Tag: creedtaylor

Joe Farrell, Moon Germs

Album of the Week, June 10, 2023

There have been times in my life where I’ve picked up a record (or, more commonly back in the day, a CD) based on the artist, or based on hearing a song, or (especially with jazz) based on another performer who appeared on the album. I am usually not a cover buyer. But sometimes a cover image gets stuck in my head and I buy the album without knowing anything else about it.

Such was the case with Moon Germs, the first album I bought by Joe Farrell. I was searching for other records on eBay—probably looking for Herbie Hancock albums—and this cover popped up. I stared at it: the geometric forms, the slab serif typography, and most of all that weird eyeball. This was back in 2018, before I had heard of Farrell, before I fell down the CTI rabbit hole. It didn’t matter; I had to pick this up.

I mean, how could I not?

Look into the giant floating eyeball of Joe Farrell. (Or someone’s eyeball, anyway.)

The players on the session didn’t hurt. By this time Farrell, who was still performing with Chick Corea in the Return to Forever band, had broadened beyond the Corea sidemen who backed him on Joe Farrell Quartet and Outback. This session featured Herbie Hancock on electric piano, Stanley Clarke on bass, and Jack DeJohnette on drums. Together the band put together a mighty groove that, for the first time in Farrell’s solo output, fell squarely on the jazz-funk side of the CTI house sound.

Farrell’s “Great Gorge” opens the album, with a firmly squelchy bass line from Clarke, doubled in the electric piano by Hancock. Farrell plays a happy, major key melody on the soprano sax that, at 1:15, abruptly shifts into a modal pulse, then accelerates into a higher gear. The second theme and Farrell’s extended solo have the flavor of a more frenetic version of The Joe Farrell Quartet. Throughout Clarke’s bass playing is remarkable. He sounds simultaneously like Ron Carter and Sonny Sharrock, with both walking bass and slithering guitar-like sheets of notes happening, somehow, simultaneously. Herbie’s solo explores a sequence of chromatic chords, steering into a sequence of celestial, space-jazz like clusters before everyone falls away but Jack Dejohnette. He rolls like thunder through his solo before firmly bringing everyone back to the original theme. The whole thing is both breathtaking and a sly subversion of expectations for what “the CTI sound” should deliver. It’s also a hook factory; apparently no fewer than ten artists have sampled that swampy bass line from the intro.

The title track sees the performers solo around a sustained ground pattern in Clarke’s bass in a kind of agitated modal twelve-bar blues. The improvisations follow in the tracks of the middle free section of “Great Gorge,” but with a rhythmic twist: where the first track was frenetic, here the blues and pulses of swing anchor the track and keep it moving forward.

Corea may not have played on the album, but Farrell was still working closely with him, and his “Time’s Lie” opens Side B. Corea’s tune begins as a subtly wistful waltz, but opens up into a fast 4/4 with Latin-influenced rhythms. Farrell’s solo remains relentlessly upbeat and joyous over a continued ground in the bass and drums. When he yields the floor to Herbie Hancock, we are reminded ever so slightly of the version of “Gingerbread Man” the pianist recorded with Miles, both in the harmonic imagination and in the one-handed solo approach. After another chorus and a moment of exposed bass heartbeat, the band falls back into the waltz time opening. It might be the most beautiful track Farrell had recorded to this point.

Stanley Clarke’s “Bass Folk Song” closes things out. Far and away the most accessible tune on the album, Clarke opens with a melodic bass line (also oft-sampled) over which Farrell states the theme on flute, the two of them trading rhythmic patterns even as Clarke stays close to that V – I progression that serves as the focal point of the song. Behind them, Hancock surges to the fore, pivoting from chunky jazz-funk chords into splashes of Echoplexed sound. The solo reminds us that his great run of albums on Warner Brothers, spanning from the accessible funk of Fat Albert Rotunda to his mind bending recordings with the Mwandishi band, had been made over the preceding three years. Farrell’s closing solo fades out, as if nodding to a never-ending dialog between the melodic and free sides of his musical identity.

The whole album covers a lot of ground, from jazz-funk workout to free jazz freak-out. To Farrell’s credit, it hangs together coherently enough to remain compelling and listenable all the way through. He wouldn’t remain balanced at this knife-edge of jazz styles forever, though, as we’ll hear in a few weeks. But next time we’ll hear from a new voice on the CTI label—and learn how he got a boost from a voice we’ve heard many times before.

You can listen to the album here:

Freddie Hubbard, First Light

Album of the Week, May 13, 2023

In the first two Freddie Hubbard albums that we’ve heard in our exploration of the CTI Records discography, we’ve heard straight-ahead small group jazz, though colored with fusion and jazz-funk. On First Light, his third outing as leader for CTI, his works take on a little more of the colors of Creed Taylor’s universe, with strings, pop music covers, classical arrangements, and casts of thousands, including Ron Carter, Hubert Laws, Jack DeJohnette, Herbie Hancock, Airto, George Benson, joined by Phil Kraus on vibes and a 20 piece orchestra. Throughout it all soars his serene trumpet and flugelhorn, marking this record as undeniably Freddie despite the new ingredients.

The title track is a classic Hubbard composition, with a floating minor-key melody played by the bandleader across a repeating funk accompaniment. Hubbard’s form is without par throughout his solo, beginning with the achingly beautiful opening solo that precedes the first statement of the theme. Unusually for Hubbard, there is an interlude for Hubert Laws and strings in the middle of the first statement before Hubbard returns with the theme once more, then ventures into the solo proper. Here the motifs are more subtle than in some of his solos, featuring some extended passages played on a single note, one stretching as far as 16 bars and punctuated by a sting from the orchestra, which otherwise supports the sound without calling attention to itself. George Benson and Hubert Laws also have solo moments, but for the most part this one is all Freddie, and it fades out the last closing vamp of the music.

What comes back in is unexpected. Unlike the rest of the CTI stable, Hubbard had not really played much contemporary pop music on record, which makes his introductory notes to “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey” even more startling. The Paul and Linda McCartney single made its first chart appearance on August 2, 1971, a mere six weeks before Hubbard entered the studio to record First Light, so this may have felt to the trumpeter like striking while the iron was hot. The work, legendarily cobbled together from three different proto-songs, is here played in three different styles: a pure ballad for the opening “we’re so sorry, Uncle Albert,” a funk-jazz voice on “Admiral Halsey notified me,” and an ecstatically free take on “hands across the water.” Throughout it all Hubbard and his band are foregrounded, with the orchestra adding only spots of color throughout. There are so many quotable moments throughout the arrangement, including Ron Carter’s mic-dropping solo halfway through as the rest of the orchestra falls away (later sampled by the Beastie Boys for 1992’s “Professor Booty”!). It’s an exciting and thoughtful arrangement, as striking today as it must have been in 1971.

“Moment to Moment,” a quieter ballad by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer, opens with a pensive dialog between Ron Carter’s bass and Hubert Laws’ flute, underscored by the string section. Hubbard plays the melody straight, but here the real star is Sebesky’s sensitive orchestration. He may have been notorious for working so fast that his scores were sometimes as unreadable as a physician’s handwriting, but at his peak there was no one better, as this track shows.

“Yesterday’s Dreams” continues with the orchestra taking a more prominent role, as Hubbard, here playing a muted trumpet, states the melody of one of the few tracks credited to Sebesky as co-composer. Ron Carter’s bass is a prominent heartbeat throughout, with Herbie Hancock’s Fender Rhodes adding a plaintive note. Hubert Laws and the woodwinds in the orchestra call to each other under the last bit of Hubbard’s solo, with Carter adding portamento to his bass obbligato as the track fades.

“Lonely Town” is an unexpected conclusion to the album, with the woodwinds and strings stating the melody of the Leonard Bernstein show tune, then suddenly giving way to Herbie and Ron Carter laying down a groove under Hubbard’s flugelhorn, accompanied only by the lightest of cymbal work from DeJohnette. The second verse picks up steam and features a magnificent bit of improvisation from Hubbard with imaginative underpinnings by Herbie and Carter. At the end the orchestra has the final word, closing out the track with notes of pensiveness and hope.

Hubbard’s work on First Light shows the trumpeter evolving and growing, and gaining a new audience in the process. The trilogy of albums we’ve listened to so far, beginning with Red Clay and continuing with Straight Life, is brought to a natural conclusion here, with all facets of the trumpeter represented. While Hubbard would continue to record for CTI, this three-album stretch is arguably unequalled in his discography for excellence and range. We’ll listen to some of those later performances soon, but next week we’ll check in with another CTI veteran as he journeys into less-traveled realms.

You can listen to the album here:

Wes Montgomery, Road Song

Album of the Week, April 1, 2023

Though still technically under the banner of A&M Records, Creed Taylor’s CTI had already firmly established its visual identity by the late 1960s, as we saw with last week’s look at Wave. Today we explore some of the development of its sound by looking at the twelfth record in the catalog, a posthumous release from guitarist Wes Montgomery.

Montgomery had begun his career in the late 1940s with Lionel Hampton, having taught himself the guitar at night while working during the day for the milk company. When the big band gig didn’t pan out, he returned to working day jobs while forming a combo with his brothers and playing small clubs. He was discovered in 1958 by Cannonball Adderley, who recommended to Orrin Keepnews that he sign Montgomery to his Riverside Records label. Montgomery went on to record a well regarded string of albums on Riverside before leaving in 1963 for Verve to record with Creed Taylor.

Taylor saw the potential for Montgomery’s clean, melodic style to cross over into the instrumental pop market and recorded a series of albums that established him as a bankable star, beginning with Movin’ Wes and including the great Bumpin’, which featured the guitarist with one of the great over the top ‘60s pop string sections on the title track. The orchestra on this recording was arranged by Don Sebesky. We’ll hear a lot about Sebesky over the course of these reviews; for now I’ll just observe that this is the first name in this column that I first saw in a Boston Pops program.

So it was that, following a string of recordings for Verve that include some great small group sessions with Jimmy Smith and a lot of instrumental pop, Montgomery recorded several sessions for Taylor’s sub-label CTI, leading off the label’s discography with A Day in the Life and returning to Rudy Van Gelder’s Englewood Cliffs studio on May 7 and 8, 1968 to record this album. Just over a month later he was dead, having suffered a heart attack at home in Indianapolis at the age of 45. Was the final recording he made in his lifetime worthy of his legacy?

I think it kind of depends on how you look at it. A jazz session it’s not, and it’s not the best instrumental pop he ever recorded either. Sebesky’s arrangement on “Bumpin’” is so legendary that it led off a 1990s Verve compilation of “acid jazz.” The arrangements on Road Song, alas, are not quite so stunning. Montgomery’s guitar does not quite engage with the strings and horns and harpsichord(!) around him. But the band that Taylor assembled here is no group of slouches, with Herbie Hancock, drummer Grady Tate, pianist Hank Jones (that’s him on the harpsichord), and the great bassist Richard Davis joining the strings. The overall effect is pleasant enough, though it must be said that the main pleasures of the album are Montgomery’s legendary touch with the guitar and not the setting Taylor puts him in.

So far we’ve heard the more instrumental pop, almost easy listening side of the CTI label. We’ll hear a very different sound next time, one that would come to dominate the way the label was perceived—and change the course of jazz as it entered the 1970s.

You can listen to the album here:

Antônio Carlos Jobim: Wave

Album of the Week, March 25, 2023

We’re going to enter a new sonic space for the next stretch of this column. While it’s still jazz by most definitions of the word, some of the albums might be in a hyphenated genre. Some of them might even have strings and feel a little more like “smooth” than most of the recordings we’ve featured so far. That’s certainly true of the first recording from the CTI label that we will feature in this series.

Antônio Carlos Jobim was 31 when his music came to worldwide attention, through recordings made by the Brazilian singer/guitarist João Gilberto, but he didn’t become really famous until five years later, when Gilberto teamed up with saxophonist Stan Getz for one of the most famous albums of all time. I can’t overemphasize how pivotal 1963’s Getz/Gilberto was. Featuring a full slate of Jobim’s compositions, as well as the composer himself at the piano, two of the tracks,“Corcovado” and “The Girl from Ipanema,” became international hits. If earlier recordings like Vince Guaraldi’s Jazz Impressions of Black Orpheus and Getz’s Jazz Samba had lit a small flame beneath the kindling of America’s appetite for Brazilian music, Getz/Gilberto blew on the fire until it became a roaring inferno. The trend was not lost on the producer of Getz/Gilberto, Creed Taylor.

We’ve met Taylor before, and have talked about the first label he founded, the seminal Impulse! Records, as well as the work he began at Verve where he recorded Bill Evans as well as Getz and Gilberto—and Jobim. By 1967 Taylor was beginning to take increasing creative control of the recordings he issued at Verve, going so far as to start a sub-label, CTI (for Creed Taylor Incorporated) at which he could exert a significant amount of influence over everything from the graphic identity (always a priority for Taylor from the earliest orange and black days of Impulse!) to the sound.

The CTI graphic identity changed slightly over the years of the label, but the foundations—strong typography (initially, Helvetica), use of white (or black) space on the cover to set off striking photographs, heavy gatefold jackets with more photos (usually black and white) inside—remained consistent throughout the label’s run. I’ve made a point to seek out CTI recordings in used record shops and they always have a substantial-ness to them that anticipates the solidity of modern reissues. Taylor was disinterested in cutting corners.

The same applies to the musicians that Taylor brought to the studio. There was often (but not always) a string section; in this recording the string arrangements and conducting is by Claus Ogerman, who had previously worked with Billie Holiday and Frank Sinatra and who scored some 60-70 albums with Taylor. The rest of the orchestra with Jobim is unusual: no trumpets, no saxophones, but trombone, French horn, flute, drums and bass, the latter played by the great Ron Carter. And Jobim plays piano, but also guitar and harpsichord. Taylor was going for a definitive kind of sound. There is no edge to this sound, only the swelling and receding of the compositions. In lesser hands, this formula might easily disintegrate into “easy listening” pablum, but with Jobim at the keyboard and the intelligence of Ogerman in the arrangements, the sound sparkles and pulses with interest.

The record does not feature Jobim’s earlier bossa nova hits; there’s no “Desafinado,” no “Ipanema.” But what’s here is highly rewarding as well. The title track is a quietly soulful meditation, enlivened by flute and the harpsichord playing of Jobim. “The Red Blouse” is more in the classic samba mode, with its dancelike rhythms anchored by the redoubtable Ron Carter and the drummer, whose inventive snare work keeps everything hopping. (There are three percussionists credited, Bobby Rosengarden, Domum Romāo, and Claudio Slon; Slon is called out as a “mastermind” of the recording in the liner notes and is the one behind the drum kit.) Many of the tracks, including “Look to the Sky,” feature soulful trombone work by Urbie Green, with assistance from Jimmy Cleveland.

If one is to criticize any aspect of the recording, which was engineered by the great Rudy Van Gelder, it is the sound of Jobim’s piano, which sometimes lacks the punch and clarity that we hear in other RVG recordings; this may be due to the strings in the mix. By contrast, Jobim’s guitar, front and center on “Batidinha” and “Triste,” is recorded clearly and is a model of rhythmic and chordal precision, a cool center around which the rest of the tracks are built. “Captain Bacardi” closes out with a pulsing bossa nova rhythm on the drums, piano and guitar, a brisk trombone solo, percussive notes from the cuíca, and a seriously funky Ron Carter bass line. The track simmers along, threatening to bubble over at any moment and belying any thought that we’ve

We are likely to hear more Jobim as I continue my survey of jazz records, but our next stop on our tour through CTI will take us in a slightly different direction. We’ll check that out next time.

You can listen to the album here:

Bill Evans, Montreux II

Album of the Week, February 25, 2023

It’s a little unfair to say that Bill Evans’ best albums were recorded in the 1960s. He had a productive decade in the 1970s, recording for Columbia, Milestone and Fantasy. But his most enduring compositions were written in the 1960s. We’ve already heard many of them; they continued to feature on the many live albums he recorded during the decade. Picking up a Bill Evans recording from the 1970s, therefore, the odds were that it was live and covered familiar ground… mostly.

Much of Evans’ creativity during these years, ultimately, was in his interpretation and in his song choices. Both elements are broadly on display in Montreux II, Evans’ second live recording from the Montreux Jazz Festival and his final recording for producer Creed Taylor, this time on Taylor’s own CTI label.

We’re going to hear a lot more about CTI in coming weeks (spoiler alert!), but in this early stage of evolution the label was a bright cross-section of straight ahead jazz, proto-jazz-funk, and some reasonably out-there avant-garde stuff. Consider that the first recorded artists in the CTI 6000 series included flautist Hubert Laws, Freddie Hubbard in an early jazz-funk masterpiece, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Joe Farrell, and this Evans date. There is, however, very little of the hallmarks of the classic CTI period here – no big string section orchestrated by Don Sebesky, no jazz-funk, very little in the way of nods to popular music. There’s just the Bill Evans Trio, doing what they did best.

This incarnation of the trio saw Jack Dejohnette (who had left to join Miles following At the Montreux Jazz Festival) with drummer Marty Morell, who would work with Evans and bassist Eddie Gómez from 1968 to 1974. Morell brought steady support and a solid presence behind the kit; while his level of creativity was not as high as Dejohnette, his fills and statements were more assertive than those that Paul Motian, for instance, had brought to some of the earlier trio recordings.

The tone, overall, is jubilant. Evans was playing in an extroverted manner here (relatively speaking). Tempos are brighter and even the ballads have the hint of a smile at the corner of their mouths, metaphorically speaking. The repertoire, as noted above, is a combination of familiar Evans compositions (“Very Early,” “34 Skidoo,” “Peri’s Scope”), covers of well loved favorites (“How My Heart Sings,” “I Hear a Rhapsody,” “Israel”), and a surprise. Starting in the 1970s Evans began to turn toward modern pop songs for repertoire, and this record features a surprisingly tender cover of the 1966 Bacharach/David hit “Alfie.” The first half of the ballad is entirely Evans and Gómez, but Morell joins them for a rhythmically jubilant verse before the trio returns to the more contemplative tone of the opening, with Gómez’s bass providing propulsive energy under the melody. It serves as a blueprint for the whole album.

One of the saddest questions we must ask about Evans’ career is where he would be without his crippling heroin addiction. Unlike past addicts we’ve seen like Philly Joe Jones, John Coltrane, and others, Evans was always careful not to let his habit interfere with his performances or his studio work (except for one memorable occasion when he accidentally hit a nerve with the needle and had to play largely one-handed for a week), but it clearly became an escape for him, and one that was only replaced by cocaine or alcohol on the brief occasions when he managed to get off the drug, from the time he got hooked in 1958 to his death in 1980. It has been described as the “slowest suicide in history,” and there’s no doubt that it interfered with his compositional creativity. But throughout that incredible ear remained as the hallmark of this most sensitive pianist. And his work remains as an influential milestone on jazz, one that a variety of unlikely musicians would pay tribute to after his death. We’ll hear one of those recordings next time.

You can listen to the album here:

Bill Evans, Trio 64

Album of the Week, February 4, 2023

Bill Evans was having a good year (or two) in 1962 and 1963. Following the sessions that produced Moon Beams and How My Heart Sings!, his contract was picked up by Verve Records, where Creed Taylor was still in full swing. He recorded a handful of additional sessions for Riverside in , including material that appeared on Interplay and on the great posthumous release Loose Blues. He then started his Verve recording career in two sessions as a sideman, one backing West Coast drummer Shelley Manne and one with the Gary McFarland Orchestra. He recorded a set of solo piano sessions, with overdubs, that became the Grammy award winning Conversations with Myself. And he played on some clunkers of albums with orchestra, performing current movie themes (hey, nobody’s perfect).

But he was never too far from his trio. In mid-1963 he recorded live sessions with Chuck Israels and Paul Motian at Manne’s club, “Shelly’s Manne-Hole,” that were later released on Milestone as Time Remembered. And on December 18, 1963, he entered Verve’s studios in New York City with Motian and the 28-year-old bassist Gary Peacock to record what would become Trio 64.

I haven’t been able to find any information to explain why these sessions had Peacock on bass, rather than Israels. The latter continued to work with Evans for several more years, as we’ll see in next week’s recording. And while Peacock went on to have a long career, recording many albums with Motian and (most notably) anchoring another piano trio, the famous Keith Jarrett Standards Trio with Jack DeJohnette, he only did this one session with Evans. (A possible reason: he went on to join Miles Davis’ band, but briefly, in early 1964.) But because Peacock did record this session, we have a rare opportunity to compare and contrast the difference that his style makes in Evans’ trio. Answer: not much, and a lot.

One thing you’ll hear immediately in the performances is that Peacock’s bass has a woodier, more percussive sound, possibly due to Taylor’s production choices. But Peacock also performs, on this outing, much more like a traditional bassist, anchoring the bottom of the harmonies rather than the more vocal-style countermelodies that Israels provided. In this trio, Evans was fully in charge, and there’s less of the give and take that characterizes his performances with Israels.

The repertoire on the album is also slightly unusual. Unlike the last sessions for Riverside, which featured Evans’ own compositions alongside standards from the Song Book, this album is entirely comprised of standards, albeit a few that are a little less than standard. For instance, the opening track — the theme to the “Little Lulu” cartoon shorts from Paramount that aired between 1943 and 1948 — has rarely been heard in other jazz contexts. And the trio’s performance of J. Fred Coots and Haven Gillespie’s “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” reminds us that, as I’ve written before, most memorable 20th century Christmas songs are not only de facto part of the Great American Song Book, they’re often by Song Book songwriters.

Trio 64 is overall an engaging, even-keeled listen. While I don’t consider it essential in the way its predecessor albums are, it’s still fun—buoyant, even. Sadly, it was to be Paul Motian’s last performance with the trio. We’ll hear from a different incarnation of the group next time.

You can listen to the album here: