Post-bop Explained

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This Jazz Piano Tutorial is about Post-bop.

By the mid 1960’s the rise of Free Jazz had shaken the very foundation of Jazz. So Mainstream Jazz had to somehow find a way to respond to the avant-garde – and this response was a genre called Post-bop. Post-bop mixes elements of bebop, hard-bop, modal and free jazz without necessarily being any one of these style.

Post-bop was more or less invented by Miles Davis’ Second Great Quintet, so a lot of what I’m going to say here relates directly to this group.

The way that Post-bop responded to this attack by Free Jazz was with ambiguity – writing songs that were:

Harmonically ambiguous
Metrically and Rhythmically ambiguous
Formally ambiguous
So, in effect, Post-bop sits half way between Free Jazz and Tonal Jazz. If Free Jazz was ‘complete freedom’; Post-bop is ‘controlled freedom’. Post-bop breaks some musical rules but retains others, and still maintains much more structure and form than Free Jazz. Post-bop took on some elements and ideas from Free Jazz but retained others from Traditional Jazz

Post-bop straddles the grey area between Traditional Jazz and Free Jazz. And it’s worth noting that the line between Post-bop and Free Jazz is fuzzy – John Coltrane, for example, sat on both sides of the fence (it’s sometimes hard to classify his music – it’s often a mix of Modal Jazz, Free Jazz and Post-Bop).

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