Dig That Bebop Jive!

BIrd In LA and the spread of bebop

“Don’t you dig that jive, Mr. Vallee?”

The voice belongs to Harry “the Hipster” Gibson, a New York pianist and MC, on an NBC radio variety show from Los Angeles called “Drene Time.” He’s bantering with Rudy Vallee, the noted “megaphone crooner,” in a classic hip/square showbiz volley that’s among the introductions and spoken asides on a 4-LP compilation, Bird in LA.

Gibson hits the bebop buzzwords in cartoonish fashion – describing the recently arrived Dizzy Gillespie Septet as “all fine groovy cats” who are playing music that’s “out of this mother-loving world” at Billy Berg’s Supper Club in Hollywood. Vallee, dazed by the syncopated syllabic assault, sputters “Forgive me Harry, but I do not comprehend your bougie-wougie….I just can’t get in the grade.”

This eventually leads to what Gibson describes as “a little deal Dizzy cooked up called “Salt Peanuts.” This features Gillespie, Charlie Parker, vibraphonist Milt Jackson, Lucky Thompson, pianist Al Haig, bassist Ray brown and drummer Stan Levey, and it’s the essence of bebop in miniature: The band nails the snappy call-and-response melody, the brief solos from Jackson and Parker have the torrid energy that prevails on many bebop studio recordings from this era. (Check Jackson’s seconds-long turn to hear how expert bebop soloists took control of the shifting rhythm, clearly defining every partial of the pulse.)

Bird In LA tells two stories. The first is about the music Parker, Gillespie and others made when visiting the City of Angels: The set gathers previously unissued performances during visits in 1945-46, at the apex of bebop creativity, and then later – in 1948 and 1952. Much of this story is centered in clubs, including a two-month residency at Billy Berg’s that was occasionally broadcast on local radio; along with those are live performances in radio studios, often for the Armed Forces Radio Service program “Jubilee.” Those recordings are the easiest on the ear; there are also a handful of tracks from a party at a ranch in Altadena, and those are erratic in terms of sound quality – at times Parker’s alto becomes profoundly distorted. This will not deter students of improvised music, who are accustomed to “filtering” out club noise to track Parker’s still-astonishing ever-modern flight patterns on the alto saxophone.

These live morsels fill in missing blips surrounding the legend of Parker’s time in LA. The saxophonist and composer spent considerable time in studios as well — mostly for a music-shop owner, Ross Russell, who founded Dial Records to document Parker’s work. There’s a nice box out containing all the Dial masters, from the famously intense “A Night In Tunisia” to the halting version of “Lover Man” that is not nearly as flattering. After that session, Parker had a breakdown in public and spent six months in Camarillo State Hospital to detox from heroin addiction.

A second, parallel story has to do with the spread of bebop, the way it was “introduced” to an unsuspecting public. Marketing wasn’t as sophisticated in the middle 1940s as it is now; the LA jazzheads and clubowners who wanted to bring bebop from its focal point in New York had to figure out ways to spark interest in this exotic, hardly instantly accessible music.

Perhaps recognizing that bebop had developed within a rarified, somewhat exclusive scene – with its own musical syntax and speech patterns and notions of socially acceptable behavior – the LA presenters borrowed as many of the non-musical bebop signifiers as they could. They worked radio hard. The clubs hired (or, as in the case of Hipster Harry, imported) MCs who spoke in the glib word-torrents made famous by Symphony Sid and others in New York. These self-styled characters used buzzwords that grew out of bandstand talk in Manhattan – this was “groovy,” “mellow” music made by “a mess of talent that’ll square the squares.”

Result: This intense and abstract music came to somehow be regarded as a hot new thing. Something cool to do, an elusive exclusive, a fast-rising meteor associated with hipsters and movie stars and thought leaders. This was, in should be noted, decades before trend tracking and cultivation became a “science.”

The spoken discourse heard on Bird In LA sometimes has a kitschy time-capsule quality – dig that crazy vintage jive! Then the playing starts, and instantly it’s possible to connect the intricacies embedded in the music with the similarly asymmetrical and just-as-beguiling speech. These brief, bouyantly comical volleys speak to that euphoric quality in the music. They’re part of an ongoing conversation between the artists creating the work and the myth-makers selling it; both seize on the complexities, both use insider codes and flippant reverse-pivoting rhetoric to disrupt entrenched thinking.

Bebop endures as a musical language, and a philosophy. Meanwhile the pitchman gyrations of Hipster Harry have largely faded – they’re usually edited out of these types of anthologies. Perhaps that’s right. Still, as Bird in LA quietly suggests, they are a surprisingly musical part of the story. Whether Rudy Vallee got it or not.

Thank you for reading, and yes, we have a suggestion box — please send along thoughts on underloved/overlooked records and aspects of music to echolocatormusic@gmail.com!