Some of jazz’s most loved albums belong to a genre many listeners could not name. Maiden Voyage, Speak No Evil and Miles Smiles are all post-bop: music that stretched hard bop open without breaking it apart. Start here with 12 essential records and what makes each one worth hearing.
What is post-bop?
Post-bop is the name for jazz made largely between about 1963 and 1968 by musicians who wanted more freedom than hard bop allowed but had no interest in abandoning structure altogether.
What they kept: written themes, defined forms, a rhythm section playing time. What they loosened: the harmony, which became more ambiguous and modal; the rhythm, which stopped marking every beat; and the relationship between soloist and band, which became a conversation rather than a solo with accompaniment.
Most of it was recorded for Blue Note at Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, or by Miles Davis for Columbia, and the same fifteen or so musicians turn up across nearly all of it. Tony Williams plays drums on nine of the twelve albums below, all of them recorded before he turned 22.
Quickstart Guide: Top 5 Post-Bop Albums
Maiden Voyage — Herbie Hancock (the most beautiful, and the easiest way in)
Speak No Evil — Wayne Shorter (the writing everyone still studies)
Miles Smiles — Miles Davis (the second great quintet at full stretch)
Point of Departure — Andrew Hill (the strangest and most rewarding)
Out to Lunch! — Eric Dolphy (where post-bop meets the avant-garde)
1. Herbie Hancock — Maiden Voyage (1965)
Maiden Voyage was recorded in a single day, 17 March 1965, when Herbie Hancock was 24.
The band is Hancock, Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, George Coleman on tenor, Ron Carter on bass and Tony Williams on drums. Carter and Williams were Hancock’s partners in the Miles Davis rhythm section, and Coleman had been the quintet’s saxophonist until the previous year.
Hancock has said the title track began as music for a television commercial. All five tunes carry sea titles, among them ‘The Eye of the Hurricane’ and ‘Dolphin Dance’, and the suspended chords of the title track give it a feeling of never quite landing. The album entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999, and it is the easiest way into post-bop.
2. Wayne Shorter — Speak No Evil (1966)
Wayne Shorter recorded Speak No Evil on Christmas Eve 1964, shortly after joining Miles Davis, and Blue Note did not release it until June 1966.
Herbie Hancock and Ron Carter came with him from the Davis band, Freddie Hubbard plays trumpet, and the drummer is Elvin Jones of the John Coltrane quartet.
The titles lean on folklore and the macabre: ‘Witch Hunt’, ‘Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum’, ‘Dance Cadaverous’. Hubbard sits out ‘Infant Eyes’, the ballad nearly every saxophonist ends up learning, and the woman on the cover is Shorter’s first wife, Teruko Nakagami. This is the album musicians most often name when they talk about post-bop composition.
3. Miles Davis — Miles Smiles (1967)
Miles Smiles was recorded over two days, 24 and 25 October 1966, at Columbia’s 30th Street Studio in New York.
Davis is joined by Shorter, Hancock, Carter and Williams, the line-up usually called the second great quintet. On ‘Orbits’, ‘Dolores’ and ‘Ginger Bread Boy’, Hancock plays no left-hand chords at all, only single lines in the right hand, so the harmony has to be inferred from the bass and the horns.
Shorter wrote three of the six tunes, including ‘Footprints’, now one of the most played jazz standards. The others came from Davis, Eddie Harris (‘Freedom Jazz Dance’) and Jimmy Heath.
4. Andrew Hill — Point of Departure (1965)
Andrew Hill recorded Point of Departure on 21 March 1964 with a six-piece band that included Eric Dolphy, three months before Dolphy’s death.
Hill was a Chicago-born pianist, and he wrote all five pieces. Alongside Dolphy are Kenny Dorham on trumpet, Joe Henderson on tenor, Richard Davis on bass and Tony Williams on drums.
The slow piece ‘Dedication’ was originally titled ‘Cadaver’, and Dorham is said to have been moved to tears while recording it. This is the most harmonically dense album on the list and not an easy first listen, but the Penguin Guide to Jazz gave it its top ‘crown’ rating and it repays the effort.
5. Eric Dolphy — Out to Lunch! (1964)
Out to Lunch! was recorded on 25 February 1964 and is the only album Eric Dolphy made for Blue Note as a leader.
Dolphy plays bass clarinet, flute and alto saxophone, with Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, Bobby Hutcherson on vibraphone in place of a piano, Richard Davis on bass and an eighteen-year-old Tony Williams on drums.
‘Hat and Beard’ is a portrait of Thelonious Monk, and ‘Gazzelloni’ is named after the Italian flautist Severino Gazzelloni. Dolphy died in West Berlin on 29 June 1964, aged 36, and the album came out that August. It was his last studio album as a leader, and it sits right on the border between post-bop and free jazz.
6. Joe Henderson — Inner Urge (1966)
Joe Henderson recorded Inner Urge on 30 November 1964 with McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones, nine days before the two of them recorded A Love Supreme with John Coltrane.
Bob Cranshaw plays bass. Henderson said the twelve-minute title track came out of the anger and frustration of trying to find his way in New York, and it has been a test piece for tenor players ever since.
‘Isotope’ is his tribute to Thelonious Monk’s sense of humour. For ‘El Barrio’ he gave the rhythm section just two chords and asked for a Spanish feel, then improvised the melody on top.
7. Tony Williams — Life Time (1965)
Tony Williams was 18 when he recorded Life Time, his first album as a leader, over two days in August 1964.
He wrote every piece. Sam Rivers plays tenor on the first three tracks with two bassists, Gary Peacock and Richard Davis. Bobby Hutcherson and Herbie Hancock appear on ‘Memory’, and Hancock and Ron Carter on ‘Barb’s Song to the Wizard’.
Williams had been playing with Rivers in Boston since he was 13, and by the time of this session he had been in the Miles Davis quintet for more than a year. The music is sparse and abstract, and it barely behaves like a drummer’s record.
8. Jackie McLean — One Step Beyond (1964)
Jackie McLean recorded One Step Beyond on 30 April 1963 with a seventeen-year-old Tony Williams on drums, a few weeks before Williams joined Miles Davis.
McLean had come up as a bebop alto player. Here he dropped the piano and brought in Bobby Hutcherson on vibraphone and Grachan Moncur III on trombone, with Eddie Khan on bass, which leaves far more space in the harmony.
Moncur wrote two of the four pieces, ‘Frankenstein’ and the fourteen-minute ‘Ghost Town’. The same front line recorded the companion album Destination… Out! later that year, and it is just as good.
9. Bobby Hutcherson — Dialogue (1965)
Dialogue, recorded on 3 April 1965, was the first album released under Bobby Hutcherson’s name, and he did not write any of its tunes.
Andrew Hill composed three of the five pieces and the drummer Joe Chambers the other two. The sextet also has Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, Richard Davis on bass and Sam Rivers, who moves between tenor, soprano, bass clarinet and flute.
Hutcherson plays marimba as well as vibraphone. An earlier session, The Kicker, stayed in the Blue Note vaults until 1999, so this was how most listeners first heard him as a leader.
10. Sam Rivers — Fuchsia Swing Song (1965)
Sam Rivers was 41 when he recorded Fuchsia Swing Song, his first album as a leader, on 11 December 1964.
He had spent part of that year in the Miles Davis quintet, and two of its members, Ron Carter and Tony Williams, play here alongside the pianist Jaki Byard.
The ballad ‘Beatrice’, named after his wife, has become a jazz standard. Rivers spent most of his later career in much freer territory, which makes this the best introduction to him.
11. Grachan Moncur III — Evolution (1964)
Evolution was Grachan Moncur III’s first album as a leader, recorded on 21 November 1963, and he wrote all four pieces.
The band is Lee Morgan on trumpet, Jackie McLean on alto, Bobby Hutcherson on vibraphone, Bob Cranshaw on bass and Tony Williams on drums. Exactly a month later, Morgan and Cranshaw were back in the same studio to record The Sidewinder.
The writing is spacious and slightly ominous, with titles such as ‘Air Raid’ and ‘Monk in Wonderland’. Moncur made only one more album for Blue Note under his own name, Some Other Stuff, which is a large part of why this one stayed underrated. It remains one of the great jazz trombone records.
12. Miles Davis — Nefertiti (1968)
Nefertiti, recorded in June and July 1967 and released in March 1968, was the last fully acoustic album Miles Davis made.
On Wayne Shorter’s title track, Davis and Shorter play the melody over and over without taking a solo, while Hancock, Carter and Williams keep changing what happens underneath. The usual roles of horns and rhythm section are reversed.
Shorter wrote three of the six tunes, Hancock two and Williams one. The album reached No. 8 on Billboard’s jazz chart, and on the next one, Miles in the Sky, Hancock was playing electric piano.
Which post-bop albums did we leave out?
Any list of twelve leaves out records with a strong claim. These four are the most likely to start an argument.
McCoy Tyner’s The Real McCoy, recorded in April 1967, has Joe Henderson, Ron Carter and Elvin Jones playing five Tyner originals. Larry Young’s Unity, from November 1965, puts Henderson and Jones alongside the trumpeter Woody Shaw, with Young’s Hammond organ in place of a bassist.
E.S.P., from January 1965, was the first studio album by the Miles Davis quintet with Wayne Shorter. Lee Morgan’s Search for the New Land was recorded in February 1964 with Shorter, Hancock and the guitarist Grant Green, then left unreleased until 1966.
For a wider view of the decade, see our guide to the 25 greatest jazz albums of the 1960s.
What to listen for
Three things make post-bop recognisable once you know them.
Listen for the drummer not marking the beat. Tony Williams and Elvin Jones both play around the pulse rather than stating it, which is why this music feels like it is floating even at fast tempos.
Listen for harmony that refuses to resolve. Post-bop writing is full of chords that could go several ways, and the ambiguity is deliberate — it gives the soloist room that a standard chord sequence does not.
And listen for the band responding rather than accompanying. On the Miles quintet records especially, the rhythm section reacts to the soloist in real time, which is why the same tune on two different nights is unrecognisable.
Where to go next
Backwards to hard bop, where most of these musicians started and where the vocabulary comes from. Sideways to free jazz, which several of them moved into. Forwards to fusion, which is where Hancock, Shorter and Williams had all arrived by the early 1970s.
For modern post-bop, the thread is alive: Brad Mehldau, Chris Potter, Mark Turner and Ambrose Akinmusire are all working in territory this music opened.
Which post-bop album would you put first? Let us know in the comments below.
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