Sunday, October 24, 2010

"Hard Bop and Its Critics": Now in The Jazz Annex

From the perspective of 50+ years, it is easy to romanticize, and thereby distort, the era of Hard Bop.  Jazz scholarship is the antidote.  To remind us what Hard Bop was up against, the late David H. Rosenthal wrote "Hard Bop and Its Critics," published in The Black Perspective in Music in 1988, the text of which is now available in The Jazz Annex.  (Take the link in the preceding sentence.)  It should whet your appetite for the book he produced five years later, Hard Bop: Jazz and Black Music, 1955-1965