Oral History is a particularly fruitful and enlightening endeavor in jazz studies because we get to hear directly from the musicians, the people most familiar with the touch of the instrument, the craft of playing, and the abstract emotional and intellectual sensations that comprise the essence of the music. Ira Gitler (d. 2019) came of age in the early 1940s as the so-called Swing Era was giving way to ‘modern’ jazz, and enjoyed a long career as a reviewer, journalist, chronicler and producer. He famously coined the phrase ‘sheets of sound’ to describe John Coltrane’s playing in the late 1950s. In the late 1970s, he began interviewing musicians who were active from the late 1930s to the early 1950s—arguably the most consequential period in jazz history—then compiled and published the interviews as Swing to Bop in 1985.

Swing to Bop is one of the great books in the jazz bibliography. From the musicians we learn that the big-band era provided the setting and the stimulus for the development of bebop. In the late 1930s, when big-band jazz dominated popular music, musicians hoped to make a name for themselves by travelling the country with a well-known band. Gitler wisely begins with the endlessly fascinating stories of musicians’ experiences on the road and rails. Milt Hinton tells of how the itinerant life of musicians raised the suspicions of provincial folk, who saw slickly-dressed, jive-talking jazzmen as interlopers out to steal the local women. Across the South, crowds frequently shouted down jazz bands, demanding earthier, hip-shaking blues for dancing (the Saturday Night Function, per Albert Murray). The Jim Crow South was particularly inhospitable to black musicians, of course, as we hear from Dexter Gordon and Charlie Rouse. Despite the vagaries of life on the road, though, the big bands provided a kind of mobile laboratory for new forms of musical expression. Musicians in constant motion around the country had the chance to rub shoulders with their peers; itinerant players interacted with the locals, after-hours jam sessions fostered and propagated new ideas. When musicians tired of the repetitive arrangements and lack of solo space allowed in the big-band programs, the time was ripe for something new.

Gitler and his interlocutors make clear that bebop did not emerge in a particular instance from a singular source. It was, rather, a matter of musicians influencing each other, through ‘a cross-pollination of thoughts and sounds.’ Venturous players translated innovations on one instrument to other instruments, or developed techniques for stretching the sound of an instrument in unconventional ways. Musicians began to change the way they played, and the way they played together. Billy Taylor hears Charlie Christian’s influence in Jimmy Blanton’s melodic bass playing, which Oscar Pettiford then extended with the Charlie Barnet band and in New York jam sessions with Kenny Clarke and Thelonious Monk. Pettiford credited pianist Clyde Hart as the first to play with a ‘modern’ left hand, establishing chord changes instead of a straight steady rhythm. Accomplished bass players freed the piano from holding down the low end, melodic lines grew longer, and Clarke and Monk introduced surprising rhythmic variations. The line of influence from Frank Trumbauer to Lester Young to Charlie Parker is well known, and Gitler makes a case for the crucial role of Mary Lou Williams (the only women interviewed in Swing to Bop): the last eight bars of the second chorus in her arrangement of “Walkin’ and Swingin’” (for Andy Kirk in 1939) are carried into the modern period in Al Haig’s “Opus Caprice,” Sonny Stitt’s “Symphony Hall Swing,” and Thelonious Monk’s “Rhythm-a-ning.” Billy Taylor says that Williams tutored Monk and Bud Powell on the piano in her apartment in Harlem.

The gravitational pull of New York was strong, particularly on 52nd Street and in the Village, but we also here of modern jazz rising in Kansas City, Philadelphia, Chicago and Detroit. The West Coast was slow to embrace bebop, despite the presence of a number of enthusiastic young players like Hampton Hawes and Sonny Criss. The fabled run of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker at Billy Berg’s in Los Angeles coincided with the shuttering of jazz clubs along Central Avenue (ostensibly as crime-prevention, but also as a stop to race-mixing). When Gillespie left to go back east, Parker stayed behind and played with Howard McGhee at a club downtown in the short-lived Bronzeville neighborhood (formerly “Little Tokyo,” but at the time devoid of Japanese-Americans, who had all been relocated to an internment camp at the Santa Anita racetrack). The response to Parker’s music illustrates the response to bebop more generally: musicians either slapped their hands over their ears and turned away, or, according to Chico O’Farrill, they suddenly realized how limited and constrained was their own playing.

Bebop began to seep into the big-band world just as the big-band era was on the wane. Band leaders like Woody Herman, Boyd Raeburn and Gene Krupa began hiring younger musicians with the bebop sound, but Earl Hines and Billy Eckstine were first to feature arrangements based on the new chords and harmonic concepts of bebop. The new arrangements ‘ruined a lot of musicians who had been bullshitting before,’ according to Eckstine, and only a handful of critics had sympathetic ears for the first ‘jarring’ steps from swing to bop (Leonard Feather, an early promoter of bebop, initially criticized Eckstine’s band for being ‘out of tune’). Gitler says that the 1945 recordings by Red Norvo and His Selected Sextet (with Gillespie and Parker) helped a lot of musicians understand the modern jazz and changed a lot of minds.

The bustle and tumult among musicians coming to terms with modern jazz, in combination with conditions imposed by wartime regulations and the evolving music business, contributed to the decline of the big-band era. As rubber and fuel rationing made travel in large groups less feasible, and local musicians’ unions discriminated against out-of-towners, managers and record companies began to promote singers and smaller ensembles. More and more musicians became freelancers, according to Max Roach, after the government levied a 20% war tax on all entertainment excepting instrumental playing, effectively limiting the profitability of large venues and ballrooms with public dancing. Finding work required a musician to hone his chops so as to stand out in the competition for scarcer gigs. The uncertainty and insecurity of the jazz life likely contributed to a rise in the use of hard drugs around the time of World War Two, says Gitler.

Swing to Bop, by allowing the musicians to tell their own stories, helps us see how bebop evolved from the big bands, on bandstands and in the after-hours jam sessions, in many parts of the country. Different people heard different things and took off in different directions, but there was no abrupt break in the form; the new sounds jes’ grew. Some musicians saw bebop as the end of an era, others saw a beginning, but it’s clear in hindsight that bebop expanded the conception of jazz, extending the harmonic and rhythmic possibilities of the music. It’s clear also that the Great-Man theory of punctuated equilibrium is a contrivance by critics; too many people were involved in making the music, too many ideas ricocheting around, to still believe that each generation requires a genius to move the music ahead. Bebop may have supplanted established styles temporarily, but in the end the bebop moment made possible the coexistence of every imaginable approach to the music. Just listen.

For some ineffable reason, I found this book the most readable on the subject and I highly recommend this work to any jazz-understanding reader. Mr. Gitler is a devoted chronicler of post -1942 Jazz . ( )