invited to join a group of white musicians in an Armed Forces Radio Service studio . There he recorded eight tunes drawn largely from the repertoires of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker , whom he had heard in concert in Philadelphia . These sides suggest an acquaintance with the first 78 rpm recordings of the two bop pioneers . Bop , the first avant-garde movement in the history of jazz , was driven by a generation of jazzmen who aspired to break free from the world of entertainment in which black artists had hitherto found themselves trapped , and to take their place in the great artistic adventure of the 20th century , of which New York was fast becoming the international capital . Bebop strove to incorporate the jazz repertoire by enriching or disguising the Broadway standards at its core with more angular melodic lines , while pointing up dissonances ( as Miles Davis noted , “ We were constantly hitting the flat fives ”) by piling up chord changes and spinning playful harmonic puns .
On returning to Philadelphia , Trane found himself at the heart of an important hotbed from which several jazz heavyweights of the 1950s would soon emerge : trumpeters Clifford Brown and Lee Morgan , saxophonists Benny Golson and Jimmy Heath , pianists Bobby Timmons , Ray Bryant and McCoy Tyner , organists Jimmy Smith and Shirley Scott , bassists Percy Heath and Jymie Merritt , and drummers Philly Joe Jones and Albert “ Tootie ” Heath . Bebop was hit hard both by its commercial failure and through the ravages of heroin . It owed its salvation to a second wave which went under the mantle of “ hard bop ”, and which was presented as a reaction to the success of West Coast jazz dominated by white musicians . The ambitions of these two rather disparate movements were not in fact entirely removed from one another . The return of the hard boppers to the roots of their Afro-American identity – the blues
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