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Hard Bop. Give us your top 5 recommends.

I'm a jazz newbie to some extent and have no idea what Hard Bop is ( will go away and look for a definition on the www). I do own the first three recommendations so maybe I'm a Hard Bopper but didn't know it!
 
Chas B said:
I'm a jazz newbie to some extent and have no idea what Hard Bop is ( will go away and look for a definition on the www). I do own the first three recommendations so maybe I'm a Hard Bopper but didn't know it!
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Difficult to describe. But many of the suggetsions above are for LPs that I put in that category myself so I guess I'm on the right track.

I see Hard Bop as generally fast paced pieces based on virtuoso solo interpretations of a main musical theme. Most common instruments are tenor saxophone, trumpet, upright bass and piano. Each soloist takes turns rotating around the members of a small jazz collective of maybe 3 to 6 musicians. Whilst I assume musicians don't usually improvise on final recordings you get the impression each soloist will have developed their sections this way rather than following written musical notiation. Diversion from the theme or tune is often substantial, but the performer remains anchored around the overall chord and rhythm structures.

It's a wonderful genre for highlighting the skills, unique tone and personality of individual musicians.

I'd been listening to Blue Train (John Coltrane), Study In Brown (Clifford Brown and Max Roach) and Go (Dexter Gordon) when I decided to ask for more recommendations.
 
Blue Train, great stuff.

I don't think Lee Morgan's album Search For The New Land is hard bop but the song Mr Kenyatta from it might qualify.
 
My recommendations:

Lee Morgan - The Rajah
Herbie Hancock - Takin' Off
George Russell Sextet - Stratusphunk
Charles Mingus - Ah Um
Art Pepper Quintet - Smack Up
Wayne Shorter - Speak No Evil

Edit - since when did 'recommends' become a noun and replace recommendations? Is it a young person thing? I think this is the second thread title to use it recently. Is it a thing now?
 
Not to be pedantic but Art Pepper in the recordings suggested, while not West Coast per se, wouldn’t really be Hard Bop. Similarly Stratusphunk by George Russell might be classed as “further explorations” in some overviews or even Third Stream? Just goes to show these rigid terms are not really fit for purpose.

Having said that I think of Hard Bop as a drum heavy rhythmic dialogue with the horn section with a lesser emphasis on piano and bass in Blakey’s case and percussive rhythmic piano style with Silver and Monk perhaps?
 
I’d put Art Blakey at the epicentre of the genre. As such there is a strong argument to just buy a few of his classic Blue Notes and follow the band members that impress the most.

This has been my approach right from the start. I pretty much started with the mid-80s budget A Sample Of Blue Notes compilation and ended up buying every album it had a track from, and then followed musicians much further. This was obviously fumbling around alone in the pre-internet dark ages, it is way easier to explore now as everything is on YouTube somewhere.
 
Hard Bop was only an evolution of existing styles. If you listen to Ellington & the Armstrong all stars from the 50s there are certain hard bop elements in play. This seems to come from from the percussive elements from the bass, piano & drums.
 
In a spirit just of recommending similar records even if they're not spot on the genre, I think the view is that Giant Steps was Coltrane's next step (see what I did there) beyond hard bop.

But I think it's a great record which if you like Blue Train you're most unlikely to hate.
 
hermit said:
Edit - since when did 'recommends' become a noun and replace recommendations? Is it a young person thing? I think this is the second thread title to use it recently. Is it a thing now?
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Not sure. Doesn’t grate with me even though the grammar is incorrect.

Happy to be taken out and shot off I ever refer to LPs as vinyls though.
 
Woodface said:
Hard Bop was only an evolution of existing styles. If you listen to Ellington & the Armstrong all stars from the 50s there are certain hard bop elements in play. This seems to come from from the percussive elements from the bass, piano & drums.
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Seems appropriate to post this interesting quote from an interview with saxophonist Dave Liebman attempting a historical perspective on the evolution of modern jazz:

“Dave Liebman: Placing Free Jazz And The Avant Garde In Musical And Historical Perspective

Dave Liebman: Let me have a shot at setting the history. This is just running around in my head and I'm not sure how accurate it will be. But basically, I want to talk about how a case could be made that more or less every five years in the 1950s and 1960s something happened to make the music change. For one thing, Charlie Parker's passing in 1955 signaled the end of the bebop era. It was codified by that time and a lot of guys could do it. Hard bop was raising its head and there was an accumulated repertoire that was being laid out which everybody could latch onto. Then, when you get to 1959 and 1960, two recordings strike me the most about that year: Coltrane's Giant Steps (Atlantic, 1960), in particular the title tune, and Miles Davis' Kind of Blue (Columbia, 1959), especially the tune "So What."

All About Jazz: What was it that struck you so much about "So What?"

DL: It was the official beginning of modal playing in jazz. For simplicity's sake, modal playing is using a scale rather than a chord cycle as the basis for improvising. It is first heard on the Milestones (Columbia, 1958) recording with Miles on the title track, but "So What" became more famous than "Milestones." What's really interesting is that John Coltrane, who of course always comes up when we talk about that era, was involved in both of those records: his own Giant Steps and Miles Davis' Kind of Blue within a month of each other. "Giant Steps" was the epitome of playing chord changes at a very fast speed, (in some ways akin to Bird playing "Cherokee"). The album Kind of Blue and particularly "So What," were by contrast to "Giant Steps" basically no chord changes. So Coltrane was playing the least and the most chord changes on two record dates within a month of each other!”

Full interview here: www.allaboutjazz.com/dave-liebman-placing-free-jazz-and-the-avant-garde-in-musical-and-historical-perspective-dave-liebman?width=768
 
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