Jinrikisha

Joe Henderson (tenor sax), Kenny Dorham (trumpet), McCoy Tyner (piano), Butch Warren (bass) and Pete La Roca (drums). From the album Page One (1963).

In the 1950s hard bop became the dominant style in modern jazz, incorporating both the elements of other emerging styles and the personal characteristics of its performers. In the mid-1960s, a new wave of hard bop musicians appeared who knew how to play bebop, modal jazz and free jazz, and who advocated their own discourse against free jazz itself. They include Dexter Gordon, Sonny Rollins, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Randy Weston and Joe Zawinul.

In the 1970s, jazz fusion and its fragmentation of styles displaced hard bop, but at the end of the decade it resurfaced with the V.S.O.P. group, and in the 1980s with the Wynton and Branford Marsalis brothers, who had belonged to the Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers and claimed a legacy that should not be lost by defending the origins of jazz with modern postulates. In contemporary hard bop we have musicians like Eric Alexander, Joe Magnarelli, Barry Harris, Grant Steward or Vince Benedetti among others.

The theme is played by Henderson and Dorham in unison at medium tempo and its melody is a bit intricate. First, Henderson comes in, alternating phrases made up of cascades of notes with slower passages. Dorham follows with a more conventional, but very expressive solo. Next Tyner enters with a suggestive melodic line in which he uses a lot of chords and finally the group re-exposes the theme.