become the real genius of modern jazz, as Louis Armstrong is the genius of traditional jazz. One of these musicians, Charlie Christian, is not only a founder of modern jazz but also one of those who created from Swing the basis for the making of modern jazz. There is a whole group of such "pioneers": together the last generation of Swing and pathbreakers for bop. Among the trumpets, it is Roy Eldridge: among the pianists, Clyde Hart; among the tenors, Lester Young; among the bassists, Jimmy Blanton; among the drummers, Jo Jones and Dave Tough; among the guitarists, Charlie Christian. Bebop was an instrumental music. No singer could have made it. Charlie Parker forever changed the fundamental relationship between voices and instruments as it had existed up to that point. Horn players still had to breathe, and so they had to base their phrased on the length of the human breath, but no longer did they need to limit what they played to the boundaries of the voice. They played faster, way beyond what any human voice could make out with clarity, and they played melodies that never were meant to be sung. Bop never came as naturally to the voice as it did to Parker's alto saxophone and Dizzy Gillespie's trumpet and then to the other instruments. The new music may have reassigned many of jazz's basic principles, especially the primacy of the blues, but it was almost only a player's music. Most bop musicians had an unusual technique. They played long, dazzling phrases with many notes, difficult intervals, unexpected breaks, and unusual turns in melodic direction. On slower tunes, they had a good ear for small changes of harmony. Only really skilled musicians were able to play bebop well, and only sophisticated listeners at first appreciated it. In bebop performances, musicians usually played an complex melody, followed with long periods of solo improvisation, and restated the theme at the end. The bassist supplied the basic beat for...
