Boppin' Along with Film Noir: Neither Form was Appreciated in Its Time, but Clearly Evidence of Their Impressions Can Be Seen Today

Music and film are not strangers to American culture. Music has been a part of American culture since slavery. Europeans and Africans alike brought their respective performance practice traditions with them to the New World. As settlers branched out, they found new ways to musically express themselves on homemade instruments if they could not afford expensive ones. 

Later, technological advancement introduced a new form of amusement: the motion picture. Writers and directors were able to bring their visions of romance and adventure to mass audiences everywhere, providing them with another source of entertainment. Soon music and film were fused together, most obviously in the musical. Through these advances, some musicians and filmmakers saw their craft becoming too commercial, and leaving their traditional roots in the dust. Jazz musicians that came of age during the post-World War II era made a conscious effort to return to these roots, leading to what is commonly called bop or bebop. 

Filmmakers used the black and white aesthetic of newsreels to create a sense of realism that would later be identified as film noir. Though bop was directed more towards an African-American audience and film noir to a mass audience, both contain characteristics that make them the antithesis of their predecessors. 

Bop was a return to early New Orleans jazz roots. Boppers such as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis had roots in swing and mainstream jazz, and used their knowledge in a proactive manner in order to elevate jazz to a more artful level. People during the 1920s and 1930s were used to music that was fun to listen to and easy to dance to. Big bands were composed of two to five trumpet players, two to five clarinets and saxophones, two to four trombones, a string bass instead of a tuba, a piano, a guitar and a drum kit instead of simply a snare and bass drum, were the norm.