David Rosenthal, Hard Bop: Jazz and Black Music, 1955-1965
1994; Volume: 18; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0364-2437
Autores Tópico(s)Musicology and Musical Analysis
ResumoDavid Rosenthal, Hard Bop: and Black Music, 1955-1965The importance geography jazz and African American musical aesthetics has always been decisive. Musical sounds were somehow representative specific areas but could adapt and alter sounds other areas. The early New Orleans sounds Kid Ory and King Oliver, for example, led exportation that style New York via Louis Armstrong in 1924. Again in early 1950s development distinctly California sounds crystallized into cool jazz (after Miles Davis' 1949 Birth Cool session with several West Coast players), and shortly thereafter a flesh jazz style emerged with a renewed boppish vigor, mostly in New York. David Rosenthal's Hard Bop: and Black Music, 1955-1965 chronicles this development in New York-based African American jazz aesthetics. What Dizzy Gillespie sparingly refers in his autobiography as ...more earthy, crunchy sound hard bop is intimately connected, Rosenthal argues, to soul music, rhythm and blues, and other popular African American musical idioms...by accretion rather than rupture.Rosenthal's book moves at times like an encyclopedia through a pantheon players divided into four general groups, the borderline between jazz and popular black tradition (Horace Silver, Cannonball Adderley, organist Jimmy Smith); those tormented (Jackie McLean, Tina Brooks, Mal Waldron, Elmo Hope); those of a gentler, more lyrical bent who found in hard bop a more congenial climate than bebop had offered (Benny Golson, Gigi Gryce, Art Farmer, Tommy Flannagan, Hank Jones); and those Experimentalists consciously trying jazz's structural and technical boundaries (Monk, Mingus, Andrew Hill, Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane). Each contingency came together in New York and recorded mostly for two major New York labels releasing hard bop recordings, Prestige and Note.Rosenthal's study marks fact that no in-depth study many these players or New York mainstream jazz scene during 1955-1956 exists. This reviewer finds his musicological discussions often reductive and too focused on adjective -laden descriptions specific representative tunes at expense historical contextualization, which is often hinted at but rarely accomplished.While Rosenthal manages a fairly thorough exploration heroin addiction and early deaths scores these players, he has trouble doing anything more than mentioning albums, tunes, and players' untimely deaths. Pianists Wynton Kelly (1931-1971), Elmo Hope (1923-1967, and Sonny Clark (1931-1963), none whom reached forty-one, have rarely seen light book pages and mention them are welcome here, despite my misgivings about Rosenthal's too-brief discussions them.To establish a context outside players' individual lives, Rosenthal discusses urban New York with a paucity historical sources but with his eye carefully trained on city as a vague geography for aesthetics. His section Jazz in Ghetto, seeks reveal how hard bop reached for and incorporated expressive qualities African American popular traditions like blues and gospel into more elaborate and complex bebop forties and on. The importance bar or night club is presented here via newly pervasive jukebox and sale jazz singles by New York jazz labels. Rosenthal says, Blue Note and Prestige each issued approximately three hundred 45 rpm singles between 1955 and 1970. Average sales for these singles (mostly ballards and groove numbers) was around 3000 for jukeboxes and 1000 for individuals. …
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