I found this channel because someone just asked me. "What is your favorite jazz genre?" I explained that it was 'Hard Bop' and in particular, I love listening to hard bop trumpeters. If I'm in a store and some comes over the speaker system, I immediately stop to listen and appreciate it. Art Blakey is mentioned here. He always hired great trumpet players for his group. To hear some Clifford Brown or Nat Adderly is still a thrill.
The last time I heard jazz in a record store was in the early nineties. I was in a D.C. Tower records and they played Frank Gambale's Robo Roo, which I bought.
Back in the late sixties Bill Evans played in Ronnie Scotts Club in London, with his trio , and as a regular customer, I was given a front row seat about six feet from the piano keyboard, which was the best seat in the house. A mutual friend named Syd Hadden, who had a band playing in a nearby hotel, introduced my to Horace Silver, who sat down beside me for the three forty five minute sets during which Bill Evans showed the audience how to play his version of cool jazz. Naturally enough the conversation was confined to the breaks between the music, but it was great to talk with Horace Silver, over an extended period in the Jazz epicentre of Europe. Bill looked over his shoulder occasionally, as he could see and hear the chat between us during the breaks between the music. On one occasion when Bill played " Someday My Prince " he looked over his shoulder and smiled as we together gasped with joy as the tune broke through from the verse to the chorus, it was a magical night never to be forgotten.
Would love a video on Post Bop. I'm a huge Mingus fan and have heard his bands described as Hard bop and post bop and would like to clarify the differences.
Epic video. This will always be my favourite style of jazz (mainly due to Hank Mobley). Thank you for making a video about hard bop, since nobody else has really tried to ( on youtube) before.
This was fantastic! I could have watched another hour of this. I absolutely loved Ken Burns' documentary on Jazz but felt it didn't cover the later period enough so this was really good and helped me understand why I like this style whilst not being a huge jazz fan.
Nicely done, sir. Your point about the melodies, I agree. The "heads" on hard bop tunes are indeed stronger (more singable/thus memorable) than classic bebop. I think that's why hard bop is a gateway to jazz for folks raised on, say, rock music (with the drums being the #2 reason.) Are you aware of this: of the 4 big jazz labels, Blue Note, Impulse, Atlantic, and Riverside, that Blue Note would pay the musicians for a day of rehearsal, before they cut the record, where the other labels just paid for the recording session. They wanted the heads tight, more polished sounding, to differentiate them from the competition. So they'd pay for a rehearsal day. The other labels, the players might just show up for the recording session, so they're just reading it down or learning on the fly. (All this according to Berklee prof Jeff Stoudt from his Jazz History class). I really think that's a big part of why Blue Note was so successful. Just thought you'd dig that bit of trivia if you didn't already know it.
Was definitely true for me in terms of coming in to jazz from rock. Hard Bop is sonically the easiest transition probably because of its heavy emphasis on the blues. I actually don’t like early Bebop too many chords for my tastes.
Julian Lage may not use a strictly hard bop vocabulary but I believe he is the only guitarists to truly capture the tone and aesthetic essence of hard bop.
There are two Jazz stations on the FM dial in Southern California KLON (now KKJZ) Long Beach and KSDS San Diego and both have for years featured hard bop on weekends especially and I remember visiting my friend who was working at the Cadillac dealership in town where they had one of these stations playing over their speakers throughout the lobby and car lot and the music was so perfect for the festive atmosphere and was what made me begin to love that sound. For years in my mind whenever I'd hear it I would call it "Cadillac Jazz" because of where I was when I first took note of it but now I have a lot of the albums and CDs.
I found your channel the day you released prologue, I can hear the influence. It's so interesting to hear an artist break down the art that inspires there own. I hope that this gets the attention it deserves, and you've earned yourself a life long listener.
Trumpeters carried it on. Clifford Brown. Freddie Hubbard. Woody Shaw. If you haven't heard Shaw's album "Stepping Stones, Live at the Village Vanguard" you should check it out. I haven't listened to enough Blakey and your expose highlights the Messengers' impact. So much great music, so little time. Great vid.
Shaw's music is considered more post bop than hard bop, but I agree that Shaw's music is very intense and worth checking out. He's one of my favorite trumpeters!
Excellent work! You clarified the matter fully - a totally on-the-spot analysis! Hard bop is my favorite jazz genre, by far. And "Moaning" may well be the best hard-bop album ever recorded!
I’d never even heard the term hard bop until about a week ago yet most of the jazz I’ve been listening to and liking the most falls into this category, but it’s good to know what to look for in future, thanks
Please go on with more Videos. You have definitely a great talent for explaining musical styles. I am a musician and freelancing music critic since 1998 and I really enjoyed your video.
Interesting and informative. What makes this a great thesis is the clarity with which you described and illustrated the departures from bebop including more solid rhythm section grooves (like so many of the ostinato left hand piano figures heard here), arrangement and compositional strategies, and improvised line styles. Thanks, I enjoyed learning from this and feel inspired to delve deeper into the artists you mentioned.
Hey mate, your video just turned up on my recs and ofc I had to watch it. Please please please do more of these, they are evey bit as entertaining, succint and easy to follow as Lee Morgan's solo on Moanin' (not to mention, there's nowhere near enough good video essays about jazz on this God-forsaken platform). Also, the buttery Aussie voice makes everything even smoother 😁
This is a great video! It's an accurate description of this arcane historical aspect of jazz. What's known as hardbop or post-bop was a response to the less melodic unpopularity of bop. As hard as it was for jazz, it would have been worse for jazz popularity if not for the advent of hardbop. Indeed Horace Silver and Blakey were two of the most prominent pioneers of hard bop or post-bop. Miles, too was a pioneer of hardbop.
Excellent video. Great job giving a brief overview and summation of the genre and it's origin. Fantastic examples showing typical elements. 10/10; this totally fucking rocks!
That's fair, and I agree. The Wayne Shorter compositions that everyone knows him for don't fit the hard bop categorisation in the video. I mainly included Witch Hunt because I was listening to the 1981 Jazz Messengers album, 'Album of the Year' on which a version of the song appears and I thought the intro would be perfect for the video. Given that this version was played by the Jazz Messengers, and Shorter had been a member of the group, I figured I could get away with the connection. Especially since I can hear the hard bop / Jazz Messengers influence in that intro. Fun fact: Shorter's album Speak No Evil, on which Witch Hunt appears, was recorded in December of 1964. This was two months after Shorter left The Jazz Messengers in September to join Miles Davis band.
Hard Bop is for me a 63 yr old jazz pianist composer whose definitely paid some dues so for me "Hard Bop" is just one categorization too many. It's just what jazz musicians do. I notice you use Witch Hunt by Wayne Shorter in your introduction. Well on that same 1964 album Speak No Evil are Infant Eyes and Wildflower. If you were to go through and collect all such similar harmonically advanced innovative pieces from him. Like Iris, Teru, Fall, Nefertiti, and really learn all those Waltzes and ballads it might make my argument for me . Another point is that it's hard to understand exactly what a transitional moment the early to mid 60s was. Because the degree of change innovation and vocabulary expansion was impossible to keep up with for both the artists and listeners. Any contemporary player worth his salt would acknowledge how hard it is to get past 1965. If you look at who was on tour in those early black and white 60s..that alone would should blow your mind. Bill Evans trio, Dexter in Europe, Monk on tour in Europe with Phill Woods, Johnny Griffin, Miles Davis's 2nd Quintet, Charles Mingus, Art Blakey, Chet Baker, the Modern Jazz Quartet, the Bossa Nova impact with Getz via Jobim really the list is endless so not too mention Ornette Coleman. So from 1949 to Giant Steps 11 yrs that's barely enough time for a player to internalize the harmonic innovations and practices of Be Bop then in barley the blink of another 10yrs you're dealing with the Avant Garde. People simply don't understand all that radically transformed in less than 20 yrs. So this category Hard Bop hmm Ellington said if you can't swing easy you can't swing hard. I mean a great Cool left coaster like Zoot would more than hold his own in a hard Bop session and vica versa .
I think I get what you're saying. That time period of the 50s and 60s did have quite a lot of musical evolution and development, so I can see how cordoning off and labeling a single segment of it might seem unnecessary. For me personally, I think we're missing out if we just say something akin to "that's just what jazz muscians do" and don't try and examine the specific trends that were happening at the time, not that that's what you were saying. Categorisation is always a tricky and nebulous thing with a lot of differing opinions. For me, I particularly enjoy the music that the Jazz Messengers put out. And if the label Hard Bop lets me quickly describe the music to people, I'm inclined to keep using it. Anyway, thanks for watching the video! I think it's great that we can have nuanced discussions about the music we enjoy!
I've never knew this was a genre. I always thought it was more big band or sextets that happened to play like this cus it sounds good. I've always if anything considered this good jazz
really well made, but a part of me wishes that you would've elaborated more on "hard bop's" innovations on the bebop style. one of those examples that couldve been mentioned was the furthering of contrafacts. The presence of rhythm changes and other contrafacts is something that's a really important point to elaborate on, especially post 50s versions of these contrafacts. Also mentioning how key players evolved over the course of this era with playing examples wouldve made things really captivating.
Thanks so much for your thoughts and thanks for watching! When I made the video back in university I had to cut content in order to meet my deadline. The video is focussed on hard bop style through the lens of the music by members of the Jazz Messengers. That's why I didn't end up mentioning other important contributors to the hard bop style. Regarding contrafacts, in my research I didn't come upon much discussion of contrafacts and hard bop. To me contrafacts have always been more associated with bebop. If you've got some great hard bop examples of contrafacts or sources discussing them, do send some my way as I'd love to check them out :D
I just increased my jazz education significantly - well done. I dismissed jazz, most of my life, as incomprehensible pseudo-music...through my studies, however, I have begun to appreciate the thoughtful complexity of this genre.
It would be good to hear a Herbie Hancock pre-Headhunters video. I am a big fan of those many Blue note recordings where you could here what he learned playing with Miles and evolving.
Friends, do you agree? : I personally think hard bop is the logical conclusion of the progression of western musical conventions. It's the end of it all. It's the mother-lovin tippy-top of cream of the crop at the top of the summit.. Everything after is a death rattle. (Such as punk, which I also love. Beauty in deconstruction, yeah?)
