Post-Bop

“Post-bop” is the least satisfying name for the richest period of jazz development: a category that says only what this music came after, not what it is. What it is is the work of the classic Blue Note and Impulse! and Columbia recordings of the 1960s: John Coltrane’s classic quartet (A Love Supreme, 1964), Herbie Hancock’s Maiden Voyage (1965) and Speak Like a Child (1968), Wayne Shorter’s Speak No Evil (1964) and Ju-Ju (1964), Lee Morgan’s The Sidewinder (1964), Andrew Hill’s Point of Departure (1964).

These records shared a family resemblance: they played on harmonic knowledge inherited from bebop but used it more freely; they incorporated modal approaches without abandoning chord progressions entirely; they played with phrase length and rhythmic placement in ways that bebop’s more regular structures had not permitted. The Blue Note “house sound” — engineered by Rudy Van Gelder at his studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey — gave all of them a warm, close-miked clarity that made the physical presence of the instruments feel immediate.

The Miles Davis second great quintet (1964–1968) — Davis, Coltrane’s successor Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Tony Williams — was post-bop’s summit: “time, no changes” playing where all the structural elements were in play simultaneously, the musicians responding to each other with such complete fluency that the music sounded almost entirely free while remaining entirely connected.