Hard Bop

Подробности

Категория: Jazz

When introduced, bop was as unpopular as swing had been popular. The complexity of the style often left the audience behind. The funky players were interested in recapturing the audience and reestablishing the hot jazz expression that had been abandoned by the cool style. This return was enthusiastic and reached back to the most communicative music in their past- church music. Another motive, less defined and certainly debatable, was the need to reclaim jazz as a predominantly African-American expression.

Cool, and particularly West Coast jazz, was predominantly white even though Davis and Young were the forerunners. The structured, soft-spoken arrangements were certainly more typical of the European tradition than the expressive African-American voice heard in the early blues.

Hard Bop influenced other musical forms beginning in 1955 and thus transcending all future jazz styles. The public accepted this moving music joyful and appreciated the opportunity to participate once again in jazz performances. Funky jazz uses simpler harmonies, an emphasis on rhythm, easily recognizable tunes, and anything else that players like Horace Silver could invent to increase the audience’s involvement and pleasure. Gospel jazz is an extension of funky jazz. Funky jazz can be heard in the performances of Bobby Timmons with Art Blakey, as well as with Cannonball Adderly . The adoption of gospel idioms by Les McCann could place his performances in the church as easily as on stage or in the night club.

Hard Bop: Black Consciousness in Jazz

In the 1940s, bebop emerged as a reaction against the increasing creative sterility of commercial big band swing. More importantly, it was the first time in the development of jazz when African-American musicians sought to create a style which would have to be recognized and accepted for its artistic values more than for its entertainment or commercial potential. Bebop was an exciting music, as sophisticated harmonically as it was rhythmically complex. The effort, led by Miles Davis, Gil Evans and a small group of musicians in 1949, to transform small group bebop into a music that could be performed by larger ensemble, with a greater emphasis on written arrangements, resulted in the development of a style which critics would soon call "cool". "Cool jazz" then evolved into a music most often associated with West Coast and white musicians. The reaction by black musicians to the popularity of "cool jazz" on college campuses and among the middle-class, was to look back at the folk roots of jazz and create a style which would eventually be known as hard bop. Incidentely, it is very interesting to notice that the birth of hard bop is usually dated back to the 1954 recording date by Miles Davis which produced the album Walkin', the same year as the Brown vs. Board of Education ruling.

Horace Silver Hard Bop vs. Cool Jazz

The most obvious sources of inspiration for hard bop musicians were Gospel music and the blues. Those were two uniquely African-American styles of music, and the connection to this musical heritage was most often missing in the styles of white "cool" musicians, as Leroy Jones pointed out his book Blues People when comparing pianists John Lewis and Lenny Tristano. "Moanin'" by pianist Bobby Timmons uses the call and response pattern commonly found in African-AmericanHorace Silver church music while Horace Silver's "The Preacher" is an even more obvious reference to this tradition. The influence of the blues is even more prevalent in hard bop. The blues served not only as the harmonic frame for countless compositions but its harmonic and melodic vocabulary was also used outside of the strict confines of the 12 bar form. Again, the two compositions mentioned earlier are good examples. While neither is strictly speaking a blues, they both use blues-derived harmonies and, especially in the case of "Moanin'", blues-influenced melodies. The influence of the blues can also be found in the melodic material used by hard bop soloists. The use of blues scales, the introduction of blue notes, the frequent emphasis of the thirteenth on dominant seventh chord, all are devices which originated in the blues.

While none of the devices described above were original to hard bop, this style did see the introduction of new harmonic and melodic material. Melodically, hard bop musicians were the first one to make common usage of pentatonic scales. While related to the blues scales, pentatonic scales can be found not only in the African-American folk tradition but also in the folk music of regions of Africa and Asia, e.g. the Japanese In-Sen scale. John Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Wayne Shorter, Freddie Hubbard and many other relied heavily on various pentatonic scales as a source of melodic material. That black musicians turned to Asia and more importantly to Africa for inspiration was significant: it marked a strong desire to develop a culture separate from the Western mainstream while re-affirming a commonality of culture with former european colonies. Martin Luther King articulated this same idea in his speeches when he drew a parallel between the struggles to end colonialism in Asia and Africa, and the struggle to end segregation in the United States.

Another significant departure from the Western musical tradition was the increasing importance of quartal (based on the interval of a fourth, instead of the traditional third) harmony in jazz during the late '50s but especially during the '60s. There can be two explanations for the appearance of quartal harmony in jazz. From a theory standpoint, the interval of a fourth is a great way to harmonize the minor pentatonic scale since this scale can be organized by stacking fourths one on top of the other. (The scale A,C,D,E,G can be organized as E,A,D,G,C.) From a cultural standpoint, quartal harmonies are an element of African folk music which was retained in African-American folk singing. As Bernice Johnson Reagon notes in the liner notes to the excellent compilation Voices of the Civil Rights Movement, it is not unusual for singers in African-American churches to spontaneously harmonize a melody using intervals of a fourth or a fifth.

Art Blakey playing the drums ca 1955 While the "cool" esthetic asked of its drummers to assume a subtle, unobtrusive, time-keeping role, hard bop drummers brought the drums back to the forefront of the music, using increasingly complex polyrhythms and increasingly higher levels of interaction with the soloists. Polyrhythms are an especially significant aspect of the music as they can be seen as the most obvious African retention in jazz. Art Blakey, one of the leading figures of the hard bop movement always insisted that jazz was an American and not an African music. Nevertheless, he traveled to Africa in 1948 and 1949 to study local drumming. He went on to record several albums featuring drummers from Africa and the Caribbean. In addition to complex polyrhythms, other African elements in Blakey's technique include hitting the side of the drums with a stick or bending the pitch by pressing on the drum's head with his elbow.

Finally, what was perhaps the most significant difference between hard bop and cool musicians for an untrained ear was the difference in instrumental timbre. While musicians associated with the cool school favored a round, almost legit sound (Paul Desmond, Lee Konitz, Chet Baker), hard bop musicians tended to strive for harsher tones, with more obvious vocal qualities (John Coltrane, Stanley Turrentine, Freddie Hubbard). Vibrato and pitch bends were used more commonly by hard bop musicians than by their "cool" counterparts. Again, this was in keeping with the African-American folk tradition.

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