DeVeaux — The Birth of Bebop

Author: Scott DeVeaux
Title: The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History
Year: 1997
Type: Book (University of California Press)

The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History is a book by the University of Virginia musicologist Scott DeVeaux, published by the University of California Press in 1997. It argues that bebop was an attempt by Black professional musicians to reshape jazz so as to gain the greatest possible autonomy within the marketplace of the swing era, and that the economics of the music were part of its musical change. DeVeaux sets this account against two older ones, the critics’ story of stylistic evolution and the social historians’ story of revolution. The evidence is the working life of jazz musicians up to 1945: the career of Coleman Hawkins, the jam session, the wartime economy and the music’s entry into the market, in a history that stops where a conventional account of bebop would begin. The book won the American Musicological Society’s Otto Kinkeldey Award and an American Book Award in 1998. Six years earlier, in his essay “Constructing the Jazz Tradition” (1991), DeVeaux had argued that the idea of a single jazz tradition is a recent construction.

The University of California Press published the book in 1997.¹ DeVeaux, a professor of music at the University of Virginia, writes in the introduction that bebop is the point at which present-day ideas of jazz come into focus, and that “to understand jazz, one must understand bebop.”² He sets the book against the critics’ account of bebop as evolution and the social historians’ account of it as revolution, and he treats economics “not as something external to the process of musical change, but as an essential component of it.”³

The first part of the book centers on Coleman Hawkins, the swing-era tenor saxophonist whose reputation as an innovator, in DeVeaux’s account, vanished with bebop just as his prestige peaked in 1944.⁴ Later chapters cover the jam session, which a chapter title calls “the jazzman’s true academy,” the wartime economy and the music’s entry into the market. The book stops in 1945, where, DeVeaux writes, a more conventional history of bebop would begin.⁵ The epilogue states the thesis: bebop was “an attempt to reconstitute jazz… in such a way as to give its black creators the greatest professional autonomy within the marketplace.”⁶

In “Constructing the Jazz Tradition” (1991), DeVeaux argued that “the idea of the ‘jazz tradition’ is a construction of relatively recent vintage, an overarching narrative that has crowded out other possible interpretations” of the music’s history. He found in jazz criticism an “agoraphobia, fear of the marketplace,” toward a music that had developed within mass-market capitalism.⁷ The essay won an Irving Lowens award, and Marc T. Gaspard Bolin treats it as a founding text of the New Jazz Studies.⁷ Later scholars answered it, among them Sherrie Tucker in “Deconstructing the Jazz Tradition” in 2005 and Charles Hersch in “Reconstructing the Jazz Tradition” in 2008.⁸

The book won the American Musicological Society’s Otto Kinkeldey Award, an American Book Award, an ASCAP–Deems Taylor Award and the Association for Recorded Sound Collections’ Award for Excellence, all in 1998, and the critic David Hajdu called it “the most commanding work ever on its subject.”¹ John Andrews, reviewing it for the World Socialist Web Site in 1998, called its prose ponderous, read its thesis as reducing bebop to a way for Black musicians to make money, and found that it overlooks Lester Young and nearly ignores Miles Davis, though he credited it with insight into the relation between the music business and the music.⁹

Key contributions

• Bebop as an attempt by Black professional musicians to win autonomy within the jazz marketplace.
• Economics treated as part of musical change.
• The career of Coleman Hawkins as the opening case of the passage from swing to bebop.
• A history of bebop’s formation that ends in 1945.

See also

• Blues People — Amiri Baraka’s 1963 history of Black music as social history
• The History of Jazz — Ted Gioia’s 1997 survey of jazz
• Authenticity and its discontents — the debate over authenticity in popular music