How Deaf Can You Get?

When Dizzy Gillespie hit Sweden and Denmark, the halls were barely big enough to hold all the beboppers; in Paris, zealous French zazous (jazz fans) came to blows over him. Last week, Manhattan's Carnegie Hall was full of beboppers. Bebop* was apparently no laughing matter.

In Carnegie Hall, no one had to strain to hear what frantic Trumpeter Gillespie and his 15 boppers (including four other trumpets) had to say. Whatever else, bebop is screechingly loud. It is also breathlessly fast, with some biting dissonance and shifty rhythms, with the brass blaring out accents up on top. Pieces like Two Bass Hit and Stay On It didn't sound like "moldy fig" music (boppese for "decadent" Dixieland jazz); but, except for Dizzy's wild, fast-riding solos, they did sound like something Duke Ellington had thought better of a long time ago.

Bebop is also a way of life (slogan: "be hip, be sharp, be bop!"). Its feverish practitioners like to wear berets, goatees and green-tinted horn-rimmed glasses, talk about their "interesting new sounds." The high priest is Dizzy, 30, a South Carolina boy whose rapid-fire, scattershot talk has about the same pace--and content--as his music. Whether he, an obscure Manhattan pianist named Thelonius Monk or Saxophonist Charlie ("Yardbird") Parker invented bebop is a matter of learned dispute among beboppers.

The unconverted get nowhere accusing bebop of dissonance. Says Dizzy: "If it doesn't hurt your ears it isn't dissonance. But then," he confesses, "I'm a little deaf myself."

Odessa hadn't caught up with bebop yet, but it already had too many low American habits to suit Pravda. "How can we get rid of swing and jitterbugging," Pravda demanded to know, "when . " . vulgar melodies [like] Pussycats, Crazy Girl and White Moth sound in the public places . . . pampering low-grade tastes . . . while folk and real ball dances are unavailable?

"Especially harmful are the so-called 'wild' jazz bands, consisting of a piano, violin, accordion and drum . . . Instead of the popular Soviet songs . . . they reproduce melodies filled with tavern melancholy and alien to the Soviet people."

*"Rebop," according to beboppers, is a term used only by squares (those who aren't hep).

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