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WHY BEBOP?

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  Jazz is dead. Bebop is rotten. Or not? You could think I am insane opening a blog devoted to bebop in 2025. Bepop? Really? Who does care about bebop, except a dozen of old fanatic cats living in the past? Nowadays the jazz scene is fully occupied by modal, fusion, acid jazz, lounge and other devilry I don't even want to know. And let's not talk about the showbiz in general: nowadays the music people listen to is everything but jazz, so what place could be left to bebop as a contemporary language to be studied and learnt by any musician? Let's start from the beginning: jazz is not dead, rather it is alive and in very good shape. Maybe not as a broadly listended genre, but its hot blood flows wildly and torrentially inside many other styles: how could r'n'r be possible without the blues, how would even be possible to imagine contemporary pop songs' refined harmonies without the deep, constant, thoughful work on substitutions, alterations, extensions developed an...
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AN INTERESTING FORUM

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  Dear all, please allow me to point out a very interesting forum created by a friend of mine to offer room for discussion about music, musical gear, musician’s life and hacks, technical issues and many things more. Supporti Musicali The forum is in Italian language but many forum era speak English perfectly. Pay a visit, it could be interesting.
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THE RHYTHMIC DISPLACEMENT

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    To understand what displacement is in practice – that is, the rhythmic shift that occurs when a dissonance appears on a downbeat instead of a target note, and the target note is postponed to the following downbeat or is even played on the upbeat – I propose a beautiful phrase by Arturo Sandoval on There will never be another you (from bar no. 39). Incidentally, we see with some surprise that, when he puts aside his machismo of the type "I can play more notes per second than any other trumpet player", Arturo is perfectly capable of improvising simple and delicious bebop phrases. At the end of the first bar, we see that Arturo applies two devices:         Displacement: instead of playing a target note (on Cm7 he could use C, Eb, G or Bb), Sandoval puts in a B natural and then a Db that just don't fit at all with Cm7. Notes that can be explained, however, as a bypass of the C that appears on the first downbeat of the second bar. Anticipat...
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