From: mchenry@guvax.georgetown.edu
Newsgroups: rec.music.bluenote
Subject: What is Hard Bop?
Date: 26 Aug 92 22:06:48 GMT
Organization: Georgetown University

In article <92239.134413KXN2@psuvm.psu.edu>, Karl Nordstrom <KXN2@psuvm.psu.edu> writes:
> mchenry@guvax.georgetown.edu says:
> 
>>I don't think Wallace is getting to be too much like Miles. I noticed that
>>he was playing traditional hard bop lines without a lot of space between
>>the licks. Miles sometimes played that way but not usually.
> 
> What is hard bop?  I've heard that Miles played it somewhere between
> Birth of the Cool and Kind of Blue,  What distinguishes it from bop?
> Was this style unique to Miles or did others play it?

To understand hard bop, you have to start with be-bop. Be-bop was an 
extension of swing music that added a lot of "high velocity" playing, i.e. 
very fast runs, and extended the music harmonically by "allowing" others 
notes to be played besides the tradional notes inside the chords in each 
measure. These harmonies now sound fairly every-day to us, but at the time 
their use was rather radical. In Charlie Parker's playing you will find 
many rythmic and harmonic surprises - phrases that go beyond the bar lines, 
quotations from other works in an ironic vein, and the use of extended 
harmonies. Be-bop often used the same chord bases as the swing songs, 
however. In the late 40s Miles, Gil Evans, Gerry Mulligan and others used 
be-bop harmonies (and we can say they were also referring back to French 
Impressionist composers and Stravinsky etc.) but in the context of slower, 
more accessible tunes that emphasized pretty melodies and harmonies, rather 
than the rage expressed in some be-bop. This "cool" school caught on fast, 
especially since it was easier in some ways to play. But around 1953-54, 
when Miles was coming out of his heroin addiction, he started to expand the 
vocabulary of be-bop by using a broader base of song styles and by playing 
faster, "harder" runs. So "hard" was the East Coast continuation/extension 
of be-bop, whereas "cool" continued in the West Coast with (mainly) white 
players. Hard bop was the dominant style of jazz in the later 1950s and 
most of the 1960s. In the early 1960s "free" jazz came in, with players 
such as Ornette Coleman, involving experiments in throwing traditional 
harmony out the window, playing what you feel when you want to, etc. By the 
end of the 1960s Miles had started down the path of jazz/rock, albeit with 
a lot less rock then anyone recognized then, and so there were three 
schools of jazz thatg were current: the hard-boppers who had continued on, 
the people switching over to jazz/rock/fusion, and the free players. 
Essentially the hard bop faded into the background until Wynton Marsalas 
came alone and was made into a big name star by Columbia and the virtuosity 
of his playing. He initially chose the hard-bop style, and now a whole 
generation of trumpet players have picked up on it. This is the best I can 
do to explain it without pulling out specific cuts on specific records. Of 
course all categories overlap and in my view, they are useful for 
organizational purposes only. For me what counts is whether or not it is 
good music, but that's another thread.

Bill McHenry                   |Those who do not hear the past works
mchenry@guvax (bitnet)         |are condemned to recompose them....
mchenry@guvax.georgetown.edu   |                 -me
Newsgroups: rec.music.bluenote