BEBOP AND A FEW OF MY FAVORITE THINGS.

I read the word bebop for the first time in the pages of a novel by Jack Kerouac. And when I got the chance to listen by chance to Coltrane’s soprano sax, singing my favorite things and completely changing the original meaning of one of my favorite cheesy tunes of all time I just have to know more about it.

When I was 11, one of my beloved and older cousins, Gabriel, took his copy of Kerouac’s “On the road” and got lost for two months without telling anybody. He appeared in Can-Cun, working as a dishwasher guy in a fancy hotel. It was his way to do homage to Kerouac and his Beatnik essence. For me, it was the moment that I got really curious with Kerouac enchant and in consequence with the BEBOP.

Bebop and Beat poetry shared the taste for experimentation and the anger of reaching new fields and new artistic languages; many bebop musicians took the genre into avant-garde grounds. Taking the jazz tradition to higher levels of virtuoso improvisation and harmonic complexity. On the other side, the Beatnik poets, took their hedonism and unconformity and converted it into a statement flag against the post-war disenchant. The bebop musicians were also reaching extremely radical borders and many of them, sadly didn’t see the end of it.

One of the most beautiful characteristics of Beatnik writers were his willing to give voice to the anti-heroes of literature, the outcasts, the poor ones, the “others”. They were crossing America and inclusively, many of them end up in Mexico at some point of their lives, looking for cheap drugs and exotic adventures.

Both genres represent and portray the reach for a new artistic representation, characteristic that saw the light in the beginning of the twentieth century and that was seeking for  its higher point in the 1950’s and 1960’s, Many of the bebopist and beatniks of that time, were also close to the most academic and serious arts and were familiar with the serious music trends of that time.

Bebop was inspired by musicians like Debussy and Schoenberg. Many serious composers of that time also had closely relationships with some of the famous names in Bebop. Although Bebop is just one small part of enormous and rich Jazz tradition, its influence is big and we can sense until now, especially in the way that change solo improvisations and turned them into a more complex and rich musical moment for every performance.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

Angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection

to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night…

A.G