I’ve been a jazz dabbler for years, mostly from listening to NPR’s weekend late-night show Jazz After Hours. But I’ve found the show much less enjoyable since the new host took over; and when I ask Spotify to play me jazz, I end up liking a relatively small minority of it and fairly seriously disliking the rest.
So as I started building a playlist of the stuff I did pick out as being “my kind” of jazz, I started to wonder if there was any discernible pattern or if it was simply that certain individuals of various eras and styles were just better–or at least more suited to my taste. As I started to look up the artists, it quickly became clear that the answer was very much the former. Without actually knowing as I listened when these records were released, I was nevertheless zeroing in on “hard bop” (though it doesn’t sound terribly “hard” to me), released within a roughly ten year period from the early Fifties to early Sixties.
I then tried reverse engineering this, going to AllMusic and Wikipedia and making a playlist of the most highly recommended tracks from all the major “hard bop” artists I could find. Then I played it on shuffle and didn’t look at who was playing until I decided whether or not I liked a track. Once again, very specific: only that early era of “hard bop” got my thumbs-up: Dexter Gordon, Phil Woods, Wayne Shorter, Bill Evans, Sonny Rollins, Art Blakey, Charles Mingus, etc. The whole genre seems to have kind of disappeared in the late '60s, only to reappear in the '80s and '90s, but I just don’t dig that later wave. And then with titans like Miles Davis, I find myself mainly enjoying his earlier sound (though if I’m blasted out of my gourd, some of his hippie-era psychedelia can be interesting but not really melodically pleasurable).
In my non-jazz music listening, I tend to be pretty up to date: I’ve got a 2010s playlist that I listen to regularly (with artists like You Won’t, We Were Promised Jetpacks, and the Barr Brothers). But without even having realized it before now, I’m apparently a stick-in-the-mud when it comes to jazz. What does this mean? Any jazz experts out there who can interpret the tea leaves here?
Hard bop is fiercer Bebop - a strutty, small combo subset of jazz. Bebop was the coolest form of macho - fast runs, in-joke riffs that use melodic quotes from jazz standards; turn-on-a-dime rhythms.
Hard bop was a lot less inclined to put the macho tag on fast play and standards quote - It focused on Coltrane-flavored rule-breaking - as the soloist, playing enough outside the chords, harmonies and rhythm to stake your own territory.
Not sure what to make of your tastes - hard bop is tight, small combo jazz, where the noise factor sits within a very ordered foundation. I think of it as the Fauvist art movement relative to Impressionism (Swing Jazz) and Post-Impressionism (Bebop).
It does! Or at least it’s interesting. As I figured, though, I’m coming from it as such an outsider that I can only partly grok what you are saying as I am missing a lot of the reference points. (So I especially appreciate the analogy to visual art movements, where I have a better intellectual grounding.)
To both of you, and anyone else that shows up who’s knowledgeable about this genre: are there contemporary musicians I might like, that I have just not managed to clue into so far? Or do I just need to keep digging into the midcentury stuff?
I share your tastes to some degree. That period was when I was getting acquainted with the various sounds I preferred. (That said, I also loved the George Shearing Quintet sound, just as a measure of my taste range.)
Blue Note seemed to have the best source for that sound for me. Prestige was also a choice. Even the bigger labels (Columbia, RCA Victor and Capitol) dabbled in the sounds but not exclusively, so you had to pick and choose carefully.
If I had to point at one group for what turned me on it would be Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, all of whom had many recordings under their own names.
If it matters, I also got into West Coast style stuff (Mulligan, Baker, Brubeck, Desmond, etc.) not long after the Hard Bop thing was getting a little too easy to predict.
But the 50’s-70’s era was the best time for my music.
Mulling this some more: it would be awfully narrowminded for someone to say they like Fauvism but no other art movement that preceded or succeeded it. Is that what I’m guilty of, overly narrow tastes in jazz? It’s okay, give it to me straight.
ETA: Zeldar, WordMan, thanks. I will check those out toute de suite. WordMan, some of the stuff I didn’t really grok at all: “macho - fast runs, in-joke riffs”; “put the macho tag on fast play and standards quote”; “the noise factor sits within a very ordered foundation.” I mean, I know all those words, obviously–it’s just that I’m unfamiliar with the idioms, or their jargony meaning within jazz lingo.
How important is it to be perceived as “a Music Person”? If you like knowing what you like, then knowing you like Hard Bop is cool. If you understand how Hard Bop fits in context of other categories and where the lines are blurry, well - that can be cool, too.
There’s no right answer - and it’s good music, so, you are fighting the good fight
Whatever gets you going. My wife’s tastes are much wider than mine, but she’s been into jazz since childhood, whereas I came late to it. I also tend to stick to bop, hard bop, and West Coast. You didn’t mention Monk: the man was a genius.
There are radio stations you can stream that only play the genres you like. I have two in my Sonos favorites, one for West Coast jazz and one for bop.
Ah - my phrasing is not “official jazz lingo (daddy-o!)” - it is my attempt to describe what I hear. Bebop is “Boy’s music,” like metal or Paganini on violin - macho technical feats, and having to show your chops to be in the club. In Bebop the way you show you are that good is by playing fast, scalar runs that vary on the melody of the main tune, and also by dropping in “quotes”/phrases of then-well-known jazz standards, kid’s tunes, etc.
Hard Bop is less concerned with speed and picking the coolest, most off-beat song to toss in a phrase from. Hard Boppers are different - they “compete with other” by picking notes to play that are far off the “official” scale, or that happen at a rhythm that cuts against the groove the rhythm section is playing. Both Bebop and Hard Bop have a standard small-combo jazz rhythm section approach and structure - start the song, play the straight melody, go explore, then bring it back to the song’s melody - but Hard Bop “goes and explores” in a way that is a bit more “out” vs. Bebop. “Out” actually is official jazz language - it means breaking the rules of melody, harmony and rhythm. The further “out” you play, the more it sounds like noise to non-jazzcats…
I came to almost exactly the same conclusion when educating myself about jazz a few years ago. Art Blakey’s classic Jazz Messengers line-up (Shorter/Morgan/Silver) led me to all those artists’ solo albums, and hence to anything recorded for Blue Note between about 1955 and 1965. You can’t go wrong with that stuff.
Thanks for the radio suggestions, **Chef **and Dale. I tend to stay in the Spotify ecosystem due to the way my devices are set up, but it is unfortunate that they just have a generic “jazz” station (though you can also base a station on a given artist and then provide feedback). A specifically “hard bop” station would be great.
I will have to try solo Morgan, as my collection is already heavy with Blakey, Shorter, and Silver. [queueing up The Sidewinder…ah yes, this is good stuff, thanks]
Right now I’d say my two favorite albums, that I’m going to risk overplaying if I don’t watch out, are Mingus Ah Um and Dexter Gordon’s *Go!. *Any of you guys fans of those albums in particular?
Also, in keeping with your wish to locate some newer players in the Mingus vein, check out the YouTube things like Seamus Blake - Peggy’s Blue Skylight and see if others in the sidebar meet your needs.
I have a friend who got a Ph.D. in trombone playing. We called him the Doctor of Trombonology. Hard Bop was his specialty, J. J. Johnson his hero. He did his thesis on Curtis Fuller.
J.J. Johnson and Stan Getz at the Opera House, Chicago, 1957. Rhythm section rocks out with Oscar Peterson, Herb Ellis, Ray Brown, and Connie Kay. Possibly the best live hard bop performance you can get. (Even though hardly anyone thinks of Getz when you say “hard bop.”) On the Verve label. You’ll thank me later.
