Bopera on Broadway

A lantern-jawed singer with baby-doll bangs and a piano player with a floppy polka-dot bow tie opened and closed their mouths like goldfish sending up bubbles from the bottom of a murky aquarium. The sound of their voices was drowned out by the thumping and puffing of six poker-faced young men behind them, who played their instruments with loud, emotionless precision. In the darkness out front several hundred listeners crowded around small tables, stood three deep at the bar, or sat in straight-backed chairs in an upholstered bull pen. On the mirror in the far corner of the Royal Roost, foot-high enamel letters spelled out "Metropolitan Bopera House."

When Jackie Cain, the girl singer, had released her last colorless bubble, and Charlie Ventura's band had slid over its last glissando and flattened its last fifth, the audience applauded politely. No one screamed; no one bounced; no one fell in a fit; no one left. The carefully disorganized music began again, the performers staring blankly at the audience, the audience staring blankly back. Bop was a very serious business--just as serious as swing used to be.

Six months ago the Royal Chicken Roost was just another basement Broadway joint, specializing in Southern fries. It enjoyed a brief notoriety last December when it offered Margaret Truman $10,000 a week for a personal appearance and was politely refused. A short time later it dropped the "Chicken" and became the country's principal showcase for what its earnest admirers call "progressive" music.

Beer from a Bottle. Bebop has been around for seven or eight years, and something of a fad for two, but experts still disagree over what it is, and whether it will last. Gusty, oldtime Blues Singer Chippie Hill says flatly and hopefully that "It won't last. My 16-month-old niece does it when she drinks beer out of her bottle, and does it better than any of them." To the naked ear its shrill cacophony seems anarchistic; on repeated hearings it becomes clear that the players planned it that way. Duke Ellington, now a disc jockey, has been kind; old Satchmo Louis Armstrong, critical. The feud now raging between partisans of the New Orleans school of jazz, who enjoy their music, and the "progressives," who seem to undergo theirs, is reminiscent of 12th Century theological squabbles.

Some of bop's first excesses have already disappeared. Few of the patrons of the Roost now wear "progressive" berets and green-tinted, horn-rimmed glasses. There are only one or two of the tentative little bop beards visible in the Bopera House bleachers, where the most serious followers pay 90-c- to sit & listen. Whether bop is trash or treasure, it certainly isn't a dud. Last week it was all over Broadway.

Explosions in a Cellar. For four weeks, patrons of New York's Paramount Theater have been pinned against its back wall by Stan Kenton's klaxon-loud "progressive" blasts. Dizzy Gillespie, the high cockalorum of bop, was getting top billing at the rival Strand Theater. At 52nd and Broadway, the intersection of commercial acumen and "art" in popular music, the Clique Club opened its doors and let the mob in. Buddy Rich, a Tommy Dorsey alumnus and bop fellow traveler, shot spectacular explosions from his drums, and a velvet-skinned Negro named Sarah Vaughan squeezed her toothpaste-smooth voice out amongst the customers, singing in a style like a kazoo. In four other cities, new-style nightclubs had opened, with a no-dancing policy, and with bleachers for serious listening.

In Manhattan, the Royal Roost, hoping to heighten bebop's moral and intellectual tone, opened a milk bar for teen-agers in the yellow leather corral. A learned study of bebop by Jazz Columnist Leonard Feather was under way, and a letter had been dispatched to Bernard Shaw to get his opinion on the whole thing.

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