MacAdams, Birth of the Cool

[Dave Monroe]

... a few more soundbites from from Lewis MacAdams,
Birth of the Cool: Beat, Bebop, and the American
Avant-Garde (New York: The Free Press, 2001) ...

Bebop was a code, and its phrase frgments themselves
were the only clues to its meaning.  As Dizzy, who
started doing a tune called "Bebop" in 1942, once told
a reporter, "If you're doing boom-boom, and you're
supposed to be doing bap on a boom-boom, that's just
like beeping when you should have bopped." (45)

Beboppers were the first generation of thoroughly
schooled black musicians....  Even the way bebop
presented itelf--with berets and goatees nd
horn-rimmed glasses--signaled not only the musicins'
personal rejection of their own all-too-recent rural
roots, but an affinity with the European cultural
avant-garde. (45)

What the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich menat to dada
during World war I, Minton's was to ebbop in harlem
during World War II ... (46)

Cool joined the aesthetic to the political.  Cool was
a militant act, a way of staying below the radar
screen of teh dominate culture without losing th
respect of one's peers.  Before bebop there was cool,
but it was only individual cool.  For the first time,
at Minton's, cool became an allegiance, a code that
only those who knew could break into or share. (46)

The beboppers needed to be smilarly [to Ralph Ellison'
Invisible Man] invisible so a to avoid the whole
crushing aparatus of world war.  They had to stifle
their rage and fear or hide it intheir music.  They
had no choice but to be cool.  They were a cabal.  
But like Shakespeare's Coriolanus telling those who
would send them into exile, "I'll banish you.  There
is a world elsewhere," they traded their invisibility
in the known world for the enhanced power of vision
and exploration in an as yet undiscovered but more
compelling world of their own invention. (46)

... weird, unprecedented chord progressions thtat
eventually turned into tunes with names like
"Klactoveesedstene" and bebop chants like
:Ooh-Bop-Sh-Bam (Klook-a-Mop)" and "Slat Peanuts" in a
language that no outsider couldunderstand. (46)

Kerouac, who claimed that Lester Young turned him on
to reefer for the first time at Minton's in 1941,
invoked those late-night hours a decade later in his
"Fantasy: The Early history of Bop."  In his eyes,
Dizzy gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Theolonious onk
were like "12th Century Monks," street-corner "witch
doctors" with their "backs to each other, facing all
the winds--bent, miserable and cold."  The only way
their genius could survive was by becoming less
visible.  The straight-forward handshake gave way to
the palm and finger brush.  The "put on" replaced the
"put-dwon" in dealing with "quares."  In the process,
the ultimate outsider became the ultimate insider,
able to neutralize the oppressor by creating a style."
(47)

... Thomas Pynchon as literary bebopper, perhaps? 
Self-imposed (political) exile in his own land? 
"Those who know, know."  Much on signification,
interpretation, and the politics tehreof there as
well.  But a recent viewing of Thirteen Days (and not
only to see The Fellowship of the Rings trailer, but
...) does make me think that maybe "keep cool, but
care,' is not always necessarily bad advice.  Had
neither Kennedy nor Kruschev kept cool, cared, well
...


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