Hard Bop: Jazz and Black Music 1955-1965 [Paperback] Review

"Hard Bop" is bop with an edge, bop with an aggressive,blues-based attack. Its archetype practitioner was trumpeter Lee Morgan, killed outside a nightclub in January 1972 by his lover.Influenced by boppers such asFats Navarro and Dizzy Gillespie, Morgan and other hard boppers developed a style emphasizing minor keys, a "dark" mood, slurs, and half-valve effects.Morgan's most popular number in the idiom was the huge 1964 hard bebop/R&Bhit "The Sidewinder."
Hard bop is introduced here through the prism of Lee Morgan: Morgan helped develop the style as an alternative to bop's successor, cool jazz, as developed, in part, by Gerry Mulligan and Miles Davis, and hard bop began to fade with his murder.But the book tackles more than Morgan, and, in fact, more than hard bop: It's a fascinating account of the various musical streams colliding--sometimes melding-- in the 10 years between 1955 and 1965.
Rosenthal traces the evolution of hard bebop as bop declined ("bebop . . . had turned into something of a straitjacket . . .Many of its best practitioners were dead, and others . . . were in decline"). Musicians looked to R & B to revive bop, and a new "more emotionally expressive and more formally flexible style began to emerge." Rosenthal looks at the expressions of hard bop in such diverse artists as Sonny Rollins, the soulful Horace Silver ("The Preacher"), Cannonball Adderley, organist Jimmy Smith ("Midnight Special"), Jackie MacClean, and, to a lesser degree, Art Farmer, Andrew Hill, Mingus, and some of the pre-1965 John Coltrane (e.g., with Miles on "Cookin'").Rosenthal perceptively notes that hard bebop was a "complicated set . . . of interlocking tendencies," rather than a static, easily defined style.
I enjoy this book because it explores a somewhat brief phenomenon, and shows how it developed, flourished, and then gave way to new elements. The writing is crisp,intelligent, energetic, and full ofillustrative anecdotes that illuminate and entertain (not the dry pedantictreatise one might expect on this rather narrow topic).Rosenthalshows the connections between various elements of jazz, and presents it as a living, evolving, powerful force. Eleven chapters following the introduction, no pictures.Very highly recommended to jazz fans of any stripe.

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