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Hard Bop And Its Critics
BY DAVID H. ROSENTHAL
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
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 Bud Powell'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 TheJazz Life, for example,
Hentoff comments:
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 John Lewis's The Golden Striker,
baritone saxophonist-composer Gerry Mulligan's The ConcertJazz
Band, trombonist Bob Brookmeyer's TheBlues Hot and Cold, and the
Third Stream Music of the Modern Jazz Quartet and composer
Gunther Schuller. 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 big band. 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 Lester Young,(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 Ben Webster. 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 Gil Evans used to showcase
pianist Cecil Taylor and composer Johnny Carisi:
Taylor and [Coleman]do not have to worry about the meaninglessantics
of a Cannonball Adderley when there is Coltrane's continuous public
confession spelling out how close to oblivionmusicianslike Cannonball(or
Art Blakey or Bobby Timmons or the Jazztet) 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. Ornette Coleman'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 Woody Shaw, saxophonists Joe Henderson and Jimmy
Woods, vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson, pianists Cedar Walton
and Andrew Hill, and drummers Joe Chambers and Billy Higgins.
In addition to these "new stars," many older hard boppers pro-
duced their best work after 1960s; among them, saxophonists
Jimmy Heath, Jackie McLean, Harold Land, and Booker Ervin and
pianists Freddie Redd 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
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.
New York City
NOTES
1. TheArt ofJazz (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,TheMakingofJazz;A Comprehensive History(Bos-
ton: Houghton Mifflin, 1978), 452.
7. Robert Palmer, liner notes to TheComplete
TinaBrooksQuintets(Mosaic
MR4-106).