Post-bop

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Post-bop is a term for a form of small-combo jazz music that evolved in the early-to-mid sixties. The genre's origins lie in seminal work by John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Bill Evans, Charles Mingus and especially Herbie Hancock. Generally, the term post-bop is taken to mean jazz from the mid-sixties onward that assimilates influence from hard bop (or bebop), modal jazz, the avant-garde, and free jazz, without necessarily being immediately identifiable as any of the above. The term is a fairly recent coinage and (like "Northern soul") was not in common use while the genre was active.

Much "post-bop" was recorded on Blue Note Records. Key albums include Speak No Evil by Wayne Shorter; The Real McCoy by McCoy Tyner; Maiden Voyage by Herbie Hancock; and Search For the New Land by Lee Morgan (an artist not typically associated with the post-bop genre). Most post-bop artists worked in other genres as well, with a particularly strong overlap with later hard bop.

By the early seventies, most of the major post-bop artists had moved on to jazz fusion of one form or another. Wynton and Branford Marsalis led a revival of the style in the 1980s that continues to this day.