Abstract
In this poem, I theorize a bebop methodology: an approach to research in communities of African descent that is simultaneously creative, improvisational, and spontaneous while reflecting dexterity, virtuosity, and brilliance. Research methods should be informed by the communities they’re intended to serve. As both the observer and the observed, I understand Diasporan Black communities as being modern colonies suffering economic, social, political, and cultural oppression. However, these homeplaces, as hooks calls them, are not without genius, beauty, and pockets of self-determining autonomy. Bebop emerged as a radical, transformative aesthetic during World War II. Through their instruments, men like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie channeled the soul-sounds of people longing to be free. A bebop methodology reverberates with the forward-leaning, socially just bent in the “Ninth Moment” (Denzin and Lincoln, 2006) of qualitative research. This work is about the poetics of research, the poetics of struggle, and the politics of hope.
The methodology of bebop is the freestyle scat of a scattered people carrying soul rhythms across the Atlantic through the trade intact on backs, in bellies that gave freely their gifts to a world new though unfree to be free or even just to be
Can you dig it?
Bebop is fried chicken, greens & candied yams catfish, barbecue & backyard jams it is smoke-filled rooms,
filled with late night sinners Sunday afternoon backsliders colliding with cats that ride white horses to the limits of sound from outwards, to in & back to the top
Bebop is father to hard bop the frenetic twin of doo-wop & great granddaddy to hip hop; tricksters to hipsters to gangsters digging their cool
can you feel its chill?
Hip cats digging all that jive & funk with soul in tempos of cut & syncopated time the dialectics of response & call the polymetrics of rise & fall crescendo & decrease tension & release the resoluteness of re-memorying spirit in field hollers in ring shouts in the talking of tongues
Bebop is a renaming rephrasing, reclaiming of culture across (dis)chord(ant) changes improvised alterity executed with rhythmic dexterity & crystal clarity creating harmonic convergences cosmic re-emergences of race and class
Bebop is a remix of all that’s jazz[2] Can you hear it?
Baby bop in utero the embryo of blues people a blues-Black people rearticulating riffs of whips and chains in a refrain of sound, frequency and beat deep like the ocean floor who finger pop to the rhythm of rattling bones and waters that roar & melodies that stream between the devil and the divine memories that scream betwixt the cerebral and the sublime blasting from the mouth of horns that made Gillespie Dizzy Sonny whine & Yardbird sing of lullabies from the Southside to Flatbush to 18th & Vine
Bebop takes an alien idiom & transforms it with glibness reconfigures it with hipness imbues it with slickness & liberates its swing;
It is a psychic reintegration a melodic iteration a fast-paced alliteration demonstrating linguistic sophistication and vernacular maturation deploying flatted fifth against dominant seventh progressions
It’s about epistemology, cosmology a decolonizing psychology informed by ontology not biology a way of being and doing that transcends empire as the operative paradigm restructuring the means and the ends relocating subjects within their own space & time
It’s about creative design and intervalic sequences replacing positivism & empiricism with criticism & lyricism minimizing pretenses resisting objectivity & neutrality arguing, rather that lived experience & commonsense validate and legitimate all other evidence
It’s about moving and grooving to the pulse of people beaten but not broken who speak resistance not weakness against the insistence of global hegemony
Against acculturation and socialization denaturalization and alienation co-makers of hybridization and syncretization in a fluid dance
It’s about romance and love for a people a blues-Black people who live in the rhythm of essentialized ancestral drums a deep inner strata from whence all my knowing comes
Can you dig it?
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
*
“Salt Peanuts” is a bebop tune reportedly composed by Dizzy Gillespie in 1943 and recorded by Gillespie and his All-Stars on May 11, 1945 in New York City for Guild Records. His lineup included Charlie “Yardbird” Parker (alto sax), Al Haig (piano), Curley Russell (bass), and Sid Catlett (drums).
**
I conceptualized this methodological theory during a visit to my hometown of Kansas City,—Yardbird country—to begin research on grassroot educational initiatives in communities of African descent. At that time, my family had gathered for an informal reunion to support my17-year-old nephew who was competing in the annual NAACP’s Afro-Academic, Cultural, Technological and Scientific Olympics (ACT-SO) Awards in the categories of instrumental music and composition where he won a Silver medal for his performance of Salt Peanuts on clarinet. As we sat around talking, I realized that I came from a family of educators. I pulled out my video camera and began recording our conversations about the state of education for African American children. It was then that I realized that research in Black communities followed a cultural paradigm that was characterized by celerity, mental dexterity, and improvisation, based on a harmonizing structure.
Author Biography
I self-describe as a mother, grandmother, and community mother, an artist, activist, and an independent scholar. My research interests include Black history and culture, Black women’s gender paradigms, critical theory, and the pedagogy of performance. I’m currently a visiting lecturer in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Illinois-Urbana.