Though it is hard to picture a uniformed Chet in that environment , the disciplines of Army music are not arduous , even to an uncertain sight-reader . The real musical learning tended to happen when not on parade . Peacetime duties , plentiful furloughs and leave allowed emerging musicians like Chet to explore the city ’ s clubs and night spots . California was galvanised by a new music that , behind a different kind of event horizon marked by war and a recording ban , had burst on the scene with what seemed deceptively like revolutionary suddenness . Whereas swing had been the typical expression of jazz just before the war , the new style , known as bebop , was fast , abrasive , technically challenging and quite consciously a deterrent to amateurs . African-American musicians were claiming back their music by making it as challenging to listen to as it was to play . The bebop “ revolution ” is something of a misnomer . Chet ’ s future employer Gerry Mulligan regularly explained in interviews that the new music was actually much more of an evolution , a turn back towards the values of hot music that had already been in evidence before the war in the work of trumpeter Roy Eldridge , saxophonist Chu Berry and others . But bop came with a ready-made mystique . Dizzy Gillespie ’ s beret and goatee , Charlie Parker ’ s ironic adoption of stilted English diction , Thelonious Monk ’ s eccentricities , Bud Powell ’ s inner demons , Charles Mingus ’ s tempestuous personality : these were all part of a new cultural package , and a new cultural selfconfidence and oppositional defiance among African-Americans who had sacrificed much during the war and then returned to an America that still treated them as second-class citizens . Bop was a defiant , activist ’ s music that seemed likely to be a poor fit with the hedonistic cool of California jazz . That said , the East vs . West “ rivalry ” was largely a record label confection , a way of capturing some of the combative energy of the old drum battles and cutting sessions . Stylistically , there were smaller differences
14