This three disc, 70 song collection chronicles the tectonic shift that happened when the Swing Era graduated into the modern sounds of bebop. Instead of music for dancing and smooching, bebop turned out sounds that had to be either listened to with an attentive ear, or simply forcing the dancers to dance A LOT faster or A LOT slower.
The songs here were chosen very wisely, chronicling the gradual but steady shift from “swing to bop”, which is actually my favorite era in jazz. “Old guys” from the Swing Era with progressive ideas like Charlie Christian, Coleman Hawkins, Billy Eckstine and Lester Young, served as the template for the change, and tunes like “Hot Mallets”, “Woody’N You”, “Second Balcony Jump” and “Jammin’ With Lester” respectively show that change was in the air.
If you’ve never been exposed to “pure” bebop, the first thing that’s going to come to your attention is how “happy” “exciting” and “in your face” the music is. Pieces like “Salt Peanuts” and “Oo Bop Sh’Bam” are a hoot, while Dexter Gordon stampedes on “Long Tall Dexter”. Eckstine’s Big Band lands a right cross on “Opus X”.
Of course, there is a plethora of the Pied Pipers of Bird, Gillespie, Bud Powell and Monk. Charlie Parker still sounds light years ahead of everyone on “Hot House” and “Koko”, Monk is the vintage beatnik on “Thelonious” and Charlie Christian’s stretched out musings on “Topsy” is still state of the art. Lesser known guys like the Lester Young-influenced Allan Eager, the Diz-inspired Fats Navarro and Howard McGhee, and Lucky Thompson produce rarified treasures. And, there’s also this young fledgling of a cat named Miles Davis, while limited in range on his trumpet, links up with Parker on some classic tunes and composes clever things like “Boplicity” and “Milestones”
A few vocalists, like Mel Torme’, Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan figured it out and really rode the tide perfectly as tunes like “Sonny Boy”, “How High The Moon” and “Lover Man” respectively demonstrate. The big band leaders and arrangers eventually caught on, particularly Woody Herman with his classic “Four Brothers”, Gillespie adding Afro Cuban beats and harmonies on “Manteca” and the underrated Claude Thornhill with the cool toned “Donna Lee”.
These three discs serves as a gauntlet that is thrown down to the listening world. Like all revolutions, it had its limitations, as there are only so many ways to re-arrange versions of ” I Got Rhythm”, eventually creating its own reaction via the “Cool School” and “Hard Bop” of music, but for these magic moments, jazz had its Camelot. If you ever wonder why today’s music sounds either stale, navel gazing or simply cacophonic, there’s a reason, particularly if you compare it to the time when giants walked the earth. To paraphrase Gloria Swanson, it’s not the beboppers that were big, but it’s that today’s music that got small.