Hard Bop and Its Critics Author(s): David H. Rosenthal Source: The Black Perspective in Music, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Spring, 1988), pp. 21-29 Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1215124 Accessed: 23/01/2009 19:08 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. http://www.jstor.org Hard Bop And Its Critics BY DAVID H. ROSENTHAL THTARD BOP, as a dominant school of jazz, flourished between 1955 and 1965-a decade unrivalled by any other in jazz history for the number of musically brilliant records that were issued. The decade's masterpieces included drummer Art Blakey's Ugetsu (Fantasy/OJC 090), trumpeter Miles Davis's Kind of Blue (Columbia Jazz Masterpieces CJ-40579), tenor-saxophonist Sonny Rollins's Saxophone Colossus (Fantasy/OJC 291), alto-saxo- phonist Jackie McLean's Let FreedomRing (Blue Note 84106), bassist Charles Mingus's Mingus Ah Um (Columbia Jazz Masterpieces CJ- 40648), and pianist Thelonious Monk's Brilliant Corners (Fantasy/ OJC 026). In addition to these magnificent recordings-and many others could be cited-the period also witnessed an outpouring of superb music that, while not quite up to the level of the records just mentioned, was notable for its passion and beauty. The foundation for this music was "bebop," a style that flourished in the late 1940s, whose high priests included trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, alto-saxophonist Charlie Parker, pianist Bud Pow- ell and composer Tadd Dameron. Technically, bebop was charac- terized by fast tempos, complex harmonies, intricate melodies, and rhythm sections that maintained a steady beat on only the bass and the drummer's ride cymbal. Bebop tunes were often labyrinthine, full of surprising twists and turns. As a style, bebop was remarkably of a piece, best played by the small group of musicians who had been responsible for its technical and aesthetic breathroughs. The 1955-1965 years (which were preceded by the vogue for "cool jazz" in the early fifties) were a time of both consolidation and expansion. Yet the exact nature of those shifts in perspective among jazz musicians, which brought jazz from the brave but somewhat constricted new world of bebop into the more diverse and expressive realm of the late fifties and early sixties, has eluded many jazz writers, who too often have been satisfied with defining the music by using such cliches as "soul," "funk," and "returning to the roots." Though the fifties were a time of renewed interest in blues and gospel among jazz musicians, these genres represent only two shades among many in a broadened musical palette that included styles ranging from classical impressionism, on the one hand, to the dirtiest "gutbucket" effects on the other. Bebop, by the middle of the decade, was being treated as only one genre among many by jazzmen. A dazzling little world full of velocity and the joy of creation, its primary affects had been audacity and lucidity as 22 THE BLACK PERSPECTIVE IN MUSIC musicians broke the molds created by the "swing" style of the 1930s and learned to think at breakneck speed. Hard bop was an "open- ing out" in many directions, an unfolding of much that had been implicit in bebop but had been held in check by its formulas. What this unfolding meant will be clearer if we look, for exam- ple, at the pianists who emerged in the late fifties, who offered a number of approaches to their music that reworked, altered, and at times subverted the bebop idiom. Among these were Tommy Flanagan, Kenny Drew, Herbie Nichols, Mal Waldron, Horace Silver, Randy Weston, Ray Bryant, Sonny Clark, Elmo Hope and Wynton Kelly. What a variety of emotional and stylistic orientations these names conjure up, as compared with the compact nucleus of bebop! Though all these men belonged approximately to the same generation, and all took bebop as their point of departure, their styles ranged from Ray Bryant's light-fingered, Teddy Wilson- tinted musings at one extreme to the starkly minimalist, fiercely driving solos of Mal Waldron at the other, with infinite tones between and around them. One could take a single pianist, say, Kenny Drew, and find in his playing many of the decade's dominant features: funk (extensive use of blues voicings on tunes that were not strictly speaking blues), Debussyesque-lyrical embellishments, finger-busting uptempo solos, and multiple references to earlier styles, both the gently contemplative (such as represented by Teddy Wilson and Nat Cole) and the hot and bluesy (as in stride piano via Monk). In such an eclectic context, it is not surprising that many more pianists with individually recognizable styles appeared in the fifties and early sixties than had been on the scene in the forties. Though hard bop was certainly a return to the pulsing rhythms and earthy emotions of jazz's "roots," it was much else besides. This "much else" makes it difficult to pin down a precise defini- tion of hard bop. Like many labels attached to artistic movements (for example, "imagism" in poetry or "abstract expressionism" in painting), the label "hard bop" as applied to jazz has vague implica- tions, and the fact that it was above all an expansive movement, both formally and emotionally, makes the term still more awkward. Nonetheless, one might try to distinguish among the different styles by assigning them to one or more of the following classes: 1. There is the music that lies on the borderline between jazz and the black popular tradition, as represented by such artists as pianist Horace Silver, alto-saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, and organist Jimmy Smith. These jazzmen, and others of similar leanings, whose LPs and singles often appeared on Billboard'scharts, drew heavily on urban blues (Jimmy Smith's "Midnight Special"), gospel (Horace Silver's "The Preacher"), and Latin American music (Cannonball HARD BOP 23 Adderley's "Jive Samba"). Without rejecting the musical conquests and advances of bebop, they played jazz with a heavy beat and blues-influenced phrasing, which gave it broad popular appeal and reestablished jazz as a staple on jukeboxes in the ghettos. 2. Then there is the music of astringent quality and a stark and tormented mood, as in the performance of saxophonists Jackie McLean and Tina Brooks or pianists Mal Waldron and Elmo Hope. These musicians-some of whom (including Brooks and Hope) achieved recognition only from a small circle of jazzmen and aficionados-also played music that was more emotionally expres- sive, less cerebral, and less technically stunning than bebop had been. The general mood of their work, however, tended toward the somber. They favored the minor mode, and their playing exhibited a sinister, sometimes tragic, air, not unlike the mood of, say, Billie Holiday's "You're My Thrill." 3. Another class comprises music of a gentle, lyrical bent, which found in hard bop a more congenial climate than bebop had offered. In a sense, such musicians as trumpeters Miles Davis and Art Farmer and pianists Hank Jones and Tommy Flanagan were not "hard boppers" at all. They are, however, partially associated with the movement for two reasons: First, they often performed and recorded with hard boppers-Miles Davis, for example, fea- tured saxophonists Jackie McLean, Sonny Rollins, and John Col- trane in his bands. And, second, the very latitude and diversity of hard bop allowed room for their more meditative styles to evolve. Hard bop's tolerance of slower tempos and simpler melodies con- tributed as well, as did also its overall aesthetic, which favored "saying something" over technical bravado. 4. Finally, there is the experimental music, which consciously set about to expand jazz's structural and technical boundaries. Rep- resentative of this are Andrew Hill, Sonny Rollins, and John Col- trane in his work prior to the 1965 record Ascension (MCA 29020). This class would include also the performance and composing of Thelonious Monk and Charles Mingus, whose inventions were at once experimental and reaching back toward the moods and forms of earlier black music, including jazz of the 1920s and 1930s. Mingus's composition "My Jelly Roll Soul," for example, is simulta- neously a tribute to New Orleans pianist Jelly Roll Morton and a successful attempt to transmute and reformulate his compositional style in terms of modern jazz. Monk's solos are notable for their mixture of dissonance and such pre-bebop modes as stride piano; often the two styles are playfully juxtaposed. These two musicians, by influencing and challenging those discussed above, kept hard bop from stagnating. Their performance, even at its most volcanic, was informed by a sense of thoughtful searching. 24 THE BLACK PERSPECTIVE IN MUSIC It should be noted, of course, that, depending upon the occa- sion, artists may have fitted into any one or more of the classes suggested above.