CHAPTER 16 | JAZZ IN THE POSTWAR YEARS 397
When the war ended and the big bands began to break up, a
corps of players remained who were eager to emphasize the lis-
tening side of jazz. In the early postwar years, the musicians’ origi-
nality sparked excitement. Though not nearly on the Swing Era’s
scale, New York’s modern-jazz scene blossomed: uptown in Har-
lem, downtown in Greenwich Village, but most of all in midtown,
on 52nd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. Tenor saxophon-
ist Dexter Gordon later described “The Street,” where the top jazz
clubs were located, as “the most exciting half a block in the world.
Everything was going on—music, chicks, [drug] connections...
so many musicians working down there side by side.” Fans of the
music made up in passion what they lacked in numbers. Those who
“dug” modern jazz gloried in being “hip” to the music’s freedom and
intensity and to the young performers, chiefl y black, who radiated
independence of spirit.
Some commentators suggested parallels between bebop
and modernist music. The writer Albert Murray, however, has
seen the music differently. Rather than trying to turn dance music into con-
cert music, Murray writes, “Parker was out to swing not less but more. Some-
times he tangled up your feet but that was when he sometimes made your
insides dance as never before.” That quality of “inner dancing” is apparent in
Yardbird Suite, a tune Parker wrote and recorded with a small combo in 1946
during an extended stay in California. T he tune’s title refers humorously both
to Parker’s nickname—“Yardbird,” frequently shortened to “Bird,” presum-
ably because of his fondness for chicken—and to the Firebird Suite by Stravin-
sky, one of Parker’s favorite modernist composers. Stravinsky’s suite is ballet
music; in a very different way, Yardbird Suite evokes dance as well.
Like many bebop tunes, Yardbird Suite is a new melody fi tted to an earlier
song’s chord progression, or changes. Bebop musicians were motivated to
write such tunes, which academics later dubbed contrafacts, not only by the
creative challenge of doing so but also by the fi nancial pressure to avoid paying
copyright holders for permission to record the original tunes. The standard
format for a bebop record begins (after a short introduction) with a statement
of the tune’s composed melody, or head, followed by a series of improvised
solos on the tune’s changes, usually with a return to the head as a closing sec-
tion. Because melodies and titles, not chord progressions, were protected by
copyright, and because bebop musicians were sometimes more interested in
the harmonic structure of a popular song than in its melody, creating a con-
trafact offered an alternative to paying permission fees that was both legal and
artistically satisfying.
Among the tunes that served as the basis for Parker’s contrafacts are Gershwin’s
“I Got Rhythm,” Ray Noble’s “Cherokee,” and Fats Waller’s “Honeysuckle Rose.”
The model for Yardbird Suite (LG 16.2) is “Rosetta,” a tune written in 1933 by Earl
Hines (the pianist on West End Blues, LG 12.4) that was a regional hit in 1937 for Bob
Wills and His Texas Playboys. Besides discarding Hines’s melody, Parker slightly
alters the changes. Where Hines’s harmonies begin with a series of chords that
slide down the chromatic scale, Parker replaces the second chord with one that
lies a tritone (three whole steps) away. This tritone substitution, a signature fea-
ture of bebop harmony, enriches the already expressive vocabulary of the classicK Alto saxophonist
Charlie “Bird” Parker and
Dizzy Gillespie with bassist
Tommy Potter (1950).bebop contrafactsLG 16.2172028_16_386-411_r3_sd.indd 397 23/01/13 10:56 AM