Entry · catalog no. 1311
bebop
/ /ˈbiˌbɑp/ /BEE-bop
noun · Harlem — Minton's Playhouse and Monroe's Uptown House — with Kansas City and Southwest territory-band input · 1940s
✓ Verified
1.
The Black modernist jazz style of the mid-1940s: fast tempos, extended harmony, small combos, virtuoso improvisation, made for an audience sitting down.
“The dance halls emptied out and the bebop rooms filled up with people who came to hear.”
2.
The word itself, taken from the vocables used to sing the music's clipped two-note figure.
“You cannot explain the phrase, you can only sing it: be-bop.”
Origin & Attribution
Black musicians in Harlem between about 1940 and 1945, worked out at Minton's Playhouse on West 118th Street and at Monroe's Uptown House. Henry Minton hired Teddy Hill to manage the club in late 1940, and Kenny Clarke assembled a house band that opened in early 1941 with Clarke on drums, Thelonious Monk on piano, Joe Guy on trumpet, and Nick Fenton on bass; Charlie Christian sat in through 1941, and Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker were regulars. The word is onomatopoeic, from scat vocables, and Gillespie is generally credited with fixing it to the music. Two dates in circulation should not be repeated. A 1942 Jefferson City newspaper citation is almost certainly a database error — Gillespie was a sideman that year and the beret-and-goatee iconography in the quoted line belongs to 1946 and after. A 1939 first-print claim appears in reference works with nothing behind it. No individual invented bebop, and any entry naming one has stopped describing what happened.
1941
Kenny Clarke's house band opens at Minton's Playhouse with Monk, Joe Guy, and Nick Fenton
1945
Gillespie records "Be-Bop" in New York on January 9, his first date as a leader, issued on Manor 5000
1948
Richard O. Boyer's New Yorker profile on July 3 locates the word's birth at Minton's for a national readership
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The Northeast
Harlem — Minton's Playhouse and Monroe's Uptown House — with Kansas City and Southwest territory-band input · 1940s
Spoken by
Black musicians first, and pointedly for each other; then the audiences who followed them off the dance floor
$BEBOPThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Enduring81 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
74/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1945
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
@bxgriot
The Bronx, NY
@phillyanne
Philadelphia, PA
Contribute your pronunciation
Citations & Sources
■
Dizzy Gillespie — "Be-Bop" — Manor 5000 · rec. 9 Jan 1945
Originally titled "Dizzy's Fingers"; Gillespie's first session as leader, issued backed with "Salted Peanuts"
■
Down Beat — magazine · 1 Aug 1945
Review of the Gillespie 78; the Oxford English Dictionary's earliest evidence for the word
■
Richard O. Boyer — "Profiles: Bop," The New Yorker — magazine · 3 Jul 1948
Contemporary reportage placing the coinage at Minton's
■
+ Cite a sourceLeonard Feather — Inside Be-bop — book, J. J. Robbins & Sons · 1949
The first book-length account; later reissued as Inside Jazz
See also