SANFORD PINSKER
65
monologue works. One reads Roth aloud for the sheer pleasure of how
individual words and phrases build toward a crescendo.
In a different key, Charlie Parker experienced something of the same
epiphany as he was playing in Dan Wall's Chili House, a Harlem jazz
spot. The month was December; the year, 1939-roughly the same
moment during which the world would find itself plunging into a cata–
strophic war. What Parker discovered was nothing less than how to play
a jazz solo based on the chords underlying the melody. This freed him–
and virtually every jazz musician who followed him-from everything
that had delimited jazz until that time. The effect was best described by
Parker himself: "I came alive. I could fly."
In the next few years, Parker and other musicians such as Dizzy Gille–
spie, Miles Davis, Bud Powell, and Kenny Clarke moved jazz from the
predictable (and confining) chord changes of big-band music to a new
thing that pundits called "be-bop." As a result, jazz became more than
dance music, entertainment, if you will; it was not only something one
listened to closely, it was, in fact art. Those who were actually experi–
menting in the new form did not like especially the label, be-bop, just as
a decade or so later, the likes of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac did
not enjoy being called Beats, much less Beatniks.
This should sound familiar: the twentieth century was filled with
instances in which people comfortable with traditional music, art, liter–
ature, and architecture were forced to confront a whole retinue of
shocks. The 1910 post-impressionist exhibition in London was one
example. Stravinsky's "The Fire Bird," which premiered during the
same year, was another. And, of course, there was the year 1922, which
began with James Joyce's
Ulysses
and ended with
T.
S. Eliot's
The Waste
Land.
If
it is true that the heyday of high modernist experimentation
was more or less over by the time be-bop entered the scene, it is also true
that the notes Parker was packing into his whirlwind solos caused a sim–
ilar upheaval in the jazz world. The big-band leader Cab Calloway,
largely remembered today for novelty pieces like "Minnie the
Moucher," dismissed be-bop as so much "Chinese music"-not as a
racist comment, but rather as a way to express his displeasure at what
the new upstarts were cooking up. And cook is what many of Cal–
loway'S musicians and other big-band players did when their night jobs
were over and they could meet for early morning jam sessions at places
like Minton's, a legendary jazz club in Harlem where there was the right
combination of cramped quarters, smoke, booze, and an appreciative,
with-it crowd. Parker could stay up late night after late night, partly
because of the sheer excitement of finding new combinations and chord
