The term post-bop has a variety of usages which vary widely. Some writers have defined post-bop with specificity, but these sources conflict with one another. Others have written that post-bop is not a musical period but a specific body of music that emerged in the late 1950s and 1960s that combined principles of bebop,
hard bop,
modal jazz,
avant-garde and
free jazz, but also departed from earlier traditions in jazz. Still other writers have defined post-bop as a genre of small-combo jazz that evolved in the early to mid 1960s in the United States that was pioneered by
Miles Davis (the central figure in the development of this genre), in conjunction with
Charles Mingus,
Wayne Shorter,
Herbie Hancock,
John Coltrane and
Jackie McLean, which crafted syntheses of hard bop with contemporaneous developments in
avant-garde jazz, modal jazz and free jazz that resulted in music with a complex and experimental flavor though still rooted in bop tradition, featuring less of the
blues and
soul leanings predominant in hard bop. The movement had a significant impact on subsequent generations of both acoustic jazz and
fusion musicians. According to
musicologist Jeremy Yudkin, post-bop does not follow "the conventions of bop or the apparently formless freedom of the new jazz". He wrote in his definition of the subgenre: According to scholar Keith Waters, some of the traits found in post-bop recordings are: a slower harmonic rhythm characteristic of modal jazz, techniques for playing "inside" and "outside" the underlying harmonic structure, an interactive (or conversational) approach to rhythm section accompaniment, unusual harmonic progressions, use of harmonic or metric superimposition, unusual underlying formal designs for head statements and chorus structure improvisation, or the abandonment entirely of underlying chorus structure beneath improvisation.
Miles Davis was particularly influential in the development of small-combo jazz post-bop in the 1960s. His second quintet was active during 1964 to 1968 and featured pianist
Herbie Hancock, bassist
Ron Carter, saxophonist
Wayne Shorter, and drummer
Tony Williams. They recorded six studio albums that, according to
All About Jazz's C. Michael Bailey, introduced post-bop:
E.S.P. (1965),
Miles Smiles (1967),
Sorcerer (1967),
Nefertiti (1968),
Miles in the Sky (1968), and
Filles de Kilimanjaro (1968). ==See also==