Roy Hargrove

New Jazz is a contemporary subgenre of trap music that emerged from the underground SoundCloud scene. Despite its name, it is distinct from the 'Nu Jazz' of the 1990s. It is characterized by colorful, repetitive synthesizer melodies, often utilizing jazz-influenced 7th and 9th chords, paired with 'wonky' or off-kilter 808 basslines and bouncy, complex trap drum patterns. The sound is often described as psychedelic, playful, and experimental, bridging the gap between the aggression of Rage beats and the melodic sensibilities of Pluggnb.

Souldies is a modern revival of classic lowrider “oldies” soul—slow, tender ballads rooted in 1960s and early-’70s sweet soul and doo‑wop aesthetics, reimagined by a new generation of largely Chicano/Latinx artists in Southern California. Characterized by warm, analog-leaning production, mellow backbeats, honeyed vocal harmonies, and heart‑on‑sleeve lyricism, the style favors mid‑slow tempos, tape‑like saturation, spring/plate reverb, and minimalist yet expressive arrangements. English and Spanish (or Spanglish) lyrics often explore love, longing, devotion, and cruising/lowrider culture. Souldies sits at the intersection of classic soul, rhythm & blues, northern soul selections, and Latin soul, offering a contemporary, community‑centered sound that feels both timeless and newly personal.

Contemporary post-bop is a modern continuation of the post-bop language, balancing the harmonic sophistication of bebop and hard bop with modal harmony, free-jazz openness, and updated rhythmic concepts. It typically favors small acoustic ensembles (saxophone or trumpet-led groups with piano, double bass, and drums), although guitar often substitutes or augments the piano in many groups. Compared with classic post-bop of the 1960s, contemporary post-bop embraces broader metric variety (odd meters, mixed meter, and polyrhythms), more flexible forms, and a wider palette of timbres. The writing often features original compositions with memorable heads, extended harmonies, motivic development, and space for improvisation that can move fluidly from inside playing to harmonically “outside” lines. The aesthetic ranges from straight-ahead swing to straight-eighth textures, with influences from ECM-style lyricism, modern classical voicings, and contemporary groove-oriented feels. The result is music that sounds rooted in the jazz tradition yet distinctly current in touch and tone.

Post-bop is a modern jazz style that emerged in the early-to-mid 1960s as a synthesis of bebop, hard bop, modal jazz, cool jazz, third stream ideas, and the experimental impulses of the avant‑garde. It typically features acoustic small ensembles (often trumpet, saxophone, piano, bass, and drums) interacting with highly flexible time, non-functional or modal harmony, and motivic development rather than relying strictly on bebop chord cycles. Its sound balances structure and freedom: forms are clearly composed and often intricate, but improvisers stretch time feels, reharmonize on the fly, and use advanced harmonic colors such as quartal voicings, pedal points, and chromatic planing. Canonical touchstones include Miles Davis’s mid‑’60s Second Great Quintet (e.g., E.S.P., Nefertiti), Wayne Shorter’s Speak No Evil, Herbie Hancock’s Maiden Voyage, Andrew Hill’s Point of Departure, and many mid‑’60s Blue Note recordings that pushed beyond hard bop.

Hard bop is a mid‑1950s subgenre of jazz that extends bebop’s virtuosic improvisation while bringing back a more explicitly African‑American groove. It incorporates pronounced influences from blues, rhythm & blues, and gospel—especially evident in riff‑based heads, church‑like harmonic movements on piano, and earthy saxophone phrasing. Compared with bebop, hard bop favors stronger backbeat accents, more grounded bass lines, and memorable, soulful melodies, all while retaining fast, harmonically rich improvisation when desired. Typical ensembles are small groups (often quintets) with trumpet, tenor sax, piano, bass, and drums. The style’s hallmark is the blend of bop harmony and lines with blues/gospel feeling and a driving swing feel.

Latin jazz is a fusion of jazz harmony and improvisation with Afro–Latin American rhythms, song forms, and percussion. It combines the swing, bebop, and big-band traditions with clave-based grooves such as son, rumba, danzón, and mambo, and later integrates Brazilian feels like samba and bossa nova. Typical features include the use of the clave (2–3 or 3–2), piano montunos (guajeos), bass tumbao patterns, timbales cáscara, conga marcha, and call-and-response horn "mambo" figures. While the rhythm section locks into cyclical patterns, soloists improvise using the vocabulary of jazz, creating music that is both danceable and harmonically rich.