ABSTRACT
In the 1950s, fans had numerous jazz listening options. While the cool reaction to bebop was taking place, most notably on the West Coast, a new generation of musicians continued the development of the bop tradition, creating hard bop. By the mid-1950s, important early third-stream works were recorded, and, by the end of the 1950s, free jazz took listeners to entirely new destinations, while other groups continued to play cool jazz and hard bop.
Art Blakey, Horace Silver, Clifford Brown, and Max Roach led important early hard-bop groups. Originally, drummer Blakey and pianist Silver worked together, forming the Jazz Messengers.
The postmodern movement is probably best illustrated by free-jazz alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman. His 1959 recording Free Jazz announced the dawn of a new era in jazz, just as Miles Davis's Birth of the Cool had done ten years earlier. In a way, free jazz reestablished the emphasis on group or collective improvisation that was important in early New Orleans jazz.
Bassist/composer Charles Mingus, an important pioneer of late modern and postmodern jazz, defies categorization. Mingus's reputation gained more notoriety in the years following his death. Much of his music lives on in the work of the Mingus Big Band.
