Swing to bop - hep to hip : a study in jazz parlance

Abstract

This interdisciplinary study attempts to analyse the English of the jazz community of the USA in the 1940s, a decade when modern jazz, bebop, was born. It also investigates how and why the language changed when the musical consensus and unity of the Swing Era of the 1930s developed into a revolutionary new music with the colourful features of an underground cult. Jazz, a player's music, has emerged from oral black tradition and is a continuum. The main data has therefore been the musician: autobiographies and the interviews conducted. Additional material is from books on jazz history, musicology, and jazz pedagogy, together with various jazz journals, record sleeve notes, discographies, and taped radio and TV music programmes. As semiprofessional musician and music critic, the writer also takes advantage of his long-time experience of and involvement in jazz life and music in general. So far there has not been any special study on jazz English, its argot, jargon, and locutions, although a few jazz books have short lists of expressions of jazz lingo as appendixes. The assumption has been: the language of bebop music, 'Boppese', is due to changes in music taste and the growing importance of social and economic factors in the USA before and after World War II. The methodology has been to collect terminology concerning bop and its culture and to investigate how the music is related to the performer's, listener's, devotee's, and writer's points of view, highlighting also its semiotic aspects. The results show that the pragmatic and also cryptic language of bop musicians and its supporters has been influenced by the speakers of the earlier jazz periods and the prevailing environments in addition to the sub-cultures of the 1940s.