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DeVeaux — The Birth of Bebop

Cited in 3 notes
Baraka — Blues People, Gioia — The History of Jazz, Jazz

Find it in a library:WorldCat·Open Library

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

The book takes the best-lit legend in jazz history, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie inventing modern jazz in a Minton’s jam session, and relocates it into the working world that legend erases: the dance-band circuits, the union locals, the draft boards, the recording ban, and the after-hours economy where Black professionals maneuvered inside a market rigged against them. “Bebop is the point at which our contemporary ideas of jazz come into focus,” the introduction argues; it is “the prism through which we absorb the past. To understand jazz, one must understand bebop.”1 DeVeaux refuses both of the field’s master narratives, the critics’ “evolution” and the social historians’ “revolution,” and proposes to “open up avenues of interpretation that move beyond the limiting simplifications” of each — with economics treated “not as something external to the process of musical change, but as an essential component of it.”2

The method is the argument. Part One builds the whole study on Coleman Hawkins, the swing-era virtuoso whose “reputation as innovator vanished” under bebop’s onslaught just as his prestige peaked in 1944 — the hinge figure a lightning-strike story has no room for.3 The narrative then works through the jam session (“the jazzman’s true academy”), the wartime economy, and the market’s embrace, and stops, deliberately, in 1945, where conventional accounts begin. The gestation is the subject; the famous flowering is left to other books.4 The epilogue compresses the thesis into its sharpest form: bebop was “an attempt to reconstitute jazz… in such a way as to give its black creators the greatest professional autonomy within the marketplace. Bop was the twin child of optimism and frustration, of ingenuity and despair.”5 The profession noticed: the American Musicological Society’s Otto Kinkeldey Award, an American Book Award, an ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award, and the recorded-sound archivists’ research prize, all in 1998.6

The book executes a program its author had already published. “Constructing the Jazz Tradition” (1991), the essay generally treated as the founding document of the New Jazz Studies, had argued that “something like an official history of jazz has taken hold” and that “the idea of the ‘jazz tradition’ is a construction of relatively recent vintage, an overarching narrative that has crowded out other possible interpretations.”7 The tradition, the essay argued, is a pedigree built to certify jazz as autonomous art, complete with “agoraphobia, fear of the marketplace,” in a music “that has developed largely within the framework of modern mass market capitalism.” Fittingly for a book about constructed narratives, its own most-quoted thesis line, that bebop was “simultaneously an artistic movement, an ideological statement, and a commercial phenomenon,” is the publisher’s jacket copy rather than a sentence DeVeaux wrote.8 The push-back against the DeVeaux program came from both flanks: a socialist critic attacked the academy’s “ponderous writing” and read the thesis as reducing bebop to a marketing strategy and the book as shortchanging Lester Young and Miles Davis, while the next generation of jazz scholars pushed past the essay from the other side, asking whom even the revisionist frame leaves out.9 The debate it started is the debate the field still runs on.

Key contributions

  • The de-mythologized bebop: the music’s birth grounded in the professional lives of Black musicians in the segregated swing economy, sourced deep in the Smithsonian’s jazz oral-history archive.
  • The Hawkins hinge: modern jazz’s origin told through a swing progressive’s mid-career fall, dismantling the clean generational-rupture story.
  • The 1945 stop: a history that ends where the conventional one begins, making the gestation visible for the first time.
  • The tradition-as-construction argument: the 1991 essay’s demonstration that the seamless “jazz tradition” was assembled retrospectively to do institutional work — jazz’s equivalent of the canon critiques Keightley wrote for rock and Peterson for country.
  • The evolution/revolution refusal: a model for holding a music’s artistic and economic histories in one frame without letting either flatten the other.

See also

  • Blues People — the 1963 predecessor that first insisted the music’s history is social history; DeVeaux’s marketplace replaces Baraka’s changing Black consciousness as the engine
  • The History of Jazz — the narrative survey this book’s historiography reads critically: the tradition told, and the telling examined
  • Authenticity and its discontents — the agoraphobia diagnosis (all virtue assigned to the anti-commercial) is the jazz chapter of the ideology that note anatomizes
  • Jazz — the umbrella whose bebop branch and canon debates run on this book

Footnotes

  1. DeVeaux, The Birth of Bebop, Introduction, pp. 2–3; the inner phrase “that great revolution in jazz” is DeVeaux quoting Bernard Gendron. Wording verified against the full text (see the UC Press edition, accessed July 7, 2026). ↩

  2. Introduction, pp. 4–5 (the two master narratives and the refusal to choose); the economics passage sits later in the introduction. Verified against the full text (accessed July 7, 2026). ↩

  3. Chapter 1, “Progress and the Bean,” p. 37 (accessed July 7, 2026). ↩

  4. The 1945 endpoint is explicit at Introduction, p. 3: the book “ends where a more conventional approach to the subject… would begin”; “The Jazzman’s True Academy” is chapter 5’s title. The oral-history sourcing leans on the NEA/Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Project. ↩

  5. Epilogue, within the closing section; the book’s final page (p. 450) adds that “jazz itself is unfinished business.” Verified against the full text (accessed July 7, 2026). ↩

  6. The Birth of Bebop, University of California Press (accessed July 7, 2026) — the Otto Kinkeldey Award, the American Book Award, the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award, and the ARSC Award for Excellence, all 1998; David Hajdu’s blurb calls it “the most commanding work ever on its subject.” ↩

  7. Scott DeVeaux, “Constructing the Jazz Tradition: Jazz Historiography,” Black American Literature Forum 25, no. 3 (1991), pp. 525–560; quotes verified against the full text hosted at Jazz Studies Online (accessed July 7, 2026; its pagination follows the 1998 Jazz Cadence of American Culture reprint, pp. 485–510). The essay won the Society for American Music’s Irving Lowens article award. Its status as New Jazz Studies’ founding document per Marc T. Gaspard Bolin, Journal of Jazz Studies 15, no. 1 (2024) (accessed July 7, 2026). ↩

  8. UC Press’s description (accessed July 7, 2026); the word “ideological” does not appear in the book’s body text. ↩

  9. John Andrews, “What bebop meant to jazz history,” World Socialist Web Site, May 22, 1998 (accessed July 7, 2026); the next-generation replies are Sherrie Tucker’s “Deconstructing the Jazz Tradition” (2005) and Charles Hersch’s “Reconstructing the Jazz Tradition” (2008), cited as the historiography-critique canon alongside DeVeaux in Bolin, 2024 (accessed July 7, 2026). ↩