Review of Keith Waters, Postbop Jazz in the 1960s: The Compositions of Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, and Chick Corea (Oxford University Press, 2019)

Abstract

[1] Keith Waters’s Postbop Jazz in the 1960s (2019) brings together more than two decades of work by one of the most prolific jazz scholars in music theory. Over the course of his academic career, Waters has focused consistently on the practices of a particular set of jazz musicians in the 1960s. During this period, the output of musicians like Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, and Chick Corea often blended elements of tonal jazz from earlier decades—including bebop, hard bop, and soul jazz—with features of emergent modal and free (or avant-garde) jazz practices. Waters and others use the term postbop to refer to the compositional and improvisational tendencies that emerged from this confluence, which are exemplified by a small but influential repertoire of jazz compositions and associated recordings.(1) His enduring engagement with this music has yielded a series of widely cited publications. While a few of these studies broadly address improvisational (2013) or harmonic (Waters and Williams 2010) strategies, most confront analytical or methodological issues through the lens of a specific musician’s output. These include examinations of form and metric displacement in improvisations by Hancock and Keith Jarre (1996, 2001), nonfunctional harmony in compositions by Hancock (2005) and Corea (2016), the influence of the ic4 cycles in John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” on postbop composers (2010), and improvisatory practices in Miles Davis’s celebrated second quintet (2003, 2011).(2)