Hard Bop and Cool
Hard Bop
• a style of jazz that is an extension of bebop (or "bop")
music. Journalists and record companies began using the
term in the mid-1950s to describe a number of styles
deriving from bebop.[1] Hard bop incorporates influences
from rhythm and blues, gospel music, and blues, especially
in the saxophone and piano playing.
• David H. Rosenthal contends in his book Hard Bop that the
genre is to a large degree the natural creation of a
generation of black American musicians who grew up at a
time when bop and rhythm and blues were the dominant
forms of black American music[2]:24 and prominent jazz
musicians like Tadd Dameron worked in both genres.
Another major influence in this genre was Miles Davis.
Hard Bop
• Hard bop is sometimes referred to as "funky
hard bop." The "funky" label refers to the
rollicking, rhythmic feeling associated with the
style.[3 The descriptor is also used to describe
soul jazz, which is commonly associated with
hard bop.
Hard Bop
• Hard bop developed in the mid-1950s, and is
generally seen as originating with The Jazz
Messengers, a quartet led by pianist Horace
Silver and drummer Art Blakey. Some saw
hard bop as a response to cool jazz and west
coast jazz.[4]
Hard Bop
• Michael Cuscuna maintains that Silver and Blakey's efforts were in
response to the New York bebop scene:
• Both Art and Horace were very, very aware of what they wanted to
do. They wanted to get away from the jazz scene of the early '50s,
which was the Birdland scene—you hire Phil Woods or Charlie
Parker or J. J. Johnson, they come and sit in with the house rhythm
section, and they only play blues and standards that everybody
knows. There's no rehearsal, there's no thought given to the
audience. Both Horace and Art knew that the only way to get the
jazz audience back and make it bigger than ever was to really make
music that was memorable and planned, where you consider the
audience and keep everything short. They really liked digging into
blues and gospel, things with universal appeal. So they put together
what was to be called the Jazz Messengers.
Hard Bop
• A key recording in the early development of hard bop was Silver's
composition "The Preacher," which was considered "old-timey" or
"corny," such that Blue Note head Alfred Lion was hesitant to
record the song.[However, the song became a successful hit.[
• Miles Davis, who had performed the title track of his album Walkin'
at the inaugural Newport Jazz Festival in 1954, would form the
Miles Davis Quintet with John Coltrane in 1955, becoming
prominent in hard bop before moving on to other styles. Other
early documents were the two volumes of the Blue Note albums A
Night at Birdland, also from 1954, recorded by the Jazz Messengers
at Birdland months before the Davis set at Newport. Clifford Brown,
the trumpeter on the Birdland albums, formed the Brown-Roach
Quintet with drummer Max Roach.
Hard Bop
• The hard bop style enjoyed its greatest
popularity in the 1950s and 1960s, but hard
bop performers, and elements of the music,
remain popular in jazz. According to Nat
Hentoff in his 1957 liner notes for the Blakey
Columbia LP of the same name, the phrase
"hard bop" was originated by author-criticpianist John Mehegan, jazz reviewer of the
New York Herald Tribune at that time.
Hard Bop
• Other musicians who contributed prominently
to the hard bop style include Cannonball
Adderley, Donald Byrd, Sonny Clark, Lou
Donaldson, Kenny Drew, Benny Golson, Dexter
Gordon, Johnny Griffin, Joe Henderson,
Andrew Hill, Freddie Hubbard, Jackie McLean,
Charles Mingus, Blue Mitchell, Hank Mobley,
Thelonious Monk, Lee Morgan, Carl Perkins
(pianist)[3], Sonny Rollins, and Sonny Stitt.
Cool Jazz
• The very term "cool jazz" conjures up images
of martinis, bachelor pads outfitted with the
latest stereo equipment, and sophisticated,
detached chicks dressed in the latest fashions.
The word cool denotes a detachment, a less
emotional approach to the music. In short,
cool jazz is something of a college-educated
form of jazz, often influenced by other musical
forms such as classical music.
Cool Jazz
• Cool jazz features arrangements that are
generally more complex than those found in
bop, where the head is played, followed by
solos, then played again. Often complex
harmonies were played behind the solos in
cool jazz--it was much more a style that
emphasized the composer and arranger.
Cool Jazz
• The first 'cool' jazz recordings were by a nonet
(or nine piece) group led by Miles Davis and
recorded on a group of sides that came to be
known as The Birth of the Cool (a title that was
applied after the fact, by the way).
Cool Jazz
• The Davis group was more collaborative and marked
some of the first influences of composer/arranger Gil
Evans, who later worked with Davis on a
groundbreaking group of albums that sought to
combine delicate, complex arrangements with
improvisation. In addition, baritone saxophonist
Gerry Mulligan, who later became a major player in
cool jazz on the West Coast, also played on the Birth
of the Cool sessions, as did John Lewis, a pianist
whose approach was certainly cerebral in nature.
Cool Jazz
• The instrumental voices in the Davis nonet were
fused in such a way as to make them all equals rather
than competing sections like those of a big band.
More tonal colors worked their way into the palette
as well, with French Horns and tuba being added.
These were musicians who were well grounded in
bebop, having come up playing this style, so it is not
a question of their possessing virtuosity. Rather, they
chose to express themselves in a way that left the
technical virtuosity that was obvious in bebop
behind.
Cool Jazz
• The Birth of the Cool nonet was not commercially
successful and their recorded sides were few. Recent
CD releases have combined the total studio output of
the group with a live radio broadcast from the Royal
Roost to collect virtually all of the group's recorded
music under the "Birth of the Cool" title, but at the
time there was no real sense that the group had
recorded a large or even unified body of work.
Nonetheless, their music became highly influential as
the various members who had contributed to the
nonet spread out and began to lead their own
ensembles.
Cool Jazz
• Gerry Mulligan's piano-less quartet, featuring
trumpet player Chet Baker, certainly did much to
increase the profile and popularity of cool jazz.
Mulligan and Baker played counterpoint around and
against each other's lines, sounding more like a
relaxed version of a Bach fugue than contrapuntal
New Orleans jazz. The space opened up by the lack
of piano or guitar not only helped further define the
cool sound as a basically minimalist style, it also left
considerable room for Mulligan and Baker to solo in a
relaxed, unhurried style.
Cool Jazz
• Very little cool jazz produced through the end
of the '50s and into the 1960s is strictly cool,
but it all has recognizable elements that link
the different practioners of the sound
together. For example, Dave Brubeck's work,
while retaining many elements of the cool
movement, is often very agitated, searching,
and experimental
Cool Jazz
• . His quartet's work with "odd" time
signatures opened the door for late-'60s
experimenters like Don Ellis and Brubeck's
piano work has sometimes been described as
"bombastic" by jazz critics. But the quartet
also featured alto saxophonist Paul Desmond,
who played every bit as lyrically as Chet Baker
or Lee Konitz and had a gorgeous, thin sound
that went against what any alto player has
done before or since
Cool Jazz
• An intellectual and talented wordsmith, Desmond
became, in many ways, the perfect example of a cool
jazz artist--cerebral, clever, humorous, and with a
penchant for good scotch and dating models.
Brubeck, too, came across as an intellectual and
something of an avant-gardist because of the fact
that he had studied with composer Darius Milhaud.
The group's music is anything but an exercise in
intellectualism, though--with drummer Joe Morello
and bassist Eugene Wright, the group could swing
fiercely in any time signature.