TT 478: Interstellar Hard Bop

What's In a Name?

For my Nation article, “Jazz Off the Record,” I attempt to highlight a certain sound.

Here are five representative pieces. In their first recordings from the mid-1960s, they are in one specific idiom:

Herbie Hancock, “One Finger Snap”
Wayne Shorter, “Witch Hunt”
Joe Henderson, “Inner Urge”
Larry Young and Woody Shaw, “The Moontrane”
McCoy Tyner, “Four by Five”

In 2025 many proficient players sort of take this list of five pieces for granted. “It’s just jazz.” But that’s not true. This sound was fashioned by a certain peer group possessed by a specific genius. They fought for every note. As with the bebop of Charlie Parker and Bud Powell, it existed in its pure form for less than a decade.

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with Shuja Haider at the Louis Armstrong House, August 2023

Early on in the process, I texted with my editor, Shuja Haider.

SH: Is there a name for this music? You don’t have to coin a phrase, but since you’re identifying a period, what would you call it?

EI: I don’t have an answer for that offhand, and I am leery of making up a brand new name

SH: I hear you, making up a new name can bring trouble. But even a descriptive phrase, a deliberately un-catchy one, may help uninitiated readers keep track. Something to think about, only if it ends up coming naturally

EI: One of my regrets about the Bad Plus is that we didn’t call ourselves a new genre. We probably had that opportunity and we didn’t take it. We were just “contemporary jazz” or another unhelpful banality. I’ll think about this

The word “post-bop” is out there, but more from the critics than the musicians. I can’t remember hearing the word “post-bop” in conversation or rehearsal. Musicians do indeed use bebop, hard bop, straight ahead, and free jazz, but we don’t use “post-bop.” In my view that word is pointlessly generic (as I say in the final article).

I read somewhere that critic Stanley Dance came up with “mainstream” to describe a certain common practice idiom. Musicians don’t use mainstream much, but it’s a solid word. A sample sentence that makes sense: “In his work as a producer for Verve and Pablo, Norman Granz generally hired mainstream musicians.”

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Dare I invent a name for the music covered in my Nation article, “Jazz Off the Record?”

John Coltrane was the father: none of this idiom would exist without Coltrane, although he also left the idiom when Rashied Ali took over from Elvin Jones.

My favorite of the late Trane albums is Interstellar Space….suddenly, I thought to call the idiom Interstellar Swing.

But then Mark Stryker came up with Interstellar Hard Bop. I liked that right away, because the idiom often had tight unison melodies like classic Horace Silver, Benny Golson, and Art Blakey. The Coltrane tune that is most like the idiom is “Miles’ Mode,” simply because that is the one time McCoy Tyner doubles Coltrane’s saxophone melody at the piano.

Nobody I discussed Interstellar Hard Bop with liked the name as much as Mark and me, but, nonetheless, a draft went into Shuja’s hands with this paragraph:

EI: For the purposes of this article I’m dubbing this genre Interstellar Hard Bop, a riff on my favorite of Coltrane’s avant-garde albums, Interstellar Space, the lean and mean duo album with drummer Rashied Ali. Coltrane helped build the genre, but he had left many of its elements behind by 1966—a choice that fans have argued about ever since. “Interstellar” is a tip of the hat to Coltrane and his relentless search, and “Hard Bop” references the swing, blues and gospel elements Coltrane discarded for his late style.

Shuja responded in an epic fashion replete with quotes from Said and Adorno:

SH: When I raised the idea of giving a name to this style, it was for two reasons. One, conceptual, to give the reader something to grasp onto, to feel like there's a tangible object we're pacing around and looking at from all angles and trying to understand. Two, more utilitarian, just to have a noun to put in sentences that needed one. I wanted it to come from you, so it would be harmonious with your reading of the music. And I think what you landed on (Interstellar Hard Bop) is catchy and evocative, and given meaning in the text. So I'm happy with that, but since you've kept deliberating over it and mentioned some variability in response among peers, I did have an idea that I thought I'd share to see what you think of it. It's more prosaic: Late Jazz.

Plainer phrasings open themselves up to more multifarious interpretations, not all of them desirable. I certainly don't want to open the door to "jazz is dead." But the reason I think this might make sense is that this was a time when people had started thinking of jazz this way—hence the integration of rock and funk in fusion, the once popular music of America now chasing trends. It suggests to me an assertion of the tradition: no, we're still playing jazz. And it's still happening right now.

Conversely, though, a plainer phrasing also doesn't ask for readers to adopt it, like "bebop" did—it more casually serves as a term of art for the discussion at hand. (One sees “late romantic” and so on all the time but it doesn’t supersede the root term.) In this case, its application would evoke a broader idea we talked about before when we considered having you go long on Wayne Shorter. Putting the Edward Said (from LRB) quote we looked at back here for reference:

Each of us can supply evidence of late works which crown a lifetime of aesthetic endeavour. Rembrandt and Matisse, Bach and Wagner. But what of artistic lateness not as harmony and resolution, but as intransigence, difficulty and contradiction? What if age and ill health don’t produce serenity at all? This is the case with Ibsen, whose final works, especially When We Dead Awaken, tear apart his career and reopen questions that are supposed to have been resolved before such works are written. Far from resolution, Ibsen’s last plays suggest an angry and disturbed artist who uses drama as an occasion to stir up more anxiety, tamper irrevocably with the possibility of closure, leave the audience more perplexed and unsettled than before. It is this second type of lateness that I find deeply interesting: it is a sort of deliberately unproductive productiveness, a going against.

Adorno uses the phrase ‘late style’ most memorably in an essay fragment entitled ‘Spätstil Beethovens’, dated 1937 and included in a 1964 collection, Moments musicaux, and again in his posthumously published book on Beethoven (1993). For Adorno, Beethoven’s last works – those that belong to what is known as the third period (the last five piano sonatas, the Ninth Symphony, the Missa Solemnis, the last six string quartets, 17 bagatelles for the piano) – constitute an event in the history of modern culture: a moment when the artist who is fully in command of his medium nevertheless abandons communication with the established social order of which he is a part and achieves a contradictory, alienated relationship with it. His late works are a form of exile from his milieu.

That last bit, "a form of exile from his milieu" resonates, I think. In this moment where both record labels and the mainstream public seem to be losing interest, this scene decides to challenge the audience instead of placating it. "A going against."

If you don't think this works, set it aside, no questions asked. It's just a thought I had that I felt out of due diligence I should bring to you before we tape up the box and tie it in a bow. And if it does strike a chord it's easily integrated.

Let’s just pause for a moment and cheer! Surely every writer anywhere would love to have an editor who engages this deeply with the topic at hand.

I liked Late Jazz even more than Interstellar Hard Bop. But, as Shuja says at the top of his comment, “I don't want to open the door to ‘jazz is dead.’” When describing an idiom that basically ends by 1972, Late Jazz seems just too negative — although in the long view, it is quite probable that jazz will never again be quite so good as it was during the ‘50s and ‘60s.

In general my work as a writer is one of advocacy; I only publish negative criticism once or twice a year for an exceptionally good reason. As good as it is, Late Jazz felt too much like picking a fight. (In the email, Shuja references a discussion we had after Wayne Shorter passed away. I don’t like a lot of post-1969 Wayne that much, and thought about writing a critical piece looking at what worked and what didn’t, but decided there was no compelling reason to go there at that time. A peek at some of my honest thoughts ended up in this post.)

Interstellar Hard Bop: yay or nay? The clock was ticking. In the end, I envisioned a made-up scenario. McCoy Tyner’s The Real McCoy is a famous example of the idiom, and one of the musicians is still around, the legendary bassist Ron Carter, who I know slightly. Could I bring a copy of The Real McCoy to Mr. Carter and declare, “Hi Ron! I named the genre you are playing here, it is now called Interstellar Hard Bop.”

Dang. I just couldn’t see doing this, although I still like the name.

I didn’t even do the surgery myself, Shuja went through the draft and took out all the “Interstellar Hard Bops” and replaced them with innocuous transitional phrases. Shuja also suggested I provide a sidebar, which was a helpful way to organize the sounds without creating a new name.

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In a more literary realm, Shuja also fixed the final paragraph. This was my first submission:

EI: Those who insist jazz is America’s Classical Music have a strong argument, for the greatest jazz is just as important as Bach or Beethoven. But there’s also a fairly strong counter-argument, which is simply that the best jazz often happened in a small club with bourbon and bartender, a lesser piano, and committed listeners mixing with the unpretentious flow of street life. If Slugs’ had been a proper concert setting (like Town Hall) for America’s Classical Music, there would be no legend, there would be no stories old musicians tell each other at the bar. Since Slugs’ was a saloon, the tall tale grows taller every day — a tall tale that takes on an extra shot of hard truth with the indisputable evidence of this newly released Forces of Nature.

Shuja changed the last sentence so that the final word was “truth.” His comment was detailed, funny, and wise:

SH: The kicker is important, and you should feel it's coming from you. My suggestion here is based on another thing that feels prosaic to articulate but in my opinion can matter a lot: which word we end on. (One of the pieces of writing advice I've never forgot came from the neoconservative blowhard Joseph Epstein, who does write good prose: he said somewhere that every sentence should start and end with "a strong word." That seems both trivial and vague in itself, but I've found that reminding myself to think about it constantly improves the result.) Anyway, I liked your way of contrasting the tall tale and the truth but then undermining the dichotomy. I felt that the last word should be "truth," rather than the name of this album. Fully your call, but ending on the title felt like we'd just read an album review, and what we actually read was bigger than that.

Of course I loved his suggestion. In print, the last paragraph ended up as:

EI/SH: Those who insist that jazz is “America’s classical music” have a strong argument: The music of that continuum is just as serious as Bach or Beethoven. But there’s also a counterargument, which is simply that the most serious jazz often happened in a small club smelling of bourbon, perhaps with sawdust on the floor, played on a piano overdue for a tuning, before a group of committed listeners mixing with the unpretentious flow of street life. If Slugs’ had been a proper concert hall for America’s classical music, there would be no legend, no search for the unknown, no war stories for older musicians to tell each other at the bar. Since Slugs’ was a saloon, the tall tale grows taller every day. But as Forces of Nature proves, this one happens to be the truth.