Fluent Essays

1.  WATCH JAZZ: A FILM BY KEN BURNS, EPISODE 2: THE GIFT https://video-alexanderstreet-com.proxy.libraries.rutgers.edu/watch/the-gift 2.  WATCH WATCH JAZZ: A FILM BY KEN BURNS, EPISODE 2: SWING, THE VELOCITY OF CELEBRATION https://video-alexanderstreet-com.proxy.libraries.rutgers.edu/watch/swing-the-velocity-of-celebration?source=autosuggest 3.  Answer the following discussion questions...   a.This episode is about what two African American musicians? b. Where did Louis Armstrong get his start playing a trumpet? What other incidents in his early life gave him the opportunity to learn to play the coronet? c. How did he get to Chicago?  Who was he playing with?? d. Where did "Duke" Ellington grow up? What was different about his young years from Armstrong's?? e. What was Duke Ellington's medium for music? How did he get started?  f. As adults and professionals, where did Armstrong and Ellington play??   How did their music develop from there? g. What was the gift that Armstrong and Ellington displayed?  How are their "gifts" different from each other? LOUIS ARMSTRONG PLAYLIST https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAvjLhr6XrzDUDh4Fw1UHuKNVvBOboItz DUKE ELLINGTON PLAYLIST https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAvjLhr6XrzA1-p__2axsxEgZjIznD5FF BEBOP AND BEBOP LISTENING PLAYLIST 1.  WATCH:  Jazz: A Film by Ken Burns. Episode 7 Dedicated to Chaos before completing this assignment.  Here's the link... https://video-alexanderstreet-com.proxy.libraries.rutgers.edu/watch/dedicated-to-chaos 2.  LISTEN: To the Afromusicology Bebop Playlist on YouTube.  Here is the link... https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAvjLhr6XrzCUQxeDNcErCMY1p0_f9kOM 3.  READ:  Dizzy Atmosphere: The Challenge of Bebop by Eric Porter.  You'll find this article under Resources on Sakai. Then answer the discussion questions below. 1. How does the author describe the musical characteristics of the style of jazz known as Bebop? 2.  Who were some of the early inventors/players of Bebop? 3.  What was the name of the club that hosted the jam sessions where Bebop was "born"? 4.  How did the young bebop musicians feel about the older swing and traditional jazz musicians? How did the older musicians feel about the younger musicians? 5.  What does the author mean by the term "critical ecumenicalism"? 6.  What were some of the social issues plaguing African Americans around the same time as Bebop's conception?  7. It is often argued that Bebop was a music born out of either revolution or evolution.  Give an example of an author and his/her views quoted by Porter in the article who believed Bebop was revolutionary.  Give an example of an author and their views quoted by Porter in the article who believed Bebop was merely evolutionary. 8.  How did the musicians themselves feel about Bebop and why they played it? Cite specific musicians and their quotes. 9.  According to Porter, what were some of the factors that led to the demise of Bebop? 1.  WATCH:  The Sounds of Soul   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZ5hvsaJ4sk And answer the following questions. 1. ________ Stax Records   2. ________ Motown Records   3. ________ Atlantic Records   4. ________ TSOP   A. Philadelphia B. Detroit C. Memphis D. New York   5. He was the handsome and soulful balladeer known for his association  with the gospel group, The Soul Stirrers as lead singer   _____________________   6. The Queen of Soul who meshed her background in gospel with R&B to  create powerful songs like “Natural Woman” and “Respect”  _____________________   7. Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett exemplified the soulful sound of what  music label?   ___________________   8. He was the founder of Motown Records ________________________    (List the City in which the following popular theatres for black  performers was/is located)   9. ________________ Regal Theatre   10. ________________ Uptown Theatre   11. ________________ Apollo Theatre   12. ________________ Howard Theatre   13. The Godfather of Soul known for his funky hard hitting rhythms and  innovative dance moves   ____________________   14. He was the lead singer for the Miracles and songwriter/collaborator  for Motown Records   _______________________   Name Four (4) Groups and or Solo Acts that recorded on the Motown Records  label   15.  16.   17. 18.   19. Give one nickname or slogan for Motown Records   ___________________________________   20. Give the nickname or slogan for Stax Records _______________________   2.  WATCH: EWF The History of Funk.   https://youtu.be/-ehzl16dqzg Answer the following questions. If the link doesn't work just search YouTube for it 1. This bandleaders message in the song along music his hippie band played was about bringing people together 2. What beat number was stressed in funk music? 3. George Clinton from PFunk mixed Acid rock with a huge dose of funk and called it what?  4. Larry Graham invented this percussive style of bass playing that would characterize funk music 5. Fill in the blanks to complete these PFunk song titles mentioned in the documentary  One ........Under a ..... Flash.... We........the...... 6.  List three Earth Wind and Fire songs mentioned in the documentary 7. This style of music eclipsed funk with its four in the floor beat pattern ...and heavy dance element. 8. This Minnesota multi instrumentalist influenced by James Brown, George Clinton, Sly and the Family Stone which a royal title. 9. The two most sampled funk artists in HipHop were... 10  The name of  this James Brown song brought him outta Soul and into Funk "Dizzy Atmosphere": The Challenge of Bebop Author(s): Eric Porter Source: American Music, Vol. 17, No. 4 (Winter, 1999), pp. 422-446 Published by: University of Illinois Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3052658 Accessed: 04/03/2009 15:09 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. 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For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected] University of Illinois Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to American Music. http://www.jstor.org http://www.jstor.org/stable/3052658?origin=JSTOR-pdf http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=illinois ERIC PORTER "Dizzy Atmosphere": The Challenge of Bebop The development of bebop in the 1940s is crucial to understanding jazz as we know it. A product of jam sessions, big bands, small com- bos, and countless hours of "woodshedding," the musical language of bebop included rapid tempos, dissonant chords and melodic lines, tritone and other chordal substitutions, extensive chromaticism, off- beat piano accompaniment ("comping"), walking bass lines, poly- rhythmic drumming, and, perhaps most important, a focus on extend- ed, improvised soloing on the front-line instruments. Swing-era heavyweights such as Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Roy Eldridge, Art Tatum, Duke Ellington, Jimmy Blanton, and Walter Page had pre- viously explored aspects of this language in the 1930s, but they came together in spectacular fashion in the work of Charlie Parker, John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk, to name a handful of bebop's best-known practitioners.1 Bebop continues to be a core element of the language of jazz. It in- forms the work of most contemporary players, and many stylistic and technical innovations created in the 1940s remain integral parts of jazz education. Bebop marked the ascendance of the small combo as the basic performing unit of jazz (which remains the case today) and its production and reception transformed the meanings associated with jazz and its place in American culture. Coming to prominence at the end of World War II, amid rising African-American political demands and increasingly visible American youth cultures, bebop garnered new capital for jazz as a music that spoke to observers of social and Eric Porter is an assistant professor of American studies at the University of New Mexico. His book, tentatively titled Out of the Blue: African American Musicians and the Idea of Jazz, is forthcoming from the University of Califor- nia Press. American Music Winter 1999 ? 2000 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois Eric Porter cultural resistance. At the same time, bebop also gave jazz unprece- dented capital as art music and signified its move into its current, al- beit precarious, position at the intersection of high art and popular culture. Bebop was also a product of a 1940s African-American social, cul- tural, and intellectual milieu, as well as a critical juncture in African- American musicians' ongoing public conversation about jazz. Build- ing on recent scholarship on bebop that has sought to understand, as well as complicate, the relationship between bebop and its historical context, I reconsider the place of the music in African-American life. Rejecting assessments that view the music as an aesthetically and ideologically consistent project, I maintain that bebop, precisely in its varying musical expressions and in musicians' differing interpreta- tions of its meanings, was a product of a collective orientation, if not a cohesive movement. Not only did the development of the music it- self reflect the forward-looking, worldly perspectives of many of its practitioners, but their public responses to the idea of bebop (wheth- er they embraced or rejected the term) also spoke of the refusal of the artistic and social boundaries that inspired their music. Ultimately, bebop marked an important moment in African-American musicians' critical conversation about jazz, an intellectual history rooted in mu- sicians' aesthetic projects and social experiences and created in dia- logue with general currents in African-American thought and the broader conversation about jazz. I do not believe we will have a full understanding of jazz and the meanings surrounding it until we have explored fully this particular trajectory of ideas.2 "The World Was Swinging with Change" In recent years, bebop has become a test case for rethinking jazz his- tory. Much writing about jazz, as Scott DeVeaux suggests, presents the music as a self-contained progression of styles that are divorced from their social context. Consequently, some write about bebop as if it is merely another chapter in the aesthetic development of the id- iom. Others pay closer attention to social context and, in so doing, describe bebop as a cohesive aesthetic movement with a seamlessness between the formal qualities of the genre and the ideological orien- tations and social positions of musicians and their audience. Such narratives explain how bebop mirrored transformations in black life, attitudes, and politics in the crucible of urban American during World War II. By creating a new music, adapting a renegade style, asserting their intelligence, and demanding to be treated as artists, young Af- rican-American musicians forged a cultural politics that challenged all at once the banality of popular swing music, the complacency of 423 American Music, Winter 1999 older musicians, and a system of economic exploitation and cultural expropriation by whites in the music business. In doing so, they helped forge a subculture that distanced itself from and challenged the mainstream. We see this approach in Amiri Baraka's Blues People, where the author argues that bebop music and styles represented an "anti-assimilationist" challenge to black middle class and white society, and more recently in Eric Lott's description of how bebop's "aesthetic of speed and displacement" reflected, albeit indirectly, the political demand of the "Double V" campaign and the militant aspi- rations of its youthful, working-class audience.3 Still, other studies challenge both types of narratives. Reexamining bebop's place in the artistic development of jazz and interrogating assumptions about its political significance are staples of recent work. Bernard Gendron suggests that the construction of bebop in high cul- tural terms and as political expression was facilitated less by any in- herent meanings in the music than by a preexisting modernist dis- cursive field surrounding it. David Stowe argues that the perceived schism between swing and bebop is a product of the political mean- ings imposed on the music rather than a radical departure on behalf of the musicians themselves. Iaking on Baraka's analysis, Stowe re- jects the notion that bebop was a significant expression of black mili- tancy. Bebop's interracial audience was more threatening than was the music as a symbol of race pride, Stowe argues, and many swing-era musicians were involved in more explicit political activism than were any of the beboppers. According to Stowe, it was the cultural style of bebop that shaped the perspective of later commentators, who read the politics of bebop's reception into the music itself.4 DeVeaux challenges Baraka's and Lott's assessments of bebop in his own recent book on the topic. He welcomes Baraka's attention to his- tory and is convinced by his insistence that bebop must be understood in the context of "the sense of resentment" that African Americans felt during World War II, when they encountered unyielding racism at a moment that offered promise for change. Similarly, he agrees with Lott's assertion that "militancy and music were undergirded by the same social facts." "But what, exactly," DeVeaux asks, "constitutes the 'intimate if indirect relationship' of music to politics?" He character- izes bebop musicians' relationship to politics as "oblique" at best and problematizes their relationship to a black mass audience, which at the height of bebop's popularity turned its attention toward rhythm and blues. Ultimately, DeVeaux argues, the emergence of bebop stemmed less from the political orientation of its practitioners and audience than from a series of aesthetic and career decisions made by young, professionalized, primarily African-American musicians, who were inspired by a variety of artistic challenges and frustrated by a 424 Eric Porter music industry that provided some opportunities but was also rife with discrimination. Eventually, this led a number of musicians to fore- go the restrictive atmospheres of the swing big bands in favor of the relative artistic and social freedoms that small-combo jazz afforded.5 This recent work by DeVeaux, Gendron, and Stowe complicates some of the claims other scholars have made about the political significance of bebop, which ultimately say as much about observ- ers' interpretations of the music as they do about the orientations of musicians. Yet I believe there is room for exploring further the "so- cial facts" of African-American life in the 1940s and their relationship to the emergence of bebop and the meanings later ascribed to it. Even if bebop should not be read as a direct expression of black militancy, we can understand it as a product of a worldly intellectual orienta- tion and experimental aesthetic sensibility I term critical ecumenical- ism. The music may not have represented a particular, class-specific ideological stance, but it did reflect changing orientations and per- spectives among African Americans, especially black youth and young adults. Most considerations of bebop touch upon Minton's Playhouse as one of its points of origin. Located on 118th Street in Harlem and owned by Local 802 delegate Henry Minton, the nightclub was the site of lengthy jam sessions where many of the musicians instrumen- tal to the consolidation of bebop developed their techniques and musical ideas. Minton's club catered to African-American musicians, although others patronized the establishment as well. Pianist Teddy Hill took control of the club's music policy in 1940, hiring a house band and making jam sessions a prominent part of the club's opera- tions. The Monday night buffet dinners, given in honor of whoever was performing at the Apollo Theater, brought together musicians from across the country.6 Looking back on these Monday night dinners and the jam sessions that followed them during the early war years, Ralph Ellison evoked an atmosphere that resonated with expectancy, camaraderie, and an element of the unknown: They were gathered here from all parts of America and they broke bread together and there was a sense of good feeling and prom- ise, but what shape the fulfilled promise would take they did not know, and few except the more restless of the younger musicians even questioned. Yet it was an exceptional moment and the world was swinging with change.... For they were caught up in events which made that time exceptionally and uniquely then, and which brought, among the other changes which have reshaped the world, a momentous modulation into a new key of musical sen- sibility; in brief, a revolution in culture.7 425 American Music, Winter 1999 What can we make of such memories? On one level, the ambiguity of Ellison's comments suggests that the atmosphere at Minton's, and by extension the emergence of bebop, did not simply reflect the po- litical and social struggles of the war years. Indeed, later in the pas- sage Ellison carefully distinguished artists' concerns from those of sociologists and historians, as he maintained that musicians and fans alike went to Minton's to seek sanctuary from the war and social ten- sions around them. But what, then, do we make of the "needs of feel- ing" that brought people to the club, the "promise" that society held out to them, musicians' kindred spirit of exploration, and a "world swinging with change"? And just how did these elements relate to this "revolution in culture"? Musicians who participated in the movement have been similarly resistant to make direct connections between bebop and political ac- tivism. Drummer Kenny Clarke expressed an ambiguous account of the relationship of bebop to its moment. Asked if he was making a statement about the world around him, Clarke responded, "Yeah in a way. The idea was to wake up, look around you, there's something to do. And this was just a part of it, an integral part of our cultural aspect." If there was a message to African Americans, Clarke contin- ued, it was this: "Whatever you go into, go into it intelligently. As sim- ple as that."8 Dizzy Gillespie also made it clear that there was no di- rect connection between music and politics: "We didn't go out and make speeches or say, 'Let's play eight bars of protest.' We just played our music and let it go at that. The music proclaimed our identity; it made every statement we truly wanted to make." Yet Gillespie thought that he and other beboppers were on the "vanguard of so- cial change." What he remembered was a collective will to artistic excellence and a sense of African-American pride joined with a re- fusal of social, creative, and even national boundaries. Speaking to charges that beboppers expressed unpatriotic attitudes, Gillespie re- marked, "We never wished to be restricted to just an American con- text, for we were creators in an art form which grew from universal roots and which had proved it possessed universal appeal. Damn right! We refused to accept racism, poverty, or economic exploitation, nor would we live out uncreative humdrum lives merely for the sake of survival."9 Bebop emerged at a crucial moment in African-American life. The 1940s witnessed an acceleration of migration, proletarianization, ur- banization, and immersion in mass culture that had begun earlier in the century. The war economy and the political climate around the conflict also contributed to changing cultural tastes and shifts in class, gender, and race relations. The ideological war against the white su- premacist Nazi regime made the enduring racism in American soci- 426 Eric Porter ety all the more glaring. African Americans' sense of group identity was augmented by a widespread belief that the expanding wartime economy, and an anticipated democratization of American society, would lead to greater access to jobs, housing, and education. This col- lective sense of expectancy translated into the overt political demands of A. Philip Randolph's March on Washington Movement, which promised a June 1941 march on the nation's capital if discrimination in defense industries did not subsist. The march never materialized, but the threat was enough to pressure Pres. Franklin Roosevelt into issuing Executive Order no. 8802, forbidding discrimination by the government and defense industries, and subsequently establishing the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) to enforce the order. The hopes of black Americans during World War II were also evident in the Pittsburgh Courier's December 1941 call for a "double victory" cam- paign "to declare war on Japan and against racial prejudice in our country"; early civil rights lawsuits; the growth of black union partic- ipation; struggles against housing discrimination; and the subtle, in- dividual struggles for respect and equal treatment in public spaces like streetcorners and buses. When social freedoms did not materialize, or when acts of resistance were met by government intransigence (the FEPC ultimately did little to end discriminatory practices) or violent responses by the state or unruly white mobs, African-American soli- darity was fused with anger and growing militancy.10 The climate of militancy and expectancy in urban centers was ac- companied by reconfigured racial affiliations and identities in flux. For our purposes, the relationship of this growing, politicized, Afri- can-American consciousness to black culture and intellectual life is critical. Writing in 1943 about New York, Roi Ottley discussed the development of African-American solidarity and what might be called a popular culture of black nationalism. This collective feeling cut across class lines; it could be found in the thoughts of Garveyites, highbrow cultural critics, religious leaders, historians, and journalists. "Black nationalism," Ottley wrote, "torn from its circus aspects, and made more palatable to a wider section of the Negro population, per- meated every phase of Negro life." This orientation was also a prod- uct of Pan-Africanist sentiment and the development of feelings of kinship with other people of color within the United States and throughout the globe. African Americans expressed internationalist affinities in their support for Ethiopia during the Italo-Ethiopian war from 1935 to 1941, and as Penny Von Eschen has recently shown, these sentiments were also evident in the internationalist orientation of Af- rican-American politics and popular culture in the 1940s, as well as in the treatment of African affairs by the African-American press. Moreover, George Lipsitz argues that the racist propaganda directed 427 American Music, Winter 1999 toward Japan, and the internment of Japanese Americans, helped gen- erate domestic interethnic affiliations among people of color.1 Not only did African Americans see themselves in an internation- alist context but, as Von Eschen illustrates, the Pan-Africanist "pop- ular discourse" of the 1940s was based not on biology but on a his- torical awareness of divergent yet shared experiences under European and Euro-American domination. Historical knowledge of these expe- riences helped forge a widespread understanding of the "construct- ed nature of race," which was paralleled by a growing, publicly stat- ed distrust among African-American intellectuals of a biologically determined, undifferentiated concept of race as a marker of cultural identity and basis for political affiliation. Among the texts that inter- rogated the idea of a static "Negro" identity in the early 1940s were W.E.B. DuBois's autobiography Dusk of Dawn (1940), Zora Neale Hurs- ton's autobiography Dust Tracks on the Road (1942), and Alain Locke's essay, "Who and What Is 'Negro'?" (1942).12 At the same time, a collective sense of African-American pride dur- ing the war facilitated cultural sharing across class boundaries in Af- rican-American urban communities. While we should not play down the structural aspects of class stratification in these communities, this period saw a loosening of cultural distinctions. Although class lines had been broached in the 1920s, they were further challenged in the 1940s as a result of the economic dislocation of the Great Depression, the cultural leveling of the New Deal, the impact of left-wing politi- cal ideas, and the rapid growth of African-American urban society. Ottley identified the emergence of a "Cafe au Lait Society," a profes- sional and intellectual middle class with liberal political beliefs and fewer social pretensions than the "traditional" black bourgeoisie. Their existence and consumption of popular entertainment (includ- ing jazz) was symbolic of the cultural sharing between distinct groups of African Americans.13 Rising black consciousness and militancy, combined with shifting class relations, an internationalist perspective, and a dissatisfaction with some of the limitations of racial identities, fostered a certain kind of oppositional consciousness among African Americans from differ- ent social backgrounds during the 1940s.14 On the musical front, this often translated into a critical ecumenicalism, as many artists main- tained a strong sense of identity as African Americans while embrac- ing a cosmopolitan approach to life and art. Musicians bristled at the primitivist stereotypes to which they were expected to conform. They also resisted cultural boundaries, whether based on high-brow "le- gitimacy," race, or national identity; often rejected the generic cate- gories that separated jazz from other kinds of music; and, at times, refused to accept the political meanings ascribed to their craft. Elli- 428 Eric Porter son's evocation of a community based on "feeling," and his attempt to celebrate the artistry of bebop while rejecting the militant intent ascribed to the music, may be read as a description of a cultural ex- pression that spoke of group affirmation and demand, yet resisted the confines of blackness as a racial category. Gillespie's refusal of cre- ative and social boundaries also resonates with this ethos, as does Clarke's description of bebop as a call to "wake up" and approach the world "intelligently." "Now's the Time" As mentioned earlier, DeVeaux carefully documents how the "birth of bebop" was in part a function of the simultaneous freedom and restriction the wartime music industry presented to young African- American musicians. Turning to ideological motivations, he offers an interesting discussion of beboppers' vexed relationship with the blues. Although some of Charlie Parker's earliest recorded musical accom- plishments-for example, his 1944 work on Tiny Grimes's "Red Cross" and "Tiny's Tempo"-stemmed from his ability to fuse "bluesy 'rice and beans' gestures" with the "esoteric arabesques of the impro- vising virtuoso," many beboppers saw the blues as a symbol of the limitations placed on their lives as musicians and as African Ameri- cans. Not only was the harmonic structure of most blues tunes fairly simple compared to original modern jazz compositions, the blues came to symbolize the primitivist expectations of a white audience and culture industry that wanted to pigeonhole black music. It also represented a rural cultural past with which "upwardly mobile pro- fessional musicians" no longer wanted to be associated. Drawing in part from a passage in Gillespie's autobiography, DeVeaux argues that many beboppers were "ashamed" of the blues, just as were many members of the African-American cultural and political elite. The musical limitations were rather easily transformed, but the social im- plications of the blues were harder to change. Musicians knew they had an obligation to a black audience that demanded the blues, and they often found these performances inspiring. Yet they also saw the blues less as a cultural essence or birthright than as "point of ex- change, between artist and audience." In keeping with a "progressive" ethos that linked musical experimentation and racial uplift, musicians often looked to bebop as a way out of the blues, and they tried to "educate their audiences" in the process.15 DeVeaux is correct in describing the blues as a symbol of social and musical restrictions for young African-American musicians. Howev- er, I want to build on his work by situating this response to the blues and the bebop movement in general in the African-American cultur- 429 430 American Music, Winter 1999 al and intellectual context sketched out above. One can read the pas- sage from Gillespie's autobiography as evidence of both the anxiety and affirmation that came from interclass cultural sharing. A few lines later he discusses how he defended his own explorations of the blues to other musicians: "Man, that's my music, that's my heritage," he told them, adding that Charlie Parker was a "real blueser" as well. Ultimately, the young musicians in DeVeaux's analysis in some ways remain more rooted in an early century, Washingtonian doctrine of racial uplift rather than in a more fluid, forward-looking ethos and acute awareness of identity stemming from the cultural and intellec- tual ferment of the 1940s. I say this not to deny the professionalism of these musicians, some of their middle-class orientations, or the leg- acy of uplift ideology, but to emphasize that beboppers' rejection of the blues may also be understood as a product of a collective ethos involving exploration, aversion to categories, mental acuity, group pride, and an understanding that racial categories and assumptions be called into question. Speaking in 1948, Dizzy Gillespie's arranger Gil Fuller suggested that earlier forms of music were simply no longer relevant as African Americans moved into the future: "Modern life is fast and complicated.... We're tired of that old New Orleans beat- beat, I got the blues pap."16 Bebop's style politics reflected this broader ethos, as intellectual practice and sartorial display coincided for musicians and their au- diences. Although Eric Lott's assessment of bebop ultimately de- scribes a cohesive and rather narrowly defined cultural and aesthet- ic politics-the meaning of which seems dependent upon a dominant reading of the subculture that accompanied the music-his descrip- tion of bebop's "style" calls attention to the way that musicians and fans alike engaged in serious mental endeavors that responded to the world around them. "Bebop," he writes, "was about making disci- plined imagination alive and answerable to the social change of its time," and the style "was where social responsiveness became indi- vidual expression, where the pleasures of shared identity met an in- tolerance for racist jive." Beboppers and their fans even adopted the personae of intellectuals; goatees, berets, and horned-rimmed glass- es became the uniform of the subculture.17 The adoption of this rega- lia of the intelligentsia not only distanced musicians from the main- stream but challenged racist ideologies that were based in part on a belief in African-American mental inferiority. We may also understand bebop style as a signifier of musicians' collective search for a better understanding of music theory and the world around them. Beyond style, African-American musicians' artistic projects, activi- ties, and ideas give insight into the deployment of their critical ecu- menicalism. Musicians involved with bebop after the war pursued Eric Porter their creative goals and their professional careers while negotiating the growing, albeit precarious, popularity of the genre and occasion- ally the discourse surrounding it. By the late 1940s bebop had come to symbolize, among other things, juvenile delinquency, black mili- tancy, masculine assertion, serious artistic expression, and intellectu- alism.18 For a brief moment bebop seemed to be a vehicle for making serious, black jazz artistry respectable and remunerative. And it seemed as if this legitimacy might come from either or both its po- tential to enter smoothly into the realm of high culture and its oppo- sitional capital as avant-garde expression. Yet bebop was never quite able to escape its association with social deviance. As bebop was in- stitutionalized as black creative expression and intellectual work in contradictory ways, musicians achieved a certain degree of voice to articulate their aesthetic visions and their concerns about their lives in the music industry. Musicians' words give further evidence that bebop was not a unified ideological and aesthetic movement, but in fact an artistic challenge that was understood in a variety of ways in its social, cultural, intellectual, and creative context. These comments illustrate how an ethos of critical ecumenicalism helped fuel the de- velopment of the idiom and eventually caused some musicians to re- ject bebop as an inadequate description of a broader musical and in- tellectual endeavor. When Gil …