>Jazz had faced that threat before, with bebop and with cool
>jazz. Hard bop managed to redeem jazz with the people, though.
>Made it popular again. It rescued the abandoned swing and
>found the balance between virtuosity and accessibility.

I would agree regarding "cool jazz" but bebop? did it really abandon the people, the instinct to dance like that? it was the doorstop that kept jazz music from becoming totally assimilated. there'd be no hard bop w/o bebop.

"Cool Jazz", with its focus on a grounding in classical music, and the technique behind jazz was more a diversion that led to more academic and formula-based pursuits of he music.

I don't think Kind of Blue would have had that impact were it not for it being the work of Miles Davis though. With his endorsement, it became the door that opened for jazz to go down more adventurous paths.

As Jakob said, the real winner was fusion -- even if it was mostly a '70s (and '80s) thing, the road to fusion (and its other predecessors like soul jazz) was paved by hard bop. Many post-boppers were hard boppers in previous incarnations.

Many of the big fusion artists remarked that their desire to adopt more rock and R&B-styled backdrops to their music was grounded in a desire to speak to a wider audience, and rather... to the music that they knew in their youth. Which does sound like selling out, though I would also argue that the best fusion artists were also heavily steeped in a jazz tradition and it shows in their compositions and actual records.

When I hear those same artists doing acoustic jazz, it has that swing, that feeling, that same sort of lively expression that you would see in hard bop jazz.

Regarding Wynton... I think he was very much an artist who tended to produce jazz music for the sake of "keeping it real"; adhering to a particular aesthetic for the sake of the "art". He was kind of the "Termanology" of jazz music.