5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Bebop

What five minutes of music would you play for a friend to make them love Alice Coltrane or Duke Ellington? After a few years of listening to a wide range of classical music, The New York Times has been asking musicians, writers, editors, critics and scholars to share their jazz favorites with readers.

This month, our focus isn’t an artist, but a style: bebop. Think of a horn player zipping through a dizzying line, over a swinging beat that sizzles so fast you can almost see smoke drifting from the cymbals. That’s bebop.

Forged in the fires of Black urban life during the postwar era, bebop was, as Amiri Baraka writes in “Blues People,” the style that “led jazz into the arena of art.” It was also laced with irreverence. “To a certain extent, this music resulted from conscious attempts to remove it from the danger of mainstream dilution or even understanding,” Baraka says.

By way of its corrugated harmonies, its dashing tempos and the particular spotlight it placed on the interplay between horns and drums, bebop altered the course of American music, and raised the bar for improvisation and composition worldwide. And it’s never really gone out of fashion: Bebop is the music Jean-Michel Basquiat painted to, and it’s the foundation of jazz theory that music students around the world are taught when they learn to improvise.

Enjoy listening to these tracks selected by a range of the genre’s practitioners, commentators and devotees. You can find a playlist at the bottom of the article, and be sure to leave your own bebop favorites in the comments.

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Jon Faddis, trumpeter

For me, any discussion of bebop must include Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. This is not to negate the contributions of Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, Oscar Pettiford, Kenny Clarke, Fats Navarro, Max Roach and many others. Parker spearheaded bebop; Gillespie, a consummate teacher, conveyed this complex musical style to others. On an autumn evening over 75 years ago, at one of my favorite venues, Carnegie Hall, a groundbreaking concert made many fall in love with bebop. It still inspires and resonates. Although there are many classic bebop recordings, such as “Complete Jazz at Massey Hall,” “Parker’s Mood,” “Koko,” “Groovin’ High,” and another favorite of mine, Bird’s solo on “Lady Be Good,” this version of “Dizzy Atmosphere” epitomizes the genius abilities of Bird and Diz to create at such a high level. Charlie Parker is on fire, and Dizzy Gillespie is right there with him. As Dizzy used to say, “Two hearts as one.”

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Camille Thurman, saxophonist and vocalist

Charlie Parker was the epitome of bebop. His improvisations were innovative, limitless, freeing, bold, boundary-pushing and unapologetically groundbreaking in the way he transcended all preconceived understanding of western harmony. This version of “Just Friends” is what bebop is all about in a nutshell. You have this beautiful orchestration of strings, with a whimsical yet eerie backdrop, and like a bolt of lightning, Bird comes in with a highly imaginative, vivid, rapid flow of endless ideas that for four measures is exhilarating, taking you on a virtuosic sonic roller coaster ride. He ever so gracefully lands into the melody of “Just Friends” and perfectly introduces the song at the end of his improvisation. To love bebop is to recognize how musicians like Bird had the gift of hearing beyond the scope of what we might take for granted when listening to a standard. Bird could take something ordinary and recreate it into something that was iconic, sophisticated, unique and timeless while freely and honestly expressing himself. He set the standard for what makes bebop, bebop.

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Gary Giddins, former Village Voice jazz critic

Only in bebop could you take a pop song, strip it of its melody and lyrics, and create a defining standard from the remains: the chord changes. The British musician Ray Noble’s 1938 “Indian Suite” harkened to the romantic Americana of Victor Herbert and Coleridge-Taylor, yet the first movement, “Cherokee,” was a swing-era hit, despite a slow-moving melody and a fast-moving harmonic episode considered so challenging (B major, A major, G major) that Count Basie relieved Lester Young from having to solo on it. Charlie Parker obsessed over those chords, and in 1945 launched bop with his transformational “Koko.” Several classic versions ensued, none more dazzling than Bud Powell’s masterpiece. He begins with a caricature of Indian music à la Hollywood, witty but also rhythmically intense so that you smile but don’t laugh, which leads to Noble’s often-ignored theme, powered by a contrapuntal plateau of chords, as if he’s laying out the territory before he explores it, which he does in two choruses of electrifying linear invention, against a barrage of bass clef chords. The solo is staged within two octaves, dipping only once as low as the area of middle C, spelled by infrequent breath-like rests, a minimal reliance on triplets, and a few heady riff episodes. After dozens of hearings over six decades, it hasn’t lost one iota of its joy, ingenuity and wonder.

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Giovanni Russonello, Times jazz critic

An unforgettable tune, hung loosely upon chord changes that originated in a George Gershwin composition but are adapted here and restructured, turned sideways and adorned with a rockslide of rhythmic melody. A French announcer atop the sound, running through titles and names. A young Miles Davis, not yet 23, blasting forth with enough squiggly canned heat on the trumpet to leave the announcer’s words sounding lifeless, irrelevant. In each of these facets, this recording of “Good Bait” — penned by the quietly revolutionary pianist Tadd Dameron — epitomizes the brilliant moment of bebop: a reckoning for Western modernism, the greeting of its own limitations, the Molotov cocktail concealed under the lapels of a three-piece suit.

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Natalie Weiner, writer

Scat singing wasn’t a bebop innovation, but it was a core part of the subgenre’s development — right down to its name, derived from common scat syllables. Betty Carter shows why on this 1958 record, cramming a nearly unfathomable number of notes into a whirlwind minute and 48 seconds of slick big band sound. Her tics and riffs sound so familiar because they’ve become standard, but here Carter was forging new ground, extending the scat innovations of Dizzy Gillespie with wild virtuosity and never conceding to the mellow, background music stylings often expected of “girl singers.”

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Sean Jones, trumpeter

This group’s performance with Thelonious Monk on “Evidence” is one of the greatest displays of bebop musicians communicating at a highly sophisticated level at extremely brisk tempos. This form of communication, improvisation, is one of the world’s best examples of spontaneous composition. The improvised section is based on Jesse Greer’s iconic “Just You, Just Me,” showing bebop’s ability to recontextualize the pop song form. Referencing that title, Monk thought, “Just Us/Justice” — which requires “Evidence.” This track also reflects the most profound aspects of rhythm and its relationship to harmony through the African American experience, creating new sonic phrasing that would become the foundation of hip-hop and other American styles of music.

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Charles McPherson, saxophonist

Bird comes from the middle of the country, Kansas City, in the middle of the 1930s, when that area was in a good musical period. But besides absorbing all the Kansas City blues and the Kansas City swing, Bird was pretty eclectic. He very much knew about people like Stravinsky: He quoted passages from “Firebird Suite” or “Petrushka.” Bird listened to cowboy country-western; he listened to everything. So he was like a sponge, musically. He also probably listened to Middle Eastern music — certainly Dizzy did that. So they’re pushing all kinds of envelopes. These guys were particularly smart and wide open, with the technique to merge it all. Billy Higgins, the drummer, said that bebop was the beginning of “sanctified intelligence.” That says it all.

The way that Bird and Dizzy play “Shaw ’Nuff,” they’re so accurate it almost sounds like one person playing. It’s a lot of moving parts, it’s very notey — but they’re played very cleanly. And these guys are right with each other. When I talk to California musicians who are of that age, they say: “We just heard Bird and Dizzy on record, they had never come out here to Los Angeles, so we thought it was one person playing. So when they came out there in the 1940s it was the first time we saw them playing, and it amazed us. Because a lot of the compositions that we thought were one person playing — no, it was two people playing.” That floored them.

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Marcus J. Moore, jazz writer

I’ve always admired the brazenness of the trumpeter Freddie Hubbard: No matter how powerfully the music swirled around him, and whether he was the bandleader or a sideman, his wail scorched through the arrangement every time. On this 1969 version of “Space Track,” from the live album “Without a Song,” Hubbard dots the composition with brisk upper-register notes that float atop the band’s turbulent mix of piano, drums and bass, bolstering the song’s urgency while guiding its shape-shifting journey. “Space Track” dips into occasional silence meant to reinforce its balance of power and tranquillity. With each of the band’s upswings, Hubbard also ascends, at one point following Louis Hayes’s spirited drum solo with an equally blistering tone. To me, the track typifies Hubbard’s command of his instrument alongside the message he wanted to convey. His mastery of tension was unparalleled.

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Kenny Barron, pianist

This is a very melodic piece. I know some people may be intimidated by bebop — the lines can be very fast and complicated — but this is a very melodic piece, with a very accessible line. It’s not a simple melody but it’s not super-complicated, either: You can actually sing along with it. And it’s taken at a tempo that’s not too fast, so it’s really very clear. Where the rhythmic emphasis falls, that’s one of the things that makes it work. One of the things that makes bebop work is that the way the one is felt — the first beat of the bar — is actually the “and” of four. So that gives it a certain kind of propulsion and forward motion, at any tempo. So when the tempo’s not that fast, you really hear that forward motion. Bud Powell’s important because he improvised like a horn player. There were some things that he did that were kind of demonic, they were so incredible. Speed-wise, and also some of the things he wrote. He was an amazing pianist.

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Melissa Aldana, saxophonist

To me, this album — “Charlie Parker With Strings” — captures the deepness of Parker’s innovative nature as an artist in a way that is beautiful, lyrical and emotional. Bird’s sound is raw and personal, but this track shows what it means to simply have a beautiful sound. It made a particular impact on me years ago, and continues to affect me now.

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