Babs Gonzales – Bips & Bops: Cool Scat From A Cool Cat 1947-1956

Description

The introduction of bebop to the musical melting pot that was the jazz scene of the 1940s brought about a revolution in the way that genre of music presented itself to the public. A new school of young musicians turned the traditional form of jazz on it’s head and brought about a new way of presenting songs without words that would itself evolve into the vocalese of the likes of Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, Eddie Heywood and King Pleasure. The pioneer of this style – on record, at least, was Babs Gonzales who, with a few like-minded souls, created a vocal bebop where wordless singing gave voice to the kind of sounds that Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and others were creating instrumentally. On this new Jasmine collection, you can hear the evolution of this then-unique concept as it took place in the late 1940s and early 1950s, with Babs and his vocal cohorts supported instrumentally by some of the key musicians of the emerging bebop scene. The titles might not always make much sense – but the music does, and it’s easy to see why this new style gripped the imagination of a new generation of jazz fans in the same way that rock ‘n’ roll would capture the imagination of a 1950s young America who were bored with traditional pop music. Babs would eventually go on to pioneer his own style of ‘rapping’ that would be the start of the road to hip hop. That’s another saga for another CD – but here Jasmine brings you more than two dozen examples of the work of the man who made vocalese sound easy, in chronological order and in the best sound of any Gonzales anthology so far.