Its bass playing is more varied, due in part to the prominence of such virtuosos as Charles Mingus and Ray Brown; it is in part intended to be more accessible to audiences unfamiliar with or not fond of bop. It also is, as David H. Rosenthal contends in his book Hard Bop, to a large degree the natural creation of a generation of black American musicians who grew up at a time when bop and rhythm and blues were the dominant forms of black American music and jazz musicians as prominent as Tadd Dameron worked in both genres.
Hard bop was developed in the 1950s and 1960s and enjoyed its greatest popularity in that era, but hard bop performers, and elements of the music, remain popular in jazz.
