A substyle of Bop dating from the mid-1950s. It stands in opposition to cool jazz and particularly to West Coast jazz in its re-emphasis on the African-American roots of bop and its reaffirmation of forthright musical and emotional qualities. Its leading practitioners were based in New York, but an oppositional stylistic label, East Coast jazz, is a literary conceit that never acquired wide currency. As practised by the Clifford Brown-Max Roach quintet (which, ironically, was organized while they were working in the heart of the West Coast jazz movement in Los Angeles), the Miles Davis quintet and Sonny Rollins’s small groups of the mid-1950s, hard bop is largely indistinguishable from the parent style, bop. However, other exponents, most notably Horace Silver, Art Blakey, Jimmy Smith, Charles Mingus and Cannonball Adderley, introduced elements of greater simplicity and tunefulness, linking hard bop to the swing era through the use of riff themes, and at the same time linking it to African-American gospel music through the incorporation of melodic devices that served as an instrumental parallel to preaching. This latter tendency was developed into a further substyle that was initially called funky jazz and later came to be known as soul jazz.
M. Williams: ‘The Funky–Hard Bop Regression’, The Art of Jazz: Essays on the Nature and Development of Jazz (New York, 1959/R as The Art of Jazz: Ragtime to Bebop), 233–7
M. James: ‘Drum Roles’, JazzM, vi/6 (1960), 9–11
J. Cooke: ‘8 Years in 8 Minutes: an Outline of the Hard Bop Era’, JazzM, xiii/2 (1967), 2–7
D.E. Rosenthal: Hard Bop: Jazz and Black Music (New York and Oxford, 1992)
BARRY KERNFELD