Tag: herbiehancock

Exfiltration Radio: anothercoverholenyohead

It’s the second Hackathon playlist this week, and the second Prince covers playlist (see: “Wanna be your cover”). This time I went hunting for jazz covers of Prince’s music, and it was surprisingly harder than I thought to find them… but they’re out there and they’re funky.

Austrian pianist David Helbock is new to me, but he was a godsend as his album Purple had a huge number of highly creative Prince covers. “Kiss” is a great example, recognizable but substantially recreated with melody line in the low bass and a combination of regular and prepared piano.

Michael Wolff was the bandleader on the Arsenio Hall show, and “The Wolff & Clark Expedition” has been recording together since 2013. “1999” comes from their 2015 album, and it’s a great version of the song, with Christian McBride on bass, Wallace Roney on trumpet, new-to-me Hailey Niswanger on sax and Daryl Johns on bass, Wolff on piano and Clark on drums.

Guitarist Dave Stryker’s “When Doves Cry” is a classic soul-jazz group lineup with Jared Gold on organ, McClenty Hunter on drums, and Steve Nelson on vibes. It’s a great take on one of Prince’s most covered songs. “The Beautiful Ones” has a very different vibe, with Ethan Iverson’s distinctive piano and improvisational style anchoring his iteration of the Bad Plus on their final record together. Often the Bad Plus can come across as bombastic on record, but this track feels lighter since the band steps back to let Reid Anderson take the lead melody in the verse on bass.

Helen Sung is another new-to-me pianist who’s been recording since 2003. “Alphabet Street” comes from her second album, in the trio format with Lewis Nash on drums and Derrick Hodge on bass. It’s a bop, a real romp through one of Prince’s lightest songs. Compare and contrast to the Jesus & Mary Chain’s version on “Wanna be your cover.”

There were a bunch of jazz covers of “Sexy M.F.”—not surprising, given the thick horn arrangement in the original. A lot of them, indeed, sounded like straight-up instrumental versions of the original chart. Brazil-born Swiss pianist Malcolm Braff’s version reimagines the song through a James Brown inspired lens, with a persistent bass line heartbeat from Reggie Washington and nimble drum work by Lukas Koenig.

“Jailbait” is a little bit of a cheat, as I don’t know if there was ever a Prince recording of this funk/blues composition. But given it comes from Prince’s last live recording from Vienne, and it was specifically written by Prince for Miles, I couldn’t not include it. The last band he toured with featured Kenny Garrett on sax and a really tight rhythm section with Deron Johnson on keys, Richard Patterson and Foley on bass, and Ricky Wellman on drums.

Miles’ old bandmate Herbie Hancock released an album of pop covers in the mid-1990s with a killer band—Michael Brecker, Jack DeJohnette, John Scofield, Dave Holland, and Don Alias! “Thieves in the Temple” has a feel of some of Herbie’s early Blue Note recordings, filtering Prince’s increasingly complex late-1980s songwriting into a distinctive brew.

So many new faces! Marcin Wasilewski records on ECM, and that label’s famed sonic approach is all over “Diamonds and Pearls,” from his second album. This trio recording is what jazz trios are all about; the degree of telepathy with Slawomir Kurkiewicz on bass and Michal Miskiewicz on drums is something to behold, and the arrangement is sparse, unfussy, and beautifully melodic. Wasilewski’s solo (coming at about the 2:30 mark) honors the song while making its own lyric approach, which can be hard to do when dealing with a well known composition. Looking forward to digging into more of his discography.

From the solemnly beautiful to the bonkers, “Controversy” is the second tune from David Helbock’s Purple. I can’t tell what piece of scrap percussion Helbock hammers throughout the piece, but it’s perfectly tuned to an F# and beautifully represents the four-note “Controversy” theme, which Helbock develops throughout the work, veering from a quiet melody to a bluesy stomp to something symphonic and strange.

Joshua Redman’s quartet take on “How Come U Don’t Call Me Anymore” is a more straightforward bluesy reading of this essential Prince deep cut. The band here—Brad Mehldau on piano, Larry Grenadier on bass, Brian Blade on drums—keeps things just off-kilter enough to make it more than just a superb soul jazz workout, which it of course also is, and most of the interesting bits happen just with Redman and Grenadier or Blade.

We wind out with an excerpt of Aretha Franklin’s big band arrangement of “Nothing Compares 2 U.” Where the arrangement by Jimmy Scott on “Wanna be your cover” is achingly dry, this one is ebulliently Aretha; we fade out her scat solo with deepest regret.

Here’s the track listing:

  1. Kiss – David Helbock (Purple)
  2. 1999 (feat. Michael Wolff & Mike Clark) – Wolff & Clark Expedition (Expedition 2 (feat. Michael Wolff & Mike Clark))
  3. When Doves Cry – Dave Stryker (Eight Track II)
  4. The Beautiful Ones – The Bad Plus (It’s Hard)
  5. Alphabet Street – Helen Sung Trio (Helenistique)
  6. Sexy M.F. – Malcolm Braff Trio (The Enja Heritage Collection: Inside (with Reggie Washington & Lukas Koenig))
  7. Jailbait (Live at Vienne Jazz Festival, 1991) – Miles Davis (Merci Miles! Live at Vienne)
  8. Thieves In the Temple – Herbie Hancock (The New Standard)
  9. Diamonds and Pearls – Marcin Wasilewski Trio (January)
  10. Controversy – David Helbock (Purple)
  11. How Come U Don’t Call Me Anymore – Joshua Redman (Timeless Tales (for Changing Times))
  12. Nothing Compares 2 U – Aretha Franklin (Aretha Franklin Sings the Great Diva Classics)

And please enjoy listening to the mix. Kick back, dig…

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:

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.

Milt Jackson, Sunflower

Album of the Week, June 17, 2023

By the time vibraphonist Milt Jackson, known by his nickname “Bags,” found his way to CTI Records, he had been recording and performing jazz for 28 years, first with Dizzy Gillespie and then with the Modern Jazz Quartet starting in 1952. The MJQ made their reputation on the juxtaposition of Jackson’s bluesy playing and pianist John Lewis’ more cerebral compositions, and over time the two grew apart musically, eventually splitting in 1974. This CTI session is therefore interesting, as a Milt Jackson solo session that was recorded in December 1972, a little over a year before the split (and, coincidentally, just over a week after I was born).

The session blends Jackson’s laid-back touch on the vibes with what was rapidly becoming recognizable as the CTI Records house sound, courtesy of stalwarts who’ve appeared in many of these reviews: Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, Billy Cobham, and notably Freddie Hubbard, as well as the arrangements and orchestra of Don Sebesky.

The album opens with the ballad “For Someone I Love,” with a Spanish classical guitar introduction by Jay Berliner, a studio musician who also played on Van Morrison’s seminal Astral Weeks. When the tune arrives, with an introduction by Freddie Hubbard and a bluesy statement of the melody by Jackson, it is buoyed on a pillow of strings. The orchestra is more prominent here than it’s been on some of the albums that have come before, though as always with Sebesky’s arrangements the small group remains at the foreground. Jackson’s solo is a slow burner that becomes positively incendiary when Hubbard takes over. The tempo drops back with a rhythm section trio, in which all three of the players brilliantly demonstrate a “less is more” approach, then scale back up to the excitement of the full track. Jackson’s playing is sensitive and nuanced throughout, and in dialog with the whole group, not in front of it.

“What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?”, from the score to the film The Happy Ending by Michel Legrand, opens with a statement of the melody in the orchestra, transitioning to Milt Jackson for a sensitive opening before handing off to Hubbard for a statement of the chorus on flugelhorn. Jackson’s solo manages to be both soulful and cool, laying down a series of improvisations on the melody in double time which is then picked up by Hancock. Hubbard slows things down once more, and the band plays a coda that gently takes the arrangement out on a series of suspensions that never quite resolve.

“People Make the World Go Round,” written by Thom Bell and Linda Creed and released in 1972 by the Stylistics, extends the string of 1970s pop hits receiving a fast-follow jazz cover on CTI albums (see: Hubert Laws covering “Where is the Love?” or “Fire and Rain”, or Freddie Hubbard with “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey”). This one is fierce, with Hancock and Carter playing the iconic bass part together over a precisely soulful rhythm from Cobham, as Jackson provides atmosphere on vibes and Hubbard plays the melody. There’s then a duo verse for Hancock and Jackson, who fill in the spaces in each other’s solos before Hubbard returns on the chorus. The solo by Jackson slips loose from the constraints of the tightly controlled verse to lay down a mighty groove over Carter’s funk-forward bass line. Hubbard’s solo plays with tonality, smearing notes and adding a rapid-tongued flourish before turning things over to Hancock, who solos on the acoustic piano, bringing more than a little of his early soul-jazz sound to the track. The band takes things out with an extended coda where the melody appears in, turn, in the vibes, flugelhorn, and Fender Rhodes as they play out. The strings don’t appear on this track at all; they’re not needed. It’s a mini-masterpiece.

The album closes with Hubbard’s original “Sunflower.” Originally recorded as “Little Sunflower” on Hubbard’s 1967 Blue Note Records album Backlash, here the tune, played by the composer, is enriched by Sebesky’s arrangement and some judicious application of Echoplexed Fender Rhodes. Hubbard takes the first solo over a steady beat from Cobham, tapering off in a dialog with Hancock’s acoustic piano. When Jackson takes his turn, it’s a coolly brilliant solo that takes us through the modes of the tune before returning once more to the melody. The strings here in the last chorus would feel overdone but for the volcanic statements of Billy Cobham, whose intensity grows throughout the track, continuing to add fills and rolls that are just behind the beat, adding to the growing feeling of tension, released only by the winds and their quiet countermelody. It’s a brilliant performance of one of Hubbard’s greatest compositions.

Jackson had a few more albums on CTI, but Sunflower, thanks in no small part to the title track, stands as a high point in his catalog, and in the label’s. Next week we’ll hear a solo session from one of the players on this album, a session that updates the CTI sound with a uniquely individual stamp.

You can listen to the album here:

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:

Freddie Hubbard, Straight Life

Album of the Week, May 6, 2023

Hubert Laws’ Afro-Classic may have been the last album recorded for CTI Records in Rudy Van Gelder’s studios in 1970, but it was not the last album recorded in 1970 to be released. A month before Laws’ session, Freddie Hubbard returned to the studio where he had previously cut the instant classic Red Clay for a follow-up session. Again featuring Joe Henderson, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and “Pablo” Landrum, the session also saw the addition of Jack DeJohnette on drums, Weldon Irvine on tambourine, and George Benson on guitar. Together the band recorded a session that was more spontaneous, took more risks, and ultimately may have been more successful than its predecessor.

The album opens with the title track, and it’s immediately arresting, with Hubbard’s fierce articulation of a rapidly tongued fanfare alternating with eruptions from DeJohnette. The tune then abruptly swings into a Latin-tinged funk groove, anchored by Herbie’s Fender and Ron Carter’s bass line, which alternates arpeggiated fifths, octaves and diminished sevenths. Joe Henderson takes the first solo, playing bold runs and then repeating the theme in ascending keys. This session was recorded a few months after his 1970 legendary live session for Milestone, which was released as “If You’re Not Part of the Solution, You’re Part of the Problem,” and he is at the top of his improvisatory game here, transitioning seamlessly from ferocious runs into more serene reflections before handing over to Hubbard. Freddie’s trumpet tone was flawless at this point, pivoting from relaxed, precisely articulated runs to screaming blues shouts within a few bars. Along the way the music slips out of the funky groove into a more abstract utterance, then quietly returns to the groove with the burble of Herbie’s solo. He begins by taking a key from Freddie’s solo, but then takes off in a more abstract direction, playing against the rhythm and finally landing in time for George Benson to pick up the thread. You can hear players shouting encouragement behind Benson’s solo, as his soul-inflected licks shift into funk, then like Herbie shift out of time for sixteen bars or so before crashing back into the rhythm of the groove. The band then locks into the groove as DeJohnette and Landrum trade polyrhythms underneath. Hubbard returns with a high keening line that echoes his opening statement before bringing the volume down for a restatement of the theme. If certain performances of “Red Clay” leave one with the impression that Hubbard had given his all and could not possibly play more, “Straight Life”’s insistent groove and the fade-out insist that he could keep playing all day.

Weldon Irvine’s “Mr. Clean” follows. A grimier funk workout that sees the bass clinging to the tonic like a life raft, the horns call to mind a James Brown line before Freddie makes like Miles with a high lonesome call, as George Benson and Herbie Hancock trade licks beneath. Joe Henderson’s solo explores the tonality of the theme in an abstract workout as the band digs deeper into the groove. Van Gelder’s engineering here is amazing as the bass seems to deepen the further out Henderson goes, followed by Hancock, who innovates both in rhythm and in tonality. Hancock’s solo continues after Henderson drops back, continuing to echo into outer space yet still rooted in the groove. Benson’s solo is similarly deep, bridging over from soul to funk to abstraction in the same breath. Throughout the rhythm section of DeJohnette and Carter stay locked into the groove.

For the final track, a rendition of the Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke standard “Here’s That Rainy Day,” Freddie switches to the flugelhorn. In a 1973 interview, he noted that he had been playing the more mellow cousin of the trumpet for “about three or four years” (though his earliest recording credit on the instrument came on 1967’s Backlash). He claimed in the interview, “Now I can play it better than the trumpet, because it’s so much easier to play.” The creamy tone of his flugelhorn became one of Freddie’s signature sounds, and here it is put to superb use in a stripped down setting, recording the ballad with sensitive accompaniment from Benson on the guitar, for an effect that is reminiscent of “Why Was I Born?,” the duet that Coltrane recorded with Kenny Burrell on their 1962 collaboration. Hubbard closes the track with a long coda that seems to float effortlessly and eternally.

This second Hubbard album on CTI established his role as a leader among the label’s artists, and he would continue to record groundbreaking sets throughout the next few years. We’ll hear another, very different one next time.

You can listen to the album here:

Freddie Hubbard, Red Clay

Album of the Week, April 8, 2023

We’ve heard one side of Creed Taylor’s new CTI label in the past few weeks as we listened to how he brought impeccable personnel and lush orchestrations to bear on Antônio Carlos Jobim’s Wave and Wes Montgomery’s Road Song. What we will hear today is something else: a record with no strings, just five players in the studio stretching out into loose 7 to 12 minute long jams. And at the center is a player we’ve heard from before: Freddie Hubbard.

Before this point, we’ve mostly encountered Hubbard as a sideman, in some of the great early recordings of both Herbie Hancock (Takin’ Off, My Point of View, Maiden Voyage) and Wayne Shorter (Speak No Evil, The All Seeing Eye). But at the same time that these recordings were happening, he had a productive and prolific career as a leader, recording nine sessions for Blue Note, three for Atlantic, and two for Impulse! between 1960 and 1969. Most of these sessions are classic hard bop or post bop, with Hubbard’s fiercely precise tone at the center of them. But in January 1970, Hubbard entered Rudy Van Gelder’s studio at Englewood Cliffs to make a different sort of session, his first for CTI. He was joined by a formidable lineup of players: Herbie Hancock on electric piano and Hammond organ, Ron Carter on bass, Joe Henderson on tenor sax, and the young Lenny White on drums.

White was no novice, having already appeared on Miles’ fusion masterpiece Bitches Brew, but he was only 20 years old and still getting started. He has noted that it’s something of a miracle that he was on the session at all; apparently Hubbard had originally called Tony Williams to do the record, but Williams begged off, citing Miles’ growing irritation at the number of players who recorded with “his” rhythm section to make their albums sound good. So White got the call. He would continue to record with Miles following this record (as we’ve heard on Champions), so apparently the decision was a good one for all concerned.

It’s hard to imagine the finished product without White’s drums at the center. The title track, which opens the album, is a funky jam that’s kept tight by Ron Carter’s insanely earworm-y bass line and at the same time kept loose by White’s drumming, which seem equally informed by Tony Williams’ inventions and Clyde Stubblefield’s “funky drummer” approach on the records James Brown was making at the time. The tune, supposedly based on the changes to “Sunny,” circles around the same changes for the entirety of the 12+ minute song, trading chordal complexity for the pure joy of the jam. Especially notable here are the solos from the two horns, with Hubbard hitting effortless highs and Henderson bringing a level of darkness and complexity to his solo that is reminiscent of some of his own early 1970s masterpieces. At 9 minutes in, the rest of the players and Carter and White take us into the engine room to unveil the heart of the groove. It’s a complete lesson in the power of the bass in funk-jazz music, and one that features prominently on my mix highlighting jazz bassists, “the low end theory.”

“Delphia” starts out as a ballad with a sensitive introduction by Hubbard and Henderson (on flute), but soon morphs into a swinging blues. Unusually, Herbie Hancock plays Hammond organ on the entirety of the tune, which includes some wonderful syncopation on the chorus and some attentive accompaniment behind Hubbard’s solo. Henderson’s flute, only heard on the opening and closing verses, is brilliantly sensitive here, as is Carter’s bass.

“Suite Sioux” opens with a riff by Hancock on the Fender Rhodes, leading into the opening statement of the theme by Henderson and Hubbard. This arrangement is notable for both the use of space—the dialog between Fender and horns is set off by ample beats of silence each time—and Hubbard’s eloquent solo. Hancock’s solo floats over White’s cymbal work until the drummer steps up to his own solo spotlight, highlighting one of the oddities of the recording: the bass drum, which has very little resonance and sounds as though it’s stuffed full of socks. Apparently the young drummer had brought his own kit, which included a bass drum that had been cut down from an oil can; while he preferred the resonant sound, Van Gelder couldn’t or wouldn’t get it to record in the studio, so they had to use another drum that White couldn’t stand but at least didn’t overshadow the rest of the band.

“The Intrepid Fox” returns to the fiery material of the opening for another extended jazz-funk jam. Another cut that would, like “Red Clay,” be a highlight of Hubbard’s live sets for years to come, this one is less groove oriented and more incendiary, and features a wicked groove from the bass together with a complex interlocking melodic statement from the horns. In some ways reminiscent of Henderson’s recently recorded “Power to the People” and “Isotope,” the saxophonist’s solo on this tune threatens to steal the show as he plays with rhythmic and chordal structures throughout. Hancock’s solo takes us into slightly more meditative territory, until Hubbard returns with a reprise of the melody.

The record as a whole was a hit for Hubbard and for the young CTI label, and helped to shape some of the sound of the coming decade. We’ll hear a lot more from Freddie in the coming weeks. But first we’ll hear from some other Miles-adjacent musicians exploring a slightly different side of the electric jazz future.

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:

New mix: Exfiltration Radio, Cooking With Fat

It’s a Veracode Hackathon, so it must be time for an Exfiltration Radio playlist! This time, naturally, the musical choices were influenced by all the Miles-related jazz I’ve been writing about over the last few months, as well as an unlikely source: my Apple Music library maintenance.

So, when you source your library from iTunes Store purchases, third-party high-res music providers like HDTracks and Bandcamp, and CD and vinyl rips, you end up with pretty big music files and a lot of music. Too much music to fit on the internal hard drive of most Macs. I’ve been using an external drive for my media for many years now. Mostly it works fine. When it doesn’t, though, it’s disastrous. There is some kind of error condition in Apple Music that causes it to freak out when the external drive is temporarily unavailable and re-download all the music in the iCloud library. Which is OK, I guess, except when the external drive comes back online, you now have two copies of all the music in your library. Or, if it happens again, three.

I’ve figured out a rubric for cleaning this up, which will be the subject of another post. But I’ve been going through all the music in my library album by album, and in the process creating new genres to make it easier to find some types of music. In particular, the genres that inspired this mix were Jazz Funk and Fusion. The latter needs no explanation due to our journey with Miles; jazz funk is just the hybrid of a bunch of different strains of African American music with a heavy focus on improvisation over a funky beat. The end mix combines some tracks I’ve already written about with some more modern jazz from my collection; I’ll provide notes for each track below.

“Wiggle-Waggle,” from Fat Albert Rotunda: the track that got the most comments from my write-up of Herbie Hancock’s TV show soundtrack, with friends noting how it sounds like this track dropped in from another dimension.

“Chunky,” from Live: Cookin’ with Blue Note at the Montreux Jazz Festival, by Ronnie Foster. I’ve programmed Foster’s great “Mystic Brew” in past Exfiltration Radio segments, including the Hammond special. This is a live version of the opening track from the same album, Foster’s great Blue Note debut Two Headed Freap. There’s a lot that’s different about his approach to the Hammond organ compared to earlier artists, but all I can say is: he funky.

“Flat Backin’,” from Moon Rappin’ by Brother Jack McDuff. Speaking of earlier artists, a lot of McDuff’s early work was squarely in the “soul jazz” category (like his great Hot Barbecue), but by the time of this 1969 album McDuff was on another planet, and the electric guitar and bass land the music in Funklandia.

“Funky Finger,” from The Essence of Mystery by Alphonse Mouzon. We have seen Mouzon on the first Weather Report album, but his solo debut for Blue Note is another thing entirely. Despite the name, it’s got less of the mystery of Weather Report and more of the funk, and this track is a great example.

“Sugar Ray,” from Champions by Miles Davis. “That’s some raunchy sh*t, y’all.” Listen to how the chord changes are so wrong, the way they just walk over to an adjacent major key and then settle back into the original as though nothing happened. Also note the remarkable Wayne Shorter solo.

“Superfluous,” from Instant Death by Eddie Harris. Sampled on “What Cool Breezes Do” from Digable Planets’ Reachin’, this is an instant classic.

“The Griot,” from Henry Franklin: JID014 by Henry Franklin, Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad. Composer Younge and former Tribe Called Quest member Shaheed Muhammad have been having a blast recording albums with their jazz idols in the Jazz is Dead series, and this newer release with bassist Franklin, who played with Freddie Hubbard, Bobbi Humphrey, Archie Shepp, Willie Bobo, Stevie Wonder and others, is a tasty slice of funk anchored by his acoustic double bass.

“Tell Me a Bedtime Story,” from Fly Moon Die Soon by Takuya Kuroda. This funky cover of Herbie Hancock’s original from Fat Albert Rotunda is a great example of latter-day jazz-funk, with the arrangement draped (or smothered, depending on your taste) in layers of Fender Rhodes, synths, and electric bass. Kuroda’s incisive trumpet anchors the arrangement and lifts the funk to another level.

“Timelord,” from Inflection in the Sentence by Sarah Tandy. A great 21st century London jazz album, featuring Tandy on both acoustic piano and electric keys, the latter notably apparent in this moody track.

“Where to Find It,” from SuperBlue by Kurt Elling. I’ll write more about this track another time, but it’s worth noting that Elling is one of the few vocalists to brave the task of putting lyrics to modern jazz tracks like this one, Wayne Shorter’s Grammy award winning “Aung San Suu Kyi.”

Enough words. “We have taken control as to bring you this special show, and we will return it to you as soon as you are exfiltrated.”

Miles Davis, Champions

Album of the Week, October 1, 2022

As a jazz fan, for years I largely wrote off Miles after Bitches Brew. Everything before was transcendent; what came after was … well, something else. Granted, there were moments that captured my curiosity, like the incredible “Sivad” from Live Evil, but I couldn’t make myself dig into them. I almost ended my series on Miles and his sidemen with Weather Report.

But there was a part of me that said, go on. That reminded me how blown away I was by “He Loved Him Madly” and by Big Fun. That said, we shouldn’t deny the funk. So today we’re going to listen to a recent record that illuminates some of what Miles got up to in the early 1970s.

Champions is an archival release, of course, like every other “new” Miles record, but it comes from sessions that produced an album, Jack Johnson, that famed critic Robert Christgau called his favorite recording from Miles since Kind of Blue and Milestones. Miles assembled many of his best players in the studio, many of whom are familiar names to us—Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Wayne Shorter, John McLaughlin, Jack DeJohnette, Dave Holland, Airto—but also new names, including reed players Bennie Maupin (here on bass clarinet) and Steve Grossman (soprano sax), drummers Billy Cobham and Lenny White, bassists Gene Perla and Mike Henderson, the latter fresh off a stint with Stevie Wonder, and Keith Jarrett, here on the electric piano. But though many of the players overlapped with In a Silent Way (among other records), the style was much more straight-ahead funk than the mysterious jazz of that album.

The shift was deliberate. In 1969 Miles told a Rolling Stone reviewer, “I could put together the greatest rock ‘n’ roll band you ever heard,” and if you listen through that lens the affinity of this record for the chugging sound of early Funkadelic and late 1960s counterculture becomes apparent. The connection to rhythm was also deliberate, making a political point. Miles was uninterested in making art music; he wanted to make Black music for Black people. And he wanted to play loud. Chick Corea has said that during this period Miles was in the greatest shape of his life: clean, sober, exercising — in fact, he was working out in the gym with a boxing trainer every day, as he worked on music for this documentary on the great African American boxer Jack Johnson.

All of this comes together in the music on Champions, which is taken from the sessions that led up to the released Jack Johnson album (and which also appears on Columbia’s massive The Complete Jack Johnson box set). “Duran (Take 4)” is an extended groove over a monster rhythm section, with Miles’ trumpet wailing over a rubbery descending bass line and John McLaughlin’s guitar filling in the blank spaces. The overall rhythm is pretty foursquare, but where Miles and company go around it is where the magic is.

“That’s some raunchy sh*t, y’all,” Miles says as the band transitions into “Sugar Ray.” Here the rhythm is bent, and the harmonic progressions bend to match, as Miles’ trumpet bends into the adjacent major keys for a patch of the chorus. The effect is simultaneously disorienting and intoxicating, the latter especially when Wayne Shorter’s soprano sax arrives to soar over the groove.

“Johnny Bratton (Take 4)” is the hardest rocking of the tunes on the album, and possibly the most egalitarian in terms of group improvisation; both are largely due to Jack DeJohnette’s monster drumming and Steve Grossman’s extended soprano sax solo, which steps a little to the side of Shorter’s mysticism and into something closer to a blend of Pharoah Sanders and Raphael Ravenscroft (of “Baker Street” fame). Miles’ solo sketches a sizzling ascendant line above the group, contributing a bluer note above the 1-5-4-diminished 3rd chords that form the main progression of the song. John McLaughlin’s guitar solo actually switches into a different key entirely for the first part of his solo, dislocating the harmony in unexpected ways. It’s a workout. Miles returns, bringing the temperature down to a simmer punctuated by more unexpected guitar chords from McLaughlin and a fade-out.

“Ali (Take 3)” and “Ali (Take 4)” are two different takes on the same song, with the melody stated in the bass by Gene Perla; this was Perla’s only appearance with Miles, though he would go on to a long association with Elvin Jones and would later form a group with Don Alias and Steve Grossman. Take 3 opens up like a gutbucket funk tune that wouldn’t be out of place on Free Your Mind…, with mind-blowing distortion in the organ courtesy of Herbie Hancock, playing alongside Keith Jarrett’s relatively more conventional electric piano line. The solitary solo comes from the trumpet, with a tight doubling in the organ. “Take 4” is an entirely different thing, and is almost like a dub reggae version of the same tune. Opening with only the bass line, and interjections from John McLaughlin with barely audible sounds on the pickups of his guitar and Airto on the berimbau, the band improvises bits of the opening with barely audible coaching from Miles in the background (“Why you play that there?” “Now play it loud!”). When the band comes in, it’s with a nasty organ line over a restrained funk drum courtesy of Steve Grossman. The band was edging closer to the mindbending sounds that would elsewhere appear on tunes like “Honky Tonk.”

The compilation closes out with “Right Off (Take 11),” with a smaller, tighter group playing through a scorching funk instrumental, anchored by Hancock on organ, Henderson on bass, and Cobham on drums. Sounding a bit like a set-closing outro, the tune notably does not feature Miles, with the lead horn part instead going to Grossman. It’s probably the least essential of the tunes collected here, but is still a seriously groovy work, and a good way to close out the set.

Miles had come a long way from the days of Dig, and we leave him here, primarily because my record collection doesn’t have any of his later work. But I hope that as we’ve undertaken this survey of records from Miles and his sidemen throughout the past 33 weeks that you’ve found something new to dig into. I’ll continue to write this weekly review—I’m having way too much fun to give up now!—but we’ll be digging into some entirely different vinyl next week.

You can listen to the album here:

Joe Zawinul, Zawinul

Album of the Week, September 17, 2022.

We last met Austrian keyboard player and composer Joe Zawinul when he arrived, seemingly from nowhere, to explore the unknown realms of in a Silent Way. On this appropriately self-titled album, Zawinul continues the journey, this time as leader and not merely as mystic guide. The album is a journey into outer space; it is also an instructive guide in the different ways to create jazz music.

Zawinul’s approach to this album was less group improvisation and more Gil Evans. The group features both Miroslav Vitouš and Walter Booker on bass, multiple drummers and percussionists (on different tracks, Billy Hart, Joe Chambers, Jack Dejohnette, and David Lee can be heard, usually in combinations of two or three), and a front line including Woody Shaw on trumpet (with Jimmy Owens on one track), George Davis on flute, Earl Turbindon on soprano sax, and Herbie Hancock on the mighty Fender Rhodes, alongside Zawinul on acoustic and electric pianos. One track features Wayne Shorter, Hubert Laws, and Dejohnette in lieu of Turbindon, Davis, and the other drummers. And the whole group performs in through composed suites that are strongly reminiscent of Gil Evans’ style, though still keeping room for solos.

“Doctor Honoris Causa” opens the album in a demonstration of this approach. The melody, written in honor of Herbie Hancock’s honorary doctorate from Grinnell University, is cut from the same cloth as “In a Silent Way,” with a slow chromatic drift of chords from the keyboards and the horns yielding to an insistent bass line supported by a steady backbeat. The front line then enters, with Turbindon, Shaw, and Davis playing the melody line with one voice as it circles the tonic before climbing up to a diminished sixth. There is a short break of around four measures before the second part of the melody returns, again in unison. Following the same arrangement pattern as some of Miles’ work on Nefertiti, the melody returns over and over again, with longer solos between. Shaw takes the first extended solo, his trumpet climbing over strong support from the Fender and Zawinul’s organ. Turbindon takes the next one, with his soprano sax exploring minor modes around the tonic and drifting away, with the Echoplexed Fender Rhodes of Herbie Hancock taking the next solo, reverberating through the cosmos. Zawinul takes the final solo, steering the group’s improvisations through turbulent air before gently bringing them to a landing. The work may celebrate Hancock’s accomplishments in title, but in execution it’s an evocation of flight.

“In a Silent Way” returns to Zawinul’s iconic composition that lent its title to Miles’ pioneering fusion album. Here we hear the work in its full extended form. In doing so, he gives us an insight into Miles’ compositional methods. The original arrangement heard here takes us through an extended introduction in multiple modal chord changes before bringing us to the famous melody. In doing so, the work takes on a very different character from Miles’ wide-eyed, searching rendition. At the last Tanglewood weekend of this summer, I heard WCRB commentator Bryan McCreath point out that much of the power of the opening of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony comes from the open fourths and fifths that constitute the opening theme, because of their harmonic ambiguity. Minus a third in the progression, they could either fall to a major or minor key. The same is true of the Miles version of “In a Silent Way,” which keeps its progressions open for as long as possible before finally revealing its mode. Zawinul’s original extended introduction, which pivots from major to minor with richer harmonies throughout, is more fully voiced, but the ambiguity is lost. It’s still a stunning performance, evoking the Swiss Alps of Zawinul’s youth, albeit with less mystery and more sentimentality.

“His Last Journey” is a different animal altogether, a tone poem for bass, piano, chimes, and trumpet. The melody is played in the uppermost ranges of the arco bass over the second bass and a descending piano line, with the trumpet sketching an alternate melody around the edges. It’s a brief dream of a composition that is over all too soon.

“Double Image” is the outlier here. Recorded in a different session in late August 1970 with Shorter and Laws, the work is more of a group improvisation than anything else on the record, with the two keyboardists and two bassists alternately working together and improvising separately, with the extended bass arco solo at the beginning exploring the outer reaches. (I’ve gotten pretty good at telling the players apart on these albums, but am not sure whether we’re hearing Vitouš or Booker there.) Zawinul takes the other solo on the track, with the horns and flute providing the echo of the melody in between. The energy level and level of abstraction comes closer here to the more frenetic tunes on Super Nova and Bitches Brew than anything else on the record; unsurprisingly, this is the one composition from this period that would later be recorded by Miles’ electric group on Live-Evil.

“Arrival in New York” closes the album with something else again: a sound collage, with taped segments of bowed bass, organ, and percussion manipulated to evoke the cacophony of the New York streets, subways, and harbor as Zawinul remembered them from his arrival in the United States in 1959. As a composition it’s an island unto itself, but it would not be the last time Zawinul would embrace different studio techniques to discover new soundscapes.

So Zawinul points toward a different way to embody Miles’ searching while taking some of the great trumpeter’s collaborators in a different direction. He would continue working with Shorter and Vitouš; we will hear that collaboration next week.

You can hear the album here:

Miroslav Vitouš, Infinite Search

Album of the Week, September 10, 2022

We’ve been spending a lot of time with the members of Miles’ different groups in this thread. At first glance, the debut solo album of the Czech bassist Miroslav Vitouš would seem an odd fit. But there are a few reasons it’s the album of the week this week: there is substantial overlap with Miles’ sidemen, and because of what is coming next.

For his debut album on Embryo Records, Vitouš assembled an impressive list of musicians: Joe Henderson on tenor sax, John McLaughlin on guitar, Herbie Hancock on electric piano, and Jack DeJohnette on drums (all except the last track, where Joe Chambers fills in). The recording was made October 8, 1969, several months after the Wayne Shorter sessions for Super Nova, on which McLaughlin and DeJohnette both played. But the sound they produce here, absent Shorter’s soprano saxophone, is very different. I should say sounds, because each of the six tracks on the album inhabits a different soundscape.

We’ve already heard Miles’ take on “Freedom Jazz Dance,” on his Miles Smiles. Here, after the introduction by the full band, Vitouš takes an extended bass solo accompanied only by DeJohnette, with interjections by McLaughlin on guitar. A solo by Herbie Hancock follows, with the chiming Fender sound climbing up into the upper octaves, followed by McLaughlin’s solo, over an increasingly frantic rhythm section. When Henderson enters, Hancock and McLaughlin drop out and the frenetic energy lessens, but only slightly before he takes his own frantic turn. Closing out with the theme, Vitouš and Hancock turn the reprise into an extended coda.

“Mountain in the Clouds” foregrounds Vitouš and DeJohnette in a short fragment of a composition, as if to assert the bass’s primacy as a melodic instrument. It works, but is so brief the tune never fully develops.

“When Face Gets Pale” is another bass-led melody with chordal support from Hancock entwined by McLaughlin’s twisting guitar lines. The composition circles the same chord progression over and over again, creating a meditative mood.

“Infinite Search” is the track on the album that feels closest to what we’ve heard before. Here the dominant tone is Herbie Hancock’s Fender Rhodes, in duet with Vitouš’s deep bass lines. Together they produce music that reaches both up to the heavens on clouds of Echoplexed reverb and down deep into the earth, grounded by the deep roots of the bass and supported by a two note repeated figure as a ground throughout. The composition wouldn’t have been out of place on Water Babies, and is insistently memorable.

“I Will Tell Him On You” is introduced by a theme by Henderson in diffuse clouds of chords from Hancock, which is then elaborated by Vitouš before Henderson returns in a swirling solo, using a technique that he returned to throughout his recording career. If Coltrane had “sheets of sound,” rapidly descending arpeggios, Henderson had whirlpools of sound that circled the tonal center. This effect can be heard to good effect here. McLaughlin follows, neatly mimicking Henderson’s technique before adding flourishes and bent notes that claim the ground as his own. Herbie’s piano solo elaborates the theme with the chiming upper octaves of the Fender before DeJohnette takes a crashing, rolling drum solo. The reprise is followed by a coda by McLaughlin and Hancock. It’s a bracing performance.

“Epilogue” is opened by an extended bass solo from Vitouš, supported by Hancock and a bed of chimes and drums. The mood continues through a solo by Hancock, never losing the mystery, until it disappears into a cloud of chimes.

So with his first solo album, Vitouš demonstrated his compatibility with the players in Miles’ orbit who were moving fusion forward, while also proving his own voice. Next time we’ll hear another musician claiming his own leading role in the new sound.

You can listen to Infinite Search here:

Herbie Hancock, Fat Albert Rotunda

Album of the Week, August 27, 2022

In 1969, NBC aired a half hour television special based on the stand-up comedy of Bill Cosby. Focused on Cos’ stories of his childhood in Philadelphia, the special, called Fat Albert and Friends, was a low-budget affair, with the animators drawing directly onto the cels with grease pencils and using actual photographs of the streets of Philadelphia for backgrounds. While the special inspired the later Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids series, it has languished in the vaults since its release.

As Cos would say, I told you that story so I could tell you this one. Because, while the budget for the special was low, it featured a soundtrack by Herbie Hancock that stands as an early milestone of jazz-funk.

Herbie hadn’t been idle since leaving Miles’ quintet. He had already recorded The Prisoner, a concept album for Blue Note with a large group of players that included Joe Henderson on sax, Johnny Coles on flugelhorn, Garnett Brown on trombone, Hubert Laws on flute, Buster Williams on bass, and Albert “Tootie” Heath on drums. The album, his final Blue Note recording, features the same core group (minus Laws) that came together on Fat Albert Rotunda, but featured a very different sound.

The opening track, “Wiggle-Waggle,” underscores the difference. With a blast of horns over a jangling guitar for an opening fanfare, it quickly moves into a tight, funky chart over a fat bass line that would not be out of place on a James Brown record. The core group here was augmented by a large group of session players, uncredited on the original release but including Joe Farrell on saxophone and the mighty Bernard Purdie on drums. (We’ll write more about Joe Farrell soon.) Anchoring the swirling chart is the Fender Rhodes of Herbie Hancock.

Hearing this recording, it’s hard to believe that Herbie initially approached the electric piano reluctantly. The chunky sound of the Fender in the opening track seems made for this new jazz-funk sound. It also provides most of the improvisatory energy; most of the horns stay in the charts for the whole track. Indeed, it’s worth noting that the compositional technique that Miles’s quintet began to adopt on Nefertiti, with the core group bookending relatively brief solos with frequent reprises of the main melody, surfaces again here, where it is more easily recognizable as pop-music style verse-chorus-verse writing.

The album continues throughout in this accessible vein, resulting in some of the most remarkably joyous music to come from Herbie’s pen to date. “Fat Mama” is a slow crescendo of a track building from another Buster Williams bass line and foregrounding Herbie’s piano and some rare flute work by Joe Henderson against the horns. “Tell Me a Bedtime Story” might be the most inspired cut on the album, with Johnny Coles’ flugelhorn opening setting the stage for a tender ballad, while “Tootie” Heath’s brisk drum work keeps the heartbeat of the song moving as the excitement of the bedtime story builds and recedes. “Oh! Oh! Here He Comes!” is another funk workout, serving as a theme for Fat Albert.

The one tune that entered Hancock’s repetoire longer-term is the ballad “Jessica,” here given a relatively lugubrious treatment thanks to the thick horn arrangements. He would later revisit this tune in the late 1970s with an acoustic group—we’ll hear that album another time—that stripped away some of the heavy chord voicings to reveal a plaintive melody. Here, after the tender opening, the tune drags—there is simply too much going on in the chart. It regains life in the solo, though, as Herbie uses acoustic piano for the only time on the album in a simple trio setting to explore the melody.

Shifting gears once again, the title track revisits the themes in “Oh! Oh! Here He Comes” as a funk-inflected march, with a blistering sax solo from Joe Henderson providing additional urgency. The set closes with “Little Brother,” a jovial jazz-funk workout for the same extended set of players as the opening track. Featuring some tasty guitar work throughout by the uncredited Eric Gale and Billy Butler and solos by Farrell and Herbie over Purdie’s legendary “Purdie Shuffle,” the track is a fitting romp to an unexpectedly rich and playful album.

Herbie has publicly said that he made Fat Albert Rotunda as the first album for his Warner Brothers contract to give him the artistic freedom to make more adventurous music. Perhaps. It’s undeniable that the follow up albums, Mwandishi and Crossing, are completely different and serve more as spiritual successors to In a Silent Way than to this album. (We’ll hear another album in that lineage from a different member of Miles’ quintet next time.) Still, it’s hard to hear Fat Albert Rotunda as anything but an expression of joy in music-making, however commercial it may be.

You can listen to the album here:

Miles Davis, In a Silent Way

Album of the Week, August 20, 2022

There are liminal moments in music history, moments that stand perched on the edge of a knife, where music stands to move one way or another. Where it can fall back and recapitulate that which came before, or fall forward into something strange and new. Miles Davis stands alone among 20th century musicians because he embraced these liminal moments, and his finest albums came from them. There may be no greater such moment in his lengthy discography than In a Silent Way.

We have heard him searching for a new sound through the last few weeks, with the addition of guitar on Miles in the Sky, the use of electric keyboards on Filles de Kilimanjaro, the use of two keyboardists on Water Babies, and throughout a shift toward songwriting that moved much of the complexity of the arrangements down into the rhythm section, leaving the horns free to embrace uncluttered melodic moments. Those movements in his writing came together as Miles continued to record through November of 1968, but none of the recordings would see the light of day until years later. However, the sessions added one important musician to the lineup on the second to last day, when the players were joined by Joe Zawinul on the organ.

Josef Zawinul was a Swiss-born musician and composer who had come to the United States in 1959 to attend the Berklee College of Music, but dropped out after a few weeks to tour with Maynard Ferguson. He came to the notice of audiences in Cannonball Adderley’s group, where he composed in a more harmonically advanced version of the soul jazz that Adderley was playing. He came to Miles’s attention and was asked to join him in the studio to contribute ideas. This swelled the number of keyboardists in the group assembled in the studio to three, since Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock were still both working with Miles.

The group took a hiatus from the studio until February 18, 1969, where they came together with another new face: the English guitarist John McLaughlin, who had come to the States two weeks previously to play in The Tony Williams Lifetime. McLaughlin reportedly idolized Miles and was petrified to meet him in the studio. So these musicians, together with Wayne Shorter, Tony Williams and Dave Holland, formed the group with which Miles embarked into a new world.

The music that the group recorded on that day has the sound of exploration, but for years there was no way to hear the tracks as originally recorded, because Teo Macero was on hand to lend the finishing touch to the masterpiece by combining several songs into two album-side-long sonatas. (You can hear the individual tracks on The Complete In a Silent Way Sessions, which I highly recommend.) Miles had paid close attention to the studio work of the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix; this was the first recording where he embraced the studio as another instrument in the process.

“Shhh/Peaceful” comprises the entirety of Side One, and opens with the sound of both new members at once: an arpeggiated chord in McLaughlin’s guitar over a suspended minor chord in Zawinul’s organ. From there the melody unfolds in the guitar over the three keyboardists, anchored by the relentless pulse of Holland’s bass coming up a fourth and by Williams’ consistently steady rock pulse. The group comes to a pause, a silence that’s broken by Williams and Holland, and then everything starts again, this time with Miles bringing a major-key melody to the front above all the complexity, over a bed of chords in the electric pianos and organ. The echoing effects created by Herbie Hancock’s Fender Rhodes in particular lend a distinctive sound here, one that I’ve written about in the past as “jazz in inner space.” As with earlier works like “Fall,” the rhythm section circles around to the theme between solos, as Miles, then McLaughlin, and finally Wayne Shorter take a turn.

Because of Teo Macero’s work, when I first heard this music in my first year of college, I assumed that it must have been through-composed. How else could the musicians have recapitulated that opening so precisely? With the knowledge that the sonata form was constructed at the tape in the studio, rather than in sheet music, my astonishment at listening to the work is redirected to the brilliance of the improvisations that constitute the repeated sections. This is a group that listens closely to each other to produce those miracles of sound.

The second half of the album is a similar sonata, “In a Silent Way/It’s About That Time,” constructed around two different soundscapes. The title song began life as a Joe Zawinul composition that was meant to evoke the sounds of the Swiss Alps. Translated into Miles’ horn and the electric keyboards and guitar, the music is less Alpenhorn (though that inspiration is unmistakable when you listen for it) and more Also Sprach Zarathustra. This is a statement of the discovery of a new world, and Miles is our guide.

Once Miles concludes his statement of the theme, there is a pause and a shift, and we are in a different place yet again. The “It’s About That Time” portion of the track is outwardly a more straightforward rock tune. But even here Miles plays against expectations, with the chorus shifting into a modal blues, in patterns of three measures stated in Chick Corea’s electric piano with support from Dave Holland and Joe Zawinul’s organ. John McLaughlin plays a free improvisation over the ground laid down by the rhythm section, and then Zawinul brings forward another counter-melody that locks into the groove.

It is at this point that Wayne Shorter steps forward with a dramatic solo, for the first time on record played on the soprano sax rather than the tenor. Wayne had started to play on the soprano in the very last 1968 recording session of Miles’s group, and it quickly became one of his signature sounds. Lines that in the tenor would have had a more searching, visceral quality here seem to float serenely, providing a powerful contrast to the rhythm section below. There may have well been a practical reason for the use of the soprano sax, as the higher register would have punched through the rest of the instrumentation more easily. Whatever the reason, Shorter’s work on the soprano sax became virtually synonymous with early jazz fusion. The improvisation draws to a close with Miles blowing an incandescent solo above the group motion. The side draws to a close with a restatement of the “In a Silent Way” theme, again cut together into the track by Teo.

In a Silent Way pointed the way to the sound of future Miles groups, while keeping one foot in the past with the yearning, open sound of the solos. In the early 1970s he would add additional percussionists, foreground the guitar more, and change the personnel frequently, but the basic combination of horns, electric keyboards, electric guitar and bass, and drums would be the instrumentation on which he built jazz fusion, starting with the very next album, Bitches Brew. My record collection is shy on Miles fusion recordings, though there will be one more before all is done. But we’ll hear from other members of the quintet, and other Miles alumni, in their solo recordings, starting with next week’s entry.

You can listen to the album here: