Carried to others through the press, bebop’s style and image served as a model antidote to the conformity of the early years of the Cold War, and as bebop was entrenched as the basis of post-war jazz, what had been associated with just one section of the jazz community soon became associated with its whole. The way these publica- tions responded to the music and words of the young black musicians at the forefront of bebop helped shape an image of the bebop musician as an individual who stood outside musical and social norms, and who stood in contrast to the more respectable elements of 1940s swing. Focusing on Down Beat and Metronome, this essay examines how this image was created in the popular jazz press of the late 1940s. The patriotic soldier jazzmen and wholesome mass entertainers of the war years were replaced by a conception of the jazz musician as a deviant who refused to conform to conventional tastes. Using the All-Stars as an example of modern jazz in the fifties, the frequently confusing jazz history narrative found in most textbooks can be reshaped, providing a more useful picture of the music during that decade.Īs the 1940s turned into the 1950s the popular image of the jazz musician shifted. They viewed their music as modern, just as their New York-based contemporaries did. Recent interviews with members of the All-Stars and articles appearing in both jazz and general interest periodicals during the fifties also indicate that the All-Stars were not playing in a different style. The recordings do not support the view that the All-Stars were playing an identifiable West Coast or Cool style that was different from an East Coast or Hard Bop style favored by players based in New York. The recordings contain a variety of modern or post-swing approaches to jazz improvisation, composition, and arranging similar to those found on recordings produced in New York. The band produced both live and studio recordings over a period of seven years. The Lighthouse provided a stable working environment for jazz musicians with few, if any, commercial restraints. This study examines the music produced by Howard Rumsey's Lighthouse All-Stars at The Lighthouse nightclub in Hermosa Beach, California between 19 and its relationship to music recorded by New York-based groups during the same period. However, by the mid-sixties when jazz was dominated of the Avant-garde or New Thing, this variation on modern jazz was discredited and frequently forgotten. It also appealed to many casual listeners, some as attracted to the provocative album cover art as they were to the music. The visual art of jazz helps account for jazz’s ability to transport artistic hipness from the enclave of modernist art into the everyday.ĭuring the Fifties, a musical style frequently called West Coast jazz became popular with both critics and serious jazz fans. In particular, this essay focuses on the photographic and illustrative work artists like William Claxton and Andy Warhol created for the newly emerging format of the record cover. The essay also follows German sociologist Andreas Reckwitz, whose history of creativity allows for interpreting the impact of the jazz art world as a chapter in the rise of a creativity dispositif. In the jazz art world, the article suggests, sound becomes intermedially embedded in visual culture and textual repertoires. Becker’s method of reconstructing “art worlds,” i.e., the networks of cooperation that include the institutional structures of marketing and distribution. This article draws on two approaches within cultural sociology to explain the historically specific cultural force of jazz: it follows American sociologist Howard S. By the late 1960s, however, this “second jazz age” had come to an end. In the early 1950s, American jazz entered a phase of artistic blossoming that was accompanied by widespread popularity and unprecedented cultural influence.
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