Hard bop

Hard bop is a subgenre of jazz that is an extension of bebop (or "bop") music. Journalists and record companies began using the term in the mid-1950s to describe a new current within jazz that incorporated influences from rhythm and blues, gospel music, and blues, especially in saxophone and piano playing.

• Many jazz fans simply refer to [hard bop] as the Blue Note sound in deference to the record label most closely associated with the glory days of hard bop in the 1950s and 1960s. As the name hard bop indicates, the leading performers of this new idiom learned from their bebop predecessors. But they also borrowed techniques from other styles of populist music. The resulting hybrid artfully mixed the sophistication of modern jazz with a rough-and-tumble swagger, brash and bluesy, that never let you forget this music's proletarian pedigree.
  • Ted Gioia, How to Listen to Jazz. page 129. Basic Books.