The Coming Of Neo-Bop

Historic Reissues Take Over The Recording Market

Now a well-recognized and thoroughly accepted form of music, jazz occupies a solid on music lovers' shelves, side by side with the classics.

 After 1983 - which was, significantly, the year the compact disc was introduced - record companies suddenly had the opportunity to reissue and anthologize the recorded heritage of jazz at a lower cost than ever before. Even with so much focus on looking back, however, in the eighties there were still some new developments, largely restricted to neo-bop and commercial productions.

The Coming Of Neo-Bop
 
With the brothers Branford and Wynton Marsalis as its stars, neo-bop was the field developed by an elite group of young musicians trained in the school of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. Heirs to hard bop, on which they put a new turn after listening to the music of the Miles Davis quintet of the sixties, these young musicians were regularly accused of being nothing but copies of earlier models.

Branford Marsalis

Their astoundingly advanced technique and flawless performances deprived them, said some critics, of that element of risk that made their predecessors interesting.

These not-very-subtle observations ignored the importance of the traditional element in black American music. On top of that, one must remember that despite its lightning-fast evolution in just a few decades, jazz has always counted more followers than innovators.

Wynton Marsalis

 The adoration for the 'small masters' who personalized Charlie Parker's message during the fifties is not so far removed from the admiration that the New York neo-boppers aroused thirty year later.

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