Announcing a new approach my listening: a monthly playlist of related albums that I will listen to and write about, discussing cultural connections, impressions, and backgrounds: I’ll tag this series. It’ll provide me with a focus each month, so I’ll know what I’m listening to throughout half the month, anyway. I’ll begin this experiment with a modest-sized list, say around ten albums, and go from there. I figure a smaller list will allow me to get to all the records in a month and give me room to throw in some nights where I can listen off-list as the mood strikes. (Seriously, sometimes knowing what I’ll be listening to is a big help; no daily decisions to tax my ossifying jelly.)
I figured I’d kick off this experiment by going back to the music that pulled me into jazz in the first place. Hard bop has always been my center of gravity—brassy, muscular, melodic, and built for people who like grooves with some grit on them. It’s where the horns shout, the drums tumble, and the bass walks like it owns the street. Think late-night-in-the-city energy, even if you’re listening in a quiet Georgia house with a well-behaved HVAC system.
This month’s playlist is ten albums that speak to each other across time—some literally through shared players, others through style or attitude. It isn’t a “best of” list or a canonical syllabus so much as a constellation: start anywhere, and you’ll still feel the pull toward the others. And since I’m listening seriously these days, I’ve also leaned toward albums that reward an audiophile setup without skipping the classics that shaped the tradition.
I’ll begin by revisiting Lee Morgan’s The Sidewinder because, honestly, where else would you start if you want hard bop to strut into the room and introduce itself properly? From there, the list spirals outward: Cannonball’s silk, Blakey’s fire, Silver’s earthiness, Joe Henderson’s sleek lines—each album linked by the fingerprints of musicians who seemed to appear on half the Blue Note releases of the ’60s. It’s that old-school shared-universe feeling, like all these players were living in the same musical neighborhood and kept wandering into each other’s kitchens. I learned this be reading Miles Davis’ autobiography recently.
Because guitar has been popping for me lately, Grant Green’s Idle Moments is tucked in the middle, functioning as the playlist’s “lights down low” moment. And since Jimmy Smith’s Hammond B-3 is basically a character in the hard bop story, we take a detour to Back at the Chicken Shack—a record that sounds like someone turned the whole band into a groove engine.
Then we circle back to the giants: John Coltrane’s Blue Train and Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue. I put them back-to-back on purpose. Hearing them after the earlier records makes their modal shift feel less like a break and more like a metamorphosis. It’s the butterfly emerging from the hard bop chrysalis—still beautiful, still melodic, but stretching toward something more cosmic.
And to close December out, Freddie Hubbard’s Red Clay pushes the timeline forward. It’s ’70s, electric-era, post-bop energy—still rooted in everything that came before, but ready for a bigger, brighter world. It feels like a good way to end the year: the sound of jazz carrying its history forward with attitude and optimism.
I’ll keep notes through the month and report what hits, what surprises, and what needs a follow-up in January. The goal is to let each list teach the next one—like walking through a record shop where every album you touch leads you to another you didn’t know you needed.
So here it is: December 2025 — Hard Bop Constellations. Drop the needle, turn the lights down, and let the horns take it from here.
