WHY BEBOP?

 

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 and implemented by countless jazz musicians? 

Please allow me to share with you a little personal secret: I do adore traditional jazz. I listen a lot to the great New Orleans, Dixieland, blues and swing masters, and I strongly believe that it would be impossible to really understand jazz without drinking deeply from its deepest sources. 

Having said that... and bebop? In my humble opinion, bebop is one of the highest, broadest and more complex and complete forms of improvisation, which is at its very core nothing else that instantaneous composition.

Nothing like bebop has been able to delve inside the creation of linear motives and phrases, based on the incessant research on tension and resolution with their relationships between chordal tones and melodic development - and all this with a strenuous attention to rhythmic placement of the aforementioned tensions and resolutions.

Las but not least, bebop has been a desperate cry of rebellion against the progressive commercialization that the white-dominated musical showbiz imposed to the swing big bands, a soulful cry against racism, dishumanization, capitalism and art's mercification: the tragic human experiences of many boppers fully testify it in flesh and blood.

These are the reasons that push me to this very unpopular decision: opening a blog to discuss bebop theory, language, culture and learning strategies.

 Hope I'll have, as the famous Italian writer Alessandro Manzoni quite hypocritically said, "my faithful 25 readers"... so, without further ados, let's start.

A la prochaine.