i've been dabbling in a jazz over the last few months, and i want to know some technical terms.

it seems most of what i've listened to (hard bop, some cool jazz) begin and end with a distinct riff, between which the players take turns soloing. what are these opening and closing bits called?

don't be afraid to lay some terms on me, i'd like to be able to chat with you jazzier folk.

Keeping it simple. It's called the "Head". It can be as many bars long as you want. Though it's typically no longer than 16. It gives the intitial and final of the piece. It also sets the key and chord progression from which the solo will proceed.

There are a lot of recordings of head-solo-head.


Hard Bop is Bop with Soul and Blues incorporated into it. It was a direct reaction to West Coast/Cool Jazz.


If you like Hard Bop....a great many of the most well known recordings will be found on Blue Note.

yuppers have quite a few of them. hard bop is pretty cool. what is it exactly, anyways?

i didn't know it was a reaction to cool jazz, although i can hear the contrast. how did this come about?

1. Did you miss the part of the post where I said what was Hard Bop?


2. Like Bop before it comes down to Race....Cool Jazz became dominated by white musicians....and while their are many excellent recordings....it really was lifeless. In the meantime, just like with when white musicians first got into Jazz the media was all over the white musicians and disregarded the black musicians. Thus once again, they were not making the same amount as money as the white musicians.

It's how Bop came about. It is reported that Charlie Parker and the first musicians who started playing Bop wanted to make a new kind of music which “they can’t steal from us�, “they� being the white musicians who copied earlier forms of Jazz and received most of its financial rewards.

Even as excellent a musician that Benny Goodman was....the clarinet isn't suited to play Bop. It's why Clarinet went from being on of the major instruments to a forgotten and unhip geek instrument. It wasn't until Avant-Garde and Free Jazz/Free Improv that it made a comeback in Jazz. Buddy De Franco was one of the few that was able to play Bop on the Clarinet. Goodman did have a short-lived Bop group.

Benny Goodman didn't start becoming successful until he ripped off Jelly Roll Morton's King Porter Stomp, which Morton didn't see a penny from. He also had Fletcher Henderson as his arranger. He was the one that gave the group the Harlem Swingin' style which lead to the B.S. King of Swing title being given to Goodman.

Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, and Bennie Moten's bands had been Swingin' for a decade by that time. Even though Goodman was Jewish, which wasn't exactly a postive back then....he was still white. With all the National attention in the newspapers and especially the Radio.... he became known as the The King of Swing.


Chick Webb's band sersiouly cut Goodman's in a "Battle of the Bands" competetion at the Savoy in front of 4000 people. It wasn't even close.