Post-Bop
Mid-1960s quintets loosen harmony, metre and texture at once without giving up the composed frame
Related
Post-bop names a set of jazz approaches that appeared in the mid-1960s. The frame of theme, solos and ensemble stays, while harmony, metre and the drums' interaction loosen at once, so the music still sounds composed.
Origins and era
Between 1963 and 1968 Blue Note and Columbia recorded this music in New York. Miles Davis's quintet settled in 1964, with Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Tony Williams treating rehearsal as composition. Shorter's Footprints used triple metre and modal scales, Hancock's Maiden Voyage a pedal bass, and Davis's ESP pulled the beat apart. The label came later from critics; the players spoke of playing something new.
What you hear
Harmony stops resolving on schedule, using pedals, modal scales and ambiguous major-minor shading. Triple and quintuple metres alternate with irregular sections, and the drums answer the soloist with colour and accent rather than counting time. The bass sometimes holds a long note while piano or vibraphone leaves space with sparse chords. It may also walk, then repeat one note for a whole section, while the piano comps with two- or three-note voicings. Themes are short and symmetrical, yet solos can travel far before returning.
Key figures
Davis's second quintet is the centre, Shorter's writing supplied much of its material, Hancock's piano and composing pushed modal harmony toward pop, and Williams's drums cut time into fragments. Joe Henderson, Andrew Hill and Bobby Hutcherson wrote equally open pieces from other directions.
Lineage
Hard bop, modal jazz and free jazz all feed in as partial techniques inside single pieces. Fusion, M-Base and modern jazz composition come out, and the repertoire shaped countless contemporary quintets. It also gave later bands a way to sound modern without abandoning written themes.
Common misunderstandings
Post-bop is not everything after bebop, or free jazz and fusion would be swallowed by it. It means the mid-1960s bands that still wrote tunes and still improvised while loosening harmony and metre. Nor is it free jazz, since themes and sections usually remain, only with wider borders.
Listen in the library
All tracks from midicn-lib — inline badge is the license tier (C1 commercial / C2 non-commercial / C3 study only).
Sources
- Keith Waters, The Studio Recordings of the Miles Davis Quintet 1965-68（Oxford University Press, 2011），用于核对曲目与手法
- The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., entry Post-bop，用于交叉核对术语与年代
Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.