David H. Rosenthal, "Hard Bop and Its Critics"

Hard bop and its critics

David H. Rosenthal

From The Black Perspective in Music, Vol. 16, No. 1, Spring 1988, pp. 21-29. The late David Rosenthal is the author of Hard Bop: Jazz and Black Music, 1955-1965, the first book length appreciation of its topic.

– Tony Flood

October 17, 2010

Hard Bop, as a dominant school of jazz, flou-rished between 1955 and 1965—a decade unrivalled by any other in jazz history for the number of musi-cally brilliant records that were issued. The decade’s masterpieces included drummer Art Blakey’s Ugetsu (Fantasy/OJC 090), trumpeter Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue (Columbia Jazz Masterpieces CJ-40579), tenor-saxophonist Sonny Rollins’s Saxophone Colossus (Fantasy/OJC 291), altophonist Jackie McLean’s Let Freedom Ring (Blue Note 84106), bassist Charles Mingus’s Mingus Ah Um (Columbia Jazz Masterpieces CJ-40648), and pianist Thelonious Monk’s Brilliant Corners (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 “bebop,” a style that flourished in the late 1940s, whose high priests included trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, alto-saxophonist Charlie Parker, pianist Bud Powell and composer Tadd Dameron. Technically, bebop was characterized by fast tempos, complex harmonies, intricate melodies, and rhythm sections that main-tained a steady beat on only the bass and the drum-mer’s ride cymbal. Bebop tunes were often labyrin-thine, 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 breakthroughs.

The 1955-1965 years (which were preceded by the vogue for “cool jazz” 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 clichés as “soul,” “funk,” and “returning to the roots.”

Though the fifties were a time of renewed interest in blues 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 musicians broke the molds created by the “swing” style of the 1930s and learned to think at breakneck speed. Hard bop was an “opening 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 example, 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 domi-nant features: funk (extensive use of blues voicings on tunes that were not strictly speaking blues), De-bussyesque-lyrical embellishments, finger-busting up-tempo solos, and multiple references to earlier styles, both the gently contemplative (such as re-presented 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 definition of hard bop. Like many labels at-tached to artistic movements (for example, “ima-gism” in poetry or “abstract expressionism” in pain-ting), the label “hard bop” as applied to jazz has vague implications, and the fact that it was above all an expansive movement, both formally and emo-tionally, 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’s charts, drew heavily on urban blues (Jimmy Smith’s “Midnight Special”), gospel (Horace Silver’s “The Preacher”), and Latin American music (Cannonball 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 Tina Brooks or pianists Mal Waldron and Elmo Hope. These musicians—some of whom (including Brooks and Hope) achieved recog-nition only from a small circle of jazzmen and aficionados—also played music that was more emotionally expressive, less cerebral, and less technically stunning than bebop had been. The general mood of their work, how-ever, tended toward the somber. They favored the minor mode, and their playing exhibited a sinister, sometimes tragic, air, not unlike the mood of, say, Billie Holiday’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 Art Farmer and pianists Hank Jones and Tommy Flanagan were not “hard bop-pers” at all. They are, however, partially as-sociated with the movement for two reasons: First, they often performed and recorded with hard boppers—Miles Davis, for example, featured saxophonists Jackie McLean, Sonny Rollins, and John Colltrane 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 contri-buted as well, as did also its overall aesthetic, which favored “saying something” over tech-nical bravado.

4. Finally, there is the experimental music, which consciously set about to expand jazz’s structural and technical boundaries. Repre-sentative of this are Andrew Hill, Sonny Rollins, and John Coltrane 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 ex-perimental and reaching back toward the moods and forms of earlier black music, in-cluding jazz of the 1920s and 1930s. Mingus’s composition “My Jelly Roll Soul,” for example, is simultaneously a tribute to New Orleans pianist Jelly Roll Morton 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 influ-encing 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.

It should be noted, of course, that, depending upon the occasion, artists may have fitted into anyone or more of the classes suggested above. Trumpeter Lee Morgan, for example, came close to black pop music on his juke-box hit “The Sidewinder” (Blue Note 84157), created a solo of unmatched ferocity on “Caribbean Fire” (saxophonist Joe Henderson’s Mode for Joe, Blue Note 84227), and showed his ability in handling shifting tempos and modal harmonies in a somewhat avant-garde con-text on trombonist Grachan Moncur Ill’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 album Take Twelve (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 featured two musicians in their early twenties, trumpeter Terence Blanchard and saxophonist Donald Harrison, who can stand comparison, 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 Freddie Hubbard as his role model, while Harrison clearly has listened closely to John Coltrane’s early work.

The years 1955 to 1965 represent the last period in which jazz effortlessly attracted the hippest young black musicians, the most musically ad-vanced, 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 neighbor-hoods where such youngsters lived. Hard bop was expressive. It was sometimes bleak and often sorrowful, but—like the blues and soul music—it transformed those qualities both by “getting them out” and reinterpreting 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 relative 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 commentators and listeners. The movement has been called regressive, self-conscious, monotonous, and even contrived.)¹

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 preference 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 unplea-sant 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 blackness 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 “hard boppers,” there are several musicians who 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 anony-mous remark would seem to refer to a recording session involving a band 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, something 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 discrimi-nation 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 to Fletcher Henderson, or Benny Goodman as compared to Count Basie, or, in modern jazz, of pianist Dave Brubeck 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 free jazz 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 assigning 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, Wayne Shorter on tenor sax, Bobby Timmons on piano, and Jymie Merritt 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 Paper Moon, this is merely a repetition of material that has been gone over time and time again by the Jazz Messengers 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 expectations.³

Another record assigned to a Downbeat critic at about the same time was Jackie McLean’s Capuchin Swing (Blue Note 84038), with Blue Mitchell on trumpet, Walter Bishop, Jr., on piano, Paul Chambers on bass, and Art Taylor 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 capable job. The only trouble is that it isn’t very inte-resting. 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 “Condition 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 Capuchin Swing 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 Down-beat that contained the McLean review: pianist-composer John Lewis’s The Golden Striker, baritone saxophonist-composer Gerry Mulligan’s The Concert Jazz Band, trombonist Bob Brookmeyer’s The Blues 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 orchestration; 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 particular future that he had in mind, which would bring about a union of jazz and classical music. Perhaps this is what appealed to the reviewer’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 musi-cians. Consider the case, for example, of Coleman Hawkins, who established the tenor sax as a major jazz instrument, and Lester Young (who fore-shadowed 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 “breakthroughs” 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 squea-mishness 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 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 meaningless antics of a Cannonball Adderley when there is Coltrane’s continuous public confession spelling out how dose to oblivion musicians like 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 example, is almost at the opposite pole from Taylor’s piano work, which was, and remains, heavily influenced by composers like Bartok and Messiaen. Sometimes free jazz was little more than incoherent 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 clichés lingered on:

The hard bop style was exhausted [by 1960], worn out by overuse . . . . The central problem was a lack of musical intelligence, 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 musi-cians as trumpeters Freddie Hubbard 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 produced 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 stimulated 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 critics of the late fifties and early sixties tended to look askance at music that openly advertised its 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.

Notes

¹ The Art of Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 233. Williams cites no examples.

² (New York: Dial Press, 1961), 140.

³ downbeat 27 (13 October 1960): 35. Both this review and the following one were written by John S. Wilson.

⁴ downbeat 28 (2 February 1961): 36, 37.

⁵ Leroi Jones, Black Music (New York: William Morrow, 1973), 107.

⁶ James Lincoln Collier, The Making of Jazz; A Comprehensive History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978), 452.

⁷ Robert Palmer, liner notes to The Complete Tina Brooks Quintets (Mosaic MR4-106).