Bee Bop

POA

In the mid-1940s bebop performers such as saxophonist Charlie Parker, pianist Bud Powell and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie helped to shift jazz from danceable popular music towards a more challenging "musician's music." Differing greatly from swing, early bebop divorced itself from dance music, establishing itself more as an art form but lessening its potential popular and commercial value.

Other bebop musicians included pianist Thelonious Monk, drummer Kenny Clarke, trumpeters Clifford Brown and Fats Navarro, saxophonists Wardell Gray and Sonny Stitt, bassist Ray Brown, drummer Max Roach, guitarist Charlie Christian and vocalist Betty Carter(See also List of bebop musicians).

Beboppers introduced new forms of chromaticism and dissonance into jazz and engaged in a more abstracted form of chord-based improvisation which used "passing" chords, substitute chords, and altered chords.

The style of drumming shifted too to a more elusive and explosive style where the ride cymbal was used to keep time while the snare and bass drum were used for unpredictable accents. These divergences from the jazz mainstream of the time initially met with a divided, sometimes hostile response among fans and fellow musicians. By the 1950s bebop had become an accepted part of the jazz vocabulary.

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