Jazz History 2: Bebop & Beyond

If big band music hadn't withered away due to the natural evolution of artistry, economics would have doomed it, since the costs were soaring and the venues were disappearing. Miles Davis cut a huge swath during this period, turning his back on bebop to create the "cool school." His "So What" is emblematic of the sound. And Dave Brubeck, with saxman Paul Desmond, created what's possibly the most famous riff in modern jazz with "Take Five."

Bop saxman Wardell Gray's solo on "Twisted" was so memorable that Annie Ross (of the jazz vocal trio Lambert, Hendricks and Ross) put lyrics to it and made it a hit a second time. "This I Dig of You" is a quintessential primer in hard bop from Hank Mobley, the so-called "Middleweight Champion of the Tenor Saxophone." And Canadian pianist Oscar Peterson gets into a cool mood with "Bag's Groove," written by Modern Jazz Quartet legend Milt "Bags" Jackson.

When it comes to jazz, the vocalists are sometimes treated like the genre's Rodney Dangerfields, as if what they did was just filler between the solos. Bzzzzt. Wrong. Check out Mose Allison's silky take on "The Seventh Son," or Blossom Dearie's "I Won't Dance," which prefigures Cyndi Lauper by decades. And could you pack more sophistication into one voice than Chris Connor's on "Poor Little Rich Girl?"

In the post-WWII era, the big band sound that had dominated jazz for a decade began to wither away, both for artistic and economic reasons. Nature abhors a vacuum, though, and the jazz soloists, freed from their large-ensemble constraints, developed a freer, more experimental sound they called bebop. But not everyone dug this new sound. In 1949, a 22-year-old Miles Davis went into the studio and gave birth to "cool school" jazz, which ultimately eclipsed bebop in popularity. More than half-a-century later, this revolutionary era continues to cast its shadow over the genre.