Hard Bop

Hard bop is the East Coast extension of bebop that emerged in the early 1950s, integrating gospel, blues and rhythm-and-blues feel into the small-group jazz format. Tempos sit at moderate-to-fast settings (110 to 220 BPM) but the rhythmic feel is heavier than bebop, with drum patterns that anchor the backbeat. Standard instrumentation is the bebop quintet — trumpet, tenor saxophone, piano, double bass, drums — sometimes expanded by trombone or by a second horn. Tunes are often original compositions rather than rewrites of show tunes, and many are built on blues or modified-blues forms. Pianists comp with heavier left-hand voicings, and tunes frequently end on big band-style shout choruses. Productions made by Blue Note and Prestige in the 1950s and early 1960s established the canonical hard-bop recording aesthetic.

The form coalesced around Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, which Blakey co-led with pianist Horace Silver from 1954 (the group's debut, recorded live at Birdland, is the formal starting point). Silver split off in 1956 to lead his own bands and write the genre's funkiest material (Song for My Father, The Preacher); Blakey carried the Messengers as a kind of jazz finishing school through to 1990, passing Lee Morgan, Wayne Shorter, Freddie Hubbard, Wynton Marsalis, Terence Blanchard and dozens of others through its ranks. Lee Morgan's The Sidewinder (1964) became Blue Note's biggest commercial hit. Cannonball Adderley, John Coltrane (in his early-1960s Atlantic period), Hank Mobley and Sonny Rollins all worked within hard bop's vocabulary.

Listen to Art Blakey's drumming for the genre's central rhythmic personality — the press roll, the heavy backbeat, the way he plays press rolls behind soloists to push them forward. Horace Silver's writing brings gospel cadences into jazz arrangements (the I-IV-V plagal cadence at the end of The Preacher is straight out of black church music). The blues form is everywhere: many tunes treat the 12-bar blues as their underlying structure even when the head sounds harmonically more complex.

Art Blakey's Moanin' (1958), with Bobby Timmons's gospel-derived title track and Lee Morgan and Benny Golson in the front line, is the canonical starting album. Lee Morgan's The Sidewinder (1964) is the funk-leaning extension. Horace Silver's Song for My Father (1965) is the bossa-tinged classic. Sonny Rollins's Saxophone Colossus (1956) sits at hard bop's most virtuosic edge.

Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers operated for roughly 36 years as the most consistent training ground in modern jazz — virtually every major hard-bop sideman from 1955 onward passed through the band at some point. Lee Morgan, who broke out as a teenager with the Messengers and later led The Sidewinder, was shot and killed by his common-law wife Helen Morgan at Slugs' Saloon in New York's East Village in February 1972; he was 33.