Gerry Mulligan - Aren't You Glad You're You (feat. Chet Baker)

The strains of blues, gospel, and R&B that figured in the music of many hard bop musicians led to the development of soul jazz, which eventually led to the development of fusion and electric experiments in jazz.

There were developments such as the organ/tenor sax combo, which brought bluesy Hammond B-3 and the open sounds of a variety of hard driving R&B tenor sax players. Bebop had set jazz and R&B on divergent paths, and cool jazz further solidified jazz’s status as art music, but hard bop seemed designed to reconcile the two and to incorporate newly developing elements of black music into the jazz genre.

Many jazz purists deride the Hammond B-3 players, judging them to be playing blues or soul music and outside the parameters of jazz, but there’s no doubt that these organists were bona fide jazz players... Soul jazz may be seen as a further outgrowth of hard bop, but it should be noted that many hard bop players remained very clearly within the confines of mainstream jazz even while mining components of blues and R&B. Others, like Jackie McLean, Dexter Gordon, and Sonny Rollins, to name but three, were influenced by hard bop but continued to mine the more harmonically complex areas of bebop itself.
Source: Hard Bop, Post Bop & Soul Jazz by Marshall Bowden

Gerry Mulligan - Aren't You Glad You're You (feat. Chet Baker)

• First recording: September 6, 1945
• Written by: Jimmy Van Heusen
• Released on: Gerry Mulligan Quartet Album

"Gerry Mulligan is primarily known as one of the leading baritone saxophonists in jazz history. Mulligan's pianoless quartet of the early 1950s with trumpeter Chet Baker is still regarded as one of the more important cool jazz groups."

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