“Counter-Bopaganda” and “Torn Riffs”

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the subculture of young African Americans who developed forms of social dancing to bebop music as recounted to the author in oral history interviews with self-identified bebop dancers and as documented by Russian modern dancer/choreographer Mura Dehn in her film The Spirit Moves and in her drafts for an unfinished study on jazz dance. Dehn’s work reveals fascinating creative adaptations to bebop’s accelerating tempos and complex melodic structures in new and expanded dances such as the applejack, Jersey bounce, and bop lindy. Through these developments, dancers engaged in intricate metric and hypermetric play with bebop music—which they refer to as dancing “off-time”—while also embodying bebop’s “cool” aesthetic and the emergent cynicism and radicalism that shaped postwar African American political culture. Their experiences, and Dehn’s work to document them, demand a re-examination of the discursive work performed by bebop’s reputation as a music innately hostile to social dancing, a label that has less to do with the music’s difficulty than with a desire to position bebop as “art” rather than “entertainment.” The chapter closes with a discussion of “the problem of Dizzy Gillespie” to highlight and explore the historiographic challenges that discussion of social dance poses to canonic narrative positionings of bebop. It suggests that bebop is better understood as part of a contiguous spectrum of Black popular culture that thrived alongside, rather than in opposition to, rhythm & blues and other popular music genres.