The Birth Of Bop: The Savoy

When bop began in the 1940’s, big-band swing music still held sway. The young players fostering this new music constituted a relatively small cadre within the jazz world, and as a result, members of the new guard often worked together in groups under each other’s names; after all, they didn’t yet have a huge pool of players from which to draw. And the companies willing to take a chance on bop were correspondingly sparse - at least at first - in part because most big labels hadn’t seen this co…