Hard Bop: Jazz and Black Music 1955-1965

223 Pages·1993·10.06 MB·English

by  David H. Rosenthal

HARP BOP
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I:FL!LJM:I«JJ
J A ZZ A ND
B L A CK M U S IC
1 9 5 5 - 1 9 65
DAVID H. ROSENTHAL
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York Oxford
Oxford University Press
Oxford New York Toronto
Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi
Kuala Lumpur Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo
Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town
Melbourne Auckland Madrid
and associated companies in
Berlin Ibadan
Copyright © 1992 by David H. Rosenthal
First published in 1992 by Oxford University Press, Inc.,
198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 100164314
First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 1993
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of Oxford University Press, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rosenthal, David, 1945-
Hard bop : jazz and Black music, 1955-1965 / David H. Rosenthal.
p. cm.
Discography: p.
Includes index.
ISBN 0-19-505869-0
ISBN 0-19-508556-6 |pbk.)
1. Bop (Music)—History and criticism. 2. Jazz—1951-1960—
History and criticism. 3. Jazz—1961-1970—History and criticism.
4. Afro-Americans—Music—History and criticism. I. Title.
ML3508.R68 1992
781.65'5—dc20 91-15669 CIP MN
The following page is regarded as an extension of the copyright page.
2468 10 9753
Printed in the United States of America
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for kind permis-
sion to quote material in copyright:
Doubleday: Excerpt from To Be or Not to Bop by Dizzy Gillespie. Published by
Doubleday, a division of Bantam, Doubleday, Dell Publishing Group, Inc., 1979.
HarperCollins Publishers: Excerpt from "Howl" from Howl and Other Poems by
Allen Ginsberg. Copyright © 1955 by Allen Ginsberg. Reprinted by permission of
HarperCollins Publishers.
Macmillan Publishing Company: Excerpt reprinted with permission of Macmillan
Publishing Company from Jazz Panorama, edited by Martin Williams. Copyright ©
1962 by Jazz Review, Inc.
The New Republic'. Excerpts from "Michael Ullman on Jazz: Horace Silver."
Published in The New Republic, July 8 and 15, 1978. Reprinted by permission.
The New Yorker: Excerpts from "Poet" by Whitney Balliett. Published in The New
Yorker, February 24, 1986. Reprinted by permission.
Random House, Inc.: Excerpts from Four Lives in the Bebop Business by A. B.
Spellman. Copyright © 1966 by A. B. Spellman. Reprinted by permission of
Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
Transaction Publishers: Excerpts from "The Black Bar in the Making of a Jazz
Musician" by Harry A. Reed. Published by permission of Transaction Publishers
from Journal of Jazz Studies 5:2 (Spring-Summer). Copyright © 1979 by Transaction
Publishers.
Portions of this book appeared in earlier form in American Book
Review, The Black Perspective in Music, Keyboard, Popular Music,
The Village Voice, and El Temps.
I wish to express my gratitude to Carlos Figueroa and Alan Rosenthal
for their careful readings of the manuscript and their suggestions; to
my editor, Sheldon Meyer, for his support and receptiveness; and to
the wonderful musicians and other artists whom I interviewed and
who gave so generously of their time, thoughts, and recollections.
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for Alan Rosenthal
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PREFACE
My brother David was fourteen (I was ten) when he discovered
jazz while attending one of those music and art summer
camps in the Berkshires. Chuck Israels, soon to be Bill Evans's
bassist, was the son of the woman who ran the place. Randy
Weston, a fabulous pianist, would drop by to play basketball.
Within a year, David knew more about jazz than many adult
jazz-lovers ever do (many of the thoughts contained in these
pages were already being expressed), and had managed by hook
or crook to gather around himself a very serious little record
collection.
At this time (1960), almost all the musicians David dis-
cusses in this book were hard at work creating sounds that
are still lighting fires under jazz enthusiasts. "Hard bop,"
whatever the hotly-debated merits of the term, was "alive,"
by which I mean not just that the music was being played (as
it still is), but that it was responding with passionate urgency
(as it emphatically no longer is) to its own imbedded impli-
cations and those of the larger surrounding culture. It was in,
of, and about the world in which it lived.
To David, a poet, critic, and savvy observer of the chaotic
postwar world, this quality of currency was never secondary
throughout his thirty-year involvement in jazz. Music was