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Hard Bop and Its Critics Author(S): David H. Rosenthal Source: the Black Perspective in Music, Vol

Hard Bop and Its Critics Author(S): David H. Rosenthal Source: the Black Perspective in Music, Vol

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

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http://www.jstor.org And Its Critics BY DAVID H. ROSENTHAL

THTARD BOP, as a dominant school of , 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 's Ugetsu (Fantasy/OJC 090), trumpeter 's (Columbia Jazz Masterpieces CJ-40579), tenor-saxophonist 's Colossus (Fantasy/OJC 291), alto-saxo- phonist Jackie McLean's Let FreedomRing (Blue Note 84106), bassist 's (Columbia Jazz Masterpieces CJ- 40648), and pianist 's (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 "," a style that flourished in the late 1940s, whose high priests included trumpeter , alto-saxophonist , pianist Bud Pow- ell and composer . 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 "" 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 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 , , , , , , , , and . 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, - 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 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 , and organist . 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 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, '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 and pianists 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 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. Trumpeter , for example, came close to black pop music on his juke-box hit "" (Blue Note 84157), created a solo of unmatched ferocity on "Caribbean Fire" (saxophonist 's ModeforJoe, Blue Note 84227), and showed his ability in handling shifting tempos and modal harmonies in a somewhat avant-garde context on trombonist Grachan Moncur III's "Air Raid" (Evolution, Blue Note 84153). Despite Morgan's dark-toned, "dirty" style, which was full of growls and aggressively slurred and bent notes, he could also play with delicacy and restraint, as on the tune "Waltz for Fran" on his (Prestige 2510). Nor is hard bop dead today, at least not in the sense that New Orleans jazz is dead. Recently Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers fea- tured two musicians in their early twenties, trumpeter and saxophonist , who can stand com- parison, both stylistically and in regard to their technical skills and inventiveness, with the hard boppers mentioned above. Though they both have easily recognizable musical personalities, Blanchard takes hard-bop trumpeter as his role model, while Harrison clearly has listened closely to 's early work. The years 1955 to 1965 represent the last period in which jazz effortlessly attracted the hippiest young black musicians, the most musically advanced, those with the most solid technical skills and the strongest sense of themselves, not only as entertainers but as artists. During this period, hard bop was the dominant jazz style in the neighborhoods where such youngsters lived. Hard bop was expressive. It was sometimes bleak and often sorrowful, but-like the blues and -it transformed those qualities both by "getting them out" and reenterpreting them through sheer verve and musical alertness. "Bad" in the sense that James Brown is bad, hard bop was at once menacing and cathartic. The attraction jazz exercised upon the ghetto's most talented teenagers, plus the rela- tive popularity of jazz at the time, account for the astonishing flood of creativity that characterized the era, which has now slowed to a trickle. Despite this remarkable record, hard bop was bitterly attacked during its heyday by some jazz critics. Even someone as sympathetic as Martin Williams felt obliged, in his essay, "The Funky-Hard Bop Regression," to begin his discussion on the defensive, saying: The gradual dominance of the Eastern and then national scene in jazz by the so-called "hard bop" and "funky"school has shocked many commen- tators and listeners. The movement has been called regressive, self-con- scious, monotonous, and even contrived.' HARD BOP 25

This was not the only charge leveled against hard bop. As the word "hard" may suggest, the music offered an outlet-previously uncommon in jazz and perhaps most strongly foreshadowed in some of Billie Holiday's singing and 's piano playing- for the darker feelings, such as rage, despair, and malicious irony. These emotions could be, and were, expressed in hard bop's pref- erence for slower tempos, extensive use of the minor mode, and blues-influenced phrasing. If the popular image of beboppers (wearing beret and horn-rimmed glasses, with pipe) suggested the literary intellectual, the image of the hard boppers reached back to the roots of black music, the blues and gospel. This orientation was heralded by a sudden proliferation of tunes with titles referring to "funk" (the term being upgraded from implying an unpleasant odor to denoting emotional authenticity), "soul," and "black cuisine"-for example, such tunes as pianist Horace Silver's "Opus de Funk," organist Jimmy Smith's "Back at the Chicken Shack," and Charles Mingus's "Better Git It in Your Soul." Many critics felt that hard bop's rage and celebration of black- ness had to do with the black jazzman's hostility toward whites, and these critics were sometimes guilty of confusing the musicians' personal attitudes with their music. In The Jazz Life, for example, Hentoff comments:

Among the modern "hardboppers," there are several musicianswho have played with unalloyed hatred. "This guy doesn't fit on the date,"one critic observed while listening to a "hard bop" session. "He doesn't hate enough."2

In terms of the present discussion, this anonymous remark would seem to refer to a recording session involving a whose music was rather aggressive, but whose personnel included one musician of lyrical bent. The comment gives rise to a number of questions. Though fury is certainly an element in much hard bop, is hatred, which involves an attitude toward a specific object, some- thing that can be expressed in instrumental music? Jazz has been a battlefield for racial hostilities ever since its beginnings; is this why, even today, racially mixed ensembles are rare? As Hentoff and others have pointed out, jazz is to be counted among the more integrated spheres of American life; was this truer in the 1960s than it is today? It is commonly known that black musicians have resented the fact that whites have made more money in playing watered-down versions of black music then have the black musicians themselves. Have the whites benefitted from racial discrimination and from the white public's preference for blander sounds? What is due those who are jazz's real geniuses and innovators? How does one account for the relative success of bandleader Paul Whiteman as compared 26 THE BLACK PERSPECTIVE IN MUSIC to , or as compared to , or, in modern jazz, of pianist in comparison to Bud Powell? Most white jazzmen are not rich, however, and after devoting years to jazz, often with scant economic rewards, they may naturally feel abused when attacked by contemptuous and resentful black jazzmen. Jazz critics, most of whom are white, have to put up with more abuse from those they write about than do, say, literary or art critics, and their comments generally are taken more personally by jazzmen. Of all the generations of jazz musicians to date, those of the 1960s-the hard boppers and the practitioners-have had the reputation of being the most hostile. How much did this have to do with the critics' evaluation of their music, such as stated in the comment cited by Hentoff? In the 1955-1965 period, Downbeat was the most widely read jazz periodical in the United States. Its reviewing staff included a number of critics whose views of hard bop verged on the hysterical, and with incomprehensible perversity, Downbeat persisted in assign- ing many of the best hard bop records to such critics for review. Take, for example, Art Blakey's The Big Beat (Blue Note 84029), with Lee Morgan on trumpet, on tenor sax, on piano, and on bass. The record bristles with relentlessly exuberant invention, epitomizing jazz's blend of youthful defiance, high spirits, and emotional self-exposure (among other things, it offers our first chance to hear Wayne Shorter's fiery brass anthems). The review of this recording is so short and dismissive that it is worth quoting in full: Except for the opening ensemble on PaperMoon, this is merely a repetition of material that has been gone over time and time again by and other groups. The general atmosphere is typified by Dat Dere, which is a mechanical repeat of something that was better the first time around. Morgan, Shorter, and Blakey live up to average expecta- tions.3 Another record assigned to a Downbeat critic at about the same time was Jackie McLean's Capuchin Swing (Blue Note 84038), with on trumpet, Walter Bishop, Jr., on piano, on bass, and on drums. While not up to the level of The Big Beat, Capuchin Swing did showcase a saxophonist whose searing tone and ardent delivery, backed up by some of the solidest swingers in jazz, raised virtually all his solos above the level of the commonplace to the exalted. The following review reveals an antipathy (perhaps unconscious) not only towards the music played, but also towards the musicians themselves:

The men involved in this set are all capable musicians, and they have turned in a capablejob. The only trouble is that it isn't very interesting. HARD BOP 27

None of the musicians is sufficiently distinctive to lift a routine group of pieces from the level of the routine. McLean plays a good solo on "Condi- tion Blue," but spoils it by staying on far too long. On other pieces he is inclined toward a shrill monotone. Mitchell blows his usual crisp phrases, but they lead nowhere. Bishop, a chomping, milling pianist, is given a full solo outing on "Don't Blame Me," which is pleasant but, like the rest of the disc, disappears after being heard without leaving a trace in the listener's memory.4

The Big Beat and CapuchinSwing were given two stars, Downbeat's "fair" rating. Some idea of the jazz-critic fraternity's general tastes can be obtained by noting which records were given four-and-a- half or five stars in the same issue of Downbeat that contained the McLean review: pianist-composer 's The Golden Striker, baritone saxophonist-composer 's The ConcertJazz Band, trombonist Bob Brookmeyer's The Blues Hot and Cold, and the Music of the and composer . Of these four records, three place at least as much emphasis on writing as on improvising (in contrast to hard bop): Third Stream Music is an attempt to fuse jazz and classical music by combining jazz soloing and classically-influenced orches- tration; The Golden Striker is a collection of John Lewis's delicate compositions; and the Mulligan work features his arrangements for . All four project an amiable, civilized mood that is a far cry from the emotional urgency of most hard bop. Moreover, Schuller's disc is a self-conscious effort to project jazz into a particu- lar future that he had in mind, which would bring about a union of jazz and classical music. Perhaps this is what appealed to the re- viewer's "historical sense." Jazz critics frequently have been better at, and more interested in, constructing historical schemata than at analyzing the work of individual jazz musicians. Consider the case, for example, of Cole- man Hawkins, who established the tenor sax as a major jazz instrument, and ,(who foreshadowed and influenced bebop's "advances" in his use of flexible phrasing that often flowed across bar lines and of "complex" harmonies; they always have been given more attention by the critics than . Was this because Webster's uniqueness lay more in such subtle areas as timbre, delivery, and rhythmic sense than in obvious "break- throughs" like Young's or Hawkins's? Nonetheless, it is generally agreed-at least among musicians-that Webster was as "great" as Hawkins and Young. If there seemed to be a kind of prissy squeamishness about high-voltage jazz among certain critics, hard boppers were soon getting it from another angle: the champions (black and white) of free jazz. In the early sixties, for example, a critic wrote in a review 28 THE BLACK PERSPECTIVE IN MUSIC of Into the Hot (MCA 29034), a record used to showcase pianist and composer Johnny Carisi: Taylor and [Coleman]do not have to worry about the meaningless antics of a Cannonball Adderley when there is Coltrane's continuous public confession spelling out how close to oblivion musicianslike Cannonball(or Art Blakey or Bobby Timmons or ) had brought jazz.5 My purpose here certainly is not to put down free jazz in the early sixties, which in any case was nearly as broad a movement as hard bop. 's blues-drenched sax playing, for ex- ample, is almost at the opposite pole from Taylor's piano work, which was, and remains, heavily influenced by composers like Bar- tok and Messiaen. Sometimes free jazz was little more than incoher- ent noise; at other times it could be music of startling beauty and originality. But to dismiss as "meaningless antics" the music of Adderley, Blakey and Timmons is unjust, and, even if it were true, would not make free jazz any better or worse. Unfortunately, hard bop has had many detractors and few articulate defenders; and perhaps for this reason, many critical opinions have come to be accepted as received wisdom. By the late 1970s, hard bop no longer presented the menace it had posed in its glory days, but some of the derogatory cliches lingered on: The hard bop style was exhausted [by 1960], worn out by overuse.... The central problem was a lack of musicalintelligence, a failure of imagination on the part of players in the style.6 But that wasn't true! Hard bop was just hitting its stride in 1960. One thinks of such younger musicians as trumpeters Freddie Hub- bard and , saxophonists Joe Henderson and Jimmy Woods, vibraphonist , pianists and Andrew Hill, and drummers and . In addition to these "new stars," many older hard boppers pro- duced their best work after 1960s; among them, saxophonists , Jackie McLean, , and and pianists and Elmo Hope. Hard bop needed, and it got, a kind of second wind in the early sixties. This, to a certain extent, came about because of Ornette Coleman's rejection of conventional chord changes in favor of solos determined by their own internal melodic logic, but it had far more to do with developments within the music. Miles Davis's Kind of Blue, and Coltrane's work on My Favorite Things (Atlantic SD-1361) and Live at the Village Vanguard (MCA 29009) opened up new harmonic areas based on modal improvisation rather than chord sequences. Monk and Davis made significant contributions also with their practice of using silence as a structural and dramatic element, and as did Mingus, with his proclivity for frequent shifts of mood and tempo within a single piece. All these things stimu- HARD BOP 29 lated young jazzmen to extend themselves-plus the fact that hard bop in the early sixties continued to attract a far larger percentage of the most gifted young black musicians than did free jazz. These factors at least partly account for the school's revitalization at that time. Hard bop has showed considerable staying power; many "new releases" in record stores today are actually reissues of sides cut during the 1955-1965 years, and most of these are hard bop dates. Indeed, for many listeners hard bop and jazz have become virtually synonymous. When most fans think of jazz, they think of hard bop's mixture of hip "street attitudes" and a kind of hard-boiled melancholy. Some critics, however, are still lagging behind, as one commentator notes: Because so many of them were jazz snobs, the criticsof the late fifties and early sixties tended to look askanceat music that openly advertisedits blues and gospel roots.7

Whatever the reason for the critics' rejection of hard bop in the past, it is surely time for a reassessment of one of jazz's most splendid decades. Hard bop has received less scholarly attention than any other genre of jazz. It is time to rectify this omission and to celebrate an era of extraordinary musical abundance. City

NOTES

1. TheArt of Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 233. Wil- liams cites no examples. 2. (New York: Dial Press, 1961), 140. 3. downbeat27 (13 October 1960): 35. Both this review and the following one were written by John S. Wilson. 4. downbeat28 (2 February 1961): 36, 37. 5. Leroi Jones, BlackMusic (New York: William Morrow, 1973), 107. 6. James Lincoln Collier, TheMaking of Jazz; A ComprehensiveHistory (Bos- ton: Houghton Mifflin, 1978), 452. 7. Robert Palmer, liner notes to TheComplete Tina BrooksQuintets (Mosaic MR4-106).

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