So the Boppers created a more AfroZentric music – a music where you would literally have to be a Black virtuouso and imitate the inimitable triple Blackness of a Bird, a Dizzy or a Monk to play and create it! Like the Funk music that followed, where there weren’t a lot of white Funk bands (the Average White Band was not so average), not many white Bop bands have popped up to this day! This cultural misappropriation actually led to a musician named Paul Whiteman being ludicrously entitled the King of Swing, using the same music that was at one time belittled as “jungle music,” “coon music” and “Jigga Boo music.” White musicians had copied and taken the compositions and ideas of big band leaders like Duke Ellington and Fletcher Henderson into the white world, where they received exceedingly more fortune and fame than the originators of the music. ![]() The Boppers were intent on taking modern music to another level, where they wouldn’t be so easily copied and compromised. After work every day, Black workers and Black celebrities rubbed shoulders in the clubs on Fillmore Street. Thousands of Blacks were drawn west from Texas and Louisiana to work in the Hunters Point Shipyard. Fillmore Street – what an exciting place to live. Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Kenny Clark, Charlie Christian, Coleman Hawkins, Bud Powell and the High Priest of Bop, Thelonious Monk, to name a few. Providence had spared a few chosen ones from abandoning their instruments of creation, in exchange for weapons of mass destruction. ![]() In the late ‘40s Bebop was created by a group of young brothers who had managed to avoid being fed to the human meat grinder called World War II. At the Cotton Club, Minton’s, Birdland and a thousand other places where Black royalty was welcomed, entertained and allowed to make names for themselves – like Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Prez, Lester Young, Art Tatum, Sarah Vaughn, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Leroy Jones aka Amiri Baraka, artists, dancers and a whole galaxy of chocolate stars!
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |