Lively history by flee-lance jazz-journalist Rosenthal of a brief
but important musical era falling between post-Charlie Parker jazz
and Stevie Wonder-style tunes. Today, Rosenthal explains, hard bop
is heard only in revivals as the neo-bop fabrication of feelings of
another era. But as musician Henry Threadgill complains: "For the
first time in the history of jazz, many young artists have become
virtuosos of styles that have passed....Are we so nostalgic that we
need virtuosos of the graveyard?" Bop grew out of Charlie Parker,
Dizzy Gillespie, and Bud Powell, elided into its second generation
(and perhaps its finest flower) with effervescent, feelingful
trumpeter Clifford Brown. Where classic bop had bubbled with
ebullience, Rosenthal says, hard bop sprang from a cooler, more
laid-back yet hard-swinging spirit, as exemplified by Miles Davis's
seminal "Bags' Groove." Davis had come into being with Parker, with
a modest middle-range style of which Rosenthal does not think
highly. It was only after a four-year bout with heroin that Davis
returned with his ringingly inventive major style, the biting but
full-toned phrasing of pieces like "Bags' Groove" and "Cookin'" and
with synergies drawn from working with the emerging John Coltrane.
Hard bop's most tragic figure is best seen, going by Rosenthal, in
trumpeter Lee Morgan, who began recording with Art Blakey's Jazz
Messengers when only 18, winnowed an overactive style down to notes
well weighed, worked up "a timbre that seemed to convey a mixture
of bitter irony and sorrow," and then, in 1980, was shot dead at
age 30 by his spurned mistress at a jazz club on N.Y.C.'s Lower
East Side. And at that point, hard bop and the milieu that buoyed
it up - "ghetto life with jazz at its center" - vanished under
Motown, soul, and "concept albums." An original and compelling
assessment. (Kirkus Reviews)
Hard bop was a brand of post bebop jazz that enveloped many of the most talented American musicians in the period between 1955 and 1956. These were years unrivalled in jazz history for the number of musically brilliant records issued - including Art Blakey's
Ugetsu, Miles Davis's
Kind of Blue, Thelonius Monk's
Brilliant Corners, and Sonny Rollins's
Saxophone Colossus.
This is the first book devoted entirely to hard bop, combining a narrative of the movement's evolution, from its beginnings as an amalgam of bebop and R&B to its experimental breakthroughs in the 1960s. With close analyses of musicians' styles and recordings, as well as specific tendencies within the school, such as `soul jazz', it offers a much needed examination of the artists, milieus, and above all the sounds of one of America's greatest musical epochs.
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