Hard bop: Jazz and Black Music, 1955-1965

by David Rosenthal

  Heavier use of the minor mode and strong rhythmic patterning, along with slower tempos, blues- and gospel-influenced phrasing and compositions, and sometimes lusher melodies were all characteristic of hard bop as it emerged in the mid-fifties. In addition, the new music was an opening out in many directions, an unfolding of much that had been implicit in bebop but held in check by its formulas. While musicians like Brown, Silver, and Blakey were all accused of playing "simplified" versions of bebop, each of them found a personal voice by fusing what had been done in the late forties with more popular elements. As a result, jazz regained a measure of acceptance in black neighborhoods and reaffirmed its connections with terpsichorean rhythms. As Art Blakey said in a 1956 interview in Down Beat: "When we're on the stand, and we see that there are people in the audience who aren't patting their feet and who aren't nodding their heads to our music, we know we're doing something wrong. Because when we do get our message across, those heads and feet do move."19

  A NEW MAINSTREAM

  Branching Out

  In the 1950s, the critic Stanley Dance coined the term "Mainstream" for jazz of the Depression years (approximately 1930-1940). In Dance's words: "Primarily, it is a reference term for a vast body of jazz that was at one time in some danger of losing its identity. Practically, it is applied to the jazz idiom which developed between the heyday of King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton on the one hand and that of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie on the other.

  "The tag originated during the recent period when jazz seemed to be entirely divided between Traditional (alias Dixieland, alias New Orleans, alias Two-Beat) and modern (alias Bop, alias Cool, alias Progressive). Among those this division left out in the cold were musicians like Duke Ellington, Earl Hines, Count Basie, Coleman Hawkins and Buck Clayton. Since all good jazz, of whatever kind and era, theoretically swings, 'Swing' was hardly an adequate label for them. Hence 'Mainstream' for jazz of a 'central' kind, a music not inhibited by any particular instrumental combination, but emphasizing the twin virtues of communicable emotional expression and swing."1

  As we have seen, stress on these "twin virtues" was also typical of hard bop, which resembles Dance's concept of Mainstream in other ways as well. For one thing, it too is "in danger of losing its identity" as it is collapsed into bebop by current terminology. As with Dance's Mainstream, hard bop was wedged in between two styles (bebop and the "free jazz" of altoist Ornette Coleman, pianist Cecil Taylor, and others) that were easier to define in a few sentences. As bebop turned into something broader and more flexible in the mid-fifties, and as a style known simply as "modern jazz"—meaning it lacked bebop's readily identifiable characteristics but had absorbed its advances—took shape, people began talking about "mainstream modernism." Jazz has always been a volatile music, changing quickly and often, and the hard-bop period (like the heyday of Swing or Mainstream) represents a moment of balance and polish in the work of many musicians, with more emphasis on perfecting an existing style than on selfconsciously breaking new ground.

  Yet neither period was one of stagnation. For one thing, the elegant equilibriums thus achieved cannot be sustained for long. Such styles generate their own pressures for radical change. In addition, the leaders of both Dance's Mainstream and the modern-jazz one were eclectic in their approaches and therefore open to change—but by accretion rather than rupture. Duke Ellington, for example, went on evolving, absorbing new elements and elaborating old ones, until the end of his life. Some of his finest work—records like And His Mother Called Him Bill, New Orleans Suite, The Far East Suite, and Afro-Bossa—dates from the 1960s, and (in the case of New Orleans Suite) 1970. The fact that Mainstream jazz didn't "all sound alike" (in the sense that to some degree bebop or New Orleans jazz did) gave him room to expand and unfold while retaining a sense of continuity. In this he was paralleled by the openness of musicians like Rollins and Coltrane to the beginnings of free jazz, as well as to developments within hard bop like the advent of modally based improvisation.

  Thus the hard-bop period, like the Mainstream one, was a time of both consolidation and expansion. Yet the exact nature of the shifts in perspective that brought jazz into a more diverse and expressive realm in the 1950s has eluded many jazz writers, who have been satisfied with cliches about soul, funk, and "returning to the roots." Though the decade was a time of renewed interest among jazz musicians in blues and gospel, these were only two tinctures among many in a broadened musical palette that ranged from classical impressionism to the dirtiest gutbucket effects. By 1955, bebop was treated by jazzmen as but one genre among many. Hard bop functioned as an opening out in numerous directions.

  What this opening out meant will be clearer if we look, for example, at the pianists who emerged in the late fifties, offering a gamut of approaches that reworked, altered, and at times subverted the bebop idiom. Among these were Tommy Flanagan, Kenny Drew, Herbie Nichols, Mai 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! Though all were of approximately the same generation and took bebop as their point of departure, their styles ranged from Ray Bryant's light-fingered, Teddy Wilson-tinted musings to the starkly minimalist, fiercely driving solos of Mai Waldron, with infinite tones between and around them. As an alternate approach, one might take a single pianist like Kenny Drew and find in his playing many of the period's dominant tendencies: "funk" | extensive use of blues voicings on tunes that are not strictly blues), Debussyesque lyrical embellishments, finger-husting up-tempo solos, and multiple references to earlier styles both gently contemplative (Teddy Wilson and Nat Cole) and hot and bluesy (stride piano via Monk). In such an eclectic context, it's not surprising that many more pianists with individually recognizable styles appeared in the fifties than 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" has always made a precise definition of hard bop difficult. Like many labels attached to artistic movements (for example, "symbolism" in poetry or "abstract expressionism" in painting), "hard bop" is a vague one; and the fact that it refers above all to an expansive movement both formally and emotionally makes it still more elusive. Nonetheless, one might tentatively break the school down into four groups.

  1. Musicians on the borderline between jazz and the popular black tradition: for instance, Horace Silver, alto saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, and organist Jimmy Smith. Artists like these, 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 renouncing bebop's discoveries, their heavy beat and blues-influenced phrasing won broad popular appeal, reestablishing jazz as a staple on ghetto jukeboxes.

  2. More astringent, less popular musicians, whose work is starker and more tormented: for instance, saxophonists Jackie McLean and Tina Brooks and pianists Mai Waldron and Elmo Hope. Such musicians, some of whom (Brooks and Hope among them) never achieved recognition outside a small circle of jazzmen and aficionados, also played music that was more expressive emotionally but less stunning technically than bebop had been. The mood of their work, however, tended to be somber. They favored the minor mode, and their playing possessed a sinister—sometimes tragic—air not unlike the atmosphere of, say, Billie Holiday's "You're My Thrill."

  3. Musicians of a gentler, more lyrical bent who found in hard bop a more congenial climate than bebop had offered: for instance, trumpeter Art Farmer, composers Benny Golson and Gigi Gryce, and pianists Hank Jones and Tommy Flanagan. In a sense, such musicians were not hard boppers at all. They are, however, partially associated with the movement for two reasons. First, they often performed and recorded with hard boppers. Art Farmer, for example, played in Horace Silver's quintet and with saxophonists Jackie McLean and Jimmy Heath. And second, the very latitude and diversity
of hard bop allowed room for their more meditative styles to evolve. Hard bop's slower tempos and simpler melodies also helped, as did the school's overall aesthetic, which favored "saying something" over technical bravado.

  4. Experimentalists consciously trying to expand jazz's structural and technical boundaries: for instance, pianist Andrew Hill, Sonny Rollins, and John Coltrane prior to his 1965 record Ascension. This category would also include Thelonious Monk and Charles Mingus, whose playing and compositions were at once experimental and reminiscent of the moods and forms of earlier black music, including jazz of the 1920s and 1930s. Mingus, for example, composed and recorded "My Jelly Roll Soul," which is simultaneously a tribute to Jelly Roll Morton and a successful attempt to transmute and reformulate Morton's compositional style in modern jazz terms. Monk's solos were notable for their mixture of dissonance and such pre-bebop modes as stride piano, often playfully juxtaposed. These musicians, by influencing and challenging those in categories 1 and 2, kept hard bop from stagnation. Even at their most volcanic, their performances were pervaded by a sense of thoughtful searching.

  Thus, a mainstream is actually a complicated set of interlocking worlds and tendencies. Indeed, many hard boppers could easily adapt their styles to the requirements of the occasion. Even Horace Silver, more identified than any other single musician with hard bop's "down-home" variant, composed some of modern jazz's most poignant ballads: tunes like "Shirl," "Lonely Woman," "Peace," "Sweet Stuff," and "Cherry Blossom." In addition, Silver was something of an innovator in his compositions, venturing into time signatures (like the f- he used on one of his first major hits, "Sehor Blues") and bar lengths (like the 16-6-16-bar structure of "Swinging the Samba") that broke with jazz's traditional Tin Pan Alley-derived thirty-two-bar A-A-B-A formula.

  Though most of Silver's recordings exemplify hard-bop-as-modern-mainstream, perhaps the most successful crystallization of his style as pianist, composer, and bandleader in the late 1950s was Fuithei Explorations. This LP featured Art Farmer, tenor saxophonist Clifford Jordan, bassist Teddy Kotick, and drummer Louis Hayes. At the time it was recorded, the quintet had been playing together for many months and had evolved into one of the best-integrated combos in jazz. Its repertoire consisted almost entirely of Silver's tunes (only one of the six cuts on Further Explorations, Harold Arlen's "111 Wind," is a standard). These were by no means casual heads for blowing but rather genuine jazz compositions. Several are unusual in their construction (for example, "Melancholy Mood," with its 7-7-7-bar pattern), and most include secondary themes, varied rhythmic devices (typically consisting of a Latin beat played off against straight-ahead j sections), and percussive riffs.

  None of the tunes is blues- or gospel-based, and only one is truly up-tempo: the shortest cut on the LP, "Safari," an early Silver composition first recorded in a trio version with bassist Gene Ramey and Art Blakey in 1952. Each is "original" in its chord structure—that is, not based on earlier pop songs. All these factors help create an atmosphere of careful craftsmanship, as well as providing springboards much like those used by big bands in the 1930s to recharge and propel soloists.

  Among the sidemen, Farmer most nearly equals Silver in brilliance and maturity. Farmer's sound is simultaneously burnished and slightly tart, while his solos are elegantly constructed. Usually his lines stay in the middle register, and he saves strategically placed outbursts in the upper reaches of his horn for moments of particular intensity. Jordan's style is somewhat less thoughtful, and Sonny Rollins's influence on him is obvious. Just as obvious, however, is his place within a nucleus of hard-blowing Chicago saxophonists of the fifties that included Johnny Griffin, John Gilmore, Charles Davis, and John Jenkins. Jordan's robustly bluesy phrasing, his honks and soulful wails, and his warm, slightly breathy sound all create an effective contrast to Farmer's more restrained and delicate approach.

  But the star of the record is Silver. His crisp articulation and his melodic imagination, his combination of fierce precision and relaxed swing all contribute to an unmistakable musical fingerprint. On "Melancholy Mood," a ballad and the one trio cut, he creates a particularly striking solo. Silver's ballad style is one of his most exquisite achievements and a good example of what he meant by "meaningful simplicity." His phrases, always ringingly percussive, are here transmuted by the tune's singing romanticism. Octave tremolos, transposed and repeated phrases, the careful deployment of funky licks that anchor the piece in the black tradition—all are elements of this beautifully realized solo.

  Most tracks on Further Explorations incorporate Latin rhythms, and this pervasive aspect of Silver's work must derive partly from his family background. His father was an immigrant from the Cape Verdean Islands, and the pianist's recollections of his childhood evoke his family's way of life and his father's music: "He loved to play music: he plays guitar, a little violin, all by ear and all Cape Verdean-Portuguese folk music, mostly in the minor key, very simple, not too many chord changes . . . When I was a kid my father and my uncles used to give house parties a lot of times. The women—my mother and some of my uncles' girlfriends—they would all prepare food. Somebody would bring a bottle of whisky, someone wine. The party would be in the kitchen— we had a large kitchen—and the place would be packed with people dancing. My father and uncles would play the music on the guitar, the violin and the mandolin. It's different from the authentic Portuguese music from Portugal—but I suppose it's derivative of that. I remember as a kid when they would have some of those parties I would have on those pajamas that your feet go into, that cover you all up. I'd go to sleep, but then they'd be laughing and talking and dancing and I'd wake up in the middle of the night. I'd hear the music and I'd get out of bed and go down the steps and sit on the edge of the steps and peek around and listen to the music and watch them dance. Somebody would bring me over something to eat, some potato salad or chicken or something, and let me stay a while."2

  Later, in the 1960s, Silver recorded "Song for My Father" {Cantiga para meu pai), his most commercially successful tune, covered by James Brown among others. In the same interview cited above, Silver described the composition's genesis: "My dad through the years had always said to me, 'Why don't you take some of this Portuguese folk music and put it into jazz?' I never could see it. To me it always seemed corny— because I was born here into American music, whether it be jazz or whatever. But there is a feeling there: there's something there that's valid. I didn't really get in tune with that feeling until I was invited by Sergio Mendes to his house in Rio de Janeiro. I went to see Carnival and went around to different places he was playing and sat in, and I was fascinated by the musical capabilities of some of the young musicians down there. They were all into this bossa nova thing, which as you know was greatly inspired by our American jazz. I got turned onto that beat. So I got back to New York and I said, 'I'll try to write a tune using that rhythm.' I started fooling around and I came up with the melody and I realized the melody I came up with was akin to Cape Verdean—like something my dad would play. That was 'Song for My Father.'"

  If Silver's rhythmically charged playing and fondness for the minor mode derive from his Afro-Iberian heritage, his affinity with the blues reflects his interests during the years when he was discovering North America's indigenous music: "My first introduction to jazz was boogie-woogie. Back in the days when boogie was prevalent, when Tommy Dorsey had a tune called 'Boogie-Woogie'—it was Pinetop Smith's tune. Dorsey had an arrangement of that which I copied off the records and played by ear. Then Earl Fatha Hines had a 'Boogie-Woogie on the St. Louis Blues'—I copied that off the record by ear. Eddie Heywood had a boogie-woogie arrangement on 'Begin the Beguine'—I copied that off the record by ear. I copied some of Jay McShann off the records. I was about 12.1 used to be the hit at the little teenage parties."

  Silver also listened to the blues: "I liked and still do like all them old downhome blues singers like Muddy Waters, Lightning Hopkins, Peetie Wheatstraw (the devil's son-in-law), Memphis Minnie. I dig the fe
eling. They weren't technicians but they had a whole lot of feeling. It was diamonds in the rough, unpolished diamonds."

  A feeling for the blues' stark economy and a search for "meaningful simplicity" were also characteristic of Miles Davis, who in the late fifties led another "classic" and very popular modern-mainstream quintet featuring John Coltrane, pianist Red Garland, bassist Paul Chambers, and Philly Joe Jones. In an interview with Amiri Baraka, Davis said of this band and the one that followed it: "I used to tell them, 'The bass got the tonic. Don't play in the same register as the sax. Lay out. Don't play ... I always listen to what I can leave out. "3

  The Davis group, which remained together as a unit from late 1955 until the spring of 1957, is often considered the most influential combo of its time. Any one of its last five records {Cookin', Relaxin', Workin', and Steamin' on Prestige and 'Round About Midnight on Columbia) could stand as an example of its work. Indeed, the four on Prestige were all recorded on two days in 1956, each number being done in a single take, and then released gradually over a period of several years. The first to hit the stores was Cookin', which featured a Davis original ("Blues by Five"), singer and saxophonist Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson's "Tune Up," a composition by Sonny

  Rollins ("Airegin"), another by Swing altoist Benny Carter ("When Lights Are Low"), and the Richard Rodgers ballad "My Funny Valentine."