ster's autobiography, a score to
which his life was the text. The
first intimations of jive could be
heard in the Blues. Jive's Blue
Period was very much like Picas–
so's: it dealt with lives that were
sad, stark, and isolated.
It
repre–
sented a relatively realistic or natu–
ralistic stage of development.
Blues turned to jazz. In jazz, as
in early, analytical cubism, things
were sharpened and accentuated,
thrown into bolder relief. Words·
were used somewhat less frequent–
ly than in Blues; the instruments
talked instead. The solo instrument
became the narrator. Sometimes
(e.g., Cootie Williams) it came
very close to literally talking.
Usually it spoke passionately, vio–
lently, complainingly, against a
background of excitedly pulsating
drums and guitar, ruminating bass,
and assenting orchestration. But,
in spite of its passion, jazz was al–
most always coherent and its in–
tent clear and unequivocal.
Bebop, the third stage in jive
music, was analogous in some re–
spects to synthetic cubism. Specific
situations, or referents, had large–
ly disappeared; only their "es–
sences" remained. By this time the
hipster was no longer willing to
be regarded as a primitive; bebop,
therefore, was "cerebral" music,
expressing the hipster's pretensions,
his desire for an imposing, full–
dress body of doctrine.
Surprise, "second-removism," and
extended virtuosity were the chief
characteristics of the bebopper's
724
style. He often achieved surprise by
using a tried and true tactic of his
favorite comic strip heroes:
The "enemy" is waiting in a room
with drawn gun. The hero kicks open
the door and bursts
in-not upright, in
the line of
fire--but cleverly lying on
the floor, from which position he tri–
umphantly blasts away, while the ene–
my still aims, ineffectually, at his own
expectations.
Borrowing this stratagem, the
bebop soloist often entered at an
unexpected altitude, came in on an
unexpected note, thereby catching
the listener off guard and conquer–
ing him before he recovered from
his surprise.
"Second-removism"-capping
the
squares-was
the dogma of in–
itiation. It established the hipster
as keeper of enigmas, ironical ped–
agogue, a self-appointed exegete.
Using his
shrC'wd
Socratic method,
he discovered the world to the
naive, who still tilted with the
windmills of one-level meaning.
That which you heard in bebop
was always
something else, not
the thing you expected; it was al–
ways negatively derived, abstrac–
tion
from,
not
to.
The virtuosity of the bebopper re–
sembled that of the street-corner
evangelist who revels in his un–
broken delivery. The remarkable
run-on quality of bebop solos sug–
gested the infinite resources of i:he
hipster, who could improvise in–
definitely, whose invention knew no
end, who was, in fact, omniscient.
All the best qualities of jazz–
tension, elan, sincerity, violence,
