The Steel Guitar Forum

A while back I posted a topic regarding bebop jazz and it was very productive learning bebop scales and triads and applying them into my playing.

I recently heard the term "Hard Bop" jazz. This style is pretty far out and way beyond my pay grade. Have no idea how you approach this style.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87AFnRk6rvU

Labels can be confusing...

When I think of Be-Bop, the music in your link is what I think of. Coltrane, Parker, Miles, Dizzy, Mingus, Monk, and Cannonball - the pioneers. They took popular swing and blues tunes and turned them into vehicles for a more complex way to interpret and improvise. They also wrote original music that allowed them even more freedom of expression.

As far as how to approach playing the music, LOTS of listening, study, and playing. My hat is off to forumite Mike Neer for his dedication to adapting lap steel to bop. Or is it the other way around?

Hi Len,

It sounds over your head because you are trying to apply scales to chords and that is not the way they are improvising through those changes.....Instead - They approach that style of playing by using the simplest way to approach improvisation which is "Intervallic improvisation" The Berklee scales to chords is far too confusing.

When changes move by far too fast - We can't use scales as the means to get where these players lived. I wasted 5 years pursuing the scale to chord Berklee method. The legends I was striving to emulate did not think that way...That scale to chord method was created as a means to analyze all of the notes we might be able to play. It was not at all how those legends though when they saw a series of chords on a page.....They saw intervals and shapes using approach notes for coloring.

Lenny Breau taught me to avoid the scale approach and instead he said I should learn to use intervallic improvisation as my cornerstone. He said that is the way Bill Evans, Parker, and so on were doing...Once I saw it that way I could hear what they were doing and everything made sense.....If we program our mind to hear a scale to a chord and then we hear them not doing that it sounds outside of our wheelhouse....Understanding it is as simple as changing our listening direction.

Your threads music example is pure Bebop....Miles, Oscar, Art Tatum, Dizzy, Parker, Lee Morgan, Louis Armstrong, etc. all composed what is known as the Bebop vocabulary.

Arguably Miles best compositions happened when he abandoned "True" Bebop for more of a classical influenced for of arranging. The compositional contributions Miles made is strongly on both sides of the Jazz fence...

Although they first entered during the Bebop period, artists like Bill Evans, Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Mingus, Miles, and Monk are credited as the crew who influenced Jazz "away" from the BeBop vocabulary, not towards it....All of their compositions introduced a new vocabulary which is followed today.

"Hard" Just means "True to the form" or "Without external influence"

"Hard Rock" = Led Zeppelin, James Gang, Steppin' Wolf etc.
"Hard Country" or some have written "Hard Core Country" = Hank Williams, Carl Smith, Lefty, Early Jones, Haggard, Owens, Price, Dickens, etc.
Hard Core Bluegrass = Bill Monroe, Flatt and Scruggs, etc.

Paul

I sure would enjoy hearing your take on anything by Monk, Paul. they say Round Midnight is the most covered jazz composition of them all.

I was overjoyed to recently find Buddy Emmons' recording of Monk's Straight No Chaser with Buddy Spicher and Calvin Vollrath, done in the early 2000's on their Air Mail Special album.

some of Monk's compositions are notoriously difficult to improvise over... there's the Coltrane quote about "falling down an empty elevator shaft" while playing through Monk changes, and the story about how they could never get a complete take of the song Brilliant Corners and finally had to assemble one for release.

I'd love to see how the intervallic approach can be applied to the songs of Monk. he's my all-time favorite composer.

Scott,

I have studied this stuff all of my adult life and I love sharing what I have learned from some of the best Jazz players....Playing through Monk songs are no different, you just approach them from the bottom up, instead of the top down.....Monk's songs are rhythmically different and he chose to compose a lot using the not so typical progressions. So Coltrane was having to figure out new lines from his earliest Bebop training to approach those various chordal intervals..Watch the Coltrane documentary on Netflix....When Coltrane made that statement he was not at the level he later became known for...He was not as advanced as the other Bebop players like Dizzy and Miles were and Monk helped take him to his next level..That's most likely the reason for making such a strange elevator statement. Monk's tunes really do follow a logical path.

So you can use the exact same process on Monk's songs as was used by Parker and Miles for playing Donna Lee. Lenny Breau told me those Jazz legends learned just like the greatest of our Country players learned....They built their improvisational houses from the ground up (The Chords).....The scale to chord comes at improvisation from the roof down. That's great for creating a curriculum but it is definitely not the fastest path towards meaningful improvisations....That path is why so many graduates sound like they are just running scales and scale patterns through changes whereas the giants never sounded that way.

Paul

Ken Pippus wrote:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_bop

Ken,

I don't put much weight on Wikipedia when referencing music issues...Around town here Wikipedia has to be corrected all the time..They have my bio incorrect and I have been trying to square that issue for several years...

....No doubt the writer they credit for the term interpreted it however he saw it...But the term "Hard" in musical terms between players means strict. And all of Jazz came from the African American/ Blues influence. So if that's true and I believe it is, how can wikipedia state variances of the art form be separated by race? That seems like a political observation from a non musicians take. Miles, Coltrane, etc did not call their music Bop or Bebop let alone Hard Bop...Just sayin'

I heard that playing Jazz means to add extra notes to the melodies. It was a term around the turn of the century by musicians who could do that saying we "jazz it up." Whatever its called? I love hearing it!

Paul

Franklin wrote:Lenny Breau told me those Jazz legends learned just like the greatest of our Country players learned....They built their improvisational houses from the ground up (The Chords).....The scale to chord comes at improvisation from the roof down. That's great for creating a curriculum but it is definitely not the fastest path towards meaningful improvisations....That path is why so many graduates sound like they are just running scales and scale patterns through changes whereas the giants never sounded that way.

So true, I had this same experience in my own playing. When I started on steel, I was coming from jazz guitar, and a mentality of knowing the proper chord/scale relationship at any point in the tune. It's a ton of information for your brain to process and make meaningful choices from - and you kind of have to be like Neo from the Matrix in order to connect it all into lines that make musical sense.
So my early steel obsession led to a much needed break from my approach to jazz guitar, and when I came back to it I approached it more one note, or line at a time - intervallically.

When i think Hard Bop, i think of the slightly slower, more groove based records that came after Charlie Parker. Miles' 1st quintet, Art Blakey, Grant Green...

Two things about Jazz: it can’t be learned in a vacuum and it is an ever-evolving process. For me, it requires 100% of my attention to be able to even begin to approach the level of playing I expect. I am not there yet and may not ever be, but I know that it is not a casual pursuit.

Post-bop is something I am even more interested in, but hard bop is the shit! You can spend a lifetime playing only variations on the blues form and rhythm changes and that would be enough.

Perhaps Hard Bop has a different connotation in Nashville than in the rest of the musical community. Elsewhere, the Wiki description parallels all the other jazz history I’ve read.

https://www.npr.org/2010/01/25/99865218 ... t-hard-bop

https://www.jazzinamerica.org/lessonplan/8/6/211

I've always been a little perplexed by the term Hard Bop and the wiki description doesn't really help. it's described as something of a backlash to Cool Jazz, but then lists Miles Davis as one of its practitioners. it also defines Hard Bop as incorporating elements of R&B and soul, but lists Thelonious Monk as a practitioner and his music contains neither of those things. so I'm still unclear on what constitutes this sub-genre of Jazz.

I did however find this passage noteworthy and somewhat steel guitar-related:

A key recording in the early development of hard bop was Silver's composition "The Preacher", which was considered "old-timey" or "corny", such that Blue Note head Alfred Lion was hesitant to record the song. However, the song became a successful hit.

Musical labels are notoriously inexact, but most people would consider Miles' "Birth of the Cool" recordings, not too surprisingly, to be "cool jazz."

His mid-50's stuff is a different kettle of fish. Horace Silver fits exactly my understanding of the genre: lotsa chops, lotsa soul, and less harmonic complexity. And it lays out great on the C6 neck, viz "The Preacher!" Has anybody taken a run at "Song for My Father" on steel?

I think where Miles is concerned, his "genre" was pretty period specific: Nobody is going to consider Bitches' Brew or Jack Johnson cool jazz or hard bop! And his initial recordings with Charlie Parker make him sort of an innocent bystander at the invention of bebop.

Ken..

I was taking this off topic by defining what the term "Hard or Hardcore" indicates from my perspective. I often hear it as I have to interpret a "musical request" from various writers / producers / arrangers. In every city from London to Nashville, saying "Hard or Hardcore" in front of the 60's, a Mooney lick, cry in your beer songs etc....means they want the real deal without outside influences.

Paul

Deleted.

Probably have it wrong but I think of hard bop as what grew out of Parker and Diz bebop of the late 40's. Miles led with the Birth of the Cool (listen to Boblicity, which is a Parker-type blues head slowed way down to Oh-so-cool), then took the modal route with Kind of Blue. Definitive hard bop, again to me, is anything Clifford and Max. That stuff is so "next level". To think Clifford was 25 when he died is amazing. Max plays the drums like it's a melodic instrument or a human voice. The arrangements, complex interplay of the players (Parisian Thoroughfare), and the intense swing took it far beyond the blues based roots from where it came. Then Trane comes along and redefines the whole genre! Lord, I wish I could play that stuff as much as I feel it. Darn.

Horace Silver was the Hard Bop Grandpop. Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, Hank Mobley, Jackie McLean, Lee Morgan, Sonny Clark--these were the hard bop cats. The next generation after Diz and Bird and Tadd Dameron, Dodo and Fats Navarro.

Hard bop is a little more soulful and a little less razzle dazzle than bebop, although it is by no means boring.

The Cool school, especially the Tristano cats like Warne Marsh and Lee Konitz are another favorite for me. I actually find their writing and blowing to be exceptional.

Not sure if this is hard bop but it is some fine playing in some "post bebop" jazz style by Maurice Anderson. Recorded in 1974.

WARNING: This tune is 15 minutes and takes one entire side of the Case Brother LP "Contrasts In Jazz". Reese comes in the first time at 7:00.

https://soundcloud.com/user267925385/full-moon

this guy has a good series of educational videos, including:

Hard Bop explained

Most of this music is above my head, but I can appreciate it when Paul says...

why so many graduates sound like they are just running scales and scale patterns through changes whereas the giants never sounded that way.

After hearing the mantra "scales, scales scales, learn them scales" so many times, I still feel that scales are just so many bricks. To me the chords are the foundation of everything I hear. All of the (little bit of) improvisation I do is based on the chord I'm hearing; it's relative chords, and extensions of those chords.

I dunno, maybe that's wrong?

Thank you Paul for the in-depth response to my post. It certainly makes you think differently listening to jazz. Very rewarding when you find a little piece you can incorporate in your playing.