In 1948, trumpeter Miles Davis organized a nine-piece band that included French horn and tuba, incorporated counterpoint and subtle ensemble colors, and gave great latitude to the arranger; as this style, quickly identified as “cool jazz,” attracted adherents based in Los Angeles including Gerry Mulligan, Shorty Rogers, and Shelly Manne, it also became known as “West Coast jazz.”
Yet it did not take long before bebop had generated stylistic variations of its own. The big band that Gillespie formed in 1946 would soon feature Cuban percussion virtuoso Chano Pozo and plant the seeds of merging jazz and Afro-Cuban music, a blend that was also encouraged on the Latin side by the jazz-oriented ensembles of Machito and Tito Puente. In 1948, trumpeter Miles Davis organized a nine-piece band that included French horn and tuba, incorporated counterpoint and subtle ensemble colors, and gave great latitude to the arranger; as this style, quickly identified as “cool jazz,” attracted adherents based in Los Angeles including Gerry Mulligan, Shorty Rogers, and Shelly Manne, it also became known as “West Coast jazz.” By the early 1950s, Davis was moving in another direction, placing greater emphasis on the blues tradition and a more intense emotional expression. This “hard bop” style, defined in the studio recordings of Davis and tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins and the touring quintet co-led by drummer Max Roach and trumpeter Clifford Brown, was seen as the East Coast response to cool jazz; and when drummer Art Blakey and pianist Horace Silver introduced elements of spirituals and gospel music, hard bop earned another name, “soul jazz.” All the while, musicians were expanding compositional possibilities in a variety of ways, from the use of fugues and other classical techniques in the music pianist John Lewis created for the Modern Jazz Quartet to the introduction of “open” forms and a return to collective improvisation in the works of bassist Charles Mingus.