Post-bop is the least well-named style in jazz, and it contains a remarkable number of albums people already love without knowing what to call them. This is a guide to the essential records.
The term covers music 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, or by Miles Davis for Columbia, and the same fifteen or so musicians turn up across nearly all of it.
Start Here: 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 is the most approachable post-bop album, built on open modal harmony and a floating rhythmic feel.
Hancock, Freddie Hubbard, George Coleman, Ron Carter and Tony Williams — four of the five being Miles Davis’ rhythm section of the period.
The title track’s suspended chords give it a quality of never quite landing, which is exactly the point. There is a loose nautical concept across the record, though it matters less than the sound.
2. Wayne Shorter — Speak No Evil (1966)
Speak No Evil is the album most often named when musicians discuss post-bop composition.
Recorded in December 1964 with Freddie Hubbard, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Elvin Jones — effectively Miles’ rhythm section plus Coltrane’s drummer.
Shorter’s writing here is harmonically ambiguous in a way that gives a soloist options rather than instructions. “Infant Eyes” is the ballad everyone learns.
3. Miles Davis — Miles Smiles (1967)
Miles Smiles is where the second great quintet stopped stating chords altogether and started implying them.
Davis with Shorter, Hancock, Carter and Williams. Hancock famously plays no left-hand chords on parts of the record, leaving the harmony to be inferred.
Recorded in two days. The band had been touring constantly, and it sounds like it.
4. Andrew Hill — Point of Departure (1965)
Point of Departure is the most harmonically adventurous album on this list and the one that rewards repeated listening most.
Hill was a Chicago pianist whose writing sits somewhere between Monk, Bartók and something unclassifiable. The band includes Eric Dolphy, Joe Henderson, Kenny Dorham,
Richard Davis and Tony Williams.
Not an easy record. Once it opens up, very little else sounds quite as interesting.
5. Eric Dolphy — Out to Lunch! (1964)
Out to Lunch! sits at the boundary between post-bop and free jazz, and it is more tightly composed than either label suggests.
Dolphy on alto, bass clarinet and flute, with Freddie Hubbard, Bobby Hutcherson, Richard Davis and an eighteen-year-old Tony Williams.
Dolphy died in Berlin later that year, aged 36, and this stands as his final statement as a leader.
6. Joe Henderson — Inner Urge (1966)
Inner Urge is the tenor saxophone album of the period, and the title track has been a test piece ever since.
Henderson with McCoy Tyner, Bob Cranshaw and Elvin Jones — a Coltrane rhythm section, playing Henderson’s writing.
His tone is drier and more oblique than Coltrane’s, and the phrasing goes places you do not expect.
7. Tony Williams — Life Time (1965)
Life Time is a drummer’s album that barely behaves like one, recorded when Williams was nineteen.
Sparse, abstract, with Sam Rivers, Herbie Hancock, Bobby Hutcherson and both Ron Carter and Gary Peacock on bass.
Williams had already been in Miles Davis’ band for two years at this point, which remains difficult to absorb.
8. Jackie McLean — One Step Beyond (1964)
One Step Beyond is where a bebop alto player deliberately walked towards the avant garde without losing the groove.
McLean brought in Grachan Moncur III on trombone and Bobby Hutcherson on vibraphone, replacing the piano, which opens the harmony considerably.
The companion album Destination Out is equally good and arguably better.
9. Bobby Hutcherson — Dialogue (1965)
Dialogue is the vibraphone record of the era, and the most collectively conceived album on this list.
Hutcherson with Andrew Hill, Sam Rivers, Freddie Hubbard, Richard Davis and Joe Chambers. Much of the writing is Hill’s and Chambers’.
Hutcherson’s playing changed what the instrument could do in a modern context, and this is where it is clearest.
10. Sam Rivers — Fuchsia Swing Song (1965)
Fuchsia Swing Song is the best introduction to a musician who spent most of his career further out than this.
Rivers had briefly played with Miles Davis in 1964. This quartet record, with Jaki Byard, Ron Carter and Tony Williams, keeps one foot in the tradition while clearly planning to leave.
11. Grachan Moncur III — Evolution (1964)
Evolution is the trombone album of the period and one of the most atmospheric records Blue Note released.
Moncur with Lee Morgan, Jackie McLean, Bobby Hutcherson, Bob Cranshaw and Tony Williams. The writing is spacious and slightly ominous.
Underrated for sixty years, largely because Moncur recorded so little as a leader.
12. Miles Davis — Nefertiti (1968)
Nefertiti is the album where the quintet inverted the roles entirely, with the horns repeating the theme while the rhythm section improvises underneath.
The title track never takes a solo. Shorter and Davis simply play the melody over and over while Williams, Hancock and Carter change everything around them.
It is the logical endpoint of what the band had been doing for three years, and the last fully acoustic Miles album before the electric period.
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, Williams and Carter all ended up by 1970.
For modern post-bop, the thread is alive: Brad Mehldau, Chris Potter, Mark Turner, Ambrose Akinmusire and Maria Schneider 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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