Bebop: The Music and Its Players

by Thomas Owens

Book Overview

"When bebop was new," writes Thomas Owens, "many jazz musicians and most of the jazz audience heard it as radical, chaotic, bewildering music." For a nation swinging to the smoothly orchestrated sounds of the big bands, this revolutionary movement of the 1940s must have seemed destined for a short life on the musical fringe. But today, Owens writes, bebop is nothing less than "the lingua franca of jazz, serving as the principal musical language of...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195052870
• ISBN13: 9780195052879
• Release Date: February 1995
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 344 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.4" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

It's about the music!

It is gratifying to find such a carefully written study of bebop -- a study which focuses from start to finish on the music. We know that many of the musicians had troubled lives and suffered with drugs and discrimination. The social and personal dimensions of bebop, however, have received ample attention in books, movies, and TV shows. This book is almost unique in providing a readable and scholarly analysis of the music. Owens faced a number of choices as to how to present his material, and he made the intelligent choice each time: Focus on the music (rare), not the details of "personal problems" (common); present just the right level of technical detail, never vague but never overly pedantic; trace the historical development of the music rather than an abstract description or a "how to play bop" approach (also common); and my favorite: organize the discussion around the idioms and masters of specific instruments -- sax, trumpet, piano, and so on. This last choice enables him to provide fresh insights as to how specific stylistic innovations on different instruments finally produced the characteristic ensemble style of bebop. I've bought two copies and I'm constantly recommending this book to friends.

Invaluable Reference for the Jazz Player or Student

A thourough exploration of the style of Parker, Gillespie, Davis, Evans and dozens of others. Replete with transcriptions and stylistic summaries. Many recordings reviewed. And his enthusiam for all that is Bebop matches Clint Eastwood's for "Bird". A musicological gem.