The Case for Hard Bop

This is a blog about bebop, or mostly bebop, although I realized recently during a conversation with my sister Marcela, who is a jazz critic, that while I enjoy bebop, I am mostly a hard bop fan. We both are.

When I talk about jazz, I refer almost exclusively to Miles Davis, Dexter Gordon, Charles Mingus, Thelonius Monk, Bud Powell, Clifford Brown, as if these were the only names in jazz, or at least, the only artists worth listening to. They are all hard boppers. In 1954, Horace Silver (of Horace Silver and The Jazz Messengers) wrote a bluesy, highly rhythmic composition, "The Preacher." That, and Miles Davis's album, "Walkin'", produced the same year, are said to have launched hard bop. The term, which describes the decade of jazz from 1955 to 1965, apparently originated with critic and pianist John Mehegan.

Hard bop compositions are based on original choral changes and employ several horns during the head and in riffs. The soloing takes on more of a vocal approach. Bebop, the style of jazz of the 1940s dominated by Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker ("Bird"),  used fast tempos and complex twists and turns, while hard bop was influenced by blues and gospel, and often dubbed, funky.

Some of the great albums to come out of hard bop, considered the east coast evolution of bebop, were: Art Blakey's Ugetsu, Thelonius Monk's Brilliant Corners, Sonny Rollins' Saxophone Colossus, Charles Mingus's Mingus Ah Um, and of course, Miles Davis's Kind of Blue.

If you want to understand more about this style of music read David Rosenthal's excellent book on the subject -- Hard Bop, published by Oxford University Press in 1992.

I am sure there are contemporary hard boppers, but I keep returning to the originals. In my mind I am always dressed in black, smoking cigarettes, listening to Miles and Coltrane. Stories inspired by their music float out of my brain, and join their shadows on an eternal stage.