... extracts from

Cookin' Hard Bop And Soul Jazz 1954-65

... from the introductory chapter :-

I have chosen the nominal period 1954-1965 as the principal focus for the book, but the prime years of hard bop fell between 1954 and perhaps 1962, by which time other musical currents were flowing through jazz - and jazz, it should always be remembered, is in any case a multi-layered genre at almost any point in its history. Even in these years, hard bop already existed alongside, and interacted with, several shades of traditional jazz, blues, rhythm and blues, gospel, both big and small group swing, bebop, the so-called cool school, and ultimately modal jazz and free jazz, rather than in a stylistic vacuum.

In my earlier book, Giant Steps: Bebop and the Creators of Modern Jazz 1945-65, I looked at a number of musicians who played a key role in the emergence of hard bop. They include the seminal work of the Max Roach/Clifford Brown Quintet, and the Miles Davis Quintet, and the recordings of the period by Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane (especially Blue Train, his only album for Blue Note).

Monk and Mingus should be added to that list, although their contributions were perhaps too characteristically individual and atypical to cite as representative of the genre.

Like most terms applied to jazz music, hard bop does not define a precisely delineated genre. The label was attached to the stream of bop-based jazz music which developed on the east coast in the mid-1950s. Miles David and the Roach-Brown Quintet provided a bridge between the original concept of bebop and the new idiom, but its principal progenitors were pianist Horace Silver and drummer Art Blakey, both members of the band which formed to record a session under Silver's leadership in 1954, and a year later became Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers.

Hard bop is often described as a reaction to the so-called cool or West Coast sound of the decade, but it is effectively a parallel development from the same harmonic and rhythmic foundations. As well as a geographical separation, these two streams of development also offer a neat racial division, with the cool sound cast as a largely white phenomenon, and hard bop a distinctively black one. Musically, the cool sound is mellow and intricately arranged, while hard bop is earthy and rhythmically hard driving. These polarities are broadly verifiable, although, like all stereotypes, are subject to exceptions and ambiguities.

The music associated with hard bop is very much an extension of the rhythmic and harmonic principles laid down in bebop, but with an even greater rigidity of the theme-solos-theme structure and reliance on 'running' the chord changes for melodic material, and a heavier, earthier feel in both instrumental expression and rhythm, a development from the airier registers of bebop which drew on blues, gospel and rhythm and blues antecedents, and prompted the soul and funk references which quickly became attached to the music.

Hard bop usually featured either the familiar quintet of trumpet, saxophone, piano, bass and drums inherited from the classic bebop line-up, or a sextet version with the addition of trombone. Variations included the Modern Jazz Quartet's vibraharp and piano front line (although the MJQ were not a standard issue hard bop outfit in any case) or sessions either led by or featuring guitarists, as well as the popular organ trio which dominated the related form known as soul jazz.

Although the musicians did not routinely choose such blistering speeds as those which were standard in bebop, mid and fast tempos were still the order of the day, and that was often extended to uptempo treatments of ballads (when played straight at slow speed, the ballad remained a form-within-a-form with its own rules and style, just as it had in bebop).

The bass player often employed a flexible walking bass line, and was less in thrall to the tyranny of counting out all four beats of the measure, a relative freedom offered by the drummer - led by Art Blakey - placing a greater and more regular stress on the backbeat (the weaker 2nd and 4th beats of a 4/4 measure), or making greater use of the 'tipping', the process of lightly but evenly sounding off each beat with the tip of the stick on the cymbal. At the same time, the drummer was also able to extend the kind of polyrhythmic approach and active interaction with the soloist which developed in bebop, allowing him to shuffle rhythmic patterns and accents to support the soloist.

Instrumental expression was generally biting in attack and firm and decisive - even harsh - in timbre, and made use of jazz's repertoire of vocalised 'calls' and bending or slurring of pitches for emphasis. Motivic development (the use of small melodic cells as the building blocks of a solo) was often more evident in hard bop than in the more complex lines of bebop, employed in exciting fashion for dramatic effect.

The use of standard tunes so prevalent in bebop gave way to greater emphasis on original compositions, and while many of these were melodic contrafacts (new tunes created on existing chord progressions), many also employed non-standard (standard in the sense of 32-bar AABA forms) chorus lengths and complex, fast moving progressions which allowed the soloists to show off their grasp of the tune's challenging harmonic implications.

The greater degree of complexity was not always evident. Hard bop also employed simpler structures in the form of marches or blues tunes employing more basic seventh-chord voicings than were commonly used in the extended harmonic structures of bebop. Tunes often used catchy, ear-grabbing themes designed to stick in the listener's mind before launching off into the improvised sequence of improvised solos, but there was generally little in the way of developed ensemble writing beyond the unison statements of the theme in the opening and closing choruses, although group interplay between the soloist and the rhythm section remained crucial.

Perhaps the most fundamental identifying feature of hard bop over bebop lay in 'feel' rather than technicalities. The music drew more heavily on the earthier sounds and tonalities associated with the secular idioms of the blues, rhythm and blues, and even folk forms, as well as the sanctified church idioms of gospel and the spirituals. None of these were new additions to the jazz vocabulary, but they were given a greater and more defining emphasis in hard bop and soul jazz, which in turn gave the music much of its more soulful and funky character.

It was also a music with a distinctly urban ambience, despite all those throwbacks to rural forms, and it is no accident that many - but not all - of its principal creators came from the big cities of the north east and mid west, places like New York, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Detroit and Philadelphia.

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Cookin' Hard Bop And Soul Jazz
1954-65

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