Sunday Music

I'm posting this earlier than usual this week because I'll be watching the World Cup final this evening. I've promised my wife, who is German, that if Germany win I'll post some German songs during the week so you, hopefully, all have that to look forward to.

I've picked three songs from Merseyside bands first. Then a Bjork track that has the unfortunate distinction of being on the sound track to two less than great films, Tank Girl & Sucker Punch. NExt up is some synth-pop from the soundtrack of Drive, which is a great film and we finish withanother Tricky track, this time featuring PJ Harvey on vocals.

Dreaming of You by The Coral

Pressure Point by The Zutons

Fortune Teller by Space

Army of Me by Bjork

A Real Hero by College featuring Electric Youth

Broken Homes by Trick feat PJ Harvey

A guide to comics part 4 (Creator owned comics)

Last time, in part 3, I talked about company owned comics. Today I'll talk about creator owned comics. Then in part 5, in a slight change from my plan, I'll talk about licensed comics then in part 6 there'll be a general glossary of terms that you will probably run across but aren't necessarily familiar with.


Creator owned comics are, exactly as the name suggests, comics owned by the people who create them. I mentioned last time that almost all the comics Marvel & DC publish are company owned but there are some creator owned exceptions. Let's deal with these first.

Marvel have an imprint called Icon. They use this for their bigger creators to publish their creator owned comics without having to go to another publisher. Icon is pretty rarely used now and it isn't uncommon to see Marvel's bigger name creators have creator owned books published elsewhere.

DC are different. I don't think it's too contriversial to say that in the competition between Marvel & DC Marvel can be seen to be 'winning' in most regards. This certainly isn't true of their creator owned imprints. DC's imprint is called Vertigo. Vertigo was created to publish stories that were too controversial to be published under the main DC brand (at the time comics in the US were subject to an archaic censorship systems called the Comics Code Authority. To protect the children, of course). Vertigo was the place books that wouldn't get Comics Code Authority approval. Many of these early stories were still owned by DC but from the start Vertigo also published creator owned comics. Over the years Vertigo has become solely a home for creator owned comics and although the quality & number of the books published by Vertigo has waxed & waned over the years it is still going strong.

FBP: Federal Bureau of Physics cover by Robbi Rodriguez, published by Vertigo.

Almost all of the comics that I get are creator owned. I get 2 each month from DC & the same from Marvel, the rest are all creator owned books. In the last post I went through some of the problems of company owned comics, I don't intend to ignore the problems of creator owned comics even though I prefer them.

The problems stem in the main from the lack of copies these comics sell. There's no giant corporation backing these comics and so there's no guarantee of a survivable income from these books. A writer could be contracted to write 36 comics for Marvel in a year. As long as they produce 36 comics they'll be paid for them. If the comic they are writing is cancelled due to poor sales they'll be given another comic to write. (Of course there are other comic types, this is just an example). A creator owned comic offers none of that security. Of course, if a creator owned comic sells well then the creators can make more money than at MArvel or DC. The truth is however, most creator owned books don't sell that well. The Walking Dead sells well and regularly is a top-10 selling book. Saga is another book that sells very well.

Sage cover by Fiona Staples.

For the vast majority of creator owned books, even those at bigger independent publishers like Image, the sales aren't that big. Here's a quote from Kieron Gillen, co-creator and writer of Phonogram that I think sums the situation up well:

We've been doing "Phonogram" for over 4 years, not including the years before the first series came out. Imagine if we could have just done the comic and not had to deal with any of the shit we've had to. We'd have been up to issue 44 now. Instead, we have 13 issues.

I feel frustrated. Enormously lucky, sure, but frustrated. We've done this wonderful thing we're crazy-proud about. But if the whole economic system was just a couple of degrees to the left, everything would have been different. I mean, just to give you an idea about narrow the margins are between what we are and what we could be, if we were selling 6K instead of 4K, we could have done those 44 issues. The difference between breaking even and actually being able to do it in comics is insane. It's like being kept under ice, clawing. I feel like a bonsai plant.

 The above quote comes from an explanation about why a third series of Phonogram wouldn't be forthcoming and comes from 2010. He also mentions that the artist and co-creator Jamie McKelvie was often only earning "a couple of hundred bucks" an issue. That's not exactly a livable monthly amount. (There's a happy end to this story though. Since the end of 2010 people have figured out that  Kieron Gillen & Jamie McKelvie are great comic creators and their stock in the industry has risen. So much so that a third and final series of Phonogram will come out.)

One final word on Phonogram, I know I'm wildly off topic here but bear with me. If you consider that you don't like comics and you only for my music posts and just happen to read this post then believe me, Phonogram is the perfect comic for you. You owe it to yourself to check it out, it'll be well worth your time.

Phongram by Jamie McKelvie

The lack of sales, and therefore money, can lead to series being cancelled and never finished. Or the conclusion to a story being rushed and compressed into fewer issues than originally planned. It can also lead to the publishing schedule being erratic. Instead of an issue coming out every month there can be large and unexpected gaps between issues as the creators have to take on other jobs to pay the bills and work on the creator owned book when they can. An extreme example of the delayed release schedule is Age of Bronze. While most comics are published monthly Age of Bronze, a critically loved & award winning comic, has published 33 issues since it began in 1998. That's right, an average of two comics a year. The last issue was published in July 2013. It's still ongoing and, hopefully, will be finished eventually. There may only be 33 issues so far, but they are 33 great issues.

And really, that's the thing I love about creator owned comics. Age of Bronze tells the story of the Trojan War. Phonogram is about music and culture and growing up. FBP is about a world in which physics has stopped working properly and has lead to the creation of a fourth emergency service. Sage is most often described as Romeo & Juliet crossed with Star Wars. That sounds brilliant but Saga is orders of magnitude better than that.

Creator owned comics show a huge variety of stories and art styles that just don't exist in company owned comics. Characters live and die, they grow old and change. The stories are created by the people who want to tell them, not run through various levels of corporate editorial checking first. Saga is just the story Brian Vaughan & Fiona Staples want to tell, not a story that has to fit in with 50 other stories being put out by the publisher. (50 isn't an exaggeration by the way, DC & Marvel put out a tonne of books every month that are all inter-connected to one degree or another). Even when the comic book is part of a wider universe it's still under the creator's control.

Hellboy might be the best example of this. First there was just Hellboy. Then other books from the universe created with Hellboy started to be published. BPRD, Lobster Johnson & Abe Sapien among others. All these books under the control of Hellboy creator Mike Mignola, although he doesn't write them all. And all really good. Hellboy  and the associated books may be my favourite creator owned comics ever. I'm not alone in that opinion of course, they're well loved by thousands of people. I do believe there's a comic for everybody and in most cases, especially people who don't consider themselves comic fans, it's a creator-owned comic.

A guide to comics part 3 (company owned comics)

We're a couple of days behind on these because I've been watching the World Cup semi-finals but still on track to have the guide to comics series finished by mid-week next week at the latest. This is the 3rd part of 6 eventual parts. This time I'll be talking about the differences between company owned and creator owned stories. I know that sounds less than interesting but it's one of the big things that affect how comics are written and stories told and is much more interesting than it seems. It's a long topic too, so I'll split it into two posts.

Today I'll be talking about company owned comics.

Company owned comics are generally speaking the best known American (and British) comics. If you remember in part 1 I talked about the Big Two, Marvel & DC. Pretty much every one of  the comics Marvel & DC publish are company owned and those that aren't are published under a separate imprint that we'll get to in the next post.

Company owned comics, sometimes referred to as Corporation owned comics when talking about Marvel or DC, are pretty much exactly what they sound like. The company that publishes the comic owns the character and the story told in the comic. For example, DC own Superman. They hire creators to create Superman stories for DC. This is generally referred to a work-for-hire. There have been, and still are, legal actions to bring control of the characters back to the creators (or, especially recently, their heirs) but if I was betting I'd put my money on DC & Marvel continuing to own the characters they do.

Most of the really popular characters that DC & Marvel own are old characters. From DC's character stable Superman was first published in 1938. Batman in 1939. Robin in 1940. Green Lantern 1940, Wonder Woman 1941, Flash 1940. Lots of these characters have newer versions of them too, but they are still pretty old. For instance the first Flash, Jay Garrick, was created, as mentioned above in 1940. Barry Allen, the most famous Flash, was created in 1956. The third Flash, originally Kid Flash, was created in 1959 to be Barry Allen's sidekick before becoming the Flash after Barry Allen's death. Finally Bart Allen, Barry Allen's grandson was created in 1994 as another younger version of the Flash, this time called Impulse before eventually becoming the Flash. The point of this short diversion is DC still exists and creates comics and other media based off characters that are around 70 years old.

All-Star Superman by Frank Quitely 

That's not to say Marvel are much different. They're a younger company but most of their well known popular characters come from a concentrated time period. Just looking at characters that non-comic fans are likely to have heard of you have Iron Man, created in 1963. Nick Fury was created in 1963, (although the version based on Samuel L Jackson that is familiar from the movies where he's played by Samuel L Jackson was created in 2001), Falcon debuted in 1969. Black Widow in 1964. Hawkeye in 1964 as well. The Fantastic Four were created in 1961 to be followed in 1962 by Hulk, Spider-Man and Thor. Wolverine is a notable later example, being created in 1974 but the X-Men themselves were created in 1963. Captain America is one of the few Marvel characters from an earlier time, he was created in 1941 for Timely Comics, who later became Marvel.

Most of Marvel's big characters were created by a small group of people and that's part of why they all come from the same time. The other part is, very few new characters of note have been created since then. The creation of most of the characters happening between 1938 and 1965 is also why so many of them are white and male.

Superhero comic fans tend to like to buy things they are familiar with and things that fit into an established and inter-connected story. DC & Marvel can provide that. DC have been publishing a Superman comic every month since 1938, and for almost all of that time more than one comic a month. Currently they publish Action Comics, The Adventures of Superman, Batman & Superman, Superman, Superman & Wonder Woman and Superman Unchained. That's 6 comics you can pick up starring Superman this month. Plus there are various Justice League comics he appears in and a Supergirl and a Superboy comic if you want them. There's a Smallville comic too. Superman isn't even the most published example, the point is if you want to read Superman comics there are lots of them for you to read and more coming out all the time.

The shared universe is another big draw with company owned comics. As mentioned above Batman & Superman and Superman & Wonder Woman comics exist to show different characters interacting together. It's more than that though. To give an example from Marvel, every character in those comics lives in the same world. You may be a teenage English girl with magic boots that give you soccer related super-powers (I'm not making this up, and it is much better than it sounds) but if a scientist in NY creates a robot that gains sentience and an Oedipus complex and can self-replicate then you can very quickly end up hiding in the British Museum protected by a magic forcefield generated by the legendary sword Excalibur. (Avengers Assemble #15AU, a genuinely great comic).

Magic Boots Mel by Butch Guice (or maybe Tom Palmer. I thought it was Palmer but Google says otherwise)

Basically the upside is things don't change, you can always get the big characters in these inter-connected worlds.

The downside is, things never change. Sometimes new characters are added, but they're almost always new versions of older characters. Creators by & large don't create unique characters for DC or Marvel, because the company rather than the creator will end up owning them. Because things never change almost everyone heroic is a white guy. The world has changed but DC & Marvel comics haven't really. And they don't because the people who buy the comics don't want them too. So the number of people buying them trends downwards but any action to change this alienates a lot of the people still buying them. It's a tough position to be in. It is partly of DC & Marvel's own making but it'd be unfair to ignore that they have tried to fix the problem. The solutions offered just haven't worked yet. Maybe one or both of them will come up with a solution that works one day. For now they stick to the safety blanket of using decade old characters and earn money for their parent companies through merchandising and films.

One final downside is, because the stories never really change the comics are almost always about characters coming across a problem and resolving it through punching. Even when really talented creators work on these books, that gets tiresome after a while. I'm not saying that stories where problems are solved by punching are bad, I am saying when that, or some other violence related solution, is the way 100+ comics a month play out then I find it has a limited shelf life.

I want to end on a positive note here because I think this post comes across as too skewed to the negative. Lots of the books that are and have been put out by DC and Marvel are great reads. Marvel's Daredevil as currently written by Mark Waid with a changing cast of artists and DC's Superman Unchained written by Scott Snyder with Jim Lee on art are both books I really enjoy. Mainly though there's Miraclenan. Written in the early to mid 80's in Britain and finally getting a wider release by Marvel now (due to ownership complications and compromises far too complicated to go into here) it is one of the very best things I have ever read, comic or not, and I look forward to it every month.

Miracleman by Joe Quesada 

Next time I'll talk about creator owned comics and a little about licensed comics.

A guide to comics part 2 (creators)

Part 2 in a 6 part series that will be over by midweek next week at the latest.

Last time I talked about publishers and how different publishers do things in different ways. There are plenty of comics readers who read stories based on which character(s) are featured in the story or which company published the story. Others choose what to read based on who the creators of the comic are and today I'm going to go a little bit into just what is meant by the term creator and what types of creators exist.

The artist.

Andy Wales

Exactly what you'd imagine. The artist draws the comic, mostly following a script from the writer. How detailed the script is, and how much room to interpret the script the artist has, varies from comic to comic. Pages are drawn much larger than the eventual comic page in case you're wondering.

The writer.

Again, pretty much what you'd imagine. The writer comes up with the script, either individually or collaborating with an artist, and then the artist draws the page. The writer is not responsible for physically writing the words on the page, that's someone else's job which we'll get to later. It's worth noting that sometimes there are co-writers on a book. Often this is because a famous person wants to write a comic but has no real experience of doing so (for instance Quentin Tarantino's upcoming Django Unchained/Zorro cross-over). They may then co-write a book with an established comic book writer. In this instance it's common for one person to be credited as the plotter, ie they decide what story they want to tell, and the more experienced writer being credited as the scripter, ie they wrote the script that is passed to the artist. In the Django Unchained/Zorro crossover I mentioned before Qunetin Tarantino & Matt Wagner will co-plot the story and Wagner will script it.  Generally when artist/writers work together the writer is named first. I've put the artist first just to follow alphabetical order.


The cartoonist.

Jeff Lemire

The cartoonist is someone who both writes and draws the same comic. This is really pretty much unheard of in modern day Big Two comics (DC & Marvel, as discussed in part 1), more common in independent comics and much more common with small press comics. There are people who started out as cartoonists and still produce independently published comics as cartoonists but also have a job just as a writer for one of the Big Two publishers. For example Jeff Lemire, above, does this. The reason cartoonists who do this tend to be employed as writers and not artists for DC or Marvel is it's much slower to draw a monthly comic so employing them to draw a comic or two while they write and draw one independently isn't feasible but employing them to write a title or two is.


The above types of creators are the ones that influence people to buy comics based on the creator rather than the publisher or character (s). However there are other people who produce a comic and I'll quickly go through those positions here.

The colourist.

Elizabeth Dismang-Breitweiser

As you'd imagine this person gets copies of the art and colours it. This sounds simple but a good colourist can make a book look great. Poor colours on the other hand can also be very noticeable. 


The inker.

Veronica Fish

The person who takes the art and inks over the lines to give it more definition. Again this sounds really easy but good inking can make good art great and poor inking can make good art look poor. You can see in the picture above the difference between inked and uninked art. Inking can be done with pens or brushes.

The letterer.

Max West using an Ames Lettering Guide.

Remember how I said above the writer doesn't actually write the words on the page? Well, the letterer does. Any words, and generally any sound affects, will be put on the page by the letterer. Lots of lettering is done by computer now but some is done by hand, as seen above. If done by hand the lettering is first done in pencil then inked over. This might be the most over-looked skill in comics. If the letters are don't properly then the comic fails on a pretty basic level.

It's not uncommon for a cartoonist to do all or some of the lettering, colouring and inking themselves and some artist double as inkers, either for their own art or another artist's.

Sunday Music

I had hoped to get more posts up this week but instead I have 4 or 5 partially completed posts for future use. On to the music.


I first came across Spearmint only a couple of years ago. They are one of the rare brand of UK post-Britpop but still kid of Britpop sounding bands that are actually good. Sweeping The Nation by Spearmint

Easy Star is a record label most well known for recording dubbed versions of classic albums. Each album has different musicians selected to fit the songs. The first album released was Dub Side of the Moon, followed by Radiodread (a cover of OK Computer) and these two albums are two of my very favourites. Eventually I'll get the time to listen to Easy Star's Lonely Hearts Dub Band, I'm pretty confident that'll be equally great. Time by Easy Star All-Stars

This version of She's Lost Control is my favourite Joy Division recording by far. I'd talk about it more, but there's really nothing to say, just listen to it. She's Lost Control (Peel Session version) by Joy Division

These two tracks are from Tricky's second album released under his name, Pre-Millennium Tension.  This is a much heavier and darker album than Maxinquaye as part of a deliberate attempt to get away from the trip-hop label that he disliked.Christiansands by Tricky

Tricky Kid by Tricky

Finally one of my favourite songs with one of my favourite and weirdest videos. The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song by The Flaming Lips

A guide to comics part 1 (publishers)

This is going to be the first part of my guide to comics. It certainly won't be an exhaustive guide, but it should give enough information to those of my readers who don't know a lot (or anything) about comics that they don't feel I'm having conversations that exclude them.

I want to talk a little here about comics, what terms are used and what they mean. Originally I was going to post my recent comic purchases but I didn't want it to be full of terms and ideas that left non-comic fans feeling left out of the conversation. I don't want to fit the stereotype of a comic fan that shuns outsiders, I want everyone to be able to follow along with the blog if they want.

It's helpful to break comics down into where they come from. Although comics exist all over the world I'm going to be talking here about what can broadly described as American Comics, British Comics, European Comics and Manga. This post is going to be almost exclusively about American Comics. Only almost because there's a degree of cross-pollination between them all, especially American and British Comics. In this post, and the next few, I'll be talking mostly about American Comics.

I'm going to do this one subject per post otherwise this will turn into a massive info-dump and I really want to avoid that.

Today I'm going to talk about Publishers. American Comics are pretty much unique in entertainment in that people really care about which company is making the product. There are examples in other media, but to my mind it is much more prevalent in American Comics. Publishers are normally broken down into The Big Two, Independents ans Small Press publishers.

The Big Two are Marvel and DC and they dominate monthly comic sale to massive degree. In the last released sales figures (May 2014) 90 of the top 100 comics were published by Marvel or DC. The Walking Dead (published by Image) was in the top 10 but it was the only book not published by Marvel or DC in the top 20. Marvel & DC publish basically all of the superhero comics that non-comic readers have heard of. Marvel has The Avengers, X-Men and Spiderman among others. DC has Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and Green Lantern amongst others. Almost all Marvel and DC books take place in some sort of shared universe where the characters live. Marvel & DC also own the characters in their books rather than the people who create them. Marvel own Iron Man and hire people to create comic books featuring him.

The Independents are a group of unrelated publishers. The biggest is Image, others are Dark Horse, IDW, Dynamite, Boom, Oni Press, Valiant and Archie, along with a few more. These publishers can be very different from each other.
Image for example tend to publish creator-owned books like The Walking Dead. Basically creator owned books are what you'd expect from the name, the creators of the characters own them rather than the company that publishes them. We'll talk about it more in a future post.
IDW tend to publish more licensed book, for instance they've licensed the rights to publish Star Trek comics and hire people to create those comics.
Dark Horse has a mix of both with some licensed titles like Conan and some creator owned books like Hellboy.
Independent  books tend not to be superhero books, although there are some. They also mostly don't have the same shared universe model that Marvel and DC do. Although some creations have more than one book taking place in the same universe, Dark Horse's Hellboy, B.P.R.D and Abe Sapien all exist in the same universe they don't belong to the same universe as other Dark Horse books, for example Buffy.
Valiant operate in a similar way to Marvel or DC with company owned characters that live in a shared universe. They are on a much smaller scale than Marvel or DC of course. They're worth mentioning as an example that superhero comics aren't incompatible with independent comics, just a much smaller part of independent comics than Big Two comics.

Finally small press publishers. These are exactly what they sound like. Basically, they are the smaller independent publishers that may only put out a few comics with small print runs. Self-published comics fit in here too.

Just to wrap it up, it is extremely important to some people which publisher a particular comic is from. There are plenty of people who will buy, for example, a Marvel comic just because it effects another Marvel comic they read. Some comics from the Big Two can be impossible to follow without reading other titles from time to time. It is one of the reasons I read very few Marvel & DC books.

Sunday Music

It's Sunday, you're here for the music so let's get straight into it.

Earlier this week I posted about Lazy Bird by John Coltrane and how I think it's a perfect introduction to jazz. It's a great track from a great album but it was released in 1957. Sometimes jazz can be pictured as rooted in the past. I don't want jazz to come across that way on this blog so here are a couple of tracks from The Bad Plus. This trio may be my favourite current jazz band. Both of these tracks are from their 2004 album Give.

First, a live version of an original composition And Here We Test Our Powers of Observation

and next a cover version of Iron Man, originally by Black Sabbath. This, in particular, is fantastic in a menacing and broody way.

Our tour around Tricky's back catalogue continues with another two songs. This is Black Steel, a cover of Public Enemy's Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos, and is very, very different from the original. It comes from Tricky's debut Maxinquaye.

This next track is I Be The Prophet from the album Nearly God. This was released under the name Nearly God as a side project rather than under Tricky's name. Tricky is joined on this track by Martina Topley-Bird who provides vocals, just as she did on most of Maxinquaye.

Gang of Four are a post-punk band who had they're biggest impact in the late 70's & early 80's. Although there best known song is almost certainly Damaged Goods, a John Peel favourite, my favourite song is Natural Is Not In It. Here's a live version from 1979 that I think really captures the urgency that great live music can bring.

I posted Frank Turner's Photosynthesis a while ago. He's nowhere near as famous as he should be so there's a good chance you're not that familiar with him. Here's some of his music to start and fix that, Reasons Not To Be An Idiot.

My favourite albums - Different Class

Not long before I put this blog on hiatus, a phrase which implies a degree of planning that certainly did not exist, I had decided to do a series of posts about my favourite albums. It's still something I want to do, now I'm going to do it.

A few ground rules first:

I'll be choosing 99 albums. Obviously, this won't be a short term project.

I'm going to limit myself to three albums per band/solo artist. This is to avoid filling the list with just the discographies of my favourite bands and seek albums that I love rather than just come up with the easy answers.

I'm going to avoid Best Of albums with the exception of some older jazz and blues artists who didn't really record albums, just singles.

These albums are not in any ranked order, I'll just write about them in the order I want to.

That's it, let's move on to the first album, Different Class by Pulp.

Different Class came out in October 1995 in between 1994's His 'N' Hers and 1998's This Is Hardcore, two other albums that will eventually feature on this list. All three of those albums were nominated for the Mercury Prize and the three albums together, in my opinion at least, form a cohesive whole about changing views and experiences of life.

Back to Different Class. Even though His 'N' Hers broke Pulp through to mainstream success Different Class made them absolutely huge. As good as His 'N' Hers was, and I think it's a great album, Different Class improves significantly on it. There's a maturity to the songs. A sense that these aren't just kids anymore but reflective adults, looking backwards to the past and forward to the future as well as recognising the present. Different Class came out in the midst of Britpop, it is very much a Britpop album, but it's also much more. It's not just about the present, about modern life in 1990's Britain and when it does talk about those subjects it isn't just about the perils of the rat race or the fun to be had at parties and festivals. It has major themes of working class life and sex running through it. It is, as I've said, an album of people who have become adults and are starting to have adult worries.

Live Bed Show by Pulp

The most well known song from the album, and from Pulp's career, is of course Common People. A song that pretty perfectly sums up the album. A song about cultural tourism the song is Jarvis Cocker's definite statement, at least it seems to me, about the class system in Britain. All done in a way that is funny and never boring. It's also covered by William Shatner if you want a really weird experience.

Common People by Pulp 

At the heart of it all Common People is an album about identity and belonging. It doesn't lionise or demonise the culture it's part of, it never sneers at it or tries to excuse it. It's full of sarcasm, piss taking and self-awareness It's about belonging regardless of how valuable or not the thing you belong to is. It's about creating something of your own to belong to, about not being afraid of life or living it your way. Not better or worse than the alternative ways and cultures, but truly yours.

Mis-Shapes by Pulp

The perfect introduction to jazz?

Jazz is a genre that a lot of people have preconceived ideas about. It's a genre that a lot of people are put off from trying. I am a huge fan of jazz and I wanted to talk a little bit about it. Honestly though, the world doesn't need another lecture about jazz. Instead I decided to share one of my favourite jazz songs and briefly describe why I think it's such a good introduction to jazz.

First we need a little bit of background. Jazz as a genre has been around for a little over 100 years. There's no definitive first jazz song and the start of the genre can be roughly placed as between 1890 and 1910. THe lack of surviving recordings from this time make it impossible to pin down exactly and I have no intention of going through the history of music in that time period here to try and provide a more definitive date, it's not needed for this post. All we do need for this post is a very rough timeline.

1890-1910 Musicians merge ragtime and blues together to form jazz.

Early 1930's Swing jazz develops

1943-45 Bebop jazz develops.

1948-49 Cool jazz, a 'softer' development from bebop develops, mainly on the west coast of the US.

Mid-1950's Hard bop develops in NYC.

That's pretty much as far as we need to go. Rather than describe hard bop to much I'll just say it's a more driven development of bebop than cool jazz. I think the best hard bop album, I'm not going to pretend to be an authority on it, is Blue Train by John Coltrane, who I rank as the greatest musician I've ever heard. I think the song that is the perfect introduction to hard bop is Lazy Bird from Blue Train. The band is:

John Coltrane — tenor saxophone
Lee Morgan — trumpet
Curtis Fuller — trombone
Kenny Drew — piano
Paul Chambers — bass
Philly Joe Jones — drums

The reason I think it's the perfect introduction, not just to hard bop but to jazz as a whole, is the way it's structured. Jazz can seem to be overwhelming at times with too much going on. Lazy Bird is far from sparse but it is never overwhelming. The solos are beautiful and contained within the song, they never wander from the rest of the band. The song starts with the full band playing and soon moves into a solo from John Coltrane. Then come Lee Morgan, (only 19 when this was recorded), on trumpet followed by Curtis Fuller on trombone. Coltrane plays another solo before Kenny Drew's piano solo progress into Paul Chambers bass playing. Chambers plays his solo with a bow but plucks the strings in the rest of the song. Philly Joe Jones, one of the great names in jazz, has a short drum solo before Coltrane leads the band to the end of the song with another sax solo. Six incredibly talented musicians playing as a cohesive band. It really is a fantastic piece of music. So that's why I think it's the perfect introduction to jazz. As to why I think you should listen to it? I think listening to jazz is an incredibly rewarding way to spend your time, it'll give you experience of music that you would never otherwise hear. It's a beautiful and expensive pool of music just waiting for you to start listening to it.