When Listening To Jazz Do You Go By Artist Or Sub-Genre?

Ive noticed that I tend to go by artist when I listen to jazz. Right now Im stuck on Sonny Stitt. In all honesty its probably because Im still no expert in all the sub-genres of jazz.

Sure, I know the difference between cool, dixieland and say fusion. Pretty obvious. But all the different "bops"? Not so much.

So here is a couple of questions for the jazz guys and ladies:

Please read these before you go on:

Whats your pattern? By genre or artist? And why?

What artist are you into right now and why? Whats got you turned on about that particular artist?

How would you explain the different "bops" of jazz?

Yes, I know there is wiki. But I want to know how you guys describe the sub-genres and how you know by listening.

Have some fun with the thread above all

 

There's really only two jazz subgenres commonly referred to as "bop" -- bebop and hard bop.

Bebop is a jazz style of the 1940s, basically invented by Charlie Parker but also with influence from his close compatriot Dizzy Gillespie, characterized typically by fast, torrential improvisations based on harmonic chord substitution more than on melodic variation (an approach often dubbed "vertical" vs. "horizontal"), and by a kind of rhythmic displacement compared to swing and earlier jazz styles -- instead of riffs, melodies and phrases holding close to the stops and starts of bar lines, in bebop the phrases often stop and end mid bar, often on off beats, and follow a horn player's breath -- breathe in and blow until you're out of breath, not start on beat 1 bar 1 and end on the 4 8 bars later. Often bebop composers and musicians worked by creating "contrafacts" -- new melodies over pre-existing chord changes, so, "Ornithology" over "How High the Moon" changes. Bebop also featured a heavy dose of off kilter harmonic ideas and intervals -- the tritone or flat fifth is closely associated with bebop

Hard bop is a style of jazz that grew out of bebop in the 1950s and featured a lot of player who had been beboppers. It is/was characterized by a return to bluesier phrase making and structures, sometimes with bebop's fast tempos and blazing, but more often at slower tempo, with many more minor keys, shorter blusier phrase making, more conventional blusier harmony, less use of things like flat fifths, more used of blusier slurs and bends especially around minor 3rd and 7ths.

Sometimes, in the years since the '60s "new thing" people have referred to a certain kind of music that grew out of free jazz, but which swings like bebop, as "free bop," but that's not a style that's ever been really definite and people to really think of themselves as playing "free bop," typically.

 

So, here's "Cherokee" as played in a swing style by a swing band:

 

Here's Charlie Paker's famous contrafact on "Cherokee" changes, "Koko." Bird always said he kind of came to "that thing I had been hearing" in his head, playing melodic and harmonic substitutions over "Cherokee" changes.

 

Here's kind of the classic example of early Hard Bop

 

Occasionally I see the term "post bop" to describe that sort of music (e.g. Miles Davis's "second quintet").

 

I tend to go by artist, with an eye on the year of the recording. With someone like Coltrane or Miles you could easily scare away a new Jazz listener who loved Kind of Blue then bought Interstellar space or Bitches Brew.

@chervokas nailed the definitions

 

I'm on ECM right now. I suppose I would call a lot of this stuff post-bop, nordic cool, or free jazz.

 

Yeah, I don't really know what "post-bop" means except "after bop" and there are all kinds of styles that fit into that, I think that's just kind of a lazy catch all that isn't terribly descriptive or helpful. I think free jazz and the new thing came along and really broke with a lot of traditions about how the music is structured and about the use of harmony, and just completely opened up jazz. I mean, "free jazz" and the "new thing" weren't really styles of music, there were many different styles of music and approaches by the players who occasioned that schism, it was an approach that welcomed structural and harmonic freedom for creators to do an almost infinite variety of their own thing. So, you know, Sun Ra's music and Ornette Coleman's music and Cecil Taylor's music aren't really similar to one another and and aren't necessarily based on the same stylistic characteristics that you can easily definite for things like bebop and hard bop.

And I think, after that, everyone went every which way. You can call all of that "post-bop," but what really does that mean? What does that tell you about the characteristics of the music or what the music sounds like, or, if you're a musician, how to play it? Nothing really. Personally, I'd just discard such a non-descriptive term.

The Miles '60s quintet kinda played in a genre of its own, which I think IS one of the challenges of definite styles of post-new thing jazz -- the new thing opened up jazz to allow people to create their own forms that way. Clearly that Miles '60s band grew out of Davis' modal period -- jazz that was going to be organized and solos that were going to developed around something other than a cycle of chord changes, had to be structured around something, so you have something like Wayne Shorter's "Orbits" -- what is that, at least in the Miles recording, you have hard swinging almost Latin elements in the rhythm like hard bop, you have a Phrygian mode thing going on, but also both melodic variation in the soloing and freedom in the phrase making in terms of the way it floats against the ground beat. But you have similar characteristics (other than the modal element) in, say, Ornette Coleman's "Una Muy Bonita" -- but are they the same sub-style of jazz? Coleman's track is much more reliant on linear melodic variation that develops its own logic without even the framework of a mode or scale or repeating motif like "Orbits" relies on. Well, hey, they're both literally "post-bop" so we can just call it all that, but does that really help us understand what's the same or different from one another about these musics? I'm not crazy about that word, my guess is that it creates more confusion than clarity.

 

I think subgenres are created by people that like to make up things to sound important. I listen to artists. Don't care what people call things. People's names are useful to me.

Q: "You like Jazz, what's some good Jazz?"
A: "Coltrane."

I do not further confuse people with words that have to be looked up on a Wiki to further the conversation.

 

I listen to whatever I feel like listening to, regardless of artists or genres. The last ten jazz artists I listened to are:

Joseph Jarman/Don Moye duets
Duke Ellington
Kamasi Washington
Sun Ra
Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers
McCoy Tyner
John Coltrane
Charles Earland
Thelonious Monk
Carla Bley

 

More examples of bebop and hardbop comparisons are welcome!

Thanks for the great info you guys!

 

I'll give you a couple of examples. It's often said of hard bop that it drew more from R&B and gospel and funky music than bebop did. So an interesting contrast is Charlie Parker's 1947 piece "The Hymn," which I'm not sure of the source of, but which Clark Terry said was based on some kind of gospel tune that Parker's former boss, KC swing band leader Jay McShann used to hum; contrast that with Horace Silver's famous 1955 piece, "The Preacher" (a contrafact apparently on the changes of "Show Me The Way to Go Home"). Both handle if not explicitly a folk source, and storefront almost Salvation Army band sort of mood and vibe. But Silver's piece is in a much slower tempo with a sort of finger popping feel, the solos by Silver, Hank Mobley and Kenny Dorham are much more bluesy in their phrase making. Parker's "The Hymn" features high octane solos by himself, Miles Davis and Duke Jordan, playing fast runs on the harmony, not the melody or even the church feel, the church theme almost is placed side by side with the solos as two separate things.

 

It's easy to draw the line between hard bop and bebop at the extremes of the style. Art Blakey's bluesy "Moanin" is a classic example of hard bop, with the bluesy stop-time theme and the finger popping shuffle beat. Charlie Parker's "Donna Lee" -- with it's asymmetrical, darting head that almost just lines out the harmony is classic bebop. But then when you listen to something like Bud Powell's "Wail," where does it fall? The head is classic, darting, asymmetrical, off kilter intervals bebop , but the solos, especially by the young Sonny Rollins and even by Bud himself, could have fit in on a Blakey record a few years later (and Clifford Brown with Blakey sounded like nothing so much as Fats Navarro). And of course a lot of bebop repertoire was widely played by hard bop bands. The famous Miles Davis Walkin' album featured a version of Dizzy's Blue 'n Boogie. And Dizzy's Night in Tunisia, especially when it was given a kind of Latin swing (like Powell did) was in bebop and hard bop bands alike.

 

So, this definitely sound like hard bop, not bebop:

 

This is a bebop classic:

 

A bebop head, no doubt, but that's one funky bop kind of solo by the young Sonny Rollins with some gut bucket tone....

 

Someone would get wildly different impressions from their first contact with Coltrane, depending on the album/period they happen to hear, then.

I think this is true of a lot of artists. Miles is an obvious example, but even someone like Dizzy, who is closely identified with bebop, also explored a variety of music--Afro-Cuban, Bossa Nova, Calypso, Fusion, even Cool Jazz and Third Stream--sometimes in small combos, sometimes with a big band. I could say, "Just listen to Dizzy," but Dizzy contains multitudes.

 

Great lessons. Thanks!

 

Post-anything usually mean the acts that jumped on the bandwagon after the originators had done all of the heavy lifting.

 

In the case of post-bop (and some similar terms I find in rock discussion, like post-punk) I think it means musicians who tried to broaden the style without breaking away from it entirely.

 

In this case not so much.

I think people have struggled to find a way to describe exactly where, stylistically, in the context of the threads of jazz of the '50s, '60s and '70s, the Miles '60s quintet fits.

That band almost played a subgenre of its own. So, "post-bop" becomes a kind of catch all that can absorb almost anything.

But as I said, I think it's a really non-descriptive term -- it doesn't capture the character of the music (which isn't that closely related to bebop or hard bop), and it's just a broad catch-all that it could be used to capture almost anything.

A lot of the jazz from the early '60s onward -- since free jazz opened up the ability for jazz to engage, formally, with all kinds of different music and approaches, both from with and from without the jazz tradition -- mixes inputs and approaches and ideas and methods, with the result that each little substyle itself is heterogeneous, and there's no hegemonic style (not like when Parker arrived, and everyone tried to play like him and it was a particular, easy to define thing). That makes things challenging for people trying to define these styles and approaches.

Lately I've been reading guitarist Joe Morris' book, Perpetual Frontier, which grew out of lectures he's given at universities and conservatories. It's a slender primer for students and practitioners trying to learn how to approach playing free jazz -- challenging because free jazz really isn't a particular style and because freedom means being able to draw form almost any possible part of the jazz (or any other) performance tradition, not playing a particular way. It's a great, thought provoking book, and between reading it and revisiting a lot of the jazz of the '70s and '80s lately, I've come to realize that it's not just in the"free" idiom that a kind of poly-stylistic borrowing of methods and ideas has gone on. It's across all jazz in the last 40 years -- other than the neo-conservative reactions to this kind of poly-stylism. So we wind up with a catch-all, "post-bop," because the explosion of poly-stylistic borrowing and playing resists easy categorization.

 

So, to follow up with the above, we wind up with these phrases like post-bop or free bop to describe music that's, like bebop, maybe a head-solos-head, small band, swinging jazz, but that's not bluesy soul jazz or otherwise similarly derived from hard bop, and not necessarily tied to a cycle of changes as an organizing idea, like bebop,

 

To quote Charlie Ventura