Free Essay On Hard BOP

Jazz is just one of the genres of music and just like other genres; it has its own set of subgenres too. One of the most popular and romanticized subgenres of jazz is hard bop. Some of the most popular hard bop artists include but may not be limited to Miles Davis, Wes Montgomery, Jimmy Health, Clifford Brown, Horace Silver, and the hard bop artist who will be the focus of this paper, Charles Mingus Jr.
One of the most popular works of Charles Mingus Jr. was the Fables of Faubus. Having heard to the song numerous times, it can be easily recognized that it is a music that belongs to the jazz category. Just like other jazz classics, it does not have any lyrics. Most people erroneously interchange hard bop with cool jazz. What those people do not realize is that these are two different jazz subgenres.
In general cool jazz can be characterized by a more classical tone or mood, a feature which makes total sense because it originated from Europe. Hard Bop, on the other hand, was mainly developed as a reaction to the people’s decreasing interest on cool jazz because of its very classical and often dull presentation.
With the introduction of hard bop, musicians became able to introduce a variety to the songs that were once too classical and boring to listen to. Generally, there are two variations of hard bop namely funky jazz and mainstream. Funky jazz was mostly composed of simple tunes and melodies with linear chord and musical progressions. In essence, it was a simple jazz with a little bit of flavor in it. The Fables of Faubus is, for me, a great example of mainstream jazz because of the difficult tunes and melodies, the musicians’ improvisations and the tough chord and musical progressions and complex forms used all throughout the music.