THE BIRTH OF BEBOP: A Social and Musical History.

By Scott DeVeaux. Univ. of California Press. 572 pp. $45.

When did jazz become modern jazz? "Such a question," writes DeVeaux, a professor of music at the University of Virginia, "is typically parried with mystification—‘If you’ve got to ask, you’ll never know.’ " Fortunately, there is very little mystification in this thoughtful and meticulous study of a pivotal period in American culture: the early 1940s, when a coterie of dance band musicians created the demanding style of modern jazz known as bebop.

DeVeaux scrutinizes the two "master narratives" that are commonly used to explain the origin of bebop. The first is the "evolutionary approach," preferred by critics and musicologists. It acknowledges the disruptive originality of such figures as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk, but defines it as one more development in the century-old jazz tradition. The second master narrative is "the trope of revolution," brandished by those who find in music "evidence of broader social or political currents." In this view, bebop is both a radical break with the musical past and the prelude to Black Power, "a rebellion by black musicians against a white-controlled capitalist hegemony."

DeVeaux tests the "lofty abstractions" of these master narratives against the "quirky contingencies" of biography. The result is a rare hybrid: a scholarly book about jazz that does justice both to the music and to the forceful personalities involved. This is no dry musicological treatise, although DeVeaux’s transcriptions and analyses are careful and precise. Nor is it a typical jazz bio, gushing enthusiasm at the expense of ideas. Rather, it is an intellectually informed account of how a remarkable group of people coped with the triple challenge of being distinguished artists, ambitious professionals, and African Americans. If the book contains no blinding revelations about bebop’s how and why, it does offer welcome confirmation of Ralph Ellison’s observation that the makers of this extraordinary music were less interested in becoming avantgardists or in overthrowing the system than in coming up with "a fresh form of entertainment which would allow them their fair share of the entertainment market."

—Martha Bayles