff’s famous (if not always very reliable) oral history, Hear Me Talkin to Ya, published in 1955 when the memories were still relatively fresh.

The cutting sessions there were just fantastic. With all of the musicians regularly working on The Street and with all those sitting in, astonishing sessions were inevitable. There were nights with five trumpets on stand and five saxophones . . . A man faced with the kind of challenge you get in a sitting-in session is not so prone to imitate. He’s apt to concentrate on building better and more original solos. Because, if after the third chorus at a free session, a man is still imitating, the guys there who are playing original lines will make him sound pretty sad. So that was one of the very good things about The Street – the practice of sitting in all the time and the challenges that came out of it.

Over time, the sitting-in sessions began to diminish, partly as a consequence of greater emphasis on preparation within the bands, and partly as a result of increasing pressure to hang on to the jobs that were around. In Taylor’s view, though, the real death-knell came from familiar sources.

The Street sort of folded gradually. The decline had begun around late 1946 and 1947. Why? Well, with so large a number of hangers-on around, those hangers-on were finding a lucrative market for all the vices – drugs, et cetera – and were preying on the school kids and others who came down . . . And the club owners didn’t help much either, because of their own greed and the fact that they didn’t police their clubs better. By their greed, I mean the small tables and the big cover charges didn’t build up good will. And the owners got into booking wars. If Dizzy were working at the Onyx, The Deuces would have Roy Eldridge and Charlie Shavers. Or if Bird were at one club, another club would get all the other alto men available – like Pete Brown and fifteen others. That sort of thing was wonderful for listeners, but it didn’t help music, having that kind of battle of attractions.

The Street’s reputation for sleaze began to eclipse the music, the striptease joints began to take over from the clubs, and the scene moved again when new clubs like The Royal Roost (where