Gil Scott-Heron, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

Gil Scott-Heron’s poetry and songs intersect with jazz, funk and the blues to paint a rich portrait of black poverty and despair.

Album of the Week, September 23, 2023

In this short series about funk, Gil Scott-Heron would seem to be an unlikely choice. A poet, militant, novelist, spoken-word artist, Scott-Heron was not a musician by calling. Indeed, he called himself a “bluesologist,” a scientist concerned with the origin of the blues. But, thanks to two important collaborations, Scott-Heron has a place not only among the progenitors of funk but among the ancestors of hip-hop.

Gil Scott-Heron was born in Chicago in 1949, to an opera singer mother and a Jamaican soccer player. His parents separated when he was young, and he went to live with his grandmother Bobbie Scott, a civil rights activist who introduced him to the works of Langston Hughes and to the piano, in Jackson, Tennessee. On his grandmother’s death, he moved to live with his mother in The Bronx. He went to DeWitt Clinton High School but transferred to the Fieldston School on a full scholarship for writing. He was known as much for his acerbic wit and keen sense of social irony as his writing; when asked in an admissions interview how he would feel if he saw one of his classmates drive by in an limousine while he walked, he asked the interviewer, “Same way as you. Y’all can’t afford no limousine. How do you feel?” He attended Lincoln University, a historically black university in Pennsylvania, because Langston Hughes had done so.

It was at Lincoln University that he met one of his most important collaborators, the musician Brian Jackson, with whom he formed a band. Jackson was to collaborate with him throughout the 1970s. At Lincoln, he also attended a performance by the Last Poets, an incendiary spoken word ensemble who are today held to be among the forerunners of hip-hop, and asked them “Listen, can I start a group like you guys?” He left school to work on his debut novel, Vulture, and moved to New York City, where he met the other significant collaborator, jazz musician and producer Bob Thiele.

Thiele had gotten his start in the record business working for Creed Taylor, and served as the head of Impulse Records following Taylor’s departure for Verve. In his eight years at Impulse, he produced the most significant of John Coltrane’s late works, including Coltrane, John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman, Duke Ellington & John Coltrane, Impressions, Crescent, A Love Supreme, Meditations, and Ascension. He also produced many other significant albums for Impulse, which was by this point a division of ABC Records, including Freddie Hubbard’s The Body and the Soul, and co-wrote the song “What a Wonderful World.”

The collaboration with Louis Armstrong on this (eventual) hit song led to a breakdown in relations between Thiele and ABC Records president Larry Newton. Apparently Newton was expecting a Dixieland style album from Armstrong, and when he learned that Thiele was recording him performing “Wonderful World,” a ballad, an argument began that escalated into a screaming match, with Newton ultimately being ejected from the recording studio and left yelling and banging on the door outside. Thiele left ABC shortly after and started his own label, Flying Dutchman. One of the first artists he convinced to record with him was Gil Scott-Heron.

The artist recorded three albums for Flying Dutchman, as well as today’s release, a 1974 compilation drawn from the first three releases after Scott-Heron departed for the Strata-East label. Gil’s debut album on Flying Dutchman, Small Talk at 125th and Lenox, was a live session of poetry with accompaniment from Eddie Knowles and Charlie Saunders on conga and David Barnes on percussion and vocals, as well as Thiele himself on piano and guitar. The album did not chart, but it did feature the poems “Whitey on the Moon” and “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” performed as spoken word pieces with percussion accompaniment.

The two albums that followed were entirely different. For Pieces of a Man, Brian Jackson joined as musical director, and Thiele assembled an enviable cast of musicians to join them, including Ron Carter on electric bass, Hubert Laws on flute, Bernard Purdie on drums, and Burt Jones on electric guitar. Jackson’s musical perspective combined with Scott-Heron’s bluesy melodic writing is what connects this album to the funk of Sly and the Family Stone—along with a similar perspective on race relations. For the album, Scott-Heron re-recorded “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” with the new band, and the combination of Carter on bass, Purdie on drums, Hubert Laws’ anxious flute obbligato, and Scott-Heron’s intense spoken word work laid the blueprint for hip-hop. Carter’s bass in particular is tense and apocalyptic throughout the track, underscoring the fierce conflict in Scott-Heron’s poem between our commercial culture and the economic struggles of Black people:

The revolution will not be right back after a message about a white tornado, white lightning, or white people
You will not have to worry about a dove in your bedroom, the tiger in your tank, or the giant in your toilet bowl
The revolution will not go better with Coke
The revolution will not fight germs that may cause bad breath
The revolution will put you in the driver’s seat

The revolution will not be televised
Will not be televised
Will not be televised
Will not be televised
The revolution will be no re-run, brothers
The revolution will be live

Gil Scott-Heron, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”

As if to underscore the diversity of Scott-Heron’s lyrical agenda, “Sex Education: Ghetto Style”, from his third album Free Will, is another spoken word poem that slyly pokes fun at his own sexual coming of age. The performance style is closer to the music of Small Talk with the important addition of Jackson on flute. The rest of the Pieces of a Man band, except for Carter, returned for this album, and it featured a blend of spoken word and more traditional songs, including the next track, “The Get Out of the Ghetto Blues,” with Jackson’s bluesy piano complemented by David Spinozza’s guitar.

“No Knock” comes from the same sessions, but is spiritually closer to “Revolution” in spirit and to “Sex Education” in conception, with Jackson on flute alongside percussionists and Scott-Heron’s rap. The original album features a spoken word intro to the performance from Scott-Heron that sets the context:

Um, we want to do a poem for one of our unfavorite people, um, who’s now the head of the, uh, Nixon campaign. He was formerly the Attorney General named John Mitchell. … no-knock, the law in particular, was allegedly, um, aheh, legislated for black people rather than, you know, for their destruction. And it means, simply, that authorities and members of the police force no longer have to knock on your door before entering. They can now knock your door down. This is No Knock. 

Gil Scott-Heron, “No Knock”

The compilation now transitions into one of Scott-Heron’s greatest collaborations with Jackson, the great “Lady Day and John Coltrane” from Pieces. Scott-Heron’s second album was the most introspective of his works, featuring multiple songs from the perspective of different sides of the Black experience, as well as this joyful, bluesy celebration of the power of jazz music. For me, the musical highlights are Carter’s bass line and Jackson’s Fender Rhodes solo after the second verse.

The compilation follows this track with the title track to “Pieces of a Man,” a ballad on acoustic piano and bass that tracks the disintegration of the narrator’s father, describing his violent outbursts and his despair at being fired from his job, leading to his arrest. The song might be Scott-Heron’s masterwork, fusing powerful metaphoric writing with an impassioned vocal. Scott-Heron’s narrator is only one of the examples of broken Black males to be found in his writing; “Home is Where the Hatred Is” (the following track) is written from the point of view of a heroin addict, who struggles to get clean while recognizing that returning “home” to his sobriety means having to confront the pain of his existence: “Home is where the needle marks/Tried to heal my broken heart/And it might not be such a bad idea if I never/Went home again.”

“Brother” flips the perspective again, calling out hypocritical Black men who take on the outward trappings of Black liberation while not actually helping their brothers and sisters, in one of the earliest spoken recordings on this set. The compilation pairs the poem with another track from Pieces, but “Save the Children” is short on specifics on how exactly the children should be saved from the harsh reality of African-American life that will confront them when they grow up, though it’s another gorgeous collaboration with Jackson.

“Whitey on the Moon” might be the most famous of Scott-Heron’s poems after “Revolution,” and for good reason, as he points out the uncomfortable gulf between the accomplishments of the Apollo program and the economic state of Black America. As I’ve written before, I’m a NASA kid, and proud of our accomplishments in space, but Scott-Heron’s poem points out that in our national choices on spending priorities in the 1960s between the space race, Vietnam, and Johnson’s War on Poverty, he could only see outcomes from two of the three.

The compilation closes with “Did You Hear What They Said?” from Free Will. The darkest of Scott-Heron’s early collaborations with Brian Jackson, the paean for a dead Black man—“They said another brother’s dead/They said he’s dead but he can’t be buried”—might be the most desolate lines he wrote. Accompanied by Hubert Laws’ flute, the closing thought, “This can’t be real,” reflects Scott-Heron’s loss of hope following the death, which evokes both Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination and the deaths of Black men from crime and police brutality.

The compilation as a whole is a powerful and complex representation of Scott-Heron’s legacy, and a good introduction to his work. But it deliberately ends in denial of the hope represented by some of his early songs, foreshadowing Scott-Heron’s own journey. His post-Flying Dutchman recordings with Brian Jackson and the Midnight Band were triumphant, but they acrimoniously split in 1980. Scott-Heron recorded sporadically after, and seemed to spiral slowly downward. Addicted to crack cocaine, he spent time in prison for drug possession, and recorded one last album in 2010, the harrowing I’m New Here, before his death in 2011, following reports of pneumonia and that he was HIV positive.

There are no easy answers in Gil Scott-Heron’s story, but I prefer to hold onto the gestures toward hope in his best songs. Next week we’ll visit another album from a performer struggling with addiction, who nevertheless continued to make vital, even joyous music.

There wasn’t an official playlist or full-album version of this compilation on YouTube, oddly, so I made my own. You can listen to it here:

Sly and the Family Stone, Stand!

The #albumoftheweek swerves into the funk lane, checking out Sly and the Family Stone’s first big hit.

Album of the Week, September 16, 2023

After spending the better part of six months exploring the intersection of jazz and funk music through the catalog of CTI Records, I thought it might be fun to dig into the other side of the equation and talk about funk for a bit. This is going to be a brief, non-encyclopedic peek, because I don’t have some of the records that should really be at the foundation of this discussion. No James Brown, no Funkadelic… But I do have a few that I’ve wanted to write about for a while, so let’s dig in.

Sylvester Stewart was born in Texas in 1943, but his family moved to California when he was young, and you can hear it in his music—a sense of sunny optimism that shines through many of the tracks on Stand!. After singing in doo-wop groups and spending time as a DJ, he formed the band Sly and the Family Stone with his brother Freddie and his sister Rose, both of whom took the Stone stage name as their surnames. The band featured an integrated line-up, following the example of Sly’s high-school doo-wop group; an exciting line-up of vocalists; a great horn section; and the combination of Stone’s rock-influenced guitar and Larry Graham’s relentlessly funky bass.

All the group’s features are in full display on the album’s title track. “Stand!” starts out as a pretty straightforward rock song… for about four bars, until it changes keys in the second half of the verse. A chugging guitar and bass combo leads to the ecstatic chorus. The second verse follows the pattern of the first, and the second chorus starts the same way—and then an abrupt cut into funkytown plays out the last minute of the track, with an incredible syncopated bass pattern on the base and fifth from Larry Graham. Apparently Sly tested the song in a San Francisco club, got a lukewarm response, and went back and recorded the ending with a group of studio musicians.

The second track swerves hard into psychedelia. “Don’t Call Me N—, Whitey” has one of the great (if unprintable) titles of 1960s rock, and the verse (sung by Rose Stone) suggests irreconcilable racial tension and a weariness after the difficult 1960s:

Well, I went down across the country
And I heard two voices ring
They were talkin’ funky to each other
And neither other could change a thing

“Don’t Call Me N—, Whitey”

The rest of the track is pure psychedelic funk, with distorted vocals reminiscent of a harmonica solo over a fiery guitar solo. It wouldn’t be out of place on an early Funkadelic album.

“I Want to Take You Higher” is one of the great bits of synthesis on the album, as the pessimistic blues funk of the second track meets the relentless singalong optimism of the first. A gutbucket harmonica line alternates between solo and backing as each of the band’s five vocalists takes turns on the verse, with stacked harmonies on the chorus. But the most amazing feature on the song has to be the locked in rhythm section, with Graham, drummer Larry Errico, a chugging rhythm guitar, and handclaps hold the line ominously and doggedly on the tonic. The narrator may want to take you higher, but something is decidedly anchoring him to something a lot lower.

“Somebody’s Watching You” again starts out sounding like a pop song, with the verse’s alternating vocals from Sly and the Little Sister backing group over a great trumpet line from Cynthia Robinson. But Sly’s funky organ and the gospel inflected chorus bring the track out of the polite airwaves and into a much funkier place.

“Sing a Simple Song” is a straight ahead funk onslaught, with the band’s secret weapon Rose Stone opening up with one of the bluesiest “yeah, yeah, yeah” openings on record. After the second verse everyone drops out except for drums and trumpet for a moment of pure funk satori. The instruments suddenly drop out behind the vocalists with ten seconds left in the track, to reveal Sly and Rose trading lines with Little Sister behind. It’s a stunner.

“Everyday People,” ironically, had the longest afterlife of any song on the album, thanks to its use in the late 1990s by Toyota for an ad campaign. It deserves its fame for the great songwriting—a chugging bassline behind a low-pitched verse; the trumpet ratcheting up the tension to the chorus an octave higher, with the voices leaning in from the ninth; and the great B part with Rose Stone taunting all the haters to the tune of “Nanny, nanny, boo boo.” It’s the song that Larry Graham famously claims is the first ever use of slap bass. It’s the song that popularized the phrase “different strokes for different folks.” Is it therefore the song that we should blame for Gary Coleman’s career? I find it difficult to be too cynical while singing that chorus, though.

And then, “Sex Machine.” No relation to James Brown’s better known “Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine,” this is the longest track on the album, clocking in at almost 14 minutes of pure funky jam. Sly returns to the vocal harmonica technique from “Don’t Call Me…” on this track for a lengthy improvisation, with Graham’s bass alternately walking up and dropping out. A five minute guitar solo follows, leading up to a crescendo and the return of the harmonica vocals. Another solo on fuzzed out guitar follows, and the track speeds up just a notch. Jerry Martini comes in on saxophone and blows through a key change from G to A, topping out with an ecstatic high A. The rest of the instruments fade out to reveal Eric’s drums; after four measures of the pattern that he had played for the last 12 minutes, he speeds up, soloing in double time, then slowly drops the speed until he is waiting several seconds between beats and someone calls “Time!”

The album closes out with “You Can Make It if You Try,” the only track not featuring Graham on bass; Sly played the instrument on this closing track, which opens with the chorus and alternating vocals on the verses. Then a moment that caught me by surprise—suddenly we get the organ and drum part that the Jungle Brothers famously sampled to create “Because I Got It Like That.” Again, Sly peels away the instruments until it’s just drums and backing vocals, then brings the guitar, organ, and bass back in one at a time for the final coda. It’s an optimistic finale to an improbably upbeat album.

The album was Sly’s first big commercial success, hitting 13 on the Billboard pop chart and 3 on the R&B album chart. “Everyday People” hit number one the week of February 15, 1969. Sly and the band enjoyed the success, maybe a little too much. We’ll hear another one from them in a few weeks, but next week we’ll hear how some of the funk sounds on this album influenced an unlikely musician…with help from someone we’ve heard many times before in this series.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

Yusef Lateef, Autophysiopsychic

Album of the Week, September 9, 2023

And so we come to the end of our Summer of CTI. We’ve traced, through the admittedly very selective lens of my record collection, the history of Creed Taylor’s label, from its beginnings as a subsidiary of Verve, to its critical heights in the works of Freddie Hubbard, to the peaks of its crossover successes with Deodato and Hubert Laws, and into the long jazz-funk coda with last week’s George Benson outing.

Today’s album takes us even further down that long and winding road, to a place where much of the jazz has been wrung out of the funk, the most famous arrangers and contributors have moved on, and you kind of want to ask yourself why that record is in your collection. But it comes from the hand of one of the all time great reed players, so maybe it’s a good time to shut down our preconceptions and listen.

Yusef Lateef had been playing since the 1950s, recording his first solo session in 1957 and following with a string of dates on the New Jazz, Prestige and Riverside labels, including what’s probably his best known work, Eastern Sounds (about which more will be said another time). But he never held still, musically, and he had begun to incorporate elements of soul and the blues alongside his Eastern musical influences by the mid-1960s. By the time he recorded Autophysiopsychic in 1977, these had blossomed into something like full-on funk music.

The opening track, “Robot Man,” is probably the boldest of these statements. No horns are heard for the first two minutes, just a funk backing track with Lateef singing. You might be tempted to turn it off! But after the opening two minutes comes Lateef’s soprano sax, and suddenly we’re in a very different sound space. Lateef was a careful listener and a brilliant improviser, and combined those into an absolutely rock solid jazz-funk conception. The rest of the track is pedestrian, but Lateef’s solo is incandescent, escaping into other tonalities while still staying absolutely funky.

“Look on the Right Side” fixes the backing track problem by tipping all the way over into George Clinton territory. Indeed, it is hard to tell that this track wasn’t a b-side from Chocolate City or Mothership Connection. The electric bass is squelched out, the keys and guitar keep the groove going, and Lateef’s voice has more than a little hint of Glenn Goins about it. His sax playing likewise seems to take inspiration from Maceo Parker and the rest of Clinton’s Parliament. This track also features the great Art Farmer, another player with a history stretching back to the late 1940s and the dawn of bebop. By now he had relocated to Europe and was doing pretty much whatever he wanted to, including playing a lugubriously rhythmic solo on this track. Only the relative mediocrity of Lateef’s lyrics keeps the track from being a stone classic.

Inside of the gatefold jacket for the album, featuring (mediocre) lyrics and liner notes

“YL” (pronounced Yeel) occupies breezier territory, vibrating on the same harmonic wavelength as George Benson’s “Theme from Good King Bad” (and also written by David Matthews). The two horns open the track playing in harmony, then Lateef switches to flute for the solo. He’s a more angular player than Hubert Laws in similar territory, at one point hitting a thrilling octave plus leap in the middle of a run, but the overall impression is of a tune happily gliding along on the pillow of its own major-key chord progressions.

“Communication” finds us back in Parliament territory, with Lateef’s “stay in contact with your mind” anchoring the track to Clinton’s cosmology. But rather than scaling the lunatic heights of “Bop Gun,” Lateef keeps the track moving along at a simmer, helped by an absolutely dirty tenor sax solo. Farmer’s flugelhorn brings a key change and a different energy to the track, as though soaring above the relentless funk below. It’s a highlight of the album

“Sister Mamie” is the only track on the album to feature Lateef’s fascination with non-Western wind instruments, opening with a fanfare of sorts on the shehnai before shifting into another funk groove. Again, what could be a relatively pedestrian backing track is redeemed by a fiery solo from Lateef alongside some funky trumpet work from Farmer.

So Lateef showed another way to enliven jazz-funk, bringing intelligent and cerebral improvisation of the highest order alongside earthy Parliament-inspired funk grooves. Alas, in 1977 CTI’s time was about to run out. The label had partnered with Motown for distribution, but that deal collapsed in 1977 and led to CTI’s eventual bankruptcy in 1978. Taylor kept the label going following a restructuring, but the momentum had gone and it ceased operations in 1984, returning with new recordings once every five or six years afterwards until Taylor’s death in 2022. Jazz-funk didn’t disappear, but classical-jazz crossovers would be less common following the label’s winding down.

We’re going to change gears a little for the next few weeks and explore some of the influences that popped up on Autophysiopsychic. Do not attempt to adjust your set…

You can listen to today’s album here:

George Benson, Good King Bad

Album of the Week, September 2, 2023

When I was growing up in the bucolic suburbs of Newport News, Virginia, listening to my parents’ music on the kitchen radio and in our car, the radio was generally on one of two stations. One, WGH, was the local independent classical radio station (which later moved its programming to WHRO). The other, WFOG, was the “easy listening” one. I didn’t mind it at first, but in time I grew to mock it, hearing the uncomplicated, dumbed-down orchestral arrangements of pop standards everywhere—dentist’s offices, malls, grocery stores. When I first heard “smooth jazz,” courtesy of Kenny G, I knew exactly where it had come from.

And when I started listening to CTI Records, I thought that was what I’d be getting, thanks to the label’s reputation for heavy string arrangements and jazz-funk hybridization. (I’ve had record collectors proudly tell me they avoid the label entirely for this reason.) As this series has hopefully shown, I was almost completely wrong.

But then there’s George Benson and Good King Bad. A technically brilliant player with a great melodic imagination, on this record he surrounded himself with a small army of studio musicians and smothered much of the material in major key, uncomplicated string arrangements. (I don’t know how to describe the unique tonality of so much of the smooth jazz adjacent recordings that I’ve heard except to observe that they are almost always in major keys and almost never use modes or complex modulations. But I always imagine some of the blissful jazz announcers I heard in Washington DC, who never seemed to let a cloud cross their minds and who seemed to always be speaking through a permanent smile, when I hear it.) The good news is that alongside the smooth jazz there is a fair amount of jazz-funk as well, in a way that lives up to Benson’s considerable prowess with the guitar.

About that small army: the musicians here are no slouches. There’s David Sanborn, Michael and Randy Brecker, and James Brown stalwart Fred Wesley, for starters, as well as Joe Farrell, Roland Hanna, Ronnie Foster, Eric Gale, and Steve Gadd, along with a bunch of other horn and string players. But there’s not a “band” to speak of as each of the tracks features a different line-up.

“Theme from Good King Bad” is not a soundtrack, just the opening number. Written by arranger David Matthews (no relation), the uncomplicated pop number has not an ounce of swing in the chart, just straight ahead seventies jazz rock with horns and Eric Gale’s insistent chukka chukka on the rhythm guitar.. The funk in the performance is brought by Benson, whose guitar redeems the track with his usual precise yet soulful melody sense, as well as a sense of rhythm that swings all over the precise backing beats of the chart. Listening to the track, recorded in 1975, is a reminder that disco was already here, just not evenly distributed yet.

Matthews also authored “One Rock Don’t Make No Boulder,” which plays with the smooth formula by bringing in some crunchy minor chord progressions. Benson’s solo finds some grime and soul in the chart, which swings a bit more than in the first track, and the clarinet solo by Don Grolnick is a notable contribution to the overall mood. It’s a more complex sound that hearkens back to jazz-funk works like Farrell’s Penny Arcade.

“Em” continues in this vein. A slightly blues-inflected jazz-funk track written by Philip Namanworth, it edges even closer to the disco line. Benson’s guitar work is unremarkable here.

Vince Guaraldi’s classic “Cast Your Fate To The Wind” is a different story. Here remade in a technicolor arrangement that brings strings around the edges of the tune, Benson is otherwise left largely to his own devices over the backing group, and he both renders the wistful side of Guaraldi’s melody as well as bringing out a hint of the bravado lurking beneath. Joe Farrell’s flute is a lovely complement to the track, and taking the second solo he brings a celebratory cadence to the music. The only misstep in the arrangement is an unnecessary key change in the bridge, but that is quickly rectified. The two soloists play in dialogue to close out the track.

Matthews’ “Siberian Workout” again seeks to shed the major-key stereotype, centering its composition in a minor mode instead. The same chicken-scratch guitar, horns and flute apply here; it’s probably the least distinguished track on the disk. “Shell Of A Man,” on the other hand, is a standout. Written by Eugene McDaniels, it’s an uptempo ballad enlivened by Dave Friedman’s vibes and Ronnie Foster’s keyboards. A tinge of blues in the chorus keeps things moving along. The coda, which swings into a fade-out, sees Benson take flight, exploring some of the changes of the set. It’s a seriously interesting track.

I wanted to dislike this album on the strength of the smooth jazz overtones, especially in the first track, but there are enough nuggets of gold in it to earn a recommendation from me. The more commercial sound was no mistake, however; it marked a period where Creed Taylor’s label was consciously seeking more and more pop-oriented sounds in the vain hopes of recapturing the chart successes they had earlier in the 1970s. We have one more record in the CTI series for this column, and it goes even further afield, with some players we haven’t heard from yet … but who may surprise you. That’s coming up next time.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

Jim Hall, Concierto

Album of the Day, August 26, 2023

We’ve met guitarist Jim Hall before, several times—once with Bill Evans in arguably his most famous recording, once with the Kronos Quartet years later revisiting that material—but never as a leader. He recorded a lot of sessions on small labels in the years leading up to today’s 1975 session, but almost always in duos or as a sideman; his first proper solo album, after a 1957 record on Pacific Jazz, came in 1969 on tiny label MPS (which we’ll hear another day), and another followed in 1972 on Milestone. But his best work came with collaborators, and for Concierto, his only solo headlining session on CTI Records, Creed Taylor surrounded him with some of the best: alto saxophonist Paul Desmond, trumpeter Chet Baker, pianist Roland Hanna, drummer Steve Gadd, and the redoubtable bassist Ron Carter. Don Sebesky is here as arranger, but the record is straight-ahead jazz untouched by orchestra, and that’s just fine.

Hall’s touch on the guitar is always lyrical and melodic even when he’s navigating challenging chord changes, and that’s in evidence on the opening track, “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To.” Hall opens the tune with Gadd, Hanna and Carter accompanying, then spins into a solo that exercises all the rhythmic flexibility and complexity in the tune before handing over to Paul Desmond. Desmond’s trademark romanticism and restraint are both on display for his short solo, which takes a second verse with Chet Baker’s accompaniment underneath. Baker then takes a proper straight-ahead solo, handing off to Roland Hanna, who takes his own run at the tune while playing with its rhythm and articulation. Carter has his own moment to stretch out, accompanied only by Hall, who picks up his pattern and enters into a duo seemingly simultaneously as Gadd enters on cymbals. At over seven minutes, the track isn’t exactly short, but it feels like it flies by.

“Two’s Blues” is what it says on the tin, a straight ahead blues that features Hall trading lines with Chet Baker. We haven’t come across Baker before in these posts, but his legend precedes him: coming up at the same time as Miles and with (initially) a similar trumpet sound, he cut many “cool jazz” classics as both a trumpeter and a vocalist, but wasn’t able to overcome his addiction to heroin. Here he’s in fine form, providing a melodic solo, but Hall’s solo is blistering, laying down a run of chords that take the song through multiple key changes, then switching it up to a pure melody again.

“The Answer is Yes” is played here as a straight ballad with a solo introduction by Hall, and then an opening in-tempo statement of the melody by Baker. Hall plays the bridge accompanied by Gadd and Carter, and keeps going into a solo that hands off to Hanna, who elegantly improvises around the melody. Baker’s solo relaxes into the tune with Hall playing counterpoint underneath; Hall picks up the solo from there as in the opening, and the whole band plays out. At the ending, Baker plays the melody with Hall answering in a call-and-response form.

The first three tracks, as gorgeous as they are, are really only a warmup for the main event, Hall’s take on Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez, which occupies the entirety of Side B. The work was already famous thanks to Miles and Gil Evans’ adaptation of it for trumpet and jazz orchestra in Sketches of Spain, but Rodrigo originally wrote it for the guitar, and Hall’s “Concierto de Aranjuez” is a master lesson in blurring the lines between classical and jazz. The opening features Hall playing the melody on electric guitar and accompanying himself with an overdubbed Spanish guitar while Carter provides a sort of bass continuo. Baker and Desmond alternate measures in the initial statement of the melody, and Hall picks it up with Desmond playing counterpoint. And then comes the Sebesky pivot, as Carter lays down a bass line and the whole arrangement shifts into a samba-flavored adaptation of the melody. Here it works; there are no strings, no electric piano, just the core band backing up Hall’s improvisations. Gadd is more active on this track, pushing the beat forward insistently beneath a sensitive solo by Desmond. Baker plays a melancholy solo that combines the lyricism of early 1960s Miles with some of the forthright assertiveness of Freddie Hubbard. Hanna’s solo again plays with rhythm, making more of the samba influence in the arrangement and then shifting into a syncopation that Hall picks up in his next solo. The full band comes back in for a moment, then Hall (again on electric and Spanish guitar), Carter, and Gadd wrap up the track, lingering on the melancholy final notes.

The session for Concierto recorded an additional five(!) bonus tracks that are available on the CD and digital reissues of the album, but the four tracks on the original LP stand as classics of the straight-ahead side of CTI as well as standouts in Hall’s recorded output. Always a gifted collaborator, he rarely performed the long-form arrangements typical of CTI, preferring more straightforward and intimate renditions. We’ll hear one of his early records as leader another time; next week we’ll hear from another guitarist and a completely different flavor of the CTI sound.

You can listen to the album here:

Freddie Hubbard, Polar AC

Album of the Week, August 19, 2023

Last time we wrote about Freddie Hubbard, we talked about his departure from CTI. I accelerated that story a little bit. We talked about his last studio album, Keep Your Soul Together, and we reviewed his concert album with Stanley Turrentine. But after his departure from the label, Creed Taylor decided he needed more Hubbard releases. And so we got The Baddest Hubbard, a greatest hits compilation, and today’s record, Polar AC. An odds and sods collection if ever there was one, the record collects extra tracks recorded in the sessions for First Light and Sky Dive, as well as two tracks recorded on April 12, 1972. It accordingly represents prime Hubbard.

“Polar AC,” also called “Fantasy in D” or “Ugetsu,” is a Cedar Walton composition from the First Light session. It’s a stunner, with the funky beat established by Ron Carter solo in the first bars, then joined by Jack Dejohnette. Hubbard is in top form here on the flugelhorn, playing a breezy, relaxed solo atop the insistent groove of the rhythm section. Sebesky’s strings support the theme, stepping forward at the chorus and then fading back during the solos. Hubert Laws’ flute is likewise in fine fettle throughout.

“People Make the World Go Round,” recorded during that April 1972 session, is an earlier run at the tune that would later appear on Milt Jackson’s Sunflower. Here the strings, in Bob James’ arrangement, are a little less prominent, as is Ron Carter’s bass, and the track opens with about thirty seconds of effects in the guitar, flute and trumpet, outright noise, and a half-articulated sigh. But the basic groove of the Thom Bell/Linda Creed tune is intact, and the interplay between Hubbard and Laws in particular is striking. The strings here are less of a Sebesky-esque blanket and more of a Greek chorus, offering stabs of sound and responding to Hubbard’s solo.

A second Stylistics cover from the same album as “People,” “Betcha By Golly Wow” is heard here from the same session. The intro dispenses with the effects on the intro, going directly into the tune with Hubbard’s trumpet surrounded by a bath of strings. This is the first place on the record where the string arrangements feel intrusive; fortunately the band is hot behind Hubbard, with Laws particularly innovative in his support and counter-melodies.

“Naturally,” recorded during the Sky Dive sessions, opens with Hubbard and George Benson playing a straight take on the Nat Adderley standard before Ron Carter and Billy Cobham join in, completing the piano-less band that Sebesky surrounds with strings and winds in the arrangement. More than many Hubbard tracks during his CTI years, this one harks back to the straight bop that he played in his 1960s days at Blue Note. The band swings the tune, and Cobham’s drums are just punchy enough to keep things moving along briskly. Hubert Laws joins for the second solo and likewise plays things straight before handing off to Benson, whose cleanly articulated solo reminds us of how great he could be as a soloist. The orchestral arrangement is heavy here, frequently stomping on the ends of solos, in an atypically unsubtle Sebesky chart.

“Son of Sky Dive,” simply titled “Sky Dive” on later reissues, is just the core band, as if Sebesky had overspent his budget on the string players in the other tracks of the compilation. Whatever the case, it’s a great run through of the tune, and makes a strong case for Hubbard the composer.

This 1975 release was really the end for Hubbard on CTI, and maybe the beginning of the end for CTI. The label’s original 6000 series ended later that year along with its distribution deal with Motown, and the new 7000 series that Taylor started to continue the music only released nineteen titles before the label entered bankruptcy. But there was some spectacular music still to come, and we’ll hear one of the best next week.

There doesn’t seem to be a full version of this album posted to YouTube, either as a playlist or as a single video, so I’ve switched to Apple Music to allow you to listen to the whole album here:

Hubert Laws, In the Beginning

Album of the Week, August 12, 2023

Hubert Laws was having a good few years. The last of his albums we reviewed, Morning Star, was nominated for a Grammy in 1973 for Best Jazz Performance by a Soloist. He had built up a track record as a sideman across a whole slew of CTI recordings—to say nothing of his appearance on Gil Scott-Heron’s major label debut, Pieces of a Man. (That’s Laws playing the killer flute obbligato on “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.”) And CTI was having a pretty good run as a label, thanks to hits from Deodato and others. So Creed Taylor doubled down, literally, on Laws, and this double album was the result.

In the Beginning has a complicated discographical history. Originally issued in the form I’m reviewing today, a few years later the two disks were unbundled and released separately as Then There Was Light Vol. 1 and 2. We do know that the original record was recorded in four days between February 6 and 11, 1974 at the Van Gelder studio, and released sometime later in 1974. And it was a substantial cast, as always with Laws’ CTI recordings. His brother Ronnie Laws played tenor sax; Bob James, acoustic and electric piano; Richard Tee, organ; Clare Fischer, electric piano; Gene Bertoncini, guitar; Steve Gadd, drums; Airto, percussion; Dave Friedmann, vibes; the omnipresent Ron Carter, bass; and a string quartet. Fischer, James, and Laws all contributed arrangements.

Incidentally, we haven’t come across Clare Fischer’s work in this column before, but you’ve almost certainly heard it, thanks to a long career as an arranger. He was the pianist and arranger for the Hi-Los in the 1950s before swerving into Latin jazz, but had a parallel and far more successful career as an arranger, working on (among many others) Billie Holiday’s Lady in Satin, Paul McCartney’s Flowers in the Dirt, Chanticleer’s Lost in the Stars, the Buckshot LeFonque project of Branford Marsalis, Michael Jackson’s This Is It, Usher’s Here I Stand, and Prince’s Parade, Sign ‘☮’ the Times, Graffiti Bridge, [Love Symbol], “Pink Cashmere,” The Vault, Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic and 3121. (!!!)

It’s a Fischer composition and arrangement that leads off the album. The title track is almost a capsule of jazz development from Ellingtonian chords to Trane-influenced minor key modality to a chunk of avant-garde, which fades into a slow rich blues. The richness of the arrangement falls back to an eight-bar solo for Carter, which then yields to a group blues with Laws taking a high solo. The final turn of the arrangement is into classic CTI jazz-funk, and then it circles back to the abstract theme of the beginning. A nifty little piece, and a great foretaste of what’s ahead.

“Restoration” is a slow waltz, supported by Bob James’s acoustic piano and a thoughtful Carter bass line. Here Laws’ flute recalls his performance with Chick Corea on “Windows,” from his early album Laws’ Clause, later collected with other Chick performances on Inner Space. Some fine Bertoncini guitar work hands off to a reflective Laws solo, and back to a Dave Friedman vibes passage, before the final chorus brings the performance to a meditative close.

That meditative feeling continues with Bob James’ arrangement of “Gymnopédie No. 1” for guitar, flute, piano, bass, vibes and string quartet. One of these years I’ll have to put together a collection of performances of this Erik Satie composition. For emotional reserve and measured tempo, this might be one of the best of the “covers” of the tune. Laws’ solo is by turns elegiac and birdlike, and the arrangement keeps the instruments from crowding each other; in most of the moments you hear only a few voices at a time. It comes too quickly to an end.

“Come Ye Disconsolate” is a gospel staple that received a contemporary pop boost from Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway in 1972, and the performance here is appropriately pop-gospel flavored; improvisatory in the middle verses, with a down-home altar call feel in the final verse. It’s comfortable and easy on the ears.

“Airegin” immediately challenges that relaxation moment, ending Side 2 with a cover of the Sonny Rollins standard with just Laws and Steve Gadd. Gadd here is especially delightful under Laws’ increasingly complex improvisation; he starts with just a steady kick drum pattern, then adds cymbals, snare and tom until it’s as much a proclamation of drum ingenuity as it is a statement of flute virtuosity. It can be easy to forget, with the excellence of the arrangements that usually drape Laws’ CTI work, just how amazing a soloist he was; this track corrects that nicely.

“Moment’s Notice,” a cover of the Coltrane classic, features a fuller big band treatment, with Ronnie Laws’ tenor sax taking an appropriately more prominent voice, then yielding to Laws’ flute util the two end up in (of course) a battle, underpinned by James on piano with some brisk walking bass from Carter and a non-stop barrage of ingenuity on the drum kit from Gadd. It’s a fun exploration of the tune, with some wonderfully pointed dissonance from James keeping it from being just another Trane cover.

Rodgers Grant’s “Reconciliation” provides a way for Laws to shift back to more meditative material, with Carter, Gadd and James closely following. The tune moves in and out of minor modes, with Carter’s high-octave tonic providing the transition. Indeed, while there’s a lot going on with this track, it’s worth just listening to the way Carter negotiates the twists of the melody, providing a steadying pulse under Laws’ flute as it explores increasingly abstract textures, then taking a solo that’s a master class in saying everything with a few notes. This isn’t relaxed reflection, exactly; there’s a touch of anxiety in the way the tune never settles into a single tonality, as if fighting against the eventual concord promised in the title.

As if acknowledging the complexity of the penultimate track, “Mean Lene” is a simpler pleasure, some straight-ahead jazz funk with a Latin tinge. But even here the tempo shifts from measure to measure in the head, not settling down until Friedman’s vibes take the first solo over the rhythm section in a happily sambified mood. But as the track continues to stretch out, some of the conventionality breaks down for something richer and stranger, until it’s no longer clear who’s soloing and who’s supporting. It’s not free jazz exactly, but it’s the track on the album that comes closest to the give and take of a free performance. Throw in a left-field drum solo and a shift back to Latin funk, alongside some overdubbed flute and another rich Clare Fischer arrangement, and we have ourselves a party.

Laws was nominated for another Grammy for this record, and for good reason. It’s one of the most satisfying of the CTI Records discography, and one that most ably shrugs off the potential limitations of the CTI formula to end up at an entirely new place.

You can listen to the album here:

Ron Carter, All Blues

Album of the Week, August 5, 2023

CTI Records has a funny history, for a record label with such a distinct sound. Just when you think you have it all figured out, it throws you a curve ball. Take this week’s record, for instance. Where last week we had virtuosic reed player Joe Farrell go all in on the CTI jazz funk sound, this week Ron Carter, whose prior headlining album was a good representation of the label’s trademark sound, has taken a left turn into acoustic jazz—and first class acoustic jazz, at that.

Part of the switch-up might have been a reaction to the label’s sound. It’s noteworthy that much of Carter’s output as a leader in the 1970s was a more traditional approach, with classics like Third Plane sounding distinctly like a reunion of the rhythm section from the Second Great Quintet (as indeed it was). But part of the credit for the sound must accrue to the players. In addition to drummer Billy Cobham and Richard Tee, who appears on electric piano on one number, Carter brought saxophonist Joe Henderson, who we last heard on Freddie Hubbard’s Straight Life, and pianist Roland Hanna.

Henderson had been busy with a prolific stretch of great albums for Milestone Records, including Black is the Color (featuring Carter on bass) and The Elements (with Alice Coltrane and Charlie Haden, among others). The latter session finished recording in Los Angeles exactly a week before Henderson entered the Van Gelder studio in Englewood Cliffs, on October 24, 1973. He was coming in hot. And he was landing alongside Hanna (later Sir Roland), who was just coming off recording his first solo album in fifteen years, after a long stint in the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra. Together the band deliver four Carter compositions and two covers as a single, quietly confident statement.

“A Feeling” begins in a sprightly tone, with the band playing collectively into Carter’s composition. There’s a caesura at one turn of the melody, where the held chord allows Carter to slide from the tonic up to a major third. It’s the hook, a stop-time moment that comes back with each repetition of the chorus. Henderson has the melody here, and it’s briskly and concisely played as he alternates bars with Cobham and Carter. Roland Hanna’s solo (he plays acoustic piano throughout) is reminiscent of some of Herbie Hancock’s right hand soloing in the later years of the Miles Davis Quintet: angular, along the melody but not slavishly anchored to it.

“Light Blue” is a Roland Hanna feature on a Carter-composed ballad. Hanna sensitively plays the melody and improvisations as Carter gently anchors him, quietly sliding from one tonality into another in the verse, taking a moment for a brisk flurry of notes under Hanna’s solo elsewhere. Cobham underpins the song with brushes on cymbals, understatedly accenting the beat throughout.

“117 Special” is the one concession on the record to the traditional CTI sound, courtesy of Richard Tee’s work on the Fender Rhodes as well as Cobham’s backbeat and Carter’s blues-influenced bassline. Henderson states the melody on two repetitions of the chorus and then steps back for Carter’s solo, played on his trademark piccolo bass. Here Carter pulls out all his trademark techniques—the sliding pizzicato notes, the high solo line, the flurry of notes emphasizing the solo, the descending fifths—and welds them together into a brilliant solo that keeps on going into the final chorus and the fade-out.

“Rufus” starts Side Two with a blues-influenced tune in sax and bass that moves through four or five different keys in its brief melody, with pauses for drum flourishes, before circling back to the tonic. Roland Hanna improvises his way through the key changes as though navigating a high wire, with a casually brilliant poise. He then yields the stage to Carter, who adroitly navigates the outlines of the melody in his solo with only occasional support from Cobham and Hanna. The band comes back in earnest behind Henderson’s solo. The saxophonist stretches out relatively infrequently on this record, and the brief two-chorus solo he takes here serves as a brilliant reminder of how inventively harmonic his approach is.

The familiar bass and piano opening of “All Blues” is followed by a statement of the melody in Carter’s piccolo bass, which sounds as though it were overdubbed as he continues on the low bassline on his regular double bass. A contemporary review claims he was playing both lines simultaneously—a feat of virtuosity indeed. Henderson takes the second statement of the melody and unfolds into a solo that stretches out over the modes and into sheets of notes before coming to a close. Carter’s piccolo bass returns for a solo, finding another counter rhythm inside the melody before returning to the chorus once more as Henderson plays it out, only to light up with a piccolo solo on the last reprise before dipping into an unexpected key change through which the band vamps in a slow fade-out.

Carter takes a true solo on Matt Dennis and Tom Adair’s “Will You Still Be Mine,” with a brisk romp on the melody anchored by his simultaneous scaffolding of the bassline. It’s merely the final demonstration of confident brilliance in an album full of them.

Carter’s embrace of more traditional small group jazz on All Blues seems to have been a harbinger of his direction through the rest of the decade; in addition to his trio album Third Plane, he also reunited with Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, and Tony Williams, who would play alongside Freddie Hubbard in a very special band throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s. We’ll hear some of those records, too, another time. In the meantime, he had a few more solo albums across the next few years with CTI, and continued to perform as an in-demand sideman as well; we’ll hear him in that capacity several times in the next few weeks.

You can listen to the album here:

Joe Farrell, Penny Arcade

Album of the Week, July 29, 2023

After the bombast of the last two weeks, one might see the cover of this week’s #albumoftheweek and think: phew. Small group straight ahead jazz. You’d be right about the group size—Joe Farrell brought a sextet into the studio this time, with Herbie Hancock returning on piano and adding Joe Beck on guitar, Herb Bushler on bass, Steve Gadd on drums, and Don Alias on congas. However, rather than straight-ahead sounds, this album continues the turn to jazz-funk that began on Farrell’s previous CTI date, Moon Germs.

In fact, since that record, Farrell had been playing a lot of jazz-funk, and so had his band. Penny Arcade was recorded in October 1973, a month after Herbie Hancock recorded the galactically funky Head Hunters. Steve Gadd had played sessions with Johnny Hammond and the earlier, funkier incarnation of Chuck Mangione’s band. Don Alias had, of course, played with Miles on Bitches Brew, and also played in the Tony Williams Lifetime. Herb Bushler had also played with the Lifetime and also with Melvin Van Peebles. And Joe Beck had played electric guitar on Miles’ “Circle in the Round,” the trumpeter’s first session with an electric guitar, and had performed with a number of jazz and funk combos, including a number of session tracks for James Brown. In fact, it’s likely that Farrell met Beck in Brown’s band, since both played on Get on the Good Foot.

And the album definitely shows its funk roots, though it takes a minute to get there. “Penny Arcade” starts out as a more conventional quintet number, but Joe Beck’s wah-wah laden solo quickly shifts things into the funk zone. Farrell’s solo is less adventurous than many on his early ’70s output as he sticks close to the melody, and the pocket.

That brings us to the mighty “Too High.” The opening is a faithful cover of the Stevie Wonders classic, thanks to some tasty keyboard work from Hancock, Farrell’s soprano sax, and the combined electric onslaught of Beck and Bushler. Herbie’s keyboard playing gets richer and stranger behind each iteration of the chorus, which repeats three times before Farrell takes a solo. Here he’s a little less tethered to the literal melody of the tune and it opens up into a modal exploration over top of a squelchy, funky rhythm section. Farrell’s solo continues, bridging between straight ahead melody, funky rhythm, and avant-garde voicings, before returning to the chorus. Hancock’s solo is full of the melodic flourishes that he brought to Head Hunters, but in a more limited palette; he confines himself to the Fender Rhodes, rather than the riot of synthesizers that appeared on his earlier album. Toward the end of the solo, he extends the tonality into a more explicitly minor key before returning to the melody. Bushler builds a solo around the bent notes of the hook, Beck supporting him with an increasingly spare rhythm until he drops out entirely. The final chorus narrows to a plaintive note from Farrell before returning for a coda. It’s the highlight of the album.

“Hurricane Jane,” by contrast, is a brighter uptempo number that opens with a more prominent Beck over the unified rhythm section, with Farrell sitting back further in the mix. The mood changes and clouds of Echoplexed Fender roll in for a few measures, and then it’s right back to the funk as Farrell takes a fierce Maceo-flavored solo.

“Cloud Cream” begins with Don Alias’s congas and a dual lead on the soprano sax and the Fender. It keeps its salsa flavor going through the first two minutes, then segues to a double-time section before relaxing back into the rhythm, led by Farrell on piccolo. The track is lovely and straightforward, and sets up the closer, “Geo Blue.” Pivoting between slower balladic moments and straight ahead groove, the track seems to sum up the funk, melodic feel, and approachability of the album. It is the most versatile set of sounds on the album, featuring a lovely and effects-free solo from Beck, an acoustic piano interlude from Hancock, and a recurring solo from Farrell on tenor sax that’s plaintive and winsome by turns.

Farrell thus managed a transition from avant-garde leaning straight ahead jazz to pure jazz funk and retained much of his credibility in the process. It’s a hard thing to do, and critics panned the follow-up efforts Upon This Rock and Canned Funk. Those albums were still loved by MCs, though, and were sampled by Kanye West and A Tribe Called Quest, among others. In 2008, 22 years after her father’s death, Farrell’s daughter sued West, Method Man, Redman and Common for sampling “Upon This Rock” without permission. She quietly settled the suit. So though Farrell may not have had a long career, his recordings lived on—and continued to earn money for the family. Next week we’ll hear from another CTI stalwart who is still recording today.

You can listen to the album here:

Retroactive FOMO

The lead to this morning’s The Morning newsletter from the Times could have been written by me. Like the writer, Melissa Kirsch,* I managed to go from 1990 to 1994 at UVA without ever seeing a Dave Matthews show (though I did see Boyd Tinsley perform in more avant-garde groups, notably with the late Greg Howard, in venues so small that you would end up at the next urinal over from him during the break). But it took me until “Under the Table and Dreaming” to develop an appreciation for him, at which point there was no way of seeing him in at tiny venues. I too feel like I missed out on an opportunity, even if the jam band culture that came from the DMB and its peers is assuredly not my kettle of fish.

I don’t know that indie (or “alternative,” or “college”) rock snobbery played any big role in my not going to DMB shows. If I’m honest, it was probably social snobbery—I was very self-consciously aware of my status as a non-fraternity member, to the extent that I never went to a Greek party in my four years there, and it seemed like a lot of fraternity guys went to those shows. Not my scene, I thought.

How foolish I was. If I’ve learned anything since then, it’s that life is too short to not take opportunities to do something simply because of who else is doing it. And I was in a fraternity, of sorts; we jokingly called the Virginia Glee Club a “fraternity of talent,” and our parties were probably not that different from what was happening on Rugby Road (maybe a little quieter).

* Footnote: Melissa started a couple years after me and we ended up in the same poetry class together in my fourth year. She was published in the literary mag I started, Rag & Bone, in the spring 1994 issue.

Don Sebesky, Giant Box

Album of the Week, July 22, 2023

Remember how I said, last week, that Deodato 2 represented the CTI Records sound dialed up to 11? Well, we’re going to redefine what “11” is. Giant Box, the biggest physical release that CTI ever did, lives up to its name in terms of packaging, scope, number of players, and sheer ambition. And it’s all wrapped up in the first of only two releases in the CTI discography credited to Don Sebesky as a leader, backed up by virtually every name on the CTI roster.

We’ve heard about Sebesky in a number of these reviews, and it’s worth taking a peek at his bio. Born in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, in 1937; a trombonist who studied at the Manhattan School of Music and played with Kai Winding, Claude Thornhill, Tommy Dorsey, Warren Covington, Maynard Ferguson and Stan Kenton; switched to arranging in 1960; had enormous success with his arrangements for Wes Montgomery on his 1965 album Bumpin’ for Verve Records, produced by Creed Taylor. By the time we find Giant Box in 1973, Sebesky had been working with Taylor for almost a decade, and the new success of the label enabled him to do this project.

And what a project it was! The seven tracks on Giant Box range from classical third stream crossover—only in this case it’s Stravinsky and Rachmaninoff; pop music (a Joni Mitchell cover); jazz-funk; and a handful of original compositions that channel a whole bunch of new influences, including Donald Byrd’s flirtations with spiritual jazz. There’s a choir on here, somehow. And there’s (deep breath) Freddie Hubbard, Grover Washington Jr., George Benson, Airto, Milt Jackson, vocalists Jackie Cain and Roy Kral, Dave Brubeck’s foil Paul Desmond, Hubert Laws, Joe Farrell, Ron Carter, Bob James, Billy Cobham, Jack DeJohnette, Randy Brecker, Warren Covington, and a full orchestra. Basically the whole roster of the label showed up, and it’s incredible.

“Firebird/Birds of Fire” combines Igor Stravinsky’s orchestral score for The Firebird with John McLaughlin’s fusion classic “Birds of Fire,” the title track for the second album by the Mahavishnu Orchestra, which had been released just four months before the recording sessions started. It’s as bonkers as it sounds, with a purely classical opening that only hints, via slight hits of the rhythm guitar, at the madness that lies ahead. At the 2:15 mark, the classical orchestra parts like a curtain, revealing an ensemble anchored by the tight rhythm section plus George Benson and a completely bananas string section. Hubert Laws gets the first solo over this rhythm section, followed by Freddie Hubbard, whose solo dissolves into a swirl of freaked-out strings. The strings and rhythm section fade out, an orchestral statement triumphantly re-voices the ending theme, and then the rhythm section and swirling strings return in a two minute coda, tapering in a fade-out.

After the opening track, Joni Mitchell’s “Song to a Seagull” is a quiet breath, with Paul Desmond’s alto saxophone fading in unaccompanied. Bob James enters on Fender Rhodes, joined by Ron Carter. This is mostly a quartet track, with only a hint of orchestral backing between verses and under the final chorus. The track is meditative and quiet, basically the polar opposite of “Firebird/Birds of Fire”.

“Free as a Bird” is one of the Sebesky originals on the album. The horn chart is straight out of the school of Gil Evans, but it falls away quickly to Bob James’ piano, in a trio with Carter and DeJohnette. Hubbard plays a brisk solo that’s quietly virtuosic, with all of the blaze and none of the screaming of his solo live work. Grover Washington Jr. plays a propulsive solo on the soprano sax, in only his second CTI appearance (he made his CTI debut on Randy Weston’s 1972 Blue Moses). The tempo changes to a 6/8 samba for about 30 seconds and then recapitulates the top of the tune. It’s a brilliant show.

Jimmy Webb’s “Psalm 150” was written for Revelation, a short lived Christian rock band, and first recorded on their 1970 self-titled debut album. Recast as a jazz number, it’s reminiscent of Donald Byrd’s spiritual jazz experiments on A New Perspective, albeit with slightly squarer vocals courtesy of Jackie and Roy, very approximate Latin pronunciation, and a little echo of the Beatles. Freddie Hubbard’s trumpet solo is tight, playing with meter as it weaves around the blues. When Ron Carter takes a piccolo bass solo, it shifts the whole composition into a blues jam. Bob James provides a quirky organ solo that continues to evolve the blues sound. After a final chorus, the whole thing ends in “loud, crashing cymbals.”

Paul Desmond again changes gears, with a tender rendition of Rachmaninoff’s “Vocalise.” I once went out with a girl in college who was an oboe player, who bitterly protested when she heard Branford Marsalis’s rendition of “Vocalise”: “The saxophones get all the solos! Let the oboe have this one!” Here Desmond applies enough English on his solo, alongside DeJohnette’s brilliant drums, to rightly claim the tune for the saxophone; Milt Jackson also comes at the tune sideways in his solo, evoking the underlying blues. Hubert Laws stacks on top of Jackson’s solo, then yields to the orchestra and a final chorus.

“Fly/Circles,” another Sebesky original, opens in flights of flute, courtesy of Hubert Laws and an echo loop. Sebesky sings his composition “Fly” in one of the few bad choices on the album; his is a fine composer’s voice but not up to the material. Another round of echoed flute ensues, transitioning into “Circles,” a fast blues with the tune in doubled keys and soprano sax, this time played by Joe Farrell. After an extended Farrell solo, the orchestra comes back, then falls away for Hubert Laws with Carter and DeJohnette. A final orchestral take on the tune closes out the track.

The closing number, “Semi-Tough” represents the jazz-funk side of CTI quite ably, with Sebesky on a variety of keyboards, Grover Washington Jr. on sax, Billy Cobham on drums, Ron Carter on a rare electric bass, and George Benson on an effects-heavy guitar, plus orchestra and voices. The guitar effect pedal threatens to sink the track; fortunately Washington’s sax pulls the track back up to a higher standard of performance. It’s not the most successful jazz-funk track in the CTI catalog, but it’s a good closing number here.

Giant Box is not subtle, but it’s surprisingly effective at showcasing all the different elements of the CTI sound, thanks to a cast of thousands and some excellent arranging from Sebesky. We’ll hear his arrangements again, but our next few CTI albums will be smaller-scale affairs—though no less funky.

You can listen to the album here:

Deodato, Deodato 2

Album of the Week, July 15, 2023

Here is a turning point in the CTI Records story. We’ve discussed how, Freddie Hubbard’s albums aside, much of the label’s output was beginning to coalesce around a formula: jazzy instrumental pop, classical “third stream” style crossover, big orchestration applied subtly, covers of recent pop songs, solid rhythm section with impeccable jazz credentials. This record takes many of the aspects of the formula and cranks them up to extremes, while discarding some of the parts that gave the label “jazz cred” among more traditional listeners. And it did it with one of the biggest selling artists on the label.

Eumir Deodato is a Brazilian keyboardist, arranger and composer. Building his career in bossa nova, he released Prelude, his first US album, on CTI in January 1973. It was a monster, becoming the biggest seller the label ever had and hitting Number 3 on the Billboard albums chart. Its first track, “Also Sprach Zarathustra (2001),” went all the way to Number 2 on the Hot 100. It was a phenomenon, and Creed Taylor, who knew how to strike when the iron was hot, quickly got Deodato back in the studio in April and May 1973 to record Deodato 2, the follow-up. The album features the instrumental pop, classical crossover, pop song covers, and big orchestration, but there’s nothing subtle about it, and you won’t find Ron Carter, Jack DeJohnette, or Herbie Hancock in the orchestra. That’s not to say there were no notable players; Hubert Laws, Stanley Clarke, Billy Cobham and Jon Faddis, who had just turned 20 and was beginning a long career as an in-demand studio musician, all appear on the record. Also worthy of note is another session player, guitarist John Tropea, who would later appear on dozens of significant recordings, including Paul Simon’s 1975 hit “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover.” But the sound here, driven by Deodato’s own arrangements, is different: keyboard-heavy, slightly muddy, and effects driven.

This is most evident in “Nights in White Satin,” the opening track.* The opening notes sound sludgy, until John Tropea’s guitar comes in, supported by a blast from the horns. All of a sudden the arrangement is in double time and Tropea is playing like he just dropped in from a Jimi Hendrix cover band. Deodato’s keyboard playing is less chunky, funky Fender Rhodes and more pitch-bendy early 1970’s pastiche. The fast section approaches the chukka-chukka sound of a million 1970s TV theme songs. In fairness to Deodato, this was mid-1973 and the sound hadn’t yet calcified into cliché; but it hasn’t aged well.

Continuing to follow the CTI formula, after a pop song cover comes a classical third stream take, in this case of Ravel’s “Pavane for a Dead Princess.” This one is given over to strings and a more acoustic sounding keyboard. The arrangement is considerably less sludgy than in “Nights” but suffers from a common problem in covers of this work: tempo. It calls to mind Ravel’s comment to Charles Oulmont following a performance of the work; he observed “the piece was called ‘Pavane for a dead princess’, not ‘dead pavane for a princess’.” The arrangement gathers some amount of interest at the 3:30 mark as the keyboard leads into a key change, but then everything dies away again.

Deodato’s original composition “Skyscrapers” opens with a heavy Stanley Clarke bass line into the main theme, which feels more than a little like a 70’s cop show theme pastiche, with the rhythm guitar chugging away under a bright optimistic theme in the horns. Here the sound is more successful, and when Tropea’s guitar arrives it feels more organically connected to the music. Deodato’s own solo features some inventive use of synth timbres, surrounded by the sunny horns. At over six and a half minutes long, the track doesn’t wear out its welcome.

Side 2 kicks off* with “Super Strut,” the other Deodato original on the album. Deodato layers Fender Rhodes and other keyboards into the funky opening line, which sets up the main theme in Tropea’s guitar and Hubert Laws’ flute. The tune is a straight ahead jazz-rock-soul number, with more than a little debt to Isaac Hayes (whose “Theme from Shaft” was by now two years in the rear view mirror but whose trademark sounds were just starting to appear in jazz-rock fusion). Throughout the pedal effects on the guitar solo are a little raspy around the edges, as if passed through a square wave filter. The orchestra is not subtle here, with layers of strings and horns slathered over the choruses with a broad brush.

And speaking of not subtle, Deodato closes out the set with a bluesy riff on the Rhodes that leads into a familiar riff in the guitar, and then the orchestra comes in and oh my God they’re playing “Rhapsody in Blue.” The opening chorus feels more than a little like the disco version of the Star Wars theme, all the romance and delight of Gershwin’s rubato flattened out into a four-on-the-floor stomp. Fortunately the solos are a more straightforward blues vamp on a single chord; it’s almost a relief not to hear the band attempting to solo over Gershwin’s chords. As a blues-rock number it’s not bad, but it’s definitely not “Rhapsody in Blue.”

All in all, Deodato 2 is all the signature bits of the CTI Records sound dialed up to 11: the strings, the pop songs, the classical crossover, and the jazz-funk-rock fusion. That much of it sounds hopelessly dated to modern ears isn’t necessarily the fault of the musicians, but some measure of blame must be laid at Deodato’s feet due to the arrangements. Fortunately he got better; his orchestral arrangements over the years graced albums by Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, Paul Desmond, and even Bjork (on Post, Telegram, and Homogenic). He hasn’t issued an album since 2010, but one suspects he could. But he might just be happy at home with his family, including daughter Kennya, who married Stephen Baldwin, and granddaughter Hailey, who married Justin Bieber.

We won’t be reviewing more Deodato albums in this space, but next week we’ll check out another example of CTI turned up to 11, courtesy of another of the label’s great arrangers.

* A note on the running order. The original LP opened with “Nights in White Satin” leading off Side 1 and “Super Strut” opening side 2. The 1988 CD reissue flipped the sides around, perhaps figuring that “Super Strut” was the stronger opening lead; later reissues have restored the original running order.

You can listen to the album here:

Freddie Hubbard, Music Is Here

Album of the Week, July 8, 2023

I’m taking a small detour this week from our review of the CTI Records discography (through the lens of my personal collection) to check out a recently published live recording of Freddie Hubbard’s from 1973. Coming just weeks after Freddie Hubbard and Stanley Turrentine, In Concert Vol. 1, this is a completely different lineup of players and in many ways a different sound, but it’s all anchored by the greatness of Hubbard’s early-1970s compositions.

Hubbard recorded In Concert Vol. 1 on March 3 and 4, 1973 in Chicago and Detroit. This new set was recorded on March 25 live in Studio 104, Maison de la Radio (ORTF), Paris, with a new group of musicians. You won’t hear Ron Carter, Herbie Hancock or Jack Dejohnette on this session. Instead, Hubbard put together a touring band, his first “regular” quintet, who would perform and record with Hubbard both in the studio and on tour throughout the 1970s. On bass was Kent Brinkley, who had previously played with Monk Montgomery and Charles Tyler. Michael Carvin had previously appeared on drums with Doug Carn and Henry Franklin, but made his name with this band and went on to record almost 100 different records as a sideman. George Cables had played piano with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers and had appeared on Joe Henderson’s great Milestone Records recordings of the early 1970s. And Junior Cook was the eldest member of the group, having debuted on a 1958 Kenny Burrell recording and played with Burrell, Horace Silver, Blue Mitchell, John Patton and others through the 1960s.

True to the album version, “Sky Dive” opens the record with a statement from rhythm section that quickly segues into the opening melodic statement from the horn players. After the opening verses, Cook takes the first solo, and immediately displays the reason he’s on board; his playing is a fiery combination of Coltrane-inspired runs and Joe Henderson-style melodies. Brinkley takes the second solo. His bass solo stays in the more traditional bass octave instead of the piccolo range that Carter was beginning to favor, exploring multiple tones around the melody before settling back into the groove. Hubbard then finally enters at around the seven minute mark, playing a series of blisteringly fast runs around the theme. George Cables’ solo is a little low in the mix on the recording, but his improvisational model is clear as he takes a more mellow approach to the tune. The horns come back in after Cables’ single chorus solo. We don’t hear a lot from Carvin on the track aside from his precise cymbal work; he’s supportive but doesn’t raise his head above the fray. The overall impression the band leaves at the end of the track is affability.

That easygoing feel is shattered by the opening of “The Intrepid Fox,” which follows “Sky Dive” closely. If this tune was raucous on Red Clay, it’s almost apocalyptic here. As the horns lay into the tune, Carvin is let off the chain and creates a ruckus, followed closely by Cables providing an extended vamp of an intro. Just before the two minute mark the full band enters to state the theme. Hubbard takes the first solo here, keeping his altitude high throughout and throwing out sonic effects left and right. At about the 6 minute mark he essays a brief melodic improvisation but quickly returns to the sonic explorations. Cook takes over and makes up for any missing melodic exploration, taking the theme into several different modes while still reflecting Hubbard’s high improvisations. Cables has a more extended solo here but is still very low in the mix. His approach is harmonically similar to Herbie’s, and his solo illustrates the modal construction of the song—the melody is basically a pedal note on the fifth of the scale while the chords move underneath it. Carvin takes an extended solo that transitions into a meditation on the cymbals, inspiring a chuckle and some Dizzy Gillespie-esque vocal improvisations from Hubbard. The band comes back together for a quick recap of the tune and then hits it, leaving the audience clapping for more. It’s almost 23 minutes long but feels gone in a flash.

“Povo” starts out in an unexpectedly tender mood, again omitting the spoken intro from the album version on Sky Dive, but launching into funk overdrive courtesy of the indefatigable bass line from Brinkley. The whole rhythm section feels looser here, with Carvin’s fills bouncing against the elasticity of Cables’ keys. Hubbard and Cook render a playful take on the alternating horns of the main tune, with Hubbard biting off the ends of phrases and beginning to improvise against the melodic line even within the head. Cook again provides his trademark blend of melodic improvisation and Coltrane-like obligatos, hitting some Freddie-like high notes at the end of the solo. Hubbard provides some support under the third verse of Cook’s solo, but plays away from the microphone so as to leave Cook in the spotlight. Carvin takes twelve bars of funky drummer alongside Brinkley, then fades back until all we get is Brinkley’s bass, heavily distorted in the low end but very funky. The group comes back together at the end for a seriously funky finish, and the track ends with the audience clapping and calling for an encore.

The band returns to the stage at the end for a brilliant rendition of “First Light.” Out of the primordial soup of the abstract opening comes the continuo of the rhythm section, rocking back and forth between A♭minor and a E♭ diminished 7th suspension, which powers the verse throughout as the horns enter at around the four minute mark. Hubbard unleashes a blistering solo that combines some of his patented pyrotechnics with melodic improvisation around the base chords. At one point he lands on a bum note, but incorporates it brilliantly into the solo, landing on it repeatedly in a funk counterpoint. He then takes off into the stratosphere for a verse before bringing the pitch back down in a series of circling patterns, continuing to drop the “off” note (an augmented sixth) into the improvisation and using it to push the key higher. He even drops a little homage to Stanley Turrentine, echoing the latter’s quotation of “It Ain’t Necessarily So” in the Chicago concert three weeks prior. Finally concluding a seven minute long solo, Hubbard steps back at almost exactly the halfway point of the track, yielding the floor to Cook, who takes a solo turn on flute. Cook’s flute is a more aggressive voice than Hubert Laws’, but it’s still a respite from the energy of the track, and it’s only two choruses long. Cables takes the floor for a solo that alternates a counter melody with outbursts of the diminished 7th chord, extended transitions between the two, and general groove. Throughout the keyboard solo, Carvin’s drumming gets progressively looser, continuing to keep time while exploring different aspects of the rhythm coming from Cables. The band comes back together for one more chorus, then Hubbard plays a sort of extended outro, Sketches of Spain style, taking the main melody at a greatly stretched tempo but still dropping in flourishes while the rest of the band gets quieter, until he finally slowly sinks, seemingly into the earth, and finally into silence. Applause, one last statement of a “theme” for the band, and then the end.

In many ways this recording captured a turning point for Hubbard’s 1970s career. He was to make one more studio album with CTI Records; Keep Your Soul Together was released at the end of 1973 and featured Cook, Cables and Brinkley alongside Ron Carter, with Ralph Penland on drums, Juno Lewis on percussion, and Aurell Ray on guitar. After that he jumped to Warner Bros., where he made a series of highly commercial but critically panned records. He spent most of the late 1970s as a member of a new quintet with Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, Tony Williams, and Wayne Shorter; we’ll hear about them in another column. He also was fighting a substance abuse problem, and suffered a lip injury in 1992 that effectively put an end to the high level of performance that characterized his greatest music.

With Hubbard’s departure from CTI, one of the main ingredients of their sound, the straight-ahead jazz core that he represented, was unavoidably diminished. Next time we’ll hear one of the elements that rose to take its place.

Listen: As with many bootlegged sessions there have been many versions of this set released over the years. While there’s no full stream of the released album (which features considerably cleaned up audio compared to the bootlegs), you can actually watch the live-in-studio concert on YouTube! Featuring “Straight Life” and “Here’s That Rainy Day” instead of “Sky Dive” and “Povo,” but dating from the same sessions, here’s a great view of Hubbard’s band in concert.

Freddie Hubbard and Stanley Turrentine, In Concert Vol. 1

Album of the Week, July 1, 2023

This week’s album is taken in chronological order of recording rather than release; there were a couple of CTI recordings that were released between Blues Farm and In Concert, Vol. 1 that I’ll come back and cover later. But this seemed to be a good time to start to tell the story of how Freddie Hubbard left CTI, and what happened after.

It’s only a slight exaggeration to call the early 1970s the peak of Hubbard’s recording career. After all, he had had some very successful albums on Blue Note and Impulse in the 1960s. But his fame after Red Clay, Straight Life, First Light and Sky Dive was at its highest point. Sky Dive actually charted on the Billboard 200 for seven weeks; the fact that it peaked at #165 is beside the point. (Eight other Hubbard albums hit the charts following Sky Dive, proving the point that nothing succeeds like success.) And so early 1973 found him on tour with a constellation of CTI stalwarts.

Co-headlining was Stanley Turrentine, who followed up Sugar with Gilberto with Turrentine and Salt Song. On guitar was Eric Gale, who as a teenager had visited John Coltrane at his house and jammed with the titan, and who had recorded with Yusef Lateef, David “Fathead” Newman, Mongo Santamaria, Johnny “Hammond” Smith, Grover Washington Jr., and both Hubbard and Turrentine at different points—and who would go on to perform on Roberta Flack’s Killing Me Softly. The rest of the band featured Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Jack DeJohnette, who collectively at this point might have been the most astonishing rhythm section working in jazz.

The performances on In Concert Vol 1 were recorded on March 3, 1974 at the Chicago Opera House, and the following night at the Ford Auditorium in Detroit. And they were fiery. Side one of the record is given over entirely to “Povo,” but where the album version had a spoken word intro from Airto, here we get just some prime Herbie Hancock electric piano before the groove is introduced, this time with Gale on guitar deepening the groove atop Carter and DeJohnette. (I should note that DeJohnette’s presence in Cobham’s stead did not make anything less funky, but the sonic palette employed by the drums is broader.) Hancock’s piano, run through a pedal that’s distorting the sound a bit, is prominent in the mix, and it’s a little hard to hear Carter. But what you can hear is that everyone is playing their asses off. Freddie’s solo takes us all over the place sonically, and it’s over six minutes into the track before Turrentine arrives. The first few verses are taken in line with the funk-soul leanings of the overall track, but beginning about a minute into his solo we begin to hear some influences from Coltrane’s chromaticism and sonic palette.

Turrentine takes his solo into the stratosphere, following Hubbard’s lead, but then brings the sax down into its growling low range as well. The whole thing demonstrates convincingly how he earned his co-headlining place on the album. Herbie Hancock’s solo sits solidly within his soulful earlier work, with at first only a few hints of the “out-there” sound of his Mwandishi band or of the even funkier eruptions of the Headhunters band that he would debut later that year. And yet they’re there in abundance, in the later moments of the track, as he takes the music into a different meter against the steady groove. Carter’s solo, taken in the higher register of his bass’s sound, plays with the steady pattern of the groove, and finds a deep melody within it. The latter part of his solo has some decoration at the edges from Gale’s guitar and Hancock’s piano and becomes a pure moment of funk. The whole thing is a deliciously stretched out nineteen minutes of the tightest possible jazz-funk sound imaginable.

“Gibraltar” is a tune we haven’t reviewed in album form; it opens Turrentine’s classic CTI album Salt Song, his second after Sugar. The album version featured the full-on Don Sebesky sound, but the live version of the song here opens with a ferocious Jack DeJohnette solo that transitions out of a set of flourishes across his kit into a repeated pattern on the bell. Carter picks up the bassline and the band is off to the races. Hubbard’s solo emerges seamlessly from the texture of the opening choruses but effectively builds a kind of sonic superiority by virtue of higher pitch and his trademarked rapid articulation. He then drops back, trading shorter rhythmic passages with Hancock before reclaiming the stratosphere once more. He then slowly descends into a more normal tessitura, trading thoughts with the saxophone before finally stepping back.

Turrentine stretches into the tune, dropping a little “It Ain’t Necessarily So” into his solo at around the eight-minute mark and then transitioning out through a quotation from “A Love Supreme.” Hancock’s solo skews slightly more abstract on this track than it did on “Povo,” embracing the series of chord changes at the heart of the chorus and elaborating them. When DeJohnette comes in he maintains the energy of his initial flourishes, playing polyrhythmic patterns in the tom and snare before engaging an extended solo on the cymbals. The horns return to the theme with four minutes remaining, and play out two verses before segueing into an extended group improvisation in which the horns play against each other and Hancock. It’s a delightful meltdown, ending with Hancock’s Echoplexed Fender disappearing into outer space and the horns bottoming out into a low growl.

In Concert Volume One arrived at an interesting time in CTI Records’ history, as the different ingredients of the sound—solid jazz, orchestral arrangements, soul-funk influences, pop covers—were beginning to swirl together into a formula. In this context, this album stands out as a sort of a proud throwback to straight-ahead live jazz playing, supported by one of the finest bands Freddie Hubbard ever had. Next week we’ll pause our CTI review to check out a recently released recording that documents another episode on Hubbard’s tour in 1973, before we dive back into the archives of the label that Creed Taylor built.