Be-Bop is Jazz !

Be-Bop is Jazz.

For some time now I have been asking myself many questions about the music that I propose and listen to… The most diffused kind of jazz is definitely that from the 50’s and the beginning of the 60’s also with some of the incredible standards, very diffused also is Jazz Rock or even 80’s Fusion. The trend of the moment, if that is what you can call it is Nu-Jazz which is also vulgarly called Lounge, that kind of redone and corrected Acid Jazz of the 90’s. Vibraphonics, Subterraneans, Quiet Boys, U.F.O., Mondo Grosso, DJ Takemura and many others had already done it all around 1993 but the people just didn’t understand! They said that it was stuff for the discos! ‘Why is it so hard to listen to different kinds of Jazz today?’, ‘everything that is in between, is it only Peterson who does it?’, ‘why don’t contemporary jazz musicians push towards Soul-Jazz or even other types of jazz like what happened abroad with the Boogaloo Investigators or New Mastersounds?’, ‘why is it always much easier to play ‘well known sure stuff’?’, ‘why do new DJ’s start off by playing Nu-Jazz / Acid Jazz without even knowing where the samples contained in their music come from?’. Well, where is jazz purism, where is the jazz culture in Italy and why have groups such as Marc 4 or Lesiman, Micalozzi and all of the Italian Librarians not had the generation recycle? What is the alternative, ‘does there really exist a Nu-Jazz that can be proposed in the clubs, does there still exist a kind of jazz culture?’, it is like saying ‘do UFO’s exist?’. That night I was asking myself too many questions. After years of Soul Beat that was what I was thinking that night, trying to lay on the table everything that was running around my head, trying to create a DJ set of alternative jazz – even if I don’t like this term – a DJ set that could ‘de-monstrate’ that there are other types of jazz. After a chat with one of the Last Poets who wrote that ‘Bop’, the continuous rhythm of the universe, must carry on ‘swinging’, everything was clear! The name must be something that united the ‘new stuff’ of the genre with the continuous rhythm of the universe, making it clear that it was about jazz. It must something that you don’t hear around, at least for some time… ‘Be-Bop’: to be bop, be in continuous rhythm or, just as it means in slang – forward, different, breaking out! This name could be the container for all jazz that isn’t standard, at least in its interpretation, it is not Jazz-Rock and above all not Nu-Jazz but ‘unconventional’ jazz, the kind that I look for. Now all I have to do is fill up the container and make sure that the contents are nice. Excluding all of the genres and periods mentioned above all that was left was for me to get looking in my favourite period which is also the one I am more expert in, if you can say that: 1967/1974 when jazz was amongst the ‘Soul Beat’ period? After finding the temporary era now I had to understand which type of jazz along with which labels etc.. I thought, seeing as the Universe is Bop and doesn’t belong to any party, religion or race my jazz should also be the same, a multi-culture jazz, open, new, swinging and groovy – practically everything that hasn’t been heard around! At this point everything was clear, the name, the era, the type and therefore: Indo-Jazz, Spiritual-Jazz, Soul-Jazz, Jazz-Oetry, Cosmic-Jazz, Hammond-Jazz, Latin-Jazz, Bossa-Jazz, Baroque-Jazz, German – Polish - Yugoslavian Jazz, White, Black or Yellow, MPS, KPM, Blue Note, Prestige, Atlantic, Tico, Black Jazz, Verve, Cenacolo, Doug Carn, Dave Pike, Lonnie Smith, Last Poets, Charlie Palmieri, Dee Felice Trio, Tamba Trio, Alice Coltrane, Dorothy Ashby, Bernard Purdie, Seguida, Indo-Jazzmen, Sun Ra. Now there is just one thing left: to start. Peace and Be-Bop all over the land.