It's hard to believe there were only twenty years between Lester Young's break-out recordings with Count Basie (37-39) and Ornette's Atlantic recordings (59-60.) It would be like going from Scarlatti to Mahler in twenty years.
Or maybe not. The other interpretation would be to say that Young was already almost Bird-like, and Bird was already Ornette-like. Young and Hawkins were already be-boppers. Jo Jones was the original bop drummer. And Bird was the original avant-gardist. Of course we can't hear that aspect of his playing unless we've also heard Ornette.
Hard bop meant stepping back from the radicalism of bop.
hard bop was streamlined bebop, more minimalist and brooding, but I think jazz mutated in that direction to a large extent because of the radicalism of the times. bebop seemed a revelatory celebration of mastery over the medium (bebop practitioners also wanted to play so fast because they knew white musicians would therefore be unable to steal their riffs) while hard bop that came later was filled with an undertone of anger that seemed to prefigure the showdown that became the Civil Rights movement...
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