what slang term did bebop musicians invent?
Learn what you need to know by looking at some examples of slang words and how they came about. In 2000, I published a book of words and phrases drawn from a lifetimes obsession with the language of vintage crime fiction, film noir, jazz, blues, hillbilly, rockabilly and rocknroll music. The Eckstine band was recorded on V-discs, which were broadcast over the Armed Forces Radio Network and gained popularity for the band showcasing the new bebop style. The jam session was exactly what the group needed to get their creative juices flowing. In Britain these days, the word hipster is frequently used as an insult, in much the same way that in the punk days of the late 1970s, one of the most damning labels you could hang on anyone was to call them a poser. Thereafter, Gillespie would record bebop prolifically and gain recognition as one of its leading figures. The sessions also attracted top musicians in the swing idiom such as Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Ben Webster, Roy Eldridge, and Don Byas. [3] Thelonious Monk claims that the original title "Bip Bop" for his composition "52nd Street Theme", was the origin of the name bebop. What is the collective noun for a group of collective nouns? She has set out large chunks of feta and slightly toast . Slang used to come from the street, from the working stiffs, the grafters, the taxi-dancers, the jack-rollers, the winchester geese, the hep-cats, the old lags, the mollies, the lobsters and the jug-bitten. Kubik states: "Auditory inclinations were the African legacy in [Parker's] life, reconfirmed by the experience of the blues tonal system, a sound world at odds with the Western diatonic chord categories. This genre came alive in the very early 20th century along the mouth of the Mississippi in New Orleans, and from there, it took on a life of its own. Sometimes they were entirely original, spontaneous melodies from start to finish. This unprecedented harmonic development which took place in bebop is often traced back to a transcendent moment experienced by Charlie Parker while performing "Cherokee" at Clark Monroe's Uptown House, New York, in early 1942. That opened up creative possibilities for harmonic improvisation such as tritone substitutions and use of diminished scale based improvised lines that could resolve to the key center in numerous and surprising ways. This word for a type of dancing had been around in rap circles for roughly two decades first surfacing in a 1992 New Orleans bounce track by DJ Jubilee called Do the Jubilee All though the term would have meant little to anyone outside of Louisiana. This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged. As early as 1983, Shawn Brown rapped the phrase "Rebop, bebop, Scooby-Doo" toward the end of the hit "Rappin' Duke". My father, who grew up in the council estates of Slough during the second world war, knew slang words for most situations, good and bad, which I would hear regularly around the house as a child. Broyard was limning Shedding is a shortened version of the jazz term woodshedding, which means rehearsing a difficult passage repeatedly until it is mastered. It also implies a bit of seclusion. Though there is little etymological evidence, Freddie Greens 1956 composition Corner Pocket has led many to believe that the term originated in pool-playing vernacular, as in I. Gillespie's "Rebop Six" (with Parker on alto, Lucky Thompson on tenor, Al Haig on piano, Milt Jackson on vibes, Ray Brown on bass, and Stan Levey on drums) started an engagement in Los Angeles in December 1945. Is this form of speech under threat? Judgments are made, sentences passed, and appeals are futile. [3] It appears again in a 1936 recording of "I'se a Muggin'" by Jack Teagarden. The new style of drumming supported and responded to soloists with accents and fills, almost like a shifting call and response. Hey, Man, I dig this "barrelhouse" music. It came alive. Many zoot suiters would often wear a fedora or pork pie hat , color-coordinated with the suit. Put the lint rollers away, we so arent talking about pesky pet hair here. used by Latin American bandleaders of the period to encourage their bands. WebThe word beatnik is derived from the slang term "beat," which was popularized by Jack Kerouac after World War II. In 1944, pianist Harry Gibson modified hepcat to hipster[2] in his short glossary "For Characters Who Don't Dig Jive Talk", published in 1944 with the album Boogie Woogie In Blue, featuring the self-titled hit "Handsome Harry the Hipster". Youre about to learn a whole new language: the language of jazz. ", One young admirer of the Basie orchestra in Kansas City was a teenage alto saxophone player named Charlie Parker. For jazz musicians, it refers to a restrained, relaxed style of playing, i.e., He played a cool song to mellow out the crowd. Two years after it was published in the UK and the US, an American book appeared called The Hipster Handbook by Robert Lanham, full of nerdy lifestyle material seemingly aimed more at ivy league squares, and somehow this has become the default modern meaning of the term: geek chic. The simple but expressive forms of the blues became by the 1960s one of the most important influences on the development of popular music namely, jazz, rhythm and blues, rock, and country music throughout the United States. [citation needed] The bebop musician or bopper became a stock character in jokes of the 1950s, overlapping with the beatnik.[8]. Bebop is a form of jazz that encourages improvisation, while swing and blues are more In jazz, clinkeris a bad note, in reference to the literal notes of music a musician plays. For nearly the first half of the twentieth century, from about 1915 to 1955, jazz was the dominant form of popular dance music in the United States. Bebop evolved from the swing music of the 1930s and early 1940s, and the terms early uses date from that period: Dizzy Gillespie and His Bebop Band Schedule Only Missouri Stop at Lincoln Saturday Night, [A]mong the ranks of bop fans facing East is linked as much with bebop as the goatee, glasses and beret. Jefferson City Post-Tribune, 8 November 1942. Bebop is characterized by its focus on improvisation. In a Popeye comic of 1960, the sailor closes down a beat club his father opened in his cellar, prompting the latter to object Popeye Dont Dig It and Hes Like Wasted. Did Charlie Parker get a cymbal thrown at his head? Learn a new word every day. Webances inspired in musicians, critics, and fans. [citation needed], The brilliant technique and harmonic sophistication of pianist Art Tatum inspired young musicians including Charlie Parker and Bud Powell. [citation needed], "Bebop wasn't developed in any deliberate way. Christian is featured in recordings from May 12, 1941 (Esoteric ES 548). 28, no. Since the 1980s, a new wave of puritanism has emerged that increasingly seeks to ban anything it holds to be suspect. Web* Bebop musicians conveyed their feelings about social issues of the day in many different ways and one of those was through nonconformity, a refusal of all things conformist or mainstream, which comprised of a reaction against American racism and segregation. The hipster subculture rapidly expanded, and after World War II, a burgeoning literary scene grew up around it. Those who incorporated Russell's ideas into the bebop foundation defined the post-bop movement that later incorporated modal jazz into its musical language. Musicians at the club began calling me Harry the Hipster; so I wrote a new tune called 'Handsome Harry the Hipster.'" Far more authentic, and of similar vintage, was the mocking English acronym lombard loads of money but a right dickhead. The hipster subculture adopted the lifestyle of the jazz musician, including some or all of the following features: dress, slang, use of cannabis and other recreational drugs, relaxed attitude, sarcastic humble or self-imposed poverty, and relaxed sexual Western and cowboy music. Among the comments left by fans below this news item were puke, gross, this song sucks, and the considerably more eloquent I think this song signals there is no hope for us, its over, we had a good run, society, however, hasfailed.. [12], Bebop grew out of the culmination of trends that had been occurring within swing music since the mid-1930s: less explicit timekeeping by the drummer, with the primary rhythmic pulse moving from the bass drum to the ride cymbal; a changing role for the piano away from rhythmic density towards accents and fills; less ornate horn section arrangements, trending towards riffs and more support for the underlying rhythm; more emphasis on freedom for soloists; and increasing harmonic sophistication in arrangements used by some bands. Charlie Parker and Clyde Hart were recorded in a quintet led by guitarist Tiny Grimes for the Savoy label on September 15, 1944 (Tiny's Tempo, I'll Always Love You Just the Same, Romance Without Finance, Red Cross). It was just modern music, we would call it. The word jazzderives from the 1860s slang word jasm,meaning energy, vitality, spirit. However, it first appeared in American English in 1912 as a baseball term meaning lively, energetic. By 1915, it had become the label for the genre of music as we know it today. Groovy was the hip new jazz word of the early 1940s, batted around by bebop musicians and pulp novelists. At this years Social Media Week gathering in London, the ad for one event urged delegates to put on your marketing seatbelt and get ready for a content marketing riff-a-palooza of actionable takeaways which sounds vaguely as if it might involve suing your local fast-food outlet while another claimed to have identified a new target audience, the mipster, or Muslim hipster. , meaning to ring as when something is struck. Sign up for writing inspiration in your email. When I get up, Mama is in the kitchen brewing tea. In most jazz performances, players play solos which they make up on the spot, which requires considerable skill. Some of the early bebop was recorded informally. Bebop, on the other hand, was art music, intended to satisfy the jazz musician with its technical complexity and focus on improvisation.24As such, much of the criticism directed The power of black music: Interpreting its history from Africa to the United States. By the late 1930s, with the rise of swing, hep began to be used commonly in mainstream "square" culture, so by the 1940s hip rose in popularity among jazz musicians, to replace hep. They and their fans were known as hepcats. In the early 1940s a schism occurred in jazz that forever changed the face of pop music. [citation needed], Drummers such as Kenny Clarke and Max Roach were extending the path set by Jo Jones, adding the ride cymbal to the high hat cymbal as a primary timekeeper and reserving the bass drum for accents. [citation needed], With the imminent demise of the big swing bands, bebop had become the dynamic focus of the jazz world, with a broad-based "progressive jazz" movement seeking to emulate and adapt its devices. Newspapers have generally been keen to give their readership an insight into the ways of slang. Eventually, jazz took on other slang meanings, including rubbish, unnecessary talk or ornamentation in 1918. Whereas the key ensemble of the swing music era was the big band of up to fourteen pieces playing in an ensemble-based style, the classic bebop group was a small combo that consisted of saxophone (alto or tenor), trumpet, piano, guitar, double bass, and drums playing music in which the ensemble played a supportive role for soloists. Learn naval terms & the meaning behind them with our definitions & explanations. Parker and Thompson's tenures in Los Angeles, the arrival of Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray later in 1946, and the promotional efforts of Ross Russell, Norman Granz, and Gene Norman helped solidify the city's status as a center of the new music. By 1945, the use of "bebop"/"rebop" as nonsense syllables was widespread in R&B music, for instance Lionel Hampton's "Hey! Gillespie recorded his first session as a leader on January 9, 1945, for the Manor label, with Don Byas on tenor, Trummy Young on trombone, Clyde Hart on Piano, Oscar Pettiford on bass, and Irv Kluger on drums. It incorporated baggy blazers with pants, bright colors, thick chalk stripes, floppy hats, and long chains. Although initially placed under the moniker of modern jazz, this music eventually came to be known as bebop, or bopa most inadequate word, as writer Ralph Ellison described it, that throws up its hands in clownish self-deprecation before all the complexity of sound and rhythm and self-assertive passion which it pretends to name [5] Dizzy Gillespie stated that the audiences coined the name after hearing him scat the then-nameless compositions to his players and the press ultimately picked it up, using it as an official term: "People, when they'd wanna ask for those numbers and didn't know the name, would ask for bebop. The musical devices developed with bebop were influential far beyond the bebop movement itself. Byas became the first tenor saxophone player to fully assimilate the new bebop style in his playing. Whether it goes to work or not, people have often determined that slang should be kept out of school. To crack a crib: to break open a house., Vulgar Tongues: An Alternative History of English Slang by Max Dcharn is published by Serpents Tail (14.99). The poet Carl Sandburg defined slang rather more poetically as language that takes off its coat, spits on its hands and goes to work. Digital. These first youths diverged from the mainstream due to their new philosophies of racial diversity and their exploratory sexual nature and drug habits. The music itself seemed jarringly different to the ears of the public, who were used to the bouncy, organized, danceable compositions of Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller during the swing era. Inwith the in crowd: secret languages can confuse, exclude or empower, TheWord Detective: A Life in Words; From Serendipity to Selfie review, Well, Ill be Theres a real science to cussing and blaspheming but beware. "[8] In a nod to Mailer's discussion of hipsterism, the United States' Cold War deployments of African-American culture and personalities for the purposes of public diplomacy has been discussed as "hipster diplomacy".[9]. Bop improvisers built upon the phrasing ideas first brought to attention by Lester Young's soloing style. He would take a breath in the middle of a phrase, using the pause, or "free space", as a creative device. The saxophone is among the youngest of the wind instruments, dating to the 1840s, and blends the single-reed clarinet-style mouthpiece for producing musical vibrations with the louder projection of the brass construction of the trumpet or trombone. That understatement of harmonically sophisticated chords would soon be used by young musicians exploring the new musical language of bebop. WebBebop was associated with the East Coast (e.g., New York); cool jazz was associated with the West Coast (e.g., California). This article is about the 1940s subculture. Parker and Gillespie appeared in a session under vibraphonist Red Norvo dated June 6, 1945, later released under the Dial label (Hallelujah, Get Happy, Slam Slam Blues, Congo Blues). A father of bebop, he influenced generations of musicians, and sparked the fire of one of the most important and successful American artistic movements. Great Big List of Beautiful and Useless Words, Vol. That solo showed a sophisticated harmonic exploration of the composition, with implied passing chords. In 1938, the word hepster was used by bandleader Cab Calloway in the title of his dictionary, Cab Calloway's Cat-ologue: A "Hepster's" Dictionary, which defines hep cat as "a guy who knows all the answers, understands jive". Read the excerpt from Other Words for Home. Cool bop or just cool jazz, sometimes called West Coast because of where some of the musicians lived, was an offshoot of the original bebop. Overall jam means pressed together tightly, a definition that first appeared in the early 1700s. 36 (Summer, 1988), pp. 597605. The bop musicians advanced these techniques with a more freewheeling, intricate and often arcane approach. Parker's first session as a leader was on November 26, 1945, for the Savoy label, with Miles Davis and Gillespie on trumpet, Hakim/Thornton and Gillespie on piano, Curley Russell on bass and Max Roach on drums (Warming Up a Riff, Now's the Time, Billie's Bounce, Thriving on a Riff, Ko-Ko, Meandering). Webcool jazz, a style of jazz that emerged in the United States during the late 1940s. [4], Some researchers speculate that it was a term used by Charlie Christian because it sounded like something he hummed along with his playing. Bebop musicians explored advanced harmonies, complex syncopation, altered chords, extended chords, chord substitutions, asymmetrical phrasing, and intricate melodies. Whybeing bilingual works wonders for your brain, When its OK to swear in front of children, Mymessage to the HSBC boss who says dialect is dying: Get real, ya wallapur, Ramsay MacDonald, Britains first Labour prime minister, declared. 'Bebop' was a label that certain journalists later gave it, but we never labeled the music. [3] A variation, "rebop", appears in several 1939 recordings. In his early days in New York, Parker held a job washing dishes at an establishment where Tatum had a regular gig. Bebop style also influenced the Beat Generation whose spoken-word style drew on African-American "jive" dialog, jazz rhythms, and whose poets often employed jazz musicians to accompany them. The classic bebop combo consisted of saxophone, trumpet, double bass, drums and piano. Christian commonly emphasized weak beats and off beats and often ended his phrases on the second half of the fourth beat. Somewhere in my early 20s, I stumbled across a cheap secondhand reprint of a book by an 18th-century Londoner named Francis Grose, which recorded the everyday speech of the people he encountered in the low drinking dens, bagnios and rookeries around Covent Garden and St Giles. His show style, influenced by black vaudeville circuit entertainers, seemed like a throwback to some and offended some purists ("too much grinning" according to Miles Davis), but it was laced with a subversive sense of humor that gave a glimpse of attitudes on racial matters that black musicians had previously kept away from the public at large. However, it first appeared in American English in 1912 as a baseball term meaning lively, energetic. By 1915, it had become the label for the genre of music as This group crucially included White jazz musicians such as Benny Goodman, Al Cohn, Gerry Mulligan, Stan Getz, Mezz Mezzrow, Barney Kessel, Doc Pomus, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Joey Bishop, Perry Como, Tony Bennett, Chet Baker, and Gene Krupa who ought to be counted as some of the "true" original hipsters as they were instrumental in turning the White American audience onto jazz and its underground culture in the 1930s and 1940s. WebToday, Charlie Yardbird Parker is considered one of the great musical innovators of the 20th century. Slang has always fascinated me. Late bop also moved towards extended forms that represented a departure from pop and show compositions. As blogger Perez Hilton put it: On the heels of Miley Cyrus twerktastic evening at the VMAs comes the single that is going to BLOW YOUR TWEEN MIND! Or not, as the case may be. Settled in habit; limited in mind.. Starting with the Eckstine band's session for the De Luxe label on December 5, 1944 (If That's the Way You Feel, I Want to Talk About You, Blowing the Blues Away, Opus X, I'll Wait and Pray, The Real Thing Happened to Me), bebop recording sessions grew more frequent. The term refers fairly exclusively to the rhythmic section, and it means they are playing perfectly in sync with one another. She has set out large chunks of feta and slightly toast . Bebop is a style of jazz that developed in the 1940s and is characterized by improvisation, fast tempos, rhythmic unpredictability, and harmonic complexity. Atthe1722 murder trial of Mary Bolton,a witness called her a nasty draggle taild toad, ugly Puss, and stinking Punk. Some sessions at Minton's in 1941 were recorded, with Thelonious Monk alongside an assortment of musicians including Joe Guy, Hot Lips Page, Roy Eldridge, Don Byas, and Charlie Christian. [1] These pioneers of the new music (which would later be termed bebop or bop, although Parker himself never used the term, feeling it demeaned the music) began exploring advanced harmonies, complex syncopation, altered chords and chord substitutions. The small band format lent itself to more impromptu experimentation and more extended solos than did the bigger, more highly arranged bands. I could hear it sometimes. It describes people who, according to Lanham, enjoy strutting in platform shoes with a biography of Che Guevara sticking out of their bags, which shows how far the word has travelled since the days of alto sax giant Charlie Parker or boogie pianist Harry the Hipster Gibson. While bebop became very popular among musicians, its public reception was less than favorable. Part of this is likely due to one of the key differences that existed between bebop and swing. Swing, as previously stated, was meant to be popular music, intended for the mainstream [15], As the 1930s turned to the 1940s, Parker went to New York as a featured player in the Jay McShann Orchestra. [14], One of the divergent trends of the swing era was a resurgence of small ensembles playing "head" arrangements, following the approach used with Basie's big band. Before the Civil Rights Movement, Gillespie was confronting the racial divide by lampooning it. (The other he mentioned, yummie young upwardly mobile moderate seems to have died an early death.) In 1947, Gibson sought to clarify the switch in the record "It Ain't Hep" which musically describes the difference between the two terms. In the 1940s, White youth began to frequent Black communities for their music and dance. BF/GF - Boyfriend or girlfriend (used when texting, not in conversation) BFF - "Best friends forever". Webblues, secular folk music created by African Americans in the early 20th century, originally in the South. Arriba!" Man, we been blowin' all night. This kind of language is a long way from the formal, statesmanlike way in which Hollywood or the BBC have traditionally portrayed dialogues between world leaders. That same technological advance has also made it possible to view footage of real-life atrocities, and brutality can be routinely filmed by the perpetrators using a cheap device carried in almost everyones pocket. WebLooking to understand the history of American slang words? This is the point at which a self-posted photo of yourself collapsed on a party floor with a toilet seat around your neck, surrounded by zombie-eyed classmates lovingly annotated with 15 contemporary euphemisms for excessive chemical overindulgence starts to look like a potential barrier to a career as a future archbishopofCanterbury. In recent years, the move towards new slang being invented simply in order sell something or identify a target audience has greatly accelerated. In the books subtitle, I used a term that most jazz musicians of the late 1940s bebop era would have been proud to bear hipster meaning someone who was one of the sharpest, the most in the know, and I had no problem calling my book A Dictionary of Hipster Slang. Charlie Parker is famous for his role in the development of bebop music, which had an onomatopoetic name reflecting the short notes and off-the-beat rhythms characteristic of the genre. Bebop samples, especially bass lines, ride cymbal swing clips, and horn and piano riffs are found throughout the hip-hop compendium. Rather than play heavily arranged music, bebop musicians typically played the melody of a composition (called the "head") with the accompaniment of the rhythm section, followed by a section in which each of the performers improvised a solo, then returned to the melody at the end of the composition. For the contemporary subculture, see. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. [17][18] The "beatnik" stereotype borrowed heavily from the dress and mannerisms of bebop musicians and followers, in particular the beret and lip beard of Dizzy Gillespie and the patter and bongo drumming of guitarist Slim Gaillard. The words hep and hip are of uncertain origin, with numerous competing theories being proposed. By 1950, bebop musicians such as Clifford Brown and Sonny Stitt began to smooth out the rhythmic eccentricities of early bebop. Fans of bebop were not restricted to the United States; the music also gained cult status in France and Japan. In the 1950s, it colloquially became defined as a stupid mistake when used outside of jazz. Though there is little etymological evidence, Freddie Greens 1956 composition Corner Pocket has led many to believe that the term originated in pool-playing vernacular, as in Im going to sink the eight ball in the corner pocket. Occasionally they would have a long feather on the fedora or pork pie hat as decoration. These substitutions often emphasized certain dissonant intervals such as the flat ninth, sharp ninth or the sharp eleventh/tritone. Advertisement. In jazz, to tag a song is to end a tune in a certain way, specifically by repeating it three times and fading outa tactic used in many modern-day melodies:The tag at the end of that song really pulls at your heartstrings. Of course, slang has always had its detractors. Chord progressions for bebop compositions were often taken directly from popular swing-era compositions and reused with a new and more complex melody, forming new compositions (see contrafact). Typically, a theme (a "head," often the main melody of a pop or jazz standard of the swing era) would be presented together at the beginning and the end of each piece, with improvisational solos based on the chords of the compositions. The same year also saw the publication of Marissa Piesman and Marilee Hartleys tongue-in-cheek work The Yuppie Handbook: The State-of-the-Art Manual for Young Urban Professionals, with its cover showing a power-suited couple proudly sporting must-have items such as a Rolex watch, a Gucci briefcase and a Sony Walkman. In 1991, Detroit rapper and producer J Dilla notably dubbed himself a funky beat maker The term has become a staple in hip-hop and electronic music. In the early days of jazz, musicians were using the hep variant to describe anybody who was "in the know" about an emerging, mostly African-American subculture, which revolved around jazz. They were adding improvisation to ragtime and other kinds of music, so they would refer to it as their version of ragtime. They said they first heard the word jazz up north (usually meaning Chicago). Louis Armstrong. a. Mailer described the hipsters as individuals "with a middle-class background (who) attempt to put down their whiteness and adopt what they believe is the carefree, spontaneous, cool lifestyle of Negro hipsters: their manner of speaking and language, their use of milder narcotics, their appreciation of jazz and the blues, and their supposed concern with the good orgasm. The early 1950s also saw some smoothing in Charlie Parker's style. Tone colours tended toward pastels, vibratos were slow or nonexistent, and Jazzy, another form of this majorly versatile word, also indicates a certain flair or panache. Yet the conversation between Bush and Blair was recorded without their knowledge, and there was no thought of trying to impress the younger members of the electorate with this language. Bebop is complicated, defined by rhythmic innovations and complexities, sudden stops, and other sonic surprises.
