Exploring Different Styles of Jazz: Cool Jazz, Hard Bop, Free Jazz, and Fusion

Cool Jazz

In part a reaction to bebop, cool jazz involved more complex compositions, slower tempos, and sometimes less overt emotional involvement. Associated with the West Coast, it had much greater rhythm variety than bop in up-tempo & medium-tempo pieces. It had extensive arrangements, including written introductions and composed passages between improvisations.

Artists

• Paul Desmond
• Dave Brubeck
• Bill Evans

Hard Bop

Hard bop is a subgenre of jazz that is an extension of bebop music. Journalists and record companies began using the term in the mid-1950s to describe a new current within jazz which incorporated influences from rhythm and blues, gospel music, and blues. An aggressive, driving, hot style of modern jazz developed by East Coast musicians in the late 1950s as a rejection of the more relaxed, cool style of West Coast jazz.

Artists

• John Coltrane
• Art Blakey
• Horace Silver

Free Jazz

The main characteristic of free jazz is that there are no rules. Musicians do not adhere to a fixed harmonic structure (predetermined chord progressions) as they improvise; instead, they modulate (i.e., change keys) at will. Free jazz improvisers typically phrase in chromatic intervals and harmonies, and some achieve atonality while playing in microtones, overtones, multiphonics (simultaneous notes played on one horn), and tone clusters. Free jazz performers often improvised without observing fixed metres or tempos.

Artists

• Bill Dixon
• Alan Silvia
• Marion Brown

Fusion

Jazz fusion is a musical genre that developed in the late 1960s when musicians combined aspects of jazz harmony and improvisation with styles such as funk, rock, rhythm and blues, and Latin jazz. Hence, the term “fusion,” as in “fusing” together the musical elements of jazz and rock. It was essentially a fusion of elements taken from jazz as well as the grooves and rhythm of funk, with the beat of R&B and the amplified electronic instruments used in rock.

Artists

• Herbie Hancock
• Weather Report
• Return to Forever