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David H. Rosenthal, "Hard Bop and Its Critics"
I thought I posted this link a few years ago, but it didn't show up in a search, so thought I'd put it out there. It's a coupla pages on how Jazz's greatest era was denigrated by critics of the day. That's right folks, back in the day records by Gunther Schuller were getting 5 stars where Art Blakey or Jackie McLean were getting 2 stars. So who killed Hard Bop, was it Free Jazz? The Beatles? Or was it the nerdy white Jazz critics? ....
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01-23-2019 07:16 AM
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I think the same thing killed jazz in general.
People can't dance to it.
Jazz popularity with the masses dropped after the swing era ended.
My father was a big swing era fan but had no interest in what came after.
This has been posted before but it tells the tale...
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Maybe people didn't relate to it. Can't blame critics if people just don't relate to it.
Don't blame anybody for the fact that times and tastes change. Who's at fault for the regrettable historical trend that leaves the music of Sylvius Leopold Weiss in the shadows of musical consciousness? Hey why doesn't anyone go out and support Luigi Boccherini's music? That was the pinnacle of music!
Hmmm, the far greater danger here is not the retrospective speculation on who sets the trends of popularity, but how much the musicians of today are being dismissed by present day critics who hold the past as the reason for not accepting the now.
The history of jazz is championed by those who searched for their path DESPITE the critics' limited perspective. I hope that never changes.
David
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Interesting!
Originally Posted by princeplanet
I know that quite a few great things were critically derided at the time. It always fun to look back....
I don’t think critics wield that much power. Look at the success of the things they hate...
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Quite Originally Posted by TruthHertz
The thing is Weiss isn’t as good as Bach, Boccherini not as good as Mozart, Marlow not as good as Shakespeare, Baro Ferret not as good as Django Reinhardt etc etc
History is ruthless, but today we have several growth industries in worshipping the past and digging up stuff that probably just isn’t that great.
But Blue Note? Well if you wanted to find the steely core of the amorphous area we call jazz, BN has kind of become it. It’s interesting how this happened and I think it’s quite organic. Nothing to do with critics. People just like it. They are great sounding records.
(But yeah, London’s straightahead scene is mostly a BN tribute band scene. It’s classical music now....)
If there is a spiritual heir to this stuff it’s in music that acknowledges modern pop music trends and fuses it with jazz. It would have a strong groove, identity and sense of purpose. Critics might find it lacking intellectually but it will find a good audience.
I can think of many contemporary examples. I’m sure others here can to. Funny thing is many of these bands I don’t really like lol.
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Food4Thought
Recently I finished reading a book by Tony Sanchez titled "Up & Down with the Rolling Stones", he was a close 'confidant' with the band in their formative years. In the book, he describes how the British bands and particularly the Stones were driven to wrestle away the stronghold that jazz had on the youth. This is the early 60's and Hard Bop / Soul Jazz was in its second phase, and people could and were dancing to the funky, earthy grooves.
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I actually prefer it to bebop. (I like some bebop, but I listen more often to hard bop records.)
A few favorites.
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IMHO, I don't think you can pinpoint it to one specific thing. More likely, it's a combination of the things that you mentioned above, as well as others, for example; "Rock-n-Roll", etc.
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Yup, and to refer to these and countless other amazing recordings as "regressive" kinda blows my mind. Was it down to some kind of academic snobbery, or just plain Racism? I know some around here don't wish to get into such discussions, but we're all sensitive, enlightened, intelligent adults around here, right? Originally Posted by MarkRhodes
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hey i’m interested, but i don’t see the context of what you’re saying here. eg what bands? referred to as regressive by whom? regressing from what? Originally Posted by princeplanet
are you talking about hard bop being regressive from bebop?
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I always go back to Wes' early recordings with Harold Land.
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Some critics didn't care for it, but few listeners cared then---this music was quite popular---and fewer care now. Originally Posted by joe2758
Tracklist: Horace Silver, "The Preacher" * John Coltrane, "Blue Train" * Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers, "Moanin'" * Sonny Rollins, "St. Thomas" * Miles Davis All Stars, "Solar" * Cannonball Adderley, "Autumn Leaves" *
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Yeah, the thing is (and you can see it reflected very much on this forum) that harmony and surface complexity is often valued as more intellectual or artistic by the musical cognescenti than groove, swing etc etc. Originally Posted by princeplanet
Yup, and to refer to these and countless other amazing recordings as "regressive" kinda blows my mind. Was it down to some kind of academic snobbery, or just plain Racism? I know some around here don't wish to get into such discussions, but we're all sensitive, enlightened, intelligent adults around here, right?
Blue Note music represents a climbdown from the rhythmic complexity of bebop - quite conscious actually I think - and an emphasis towards groove. So I can see why some critics would think it regressive. It's not just critics - I don't think Barry Harris is a huge fan of that simplified language, he prefers the music of Bud Powell and Bird - even though he is a stalwart of that period of jazz!
Anyway, how you listen to music is govern by your cultural background and what your ears are attuned. I can only say that I am a much bigger fan of groove music now I have worked heavily on time/feel and rhythm.
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I think this is right. But, you know, f*ck 'em, amirite? Originally Posted by christianm77
I think a lot of critics raved about bebop because they felt smart doing so. It's so complex! It's so demanding! It's art, damnit! Look how with-it we are loving this stuff!
I feel some sympathy for jazz critics, especially those who can't play and don't know much about music but are talking about music without words. Still, they too often remind me of sportswriters who don't love the game itself and instead want to write about The Bigger Picture with sports as a springboard.
When I was young I read a lot of record reviews. When I was in my 20s, I wrote hundreds of them. And one day I realized there were better things to do with my time. I stopped writing reviews and stopped reading music magazines. I don't miss either.
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I thought hard bop ended up being the dominant post bop style...I didn't get the memo that somebody killed it. It's many practitioners still exist, and the rest mostly played it until they died this century. Originally Posted by princeplanet
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I haven't paid attention to critics since I was a kid reading Hilburn's rock reviews in the LA Times. It's always been clear to me who could throw down and who couldn't, and I don't need a savant to tell me what to like.
Those who can, do; those who cannot critique. Those who will, listen.
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You know probably better than I do that Jazz sales in 1960 massively outweigh the numbers for, say, 1970. Of course the reasons are multi-faceted and probably unknowable, but I wouldn't be so quick to discount the influence of the Jazz critics of the day. We know that critics often have little influence on low brow entertainment - recent Hollywood Superhero styled releases attest to this- but audiences with pretensions in high brow arts/entertainment are more susceptible to seemingly informed critiques, so it's not a stretch to assume that the impressionable jazz hipster thought he should prefer Cecil Taylor to Wynton Kelly by 1965, lest he appear to be "unhip". Originally Posted by cosmic gumbo
Anyway, I'm not here to argue that critics killed Hard Bop (it's way more complicated), but isn't it interesting that one of Jazz's most enduring forms (albeit in vastly diminished numbers) was disregarded or derided by people who had acquired the job of Jazz Critic for influential and widely read publications. Kinda like going through the list of reputable men around the world who were Hitler's admirers during the 30's. History showed them to be not as wise as they once thought they were...
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The article was written in 1988, one year before the 50th anniversary of Blue Note Records. I was at an impressionable age then and remember all the re-releases and marketing stuff they did to bring the label back to the forefront.
The eighties were the era of post-this and neo-that, which in a way did a lot to end the obsession with „progress“ in jazz.
In this climate, and with the 90s trend towards Acid Jazz and Rare Groove, the Blue Note reissues brought a style back into the mainstream that hadn‘t been particularly relevant for 20 years.
What I‘m trying to say is that the whole discussion is skewed if you don‘t take this into account.
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Along with the soul music hits of the day, this was the music my folks played and danced to during my youth.
Albert
Originally Posted by MarkRhodes
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Some music appeals to the masses and some music appeals to a narrower audience. Both are relevant and have their place.
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I started getting into jazz in the late 70s/early 80s. The idea that the hard bop/post bop titans were forgotten simply doesn't fit with my memory of that time. My reference for this is the music I heard on jazz radio stations and people I saw perform in clubs. I live (and lived) in NYC at the time, so my view of this may be somewhat skewed, but Blakey, Hubbard, the Mingus band, Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra, Milt Jackson, McCoy Tyner, George Coleman, Harold Mabern, Kenny Burrell, Stanley Turrentine, Ron Carter, etc., etc., etc. were on the radio, selling records, and filling clubs and festivals. Guys like the Marsalises, Terence Blanchard, Bobby Watson, Donald Harrison were doing their apprenticeships with Blakey. There was a lot of fusion going on, and it was the heyday of Pat Metheny, Weather Report, We Want Miles, etc., but it wasn't an either/or thing. Clubs featured the full spectrum of jazz, and people from different branches of the tree routinely played on each others records and gigs and sat in with each other. The Blue Note revival worked in some measure because there was an active vibrant scene for it to "revive". Originally Posted by docsteve
John
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Well, I started listening to jazz in the mid-eighties in Europe. Completely different experience... I can‘t remember anything except fusion and dixieland.
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I was working in Austin, TX from 1984 until 2000 (with two years missing in the middle while I lived in Scotland and Seattle) and I remember the Blue Note catalog being a common currency for my musician friends. We were also digging the Steps Ahead, Mike Stern, Sco, Tribal Tech, Weather Report, Jaco, etc. There wasn't an either/or. I also know from being friends with some of the guys in NY who were coming up at that time that they would have sessions where they would play an entire night of 1960s Wayne Shorter or other music from that era/label. There were a couple of attempts by clubowners to get Acid Jazz off the ground but they didn't last. Originally Posted by docsteve
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Since no one bothered to click on my links I'll excerpt the most relevant bits of Brad's essay: Originally Posted by John A.
Bird’s solos were full of triplets that were interspersed between regular 8th notes; this feature of his solos gave them rhythmic variety. I’ll never forget a master class I attended years ago that the great jazz pianist and teacher Barry Harris was teaching. He was chiding all of us for playing endless chains of 8th notes. We may have absorbed some be-bop, but we weren’t dealing with triplets for the most part. We could have a little comfort in the fact that we weren’t alone – a lot of the great hard bop stylists from the 50’s onward didn’t really have triplets in their playing either. Having that in your playing, Harris maintained, was necessary for authentic bop expression – otherwise it was something else, something incomplete and weaker.
I never thought I was going to play be-bop like Barry Harris or another great Detroit pianist from the same generation, Tommy Flannagan, as much as I listened to them and absorbed their styles. But this idea that there was a true way of playing be-bop, and then there was this other way that did not make the grade – that made a great impression on me. To hear Barry Harris tell it, there were a bunch of players that I loved who did not make the grade.
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What I discerned, listening to Barry Harris and Lou Donaldson, was that a strong paradigm led to the most rigid aesthetic. Once you found out how great something was, everything else would just keep falling away – you couldn’t use it anymore. It reminded me of Harold Bloom in his Shakespearean-scholar mode – even great writers like Melville, Joyce and the like, for Bloom, were just riffing on Shakespeare, and none of them matched his power. The way these guys loved Bird – and Bud Powell, as we’ll see in a minute – well, it didn’t leave room for much else. It made sense: The more you find out how great somebody is, the more you realized how his followers don’t match up to him. Still, it was troubling! Being young and hearing strong, unapologetic opinions from your elders is good tonic, though. After all, Barry Harris and Lou Donaldson were around when those giants were walking the earth. To them, Miles, Coltrane and Ornette were just guys like them – they were their contemporaries, and not the towering giants they are for younger generations. So those guys could get away with saying the kind of stuff Lou said. Nobody else – not a critic, not a younger musician – could. We’d just sound like clowns.
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Originally Posted by christianm77
I was actually going to say something similar to the point about Harris or Donaldson having the personal standing to say something critical of Miles or Coltrane that others lack. But I think you also have to tread carefully in interpreting these sorts of comments. These guys knew each other and there are layers of respect, contempt, like, dislike, rivalry, friendliness, jealousy, admiration, and just plain old doing the dozens that are hard for outsiders to penetrate. I remember a discussion here some time back about all the nasty things Miles said in his autobiography, and how hard it is to reconcile this with the fact that he continued to hang out with all the people he insulted, and how many of the people he insulted had only kind things to say about him. There's just a perverseness to the way some people talk about each other.
Regarding triplets -- agreed, it's one of the defining characteristics of Bird's style and of the one-true bop. I actually think of rhythm as being an even more important distinguishing feature of bop than harmony or long solos. But -- that encompasses the Klook ride cymbal and relatively straight 8th notes, and I think individuals are allowed to stress one of these distinguishing features differently from Bird without being kicked out the bop tent. It would be pretty boring if everybody played the same way.
John
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