Album of the Week, September 27, 2025
By 1969 a few things had changed in the jazz world. Some of the old formulas for how jazz worked on albums like Brother Jack McDuff’s Hot Barbeque had started to morph, influenced by what was happening in rock and roll (and responding to the shift of youth attention from jazz to rock music). In particular, Miles Davis was listening to Jimi Hendrix, and the music he made in response on records like Filles de Kilimanjaro and Bitches Brew brought a different conception of the role of guitar in improvised music. But other genres were colliding with jazz, particularly funk.
We’ve talked about jazz-funk before in the context of CTI Records and of Herbie Hancock’s glorious Fat Albert Rotunda. By 1969, Blue Note Records had started to embrace this sound in a significant way. Jack McDuff had signed to Blue Note after a brief stint with Atlantic Records, and for this, his second album, he brought together a small army of younger musicians, including Joe Dukes on drums (and a guest appearance from Richard Davis on bass for two tracks) and dove into some truly strange, but truly glorious, jazz-funk explorations.
“Flat Backin’” starts us off in fine form, with the melody stated by Richard Davis’ funky, funky bass and a flourish on the drums from Spider Bryce, and a spiraling guitar line from Melvin Sparks that pans right to left. When McDuff enters on the Hammond, he’s right in the middle of everything, including a horn section that appear for a moment and then back away as the cymbal and bass restate the groove. And then—zowie!—it’s as though the track travels back in time at least ten years as the bass groove falls back into a swinging fast four and the band gives us a scampering improvisation, only to fall back to that groovy bass and an echo-laden guitar freak out, followed by a Hammond solo. Structurally the track keeps returning to that bass groove. It’s undeniably cool—not as out there as Bitches Brew but still fun to listen to.
“Oblighetto” is a more straightforward blues, given juice by Sparks’ guitar, right up until we get four measures of unexpected chords from McDuff and a spacey vocal in a minor mode, à la Star Trek. And then we shift gears again into a fast four as McDuff and drummer Vince DiLeonardi give us a little boogaloo, only to return to the minor mode and vocals once more. The band finishes with a return to the boogaloo, and one more minor chord.
“Moon Rappin’” is another jazz-funk workout, with a Richard Davis bass line and a winding chord progression that exercises both McDuff and the horns. After the lead, the band settles into a groove around a fifth, on which the horns unfortunately blow a little out of tune. But the reverby McDuff piano solo makes it all worthwhile. We then get a tasty minor blues that adjusts the bass line melody from “Flat Backin’” into something anticipatory and deeply funky, especially as Melvin Sparks’ guitar seems to reverb into outer space.
“Made in Sweden” threatens to invade “Take Five” territory, but it’s in six rather than five, and the melody goes in a slightly different direction, staying more closely wedded to the groove. Ron Park’s flute is a great addition to the theme, but the real star is McDuff’s Hammond, which threatens to levitate into outer space throughout his solo. A drum break separates the second half of the tune, in which a two-note riff moves from the organ to the horns and back “Loose Foot” picks up where “Made in Sweden” left off, but it’s a more straightahead tune and a showcase for Ron Park’s tenor sax. McDuff gives us a blues-forward solo in which he displays his virtuosic touch on the organ. The band closes out the outer-space album in a most grounded way, with the blues.
McDuff was a survivor; he kept on recording through the ’70s, even as commercial interest in jazz collapsed, and enjoyed a career renaissance in the late 1980s and 1990s, recording albums for Muse and Concord Jazz. He died in January 2001, less than a year after touring Japan at age 73. While he certainly picked up influences from the jazz-funk movement, he never tipped over into the sound wholesale. But other jazz organists did, and next week we’ll hear one of the most famous examples of the genre, from an artist we’ve heard before.
You can listen to this week’s album here:
BONUS: I included “Flat Backin’” in my “Cooking with Fat” episode of Exfiltration Radio, an hour-long exploration of jazz-funk. You can listen to that radio show below: