Spearheaded by Billy Taylor, Wynton and Branford Marsalis, and many others, jazz—mainstream, historic jazz—is enjoying a comeback. America's original art form is 100 years old and was in danger of fading until some of its natural heirs began to revive it. To do that they needed to know: What is the authentic music, what are its roots, where is the true line? (Renewals in rock 'n' roll are often similarly produced by going back to the roots and following the right line.) So jazz is very much alive, but it did experience a serious midlife crisis.

Jazz was born from the marriage between West African and European music. The courtship took place in North America during slavery. The meeting places were peculiar: Calvinist churches, funeral marches, and plantation dances. Strongly affected by the Great Awakenings, African Americans were never far from the message of deliverance in Christ, especially in their musical expression. The deep sorrow and the deep hope of the gospel permeated their music.

Yet, despite the encounters that begot jazz, the wall of separation between the two communities, black and white, was high. As a result, the sources for jazz and for Western music were substantially different. African Americans drew from the workplace (the blues, judgment songs), and especially the separated churches (shouts, spirituals, and gospel). Although they often had to play in tough sections of town, in the honky-tonks and barrel houses, it was more a question of economic survival than deliberate choice. By contrast, the highbrow music of whites was nurtured in concert halls, living rooms, and universities and was evaluated by critical reviews in the white press.

To be sure, in the early decades of the twentieth century, whites were well aware of jazz. Some loved it. They came in great numbers to places like the fashionable Cotton Club to hear the vibrant sounds of Duke Ellington. Hugues Panassié, the French aficionado, greeted le jazz hot of Louis Armstrong with unbounded appreciation. Others hated it, afraid that its pulsation and exotic sounds would lead to cultural decadence and immoral behavior. They called it "jackass music," a racist slur that likely gave us the word jazz (take away the "CK" and you get jass, an earlier form of the familiar term).

In the war years, the isolation began to break down. Black musicians came to New York on equal terms with whites. Many blacks had resented having to fight in a war whose spoils would not go to them. Significantly, for the first time the principal greats of a jazz style did not grow up in the church. Some became Muslims, taking on Islamic names and blaming Christianity for oppression.

Such was the setting for the crisis in jazz that began in the early 1940s when a new style came into prominence known as bebop, rebop, or, most commonly, bop. Until that time, jazz had known a certain continuity, beginning with the classic New Orleans sound and moving on through the swing era (not so much the big bands of white musicians, but those of Fletcher Henderson, Chick Webb, and Benny Moten). It always featured the language of (1) lively modal scales used by folk musicians, with their passionate blue notes, (2) melodies drawn from African American vocal technique, and (3) above all, the characteristic underlying pulsation known as swing.

But in the early 1940s, suddenly, or so it appeared, something quite different, quite revolutionary, burst onto the stage. Usually faster, and always more complex, the new music was intentionally controversial. It didn't seem to swing, or at least you couldn't dance to it. It was harmonically sophisticated and demanded much of the listener. Cool replaced hot as the highest accolade for good jazz. The typical stance of the bop musician was aloof, if not hostile. Fifty-second Street in New York became the mecca of the new sound, and the audience was populated by hipsters who cultivated disdain for the older musicians because they were square. Older musicians didn't like it. Louis Armstrong called it modern malice. Younger ones refused to acknowledge traditional jazz.

The leading figure in the bop revolution was Charles "Yardbird" Parker, not only a virtuoso performer—the most remarkable saxophonist of his generation—but also a pioneer whose conception of music influenced an entire generation. Steeped in jazz tradition, Parker was conversant as well with the leading European composers and their techniques. He was thoroughly familiar with Stravinsky's scores. He drew from Bartok, Debussy, Shostakovich, and Hindemith. He wanted to create a third way, a fusion between their sounds and jazz, though he was finally unable to realize that dream.

Carl Woideck, himself a saxophonist and professor of jazz history, has opened up to us some of the inner workings of the improvisational art of Charlie Parker. He takes us to the music itself, painstakingly transcribed from recordings. He walks us through the melodies and harmonies of Bird's characteristic works. He documents the influence of older musicians like Lester Young and Art Tatum and shows how Parker built on those and took them to new heights. In one chapter, Woideck identifies 13 qualities and traits found in Parker's music, including poetic depth, the range of tempos, and the melodic building blocks. What Parker could do with a basic unit, or motif, was astonishing. He could bend it, stretch it, use partial fragments, play around with its harmonic implications, and at any speed. He could stay for many measures right behind the beat, and then suddenly catch up. He could improvise for long measures on the upper reaches of complex chords, such as 11ths or 13ths. As Woideck skillfully shows, Parker had an encyclopedic mind, and when the music suggested it, he could weave in snatches from classical music or jazz licks. And his execution was virtually flawless, always clean and articulate.

While the book is superbly competent in its musical analysis, it rarely lifts our heads above the notes and historical facts. The introductory chapter on Parker's life is solid and accurate. It stresses his terrible drug habit, which began when he was still in his teens. (He was only 34 when he died.) But we do not find out why Bird became the icon of the beat generation. (I am old enough to remember the painted graffiti on walls around Greenwich Village declaring, Bird Lives.) Woideck doesn't do much to make connections between the musical text and the revolutionary changes in the cultural environment. There is no mention of Jack Kerouac, who regarded Parker as his primary model for literary composition. With On the Road and Visions of Cody, Kerouac considered himself the literary counterpart to Bird, who with him lived in the era of abstract expressionism and existentialism.

Charlie Parker: His Music and Life

By Carl Woideck

University of Michigan Press

277 pp.; $29.95

Admittedly, there are dangers in seeking to connect the arts to a prevailing philosophy. In fact, I usually find myself arguing the other side, pleading for focus on the text and holding off on sweeping judgments about an aesthetic background. In their eagerness to label artifacts, Christians often make unwarranted connections between art and philosophy. But in the case of Woideck's meticulous study, we have the opposite problem. It needs to put the music in a setting, to stand back and look at the larger context. Is bop a part of jazz, a rather advanced form of it, or is it another kind of music altogether, as its critics maintain? Should it be seen in retrospect as an embarrassing parenthesis in the history of jazz—evidence of the pernicious influence of largely white philosophical trends on an indigenous African American art—or was it a natural outworking of trends that were there all along? Was Bird a lost genius, a child of existentialism, or was he the logical next step in the evolution of true jazz, rooted in the workplace and the church?

My own judgment is that he was a little of both. Jazz was permanently altered after bebop, and many of the innovations from those days were simply incorporated into the language of jazz. But the roots are still there, at least to a large extent. No doubt individuals like Miles Davis, who was a younger figure in the bop revolution, have wandered far from those roots. But many others have kept close to the source, however modern their music may sound. And yet, at the same time there was something exotic to the sounds of bop, something quite foreign to the earlier African American experience, including the Christian background. Instead of the deep sorrow and deep hope of the gospel, one often discerns anger and a yearning for a pure freedom without structure. The direct heirs of this more revolutionary side are in the Free Jazz movement and the irrational sounds of the New Thing.

Why does it matter whether today Bird lives in one kind of music or another? It matters because the magic of jazz, its ability to move us, to entertain us with the sounds of deep, renewing joy, depends on the source. If the source is the religious experience of the African American community, as I believe it is, then authentic jazz will still reflect that inspiration. However many streams there may be that flow into the main river of jazz, if that river has been diverted by a dam of existentialist epistemology, the job of reviving it is harder. But in fact, though the river sometimes gets low, it is there, and Billy Taylor and the Marsalis brothers have found it.

William Edgar is professor of apologetics at Westminster Theological Seminary. He has published widely on theology, philosophy, and music. His most recent book is Reasons of the Heart (Hourglass/Baker Book House).

Copyright(c) 1997 by the author or Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@booksandculture.com.

Nov/Dec 1997, Vol. 3, No. 6, Page 14