Howard Roberts The Magic Band Live at the Donte's Vol. 1
1 All of You (Porter) 13:30 2 Shiny Stockings (Foster) 15:50 3 All Blues (Davis) 12:40 4 Polka Dots and Moonbeams (Burke, VanHeusen) 12:26 5 When Sunny Gets Blue (Fisher, Segal) 17:17
Personnel Howard Roberts - g Steve Bohannon - org Tom Scott - as, ts & ss Chuck Berghofer - b John Guerin - dr
Recorded July, 1968 at Donte's in Los Angeles, CA.
A little-known guitarist well worth exploring is Mr. Howard Roberts (1929-1992). A respected educator, co-founder of GIT, studio musician (he clocked so many session hours as an LA studio musician that he was referred to as "The Fifth Monkey"), and columnist for Guitar Player Magazine (Roberts and colleague Jerry Hahn practically invented the "guitar columnist" genre), he was above all a master of the instrument and a consummate jazzman. As a tribute to the man, Gibson, the legendary guitar maker, still manufactures one of its best-selling jazz models, Howard Roberts Fusion, tailor-made to meet Roberts' needs. This out-of-print Concord release from 1977 teams up Roberts with legend Ray Brown on bass, Ross Tompkins on piano and Jimmie Smith on drums in a set guaranteed to satisfy jazz guitar fans.
Tracklisting: 1. Dolphin Dance 2. Darn That Dream 3. The Lady Wants to Know 4. Parking Lot Blues 5. Gone With the Wind 6. Serenata 7. Angel Eyes 8. All Blues
Third and final post dedicated to the late great Freddie Hubbard. Forget his jazz - funk extravaganzas of the 70s; this time it's as straight-ahead as can be in the mold this great 1985 performance for Blue Note records 50th anniversary below playing Herbie Hancock's Cantaloupe Island (from Herbie's Empyrean Isles of 1964, an LP Hubbard originally appeared - and excelled - in) amply demonstrates.
This blog laments the passing away of jazz trumpet giant Freddie Hubbard. To this end, some of his most representative recorded works will be presented.
A fitful way to start would be Hubbard's first album as a leader, Open Sesame. Recorded in 1960, it is not only a very good record, it dramatizes history in the making. The trumpeter was not unknown then, but he was still in his early years; so was pianist McCoy Tyner, for whom a momentous association with John Coltrane was just around the corner. Indeed, the best-known musician at the time of this recording was bassist Sam Jones, and while he went on to bigger things with Cannonball Adderley and then Oscar Peterson, it was Hubbard and Tyner who would emerge as unambiguously major figures. That by rights should also have characterized tenorist Tina Brooks, but this superb player (his work on "But Beautiful" here is exquisite) never got the recognition he deserved, dying almost forgotten in 1974 at the age of 42. Further highlights include the leader's "Hub's Nub" and the two takes apiece of the title track and "Gypsy Blue," both excellent compositions by Brooks. Mention should also be made of drummer Clifford Jarvis, a young lion steeped in Blakey, and Rudy Van Gelder's predictably flawless engineering. The music both invigorates and enchants.
"Freddie Hubbard's mixture of forward-looking musical ideas and old-fashioned brassiness might be called the essence of the early-sixties Blue Note sound."
--Peter Keepnews
Freddie Hubbard first played and recorded in Indianapolis with the Montgomery brothers. After moving in 1958 to New York he began a series of brief associations with established jazz musicians, including Philly Joe Jones (1958-59, 1961), Sonny Rollins (1959), Slide Hampton (1959-60), J.J. Johnson (1960), and Quincy Jones, with whom he toured Europe (1960-61). In 1961 he joined Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, but left in 1964 to lead his own group. He also played as a sideman with Max Roach (1965-66).
From 1966 Hubbard worked principally with his own quintets and quartets, though he made a tour of the USA with Herbie Hancock's group V.S.O.P. in 1977. His most constant sideman was Kenny Barron, who played in his groups of the late 1960s (with Louis Hayes), early 1970s (with Hayes and Junior Cook), and early 1980s (with Buster Williams and Al Foster). In the mid-1980s Hubbard made a number of international tours and recorded with all-star groups, often in the company of Joe Henderson, playing a repertory of hard-bop and modal-jazz pieces. He continues to perform and record as a leader, and in 1985 made an album with Woody Shaw.
Hubbard has recorded scores of bop, modal-jazz and jazz-rock albums, both as a sideman and as a leader. In the early 1960s he also participated in such radically experimental sessionsas those for Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz and John Coltrane's Ascension albums, but was subsequently criticized for his overly conventional playing. His recordings of the mid-1960s with Hancock placed him among the foremost hard-bop trumpeters, his improvisations combining imaginative melody with a glossy tone, rapid and clean technique, a brilliant high register, a subtle vibrato, and bluesy, squeezed half-valve notes.
In the early 1970s he issued several commercially successful albums with musicians who had formerly played with Miles Davis (Straight Life won a Grammy Award), but for the remainder of the decade he unsuccessfully sought widespread recognition and financial security. He tried funk, all-electronic rock, disco, and overarranged pop music, and concentrated on ostentatious virtuoso displays; his trademark, a climactic trill between nonadjacent pitches (a shake), became a cliche.
During the 1980s, however, he reverted to his former style, improvising on lyrical ballads and complex bop tunes; unfortunately the histrionic elements did not entirely disappear from his playing.
--BARRY KERNFELD, The New Grove Dictionary Of Jazz
A selected discography of Freddie Hubbard albums.
* Open Sesame, 1960, Blue Note. * Hub Cap, 1961, Blue Note. * Ready For Freddie, 1961, Blue Note. * Artistry Of Freddie Hubbard, 1962, Impulse! * Red Clay, 1970, CTI. * Straight Life, 1970, CTI. * Born To Be Blue, 1981, Pablo.
A few posts back we claimed that this blog is dedicated to lesser-known jazz musicians deserving wider recognition. We'll break this rule for now on behalf of this great David Sanborn offering for Verve records, infused in the kind of polished, expertly delivered jazz Sanborn is famous for, with excellent choice of material to boot. Listening to it is like wearing an old, favorite pair of slippers, the perfect holiday companion imo. Enjoy and happy holidays to everyone out there.
Trumpeter Lew Soloff (1948 - ) might have cut his musical teeth with jazz-rock band Blood, Sweat & Tears during the late '60s (one's got to pay the rent somehow), but he is a jazzman to the bone. His collaborations read like a jazz Who is Who including the likes of Machito, Gil Evans, Tony Scott, Tito Puente, Clark Terry, Mongo Santamaria, the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra, the Gil Evans Big Band, Stanley Clarke, Jon Faddis, Sonny Stitt, Stanley Turrentine, Bill Evans, Carla Bley, Ray Anderson, Franco Ambrosetti, Ornette Coleman, Tony Bennett, Louie Bellson, The Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, the Magic City Jazz Orchestra, the Bohuslän Big Band, the Manhattan Jazz Quintet and last but not least the George Russell Big Band (see previous post).
This 1998 offering teams up Lew with a dream rhythm section consisting of pianist Mulgrew Miller, bassist George Mraz and drummer Victor Lewis as well as Emily Mitchell, Soloff's wife, playing the harp (the Harpo Marx type, not the harmonica) on two of the nine album cuts, one of which is a movement from a Tchaikovsky symphony.
Needless to say that the interplay between these top musicians is top-notch (pun intended) as embedded track Come Rain Or Come Shine amply demonstrates. Material is painstakingly chosen and sequenced to provide that winter-by-the-fireplace-holding-a-glass-of-brandy CD so rare nowadays, enjoy.
George Allen Russell (1923 - ), American jazz pianist, composer and theorist, is considered one of the first jazz musicians to contribute to general music theory with a theory of harmony based on Jazz rather than European music, in his 1953 book, The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization which paved the way for the modal revolutions of Miles Davis and John Coltrane. Russell's stylistic reach in his own compositions eventually became omnivorous, embracing bop, gospel, blues, rock, funk, contemporary classical elements, electronic music and African rhythms in his recent, ambitious extended works -- most apparent in his large-scale 1983 suite for an enlarged big band, The African Game. Like his colleague Gil Evans, Russell never stopped growing, but his work is not nearly as well-known that that of Evans, being more difficult to grasp and, in any case, not as well-documented by U.S. record labels.
We try to remedy this here with this magnificent 1978 session when Russell led a 19-piece big band at New York's Village Vanguard for six weeks, in a tremendously diverse performance displaying the many facets of his art -- including his first famous composition, the two-part "Cubano Be, Cubano Bop" written in 1947 for the Dizzy Gillespie Orchestra that served as a solid vehicle of that band's pioneering experiments in fusing bebop and Cuban jazz elements, enjoy.
Let's turn the clock back a bit and imagine it's 1955. Trumpeter Buck Clayton led a series of exciting studio jam sessions then in the company of stalwart swing soloists Joe Newman, Joe Thomas, Billy Butterfield, and Ruby Braff on trumpets; trombonists Urbie Green, Benny Powell, Henderson Chambers, Trummy Young, Bennie Green, Dicky Harris, J.C. Higginbotham, and Tyree Glenn; altoist Lem Davis; tenors Coleman Hawkins, Al Cohn, and Buddy Tate; Julian Dash doubling on tenor and alto; baritonist Charlie Fowlkes; several rhythm sections with pianists Sir Charles Thompson, Jimmy Jones, Billy Kyle, Ken Kersey, and the forgotten Al Waslohn. Results are trouser-flapping, unadulterated swing of the highest order and in pristine sonic quality to boot. Swing lovers should not miss this one.
In this great solo piano set from 1997 Arvanitas displays in spades what separates the men from the boys. His choice of material is impeccable and spans the whole history of jazz piano from Scott Joplin to Chick Corea.
Tracklisting: 1. The Entertainer 2. Rosetta 3. Ain't Mishbehavin 4. Blue And Sentimental 5. Come Sunday 6. Piano Is Art 7. Chelsea Bridge 8. This Way Out 9. Misty 10. Boucing With Bud 11. Monk's Mood 12. D & E 13. DJango 14. The Duke 15. Nica's Dream 16. Very Early 17. Dolphin Dance 18. Windows 19. Beautiful Florence
The attitude of the gallant Six Hundred which so aroused Lord Tennyson's admiration arose from the fact that the least disposition to ask the reason why was discouraged by tricing the would-be inquirer to the triangle and flogging him into insensibility.
F.J. Veale,
Advance to Barbarism
(Mitre Press, 1968).
Music posted here is for information purposes only. I don't subscribe to the notion that record companies are ripped off by the proliferation of blogs like this one. It is my firm belief that quite the contrary happens i.e. by bringing awareness to hitherto virtually unknown artists to the general public the music benefits greatly and a new level of interest is created.
Listeners are therefore kindly requested to buy the original music and support artists if they fancy what they hear - remember: if you like it, buy it!
