The Police, Reggatta de Blanc

Album of the Week, January 4, 2025

The story of good music is frequently the story of the collision between different ways of performing and hearing music. Cécile McLorin Salvant mashed the sounds of Irish lamentation with British art pop music over a jazz background. Alice Coltrane intersected Indian devotional music with free jazz. Duke Ellington collided Tchaikovsky and big band. And the musicians we’ll be listening to for the next little bit intersected punk rock with reggae and jazz, in differing amounts, and created something entirely new.

Gordon Sumner was born in 1951 in Northumberland, England, the eldest child of a hairdresser and a milkman who used to be a fitter at an engineering works, in the shadow of Wallsend Shipyards. He attended University of Warwick at Coventry but found he preferred playing and writing music, so left after a term. He worked a series of odd jobs, eventually getting certified as a teacher, and taught at a prep school for two years. During this period he played jazz in the evenings and weekends with a series of bands including the Phoenix Jazzmen, where a yellow and black striped sweater earned him the nickname “Sting,” and Last Exit, a jazz fusion band.

He was a bassist, singer and songwriter during this period and was actively writing songs, many of which would be recycled for material in his later projects. Last Exit moved to London in 1977 to try to make it big, but ended up breaking up, with half the band heading back to Newcastle. Sting’s co-founder in Last Exit, keyboardist Gerry Richardson, became music director for the band of a Trinidadian-born singer/songwriter named Billy Ocean. And Sting joined a new project with drummer Stewart Copeland and guitarist Henry (or Henri) Padovani; they called the band The Police, inspired by the American Copeland, whose father was an intelligence operative for the CIA. Copeland had been playing in a progressive rock band called Curved Air; he had met Padovani after a Curved Air gig and invited him to join the band.

The new trio recorded a single, “Fall Out,” that got some press (Mick Jagger wrote the review in Sounds magazine). About the same time, musician Mike Howlett invited Sting to join a project called Strontium 90, and Sting brought Copeland along. In the band they met guitarist Andy Summers, ten years older than Sting and Copeland, who had played with Eric Burdon and the Animals and psychedelic artist Kevin Ayers. Sting was growing dissatisfied with Padovani’s limited playing, and invited Summers to join the Police as their fourth member; ultimately Summers issued an ultimatum that if he was to stay, Padovani had to go, and the Police were a trio again. Desperate for cash, the trio bleached their hair blond for a Wrigley’s gum commercial.

They got signed to A&M Records and recorded an album, taking advantage of Sting’s hot songwriting streak that produced songs like “Can’t Stand Losing You,” “So Lonely,” and “Roxanne.” Outlandos D’Amour hit the upper reaches of both the US and UK charts, and after an exhausting tour the band headed back to the studio, with lots of time but fewer songs prepared. The result was Reggatta de Blanc, which I always translated as a kid as “the white boat race” but which apparently actually meant “white people reggae.”

(This is what it’s like to write about The Police. There’s so much backstory that you end up writing five or six paragraphs before you even get to the music.)

Fortunately for the longevity of the band, the very first song on the album was an all time classic. Sting says he came up with “Message in a Bottle” on tour, and that Andy Summers added the hook, that incredible arpeggio that underpins the song. The actual recording, while it sounds simple, is built of overdubs, with both Summers and Copeland layering their parts. Over it Sting sings one of the great melodies of his career. There’s not much reggae in this song, except in Sting’s voice, which at this phase of his career is notable for the altitude his tenor could reach and the slight echo of a Jamaican patois around the edges. Sting had acknowledged listening to Bob Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry” in writing “So Lonely,” but he must have been listening to more to pick up that depth of an accent in his singing voice. (Elvis Costello notoriously once said, “Somebody should clip Sting round the head and tell him to stop singing in that ridiculous Jamaican accent.”)

But even with all these factors going on, the fundamental genius of the song is built into it from the start. Those swirling arpeggios at the outset are echoed in Sting’s vocal line, which drops from the fifth of the minor scale down to the third and back, with variations on the fourth and second of the scale. But Sting stays floating above the tonic until the chorus, where he hammers it three times before popping back up to the third and back down (“I’ll send an SOS to the world”). And he repeats the next phrase three times, all on the tonic (“I hope that someone gets my…”), while the chords change underneath. And then we realize that we’ve actually been suspending above the fifth of the scale for the chorus, and when he drops to “message in a bottle” it’s only a half step down but it feels as though the bottom of the world has dropped out from under you. The arrangement on the record reinforces this, with the guitar ceasing its arpeggiation and only Sting’s bass reinforcing the pounding loneliness. Stewart Copeland adds to the feeling of drift here; playing a driving beat through the majority of the song, he gives a syncopated fill on the high hat on the chorus that reinforces the feeling of loneliness and alienation. Finally, there’s the coda, the “sending out an SOS” on repeat, over Andy Summers’ weeping guitar line. There are relatively few perfect pop songs, and the Police led off side 1 with one of them. It was their first song to go to Number One on the UK chart.

How do you follow a masterpiece? If you’re the Police, often with an instrumental. “Reggatta de Blanc” shows a couple of key Police traits: the virtuosity of all three players, the degree to which Jamaican music was occupying their collective imaginations, and the joy that they apparently found in playing music with each other. With a sustained note on the guitar and Copeland beating double time on the hi-hat, Sting counts the band off and Copeland immediately lets loose with one of his virtuosic drum fills, this time crackling on the rim of the snare. Sting plays a bouncy arpeggio that rocks back and forth between the two opening chords and Andy Summers plays fills until the trio locks into a rock beat, playing a series of chords over an insistent eight-note ground on the tonic in the bass. This is where the vocals come in, and they’re pure filler, a set of “cha!”s and what can only be described as a vocal exercise: “Eeyo, eeyo, eeyo-yo.” It’s fun, almost cinematic in the moods it delivers, and utterly inconsequential. Setlist.fm says that the band played it live 42 times between 1979 and 1982, but almost twice as many times in the years before they broke up in medley with “Can’t Stand Losing You.” That version was in the setlists when they did their 2007-2008 reunion tour, and both Sting and Stewart Copeland played the medley on their solo tours in the past year.

If “Reggatta de Blanc” became an unlikely live staple, “It’s Alright for You” appears to have been the opposite, a filler track only played live once by the band. Written by Copeland with words by Sting, the song is aggressive and driving but the lyrics seem to be mostly throwaway, with some unfortunate period notes in the verses (the “limp wrist tight fist contract no twist” verse in particular makes this a challenging karaoke choice).

“Bring on the Night,” by contrast, has enjoyed a long life for a song not even written for the band. Like many of Sting’s songs, on paper it sounds hopelessly pretentious. Written while Sting was in Last Exit, the song was originally titled “Carrion Prince,” a reference to the Ted Hughes poem “King of Carrion” (though I didn’t know it when I was first listening, at the same time that I was falling down a Ted Hughes rabbit hole), and was apparently written with Pontius Pilate in mind. (Worse yet: Sting later read The Executioner’s Song, and, feeling that “Bring on the Night” was a fit to Gary Gilmore’s death wish, now says “I sing it with him in mind.”) You don’t have to know any of that to enjoy the song; in fact, you might be better off not knowing. In the version on the album it’s a reggae-inflected romp, with Summers and Sting exchanging phrases and ideas throughout on their respective instruments. We’ll hear this song again. The next song, “Deathwish” — not so much. This wisp of a song, credited to all three members of the band, hasn’t been played live by anyone since 1981. It’s got a striking intro, played with open fifths in a syncopated beat, but the lyrics are blah. It doesn’t have a real chorus, just an instrumental riff. It’s in and out so you can get on to the next song.

And the next song is worth it. “Walking on the Moon” was the band’s second Number One in the UK. It continues the subdued mood of the chorus from “Message in a Bottle” and stretches it out in an eerie, echoey track that is simple, subversively melodic, unexpectedly modal. The backbone of the track is the bass line, which is just six notes in syncopation: subtonic (x2), tonic, mediant, supertonic, subtonic. A ringing chord from Andy Summers punctuates the riff after the tonic is played. Stewart Copeland plays some of the finest work of his career, giving a weightless feeling with his snare work and, especially, the shift into a triple meter for a full sixteen measures after the last chorus. The track is in a minor key but feels somehow upbeat, as though one is traveling meters with each step. Sting has said he knew he had made it as a songwriter when he heard an intern in the hospital where his first child was born whistling “Walking on the Moon” as he walked by in the hallway. When I first heard dub, years later, I understood the musical point of departure for the song.

If Copeland was in the land of the sublime on the previous track, he swings to the ridiculous on this next song, opining “The other ones are complete bulls**t.” He has sole writing credit on “On Any Other Day,” and it sounds more like his later solo work than a Police track. I can’t find a mention of a single live performance on Setlist, which is a pity because the song is bratty fun with its story of a middle aged man who hits one minor obstacle after another on his birthday. Unfortunately, the obstacle Copeland picks for the last line of the chorus, “My fine young son has turned out gay,” hasn’t aged especially well.

“The Bed’s Too Big Without You” was the last single released from the album, getting a release as an extra 45 included in a collection, Six Pack, that also includes the Police’s first five singles (excluding “Fall Out”). It’s the most steretypically “reggae” of the tracks on the album and is deceptively simple, given its tragic history (Sting is said to have written it in memory of his first girlfriend, who supposedly committed suicide in the distraught aftermath of their breakup). The mono mix of the song, which is more like a full re-recording and which is only available on the Message in a Box compilation, is even more stripped down; the sixteen bars before the last chorus, just bass and drums, are as minimal as this band ever got.

“Contact” is another Stewart Copeland track that doesn’t appear to have ever been played live. It’s fine but nothing memorable. The same cannot be said for his last songwriting credit on the album, “Does Everyone Stare,” which opens with a piano figure that he supposedly wrote in college and has a moment of pure serendipity after the first chorus, a swelling operatic tenor moment that, according to Copeland, came from a radio broadcast that happened to be picked up by the poor wiring of his home recording studio when he was recording the demo. It also has some of the funniest writing on the album (“I never noticed the size of my feet/till I kicked you in the shins”) as well as some of the deepest self-pity (“Last of all I’m sorry ‘cause you never asked for this/I can see I’m not your type, and my shots will always miss”). It was a perfect song for a thirteen-year-old me.

The last song, “No Time This Time,” was written by Sting as a b-side for “So Lonely,” and was added to fill out the album’s running time. It sounds more like Outlandos D’Amour, with a rushed vocal performance and a strong punk flavor. The band performed it live a handful of times, but it probably deserved more; it has a huge energy and is eminently singable.

The Police were one of the rare bands where the second album was stronger than the first, and they would continue to build this trajectory with the follow-up. But at the time they were still doing various side projects, and next week we’ll listen to the most unusual of the projects from this period.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

What’s up in early 2025 for the Album of the Week?

I’ve been writing about jazz (and some other music) on this blog now for … a while! The first real post in the series (Eva Cassidy’s Live at Blues Alley) happened in January 2022, so almost three years now. And we’ve written about some really great stuff—Trane, Bill Evans, Cécile McLorin Salvant, CTI.

What I’ve found most interesting about writing these columns is that, the more I stretch outside my comfort zone, the more interesting things get… and when I return to my comfort zone, things are richer for the detour.

So the upcoming columns. I’ve been thinking about the narrative we’ve heard so far… how traditional jazz went avant garde, splintered into rock-influenced fusion and funk-influenced jazz-pop, and returned to something like a traditionalist stance… all within the scope of about 20 years, from 1964 to the end of the 1970s.

But what happened then? Jazz is still around, but the journey it went on in the 1980s was very different. And along the way it had some flirtations with some very different kinds of music.

So we’re going to start next week exploring some of the kinds of music that touched jazz in the 1980s—but we’ll explore them on their own terms, not just as jazz adjacencies. And we’re going to visit what happened to some of the artists we’ve been following as well as how other kinds of music were changed by jazz. And we’re going to do it all through the lens of one of the most successful popular artists of the 1980s.

Hope that’s whetted your appetite, and will see you next week!

Duke Pearson, Merry Ole Soul

Album of the Week, December 28, 2024

We’ve come across Duke Pearson twice before in this series, both times in Blue Note recordings by the great McCoy Tyner, where he was the producer on Tyner’s Extensions and Expansions. Pearson had been with Blue Note artists since the early 1960s, when he joined the Donald Byrd-Pepper Adams Quintet. In 1963, Pearson made his mark in two important ways: first, he was the arranger for four of the five tracks on Byrd’s A New Perspective, including “Cristo Redentor,” which became a hit.

Second, he became the chief A&R (artists & repertoire) man for Blue Note following the death of Ike Quebec. In this role he is credited with shaping the sound of Blue Note during the bulk of the 1960s. He also recorded seven albums between 1964 and 1969 on Blue Note, beginning with the auspiciously titled Wahoo! and ending with Merry Ole Soul, which as is traditional for Christmas albums finished recording in August of 1969 (and as is traditional for 1960s Blue Note albums was recorded at Van Gelder Studios). He was joined for the sessions by Bob Cranshaw (from Sonny Rollins’ band) on bass, Mickey Roker on drums, and Airto Moreira on percussion.

We’ve heard the opening track “Sleigh Ride” in this blog before; it kicked off my 2022 Christmas jazz hour on my Exfiltration Radio series, “Riding in a Wonderland.” At the time, I wrote, “This uber-cool take on “Sleigh Ride” is viewed through the prism of spiritual jazz, with a drone in the bass and drums that’ll knock your socks off.” Well, that’s true, but there are some really spectacular fine details in the arrangement as well that are worth expanding upon. The open chords in Pearson’s introduction, the pervasive swing, and the genius switch from piano to celeste for that opening melody: all perfection. And listen to what the bass is doing in that opening! That syncopated drone on that fifth of the scale, in octaves, remains the steady pulse throughout the entire intro, first verse, first solo, all the way into the bridge where suddenly the arrangement snaps into a more conventional bebop pattern, but only for sixteen bars! And the stride-influenced piano rumble that Pearson adopts on the second bar (“there’s a birthday party at the home of Farmer Gray…”)!

Pearson takes “The Little Drummer Boy” at breakneck speed, but still gives Mickey Roker plenty of time to make his mark in a way that the prior song didn’t really permit. Here the drummer gives a massive marching-band style introduction across the entire drum kit as the bass and the lower chords of the piano keep the drone going. When the full melody arrives, Cranshaw gets to cut loose a little, boogeying up and down the octave but still returning to that ground—and at the end of each verse, Roker returns to cut loose, here with a splashy cymbal, there with a roll.

Pearson plays Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane’s “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” more straight, though there’s still more than a touch of the blues about his playing. Only the entrance of the celeste at the end signals Pearson’s imaginative rearrangements. The next track, “Jingle Bells,” is more freely adapted, with Airto’s Latin percussion (doubled by Roker on the wood blocks) signaling the brisk samba tempo. Cranshaw gets to join in the reindeer games with a wandering bass line throughout.

The duo of Roker and Airto get “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” going at something like a breakneck speed, as though a samba party were happening at 78 RPM instead of 45. Pearson follows suit, gleefully improvising atop Fred Coots and Haven Gillespie’s Christmas classic, and Cranshaw follows, briskly ripping through two choruses and a bridge. Santa has never samba’d so hard.

Pearson turns serious on one of the few non-secular songs on the album. “Go Tell It on the Mountain” is an African-American spiritual that was first collected in Religious Folk Songs of the Negro as Sung on the Plantations, compiled by Thomas P. Fenner, the first director of music at what is now Hampton University. Pearson brings church to the performance, with inflections of gospel and blues in its depths.

We’re back with the martial marching beat of “Little Drummer Boy” for “Wassail Song,” otherwise known as “Here We Come A-Wassailing.” Pearson and Cranshaw have an extended improvisation on the theme in the lower octaves before the main tune returns and the procession moves away. But “Silent Night” is back in the sound world of “Go Tell It on the Mountain” and gospel, as though Franz Gruber were a southern pastor.

“O Little Town of Bethlehem” is played as straight as it gets: a piano solo, with no blues around the edges. This might have been Pearson playing in church. It brings a quiet note to end a set that has gone in every other possible direction already.

Pearson’s collection was the only Christmas album released on Blue Note Records during the 1960s, and is lesser known compared to some of the great jazz Christmas classics like Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas. But it’s a great collection that spans a variety of styles and is well worth adding to your Christmas playlist.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Here’s the playlist of Christmas jazz from 2022 that opens with Pearson’s rendition of “Sleigh Ride.” It might be time to make another one of these…

Boston Camerata, A Medieval Christmas

Album of the Week, December 21, 2024

I’ve featured the Boston Camerata in this series before (and even before this series was a thing). The early music ensemble, directed for many years by Joel Cohen, was responsible for introducing me to the sound of Middle English, Renaissance and Sacred Harp music, and a great many other things. And before I started collecting old records, I thought they had recorded three Christmas records for Nonesuch: Sing We Noel first, then A Renaissance Christmas, and finally A Medieval Christmas, which I thought had been released in 1991 when it came out on CD.

It turns out I had things backwards. As I wrote last year, the Nonesuch A Renaissance Christmas was a re-recording of an earlier performance from before the Camerata had signed to a major label. And it turns out that A Medieval Christmas was originally released in 1975, meaning that it precedes Sing We Noel by a full three years.

That difference is significant. Thanks in part to Cohen, as well as to British early music artists like Paul Hillier and David Munrow, the standards for early music performance were rising rapidly, and certain scarcities like authentic period instruments and unusual voice parts (like countertenors) were starting to be more widely available. Indeed, the scarcity of early instruments was, um, instrumental in the founding of the Camerata; it began as a group dedicated to demonstrating the rare antique instruments in Boston’s Museum of Fine Art, and this album was recorded at the MFA.

But during this transitional period, Cohen still had to work with the forces he could find, including some interesting vocalists. Charles Rhodes, the countertenor who is featured prominently on the Franco-Provençal setting of the prophecy of the Angel Gabriel, “Oiet, virgines,” is probably the most notorious example; he has an expressive voice, but his vocal production is a little uneven and he strays a little toward the pinched and strained side of the high tenor sound. But it’s still mesmerizing, and that’s due at least in part to the program and the instrumentalists.

Cohen can be reliably counted on to deliver the most incredibly obscure music, whether a cantillation of the Torah or a 10th century Spanish plainchant, and then to weave them together seamlessly into a single performance. When the conductus “Adest sponsus” enters, it’s with great vigor that the percussion and the shawms set the tempo, as if for a procession; the album closing conductus “Orientus partibus” is actually performed as a recessional, which contributes greatly to the mood if not to the audibility.

There is also some fairly spectacular programming of related tunes together, with the familiar macaronic carol “In dulci jubilo” paired with its plainchant antecedent, “Congaugent hodie,” as well as readings in Middle English courtesy of Nicholas Linfield (who also did the readings on Sing We Noel).

The album as a whole can be taken as many things: a scholarly illustration of medieval musical practices (especially if you read Cohen’s comprehensive liner notes while listening), a window into alternate musical Christmas traditions, or just something to put on and meditatively listen. Or all of the above, which is what I plan to do this week. Next time, we’ll get to something a little funkier.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

Boston Pops, Pops Christmas Party

Album of the Week, December 14, 2024

For about 100,000 people every year in my adopted home town of Boston, the Holiday Pops are a major attraction and marker of the holiday season. The modern institution as we know it today—a series of December concerts with repertoire both classical and popular, garnished by a certain man in a big red coat—has existed since 1973. But the Boston Pops has been programming holiday fare for much longer. Its iconic “Sleigh Ride,” Leroy Anderson’s feature for whinnying trumpet, sleigh bells and slapstick, was written in 1948 (based on an idea the composer got in a 1946 heat wave) and premiered in a concert in May of that year. And the Pops has long had a deep bench of holiday arrangements as well. As far as I can tell, the Pops Christmas story starts in earnest with today’s album, 1959’s A Pops Christmas Party.

The album is a combination of arrangements, medleys, and works written especially for the orchestra, along with light classical pieces that carry the flavor of the season—in other words, a typical Pops album. And the hands of three of the Pops’ great arrangers and composers—Anderson, Jack Mason, and Richard Hayman—are all over it.

“A Christmas Festival” kicks us off in fine Pops style. Most Holiday Pops concerts start with a fanfare, frequently a medley of familiar Christmas carols, and this Leroy Anderson arrangement is the grandaddy of them all. Fiedler takes the opening in a stately tempo and then gradually accelerates up to something more like a slow modern Pops tempo. The genius of Anderson shows in the moving eighth note accompaniment to “Deck the Hall with Boughs of Holly,” which manages to be both traditional and ultramodern at once, and there are touches of this throughout—the passing trumpet notes at the end of “Deck,” the moving eighth note pizzicati and winds that mark the edges of “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” and so on throughout. I think my favorite moment, though, is the few notes played on the tubular bells in the midst of “Silent Night”—just before the winds provide the rapid-fire accompaniment that signals the beginning of “Jingle Bells” and the approaching finale. The syncopation in the brass that begins the second verse ends by morphing into what feels for all the world like a can-can on “O Come, All Ye Faithful” before it turns into a massive orchestral finale, with all hands on deck. Here Fiedler takes the tempo at something approaching breakneck speed as the organ roars the final notes.

The record’s performance of “White Christmas” is as sedate and mystical as I’ve ever heard it. Though the celeste is not quite in unison with the pizzicato strings on the two out of tempo notes, still the strings play in gorgeous muted harmony under the concertmaster’s solo. (Aside: it was often a custom before I joined the TFC that the musicians would toss pennies at Pops concertmaster Tamara Smirnova’s feet after she completed the solo, signaling their approval.) This version, the original arrangement by composer Jack Mason, lacks the choral coda and key change that has been the Pops’ practice since I joined.

By contrast, the Pops’ “Sleigh Ride” hasn’t changed a note since its inception, save perhaps for the arrival of Sparkle the Magical Christmas Unicorn in recent years. It remains a perfect bit of musical scene painting, with literal slapstick to play the role of the cracking whip. Mason’s arrangement of “Winter Wonderland,” which follows, has since disappeared, victim of its midcentury ballroom dancing aesthetic. But they’ve brought back Léon Jessel’s “Parade of the Wooden Soldiers,” courtesy of a brilliant bit of animation that illustrates the journey and travails of the titular toy. (It doesn’t seem to be online, but there’s a short preview on Facebook.)

In a reversal of current Pops practice, the classical works are saved for the opening of the second half of the album. The “Dream Pantomime” from Engelbert Humperdinck’s light opera Hansel and Gretel seems to have fallen by the wayside as a holiday piece, but it’s lovely here, with delicate work from the strings throughout as the angels come to surround and protect the lost children as they sleep.

Mozart’s “Sleigh Ride,” from his German Dances, is also an unlikely Christmas work, but is at least more commonly played—if not overly familiar from high school orchestra concerts. The Pops play it straight here, with the emergence of the sleigh bells seeming to signal the sleigh breaking into the open after passing through the dense orchestration. The “Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy” from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite of course remains a beloved holiday classic to this day, appearing mostly recently on the Pops’ program in its Duke Ellington re-arrangement (“Sugar Rum Cherry”) in 2021 (during which time I created the cocktails Sugar Rum Cherry Nos. 1 and 2).

“Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” is the sole arrangement by veteran Pops hand Richard Hayman to appear on the album, and is another one that lingers in the Pops repertoire to this day. This 1959 recording, appearing just ten years after the introduction of the Johnny Marks song by Gene Autry, sounds just as brilliant as modern performances do. Hayman loved to shoehorn little details into every corner of an arrangement, like the extra whip cracks that appear around the edges and the bassoon counterpoint to the tune in the last chorus, and they’re crystal clear here.

“Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town” might be the most enduring of the Mason arrangements in the Pops repertoire, or at least the part that appears here. The 1934 Coots/Gillespie tune receives every trick in the arranger’s book, including the pizzicato countermelody (which the TFC always “bum bum bum”s along to during modern performances, the big band swing at the conclusion of the arrangement, and the omnipresent sleigh bells in the hands of what must surely be a tired percussionist.

The success of Pops Christmas Party and its sequels played a role in establishing the Boston Pops in the format they still follow today: a spring of light classics and popular music, a December full of holiday cheer. It’s a tradition that I became a part of when I joined the Tanglewood Festival Chorus in 2005, and it’s still fun to hear “A Christmas Festival,” “Sleigh Ride,” “Parade of the Wooden Soldiers” and “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and sing the vocal version of Mason’s “White Christmas” year after year. Next time we’ll check in with another holiday tradition, albeit this time one that’s more unique to my family.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

The Ramsey Lewis Trio, More Sounds of Christmas

Album of the Week, December 7, 2024

There never seems to be enough time in the holiday calendar to write about all the Christmas music that there is. That’s partly because I like a wide variety of the stuff, of course, and partly because there is, in fact, an awful lot of it. Some Christmas albums are stone classics, and some … aren’t but are still pretty good.

Such is the case with today’s album, recorded in October 1964 and released just in time for that year’s holiday season. The title, a reference to the Lewis trio’s 1961 classic Sound of Christmas, screams “not putting in a lot of effort.” But this isn’t a run of the mill band going through the motions; this is the Ramsey Lewis Trio, and in fact the same trio that we heard on the 1961 recording, with Eldee Young on bass and Issac “Red” Holt on drums (with a little assist from Cleveland Eaton and Steve McCall on some of the tracks). The only difference is that Riley Hampton’s string arrangements don’t return; in their place are charts by bandleader King Fleming and saxophonist Will Jackson. The end product isn’t a stone classic, but it still has some great moments and is a good way to ease into the holiday.

“Snowbound,” a song by bandleader Russell Faith with Clarence Kehner made famous by Sarah Vaughan, starts us off in a contemplative mood. Ramsey Lewis performs the tune with subtle accompaniment by the string orchestra, then improvises while the orchestra takes the theme. The effect is meditative and evocative; one can imagine Lewis staring out a window into the falling snow… at least until the trombone solo crests at the peak of the bridge. (Fun fact: Trombonist John Avant went on to play in the Sun Ra Arkestra.)

From the slightly obscure mid-20th-century pop vein, we drop right into full holiday mode with “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” The arrangement takes us through day three with the strings, sleigh bells, and celeste only, before Lewis’s piano enters with the rest of the trio, playing a bluesy chorus. If you’ve sat through (or, ahem, sung) a few too many rounds of 12 Days, this arrangement is a pretty good way to allow you to reimagine it, albeit by discarding the structure and tune of the song pretty completely after the first minute.

The Lewis original “Egg Nog,” played just by the trio, is a full-throated twelve bar blues in which the band demonstrates their completely soulful mastery. Stride piano styles? Check, in the bridge. In-the-pocket drumming? Check. Deeply swung bass rhythms? Check. Only the celeste, played by Lewis on the intro and outro, takes this into Christmas music territory. It’s a good opportunity to whip up a batch of Charles Mingus’s eggnog recipe and sit by the Christmas tree.

What is there to say about “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer” that hasn’t already been said? Well, as I was reminded watching the classic 1964 Christmas special last night, maybe it’s worthwhile remembering that the beloved Christmas mascot first found life in a poem published by Montgomery Ward in 1939, written by Robert L. May, a copywriter who was deeply in debt due to his cost of his dying wife’s medical treatments for cancer. The poem became a book due to May’s persistence, who convinced reluctant book publishers (who figured there wasn’t a market for a poem that already had six million copies in print thanks to Montgomery Ward) to take a chance on the children’s book market. At the beginning of the baby boom, this was a good bet; the book sold like hotcakes, and May was subsequently able to convince his sister’s husband, Johnny Marks, to write a song about the red-nosed reindeer. In the initial recording, performed by an initially reluctant Gene Autry, Rudolph completed his ascension to the highest stages of the secular American Christmas pantheon. —Okay, so maybe there was a little to say about the song after all. In this case, Lewis’s trio and the orchestra swing the song hard, driven by Red Holt’s monstrous syncopated drumming. (I listened to this song five times as I wrote this and am convinced I’ll be feeling that anticipatory downbeat in my dreams tonight.)

The trio seems to take the heavy swing of “Rudolph” as a challenge to see if they can swing “Jingle Bells” even harder. This is a showpiece for Eldee Young, who solos the entire song with what must have been a finger-bleeding pizzicato, accompanied by some pretty first class scat singing, taking us out of the first half. And it’s Young’s bass that takes us into his composition “Plum Puddin’” to open the second side. Lewis and the trio take us on a quick ride through what’s essentially a jam, with Lewis executing filigreed runs that veer into blue notes and back out again as Young and Holt lock into a tight rhythm that never lets up throughout.

“Snowfall,” a 1941 hit by Claude Thornhill and his orchestra, recaptures some of the mood of the album opener, but this time the strings are in control with less input from Lewis, until he starts jamming bits of what sound like a countermelody of his own “Sound of Christmas” at the end. Lewis’s trio arrangement of “We Three Kings” is more adventurous, driven both by Lewis’s bluesy piano and Holt’s heavily syncopated snare work. At the back of it all, Eldee Young’s bass weaves in and out with a descending line that echoes the magi’s journey all the way to the fleeting appearance of major-key tonality in the chorus, punctuated by huge drumrolls from Holt. Lewis closes it out in a minor mode with a trill on the minor third.

Lewis slides into Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” with an eight-bar major key intro that suspends us on the fifth until he finally brings us down to the melody. It’s the sort of trick that “My Favorite Things”-era John Coltrane would have soaked in for half an hour or more; here it’s just another tool in Lewis’s belt. The rest of the performance is pretty standard for the trio, “just” outstanding bluesy swinging.

“Little Drummer Boy” must surely be the weirdest example of the interconnectedness of the 20th century; how many Christmas songs have an indirect connection to the Nazi takeover of Austria? It was the Trapp Family Singers (of “Sound of Music” fame) who first performed Katherine Davis’s “Carol of the Drum,” before Harry Simeone took it and rearranged it into the form we know today. Lewis does a little rearranging of his own, with the strings playing a repeated drone on the downbeat before Lewis takes an extended bluesy jam out of the end of the first verse, and stays in that vein until he glissandos right into a key change. The arrangement has him continue to jam his way through the end, until he picks up the melody once more as a tag at the end.

More Sounds of Christmas provides sufficient evidence that the persistence of the Ramsey Lewis Trio—ten years, twenty-something albums, a top ten hit—had as much to do with Young and Holt as it did with Lewis. We’ll listen to more of their recordings another time. but this week I recommend you spin this platter of bluesy holiday cheer as you’re dragging those ornaments out of storage. Next time we’ll flip over to something a little more traditional.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

Wayne Shorter, Celebration Vol. 1

Album of the Week, November 30, 2024

When Wayne Shorter died, on March 2, 2023, in many ways it marked the end of an era. By the time of his passing he was being hailed as America’s greatest living jazz composer, and the “Footprints Quartet” that we heard last week had a reputation as one of the greatest improvisational bands in history. In some ways, though, his death accelerated the release of material by the quartet, a flood that began with a trickle following his retirement from performing in 2018. Some of the works released featured other ensembles; the last album released before Shorter’s death featured him in a new quartet with Esperanza Spalding, Teri Lyne Carrington, and Leo Genovese, from a festival appearance the summer before his retirement, and other ambitious recordings combined the “Footprints Quartet” with an orchestra (we’ll review the most notable of those another day).

But today’s record, the evocatively titled Celebration Vol. 1, is a pure representation of the Footprints Quartet at the height of its powers. A live-in-concert recording from an October 18, 2014 appearance at the Stockholm Jazz Festival, it features only a few recognizable Shorter compositions alongside many collective group improvisations. At one point, Shorter thought to title the record Unidentified Flying Objects, after these improvisations, and they do feel a little like invaders from outer space in the way they arrive and transform.

“Zero Gravity To the 15th Dimension” opens as a mysterious minor-third centered tune by Pérez and Patitucci, with rolling thunder under provided by Blade. Starting out on single notes, Shorter builds to an obbligato of mysterious tones that transform into a sort of sonata, with all three melodic players essaying the melody over Blade’s cymbals. A single beat on the bass drum signals the start of a 4/4 section and the return of the chromatic tune from the beginning. The band returns to a more melodic land built approximately around the chords from “Orbits” for a few bars, then turns to a new mysterious modal tune driven by a rising pattern in Patitucci’s bass; they gradually build in energy and dynamic before settling into a tune atop his constantly moving, restless arpeggios. (Hearing him after last week’s first outing of the “Footprints” quartet, it becomes clear just how much the bassist was contributing melodically and improvisationally by this point to the quartet.)

The band draws this number to a close and launches without a pause into “Smilin’ Through,” notionally a cover of the 1919 song by Arthur Penn but thoroughly transformed by Shorter’s arrangement and his playing, which channels some of John Coltrane’s melodic imagination in a far gentler expression. Pérez plays the melody as a gentle modal exploration while Shorter plays obbligatos over and around the tune and Patitucci and Blade create a sternly rhythmic pulse.

Side 2 opens with a series of brief explorations, played without interruption but labeled on the cover as “Zero Gravity to the 11th Dimension,” “Zero Gravity to the 12th Dimension,” and “Zero Gravity – Unbound.” The first opens as though it will be a pop song before turning into a fluttery exploration of beyond. The second begins with a bass figure that is then punctuated by stabs of chords in the piano, and isolated notes from the saxophone. All the players coalesce into an oddly sprightly tune that transforms into the “Unbound” version—a freer playing of the tune in the same key that circles around an oddly familiar set of chords.

A quick whistle signals the opening of “Orbits,” which reveals itself to have been the source of the familiar chords. The melody circles in the piano and the saxophone, and then the players take a step sideways and find themselves in a different tonality, even as Patitucci intones the theme again. They play the theme out and into a different feeling once again, as if they opened the door to a Latin ballroom. This may be the definitive version of “Orbits” by virtue of the way it jumps from planet to planet, each time with the swirling theme signaling the transition. The piece ends with a stuttering version of the theme, accompanied by descending whistling, as the band comes back to earth.

“Edge of the World (End Title)” is a Shorter arrangement of the end theme of the 1980s movie Wargames, written by film composer Arthur Rubinstein. (Yes, really. Shorter was a notorious science fiction buff, and was watching hours of old movies in his Los Angeles home between tours at the end of his life.) Here it’s a solemn and straight reading of the tune to close out the most exploratory, gnomic and fascinating side of the album.

“Zero Gravity to the 90th Dimension” opens with a thudding percussive roll on muffled drums, followed by stabbing chords and a sustained trill from the piano and a bowed eerie note from the bass. Shorter transitions the band out of the Zero Gravity moment with a completely unaccompanied melody, signaling the opening of “Lotus,” a Wayne Shorter original that only appeared on one other album, his 2018 magnum opus Emanon. Here it reveals itself as a tender melody that plays suspended over the chords that were in the 90th dimension previously. At one point the band quotes something that sounds for all the world like Radiohead’s “Everything In Its Right Place,” and it seems as though it fits right in, as does a fleeting quotation by Shorter of “Tomorrow” from Annie. The band reaches a climactic shout that draws to a close with Pérez’ piano.

The final side of the record is a twenty-minute-long performance of the folk song “She Moves Through the Fair.” This folk song, popularized by Fairport Convention among others, became a signature tune for the Footprints Quartet on Shorter’s 2003 album Alegría and he would revisit it on Emanon. The Fairport Convention version feels like the point of departure for the slightly Middle Eastern influenced introduction from the rhythm section; it’s not until almost five minutes in that Shorter joins to play the melody over the unfolding exploration. The band shifts gears about halfway through into a different mood, seeming to play a suite within the performance. Something that this last song brings home more than anything is the quartet’s unique ability to improvise collectively—not in a free jazz sense, but with all four players finding a collective, coherent melodic sense at each moment, so that in a split second they could switch from tender and delicate to pounding to melancholic to triumphant. Shorter, who was always more deeply thoughtful about his compositions than he let on, may in fact have composed some of the transitions, but they seem so effortless that overall they feel like dancing en pointe on a tightrope.

Celebration Volume 1 is the end of this second run of reviews exploring the works of Miles Davis’ band, both during their association with the great trumpeter and afterwards. But just as this record signaled a new effort to bring Shorter’s works before the public, the Miles series will be back as I find more to explore… and add it to my collection. (Hey, I do it so you don’t have to find the shelf space for all of these records!)

We’ll take a break for the annual Christmas records series next week as we head into the holidays, and then turn our attention to something completely different, sort of, in the new year.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

Wayne Shorter, Footprints Live!

Album of the Week, November 23, 2024

As we discussed last time, Herbie Hancock went through a transition back to acoustic jazz following the success of his “Rockit” band, and with a few exceptions stayed in this lane. His former Miles Davis (and VSOP) bandmate Wayne Shorter was in a different place. Following his departure from the Miles band after Bitches Brew, Wayne cofounded one of the bedrock-foundation fusion bands, Weather Report (we listened to their first album back in 2022). He stayed with Weather Report and had a fascinating side career as a sideman to Joni Mitchell (with whom he recorded 10 albums) and others (that’s him on Steely Dan’s “Aja” and Don Henley’s “The End of the Innocence”). And he continued to record as a leader.

In retrospect, his albums and original compositions in the 1970s and 1980s had some common characteristics, though they were all very different on the surface: strong, if quirky, melodies, combined with rich orchestration—though sometimes the “orchestra” was a bunch of synthesizers. There were high points, like his duo album 1+1 with Herbie Hancock, but there were also some puzzles, like Phantom Navigator, recorded primarily with synthesizers the year after Weather Report’s dissolution and received poorly by critics. But underneath the puzzling production choices were still some of the Shorter trademarks, including new compositions based around the familiar themes of exploration to the edge of space and beyond.

So in the early 2000s when he started touring with the Wayne Shorter Quartet—the first time in his over forty-year career that he had a steady ensemble named after himself!—people started taking notice. And the quartet, also known as the “Footprints Quartet” following this first appearance in a set of live recordings released in 2002, was worth listening to. We’ve met Danilo Pérez as the bandleader on Kurt Elling’s Secrets are the Best Stories; here the pianist was in the full flower of his career, having joined the faculty of the New England Conservatory and in demand both as a performer and a composer. Bassist John Patitucci had played extensively with Chick Corea in both acoustic and electric settings, as well as with Herbie Hancock. And drummer Brian Blade was in demand as a sideman for artists as various as Joshua Redman, Brad Mehldau, and Emmylou Harris; immediately prior to joining the group he appeared on Norah Jones’ debut Come Away With Me. The group joined Shorter on a series of European jazz festival performances (Festival de Jazz de Vitoria-Gasteiz, Jardins Palais Longchamps in Marseille, Umbria Jazz Festival in Perugia) that took a spin through Shorter’s entire career. But this wasn’t a conservatory act; it was an act of revolution.

“Sanctuary,” a track from Bitches Brew, begins with a haze of cymbals and a figure in the bass, then a repeated figure in the high octaves of the piano and an almost imperceptible low note on the tenor saxophone. Shorter rises in prominence in the track, playing a series of diminished minor arpeggios, and Pérez immediately responds with a stronger attack; throughout the players sense each others’ energy and support or even egg it on. Shorter plays the melody as a quiet improvisation in a series of two- and three-note patterns, over a constantly shifting chordal landscape in the piano and locked-in drums and bass from Blade and Patitucci.

The song doesn’t end so much as abruptly crash into “Masqualero,” which is signaled by the descending figure of the theme. The arrangement at first appears to be chaos, with the different players all going in slightly different directions from the opening. However, within a minute both Shorter and Pérez have locked into a slightly Latin rhythm, punctuated by recaps of the theme that you gradually come to realize are the organizing factor, separated by stretches of solos. … Well, the recaps of the theme and a gradually rising tide of intensity, led by Pérez’s piano. And then at about the halfway point, the band seizes onto a new melody, one that surges back and forth (and is a little reminiscent of Nirvana’s “Something in the Way”) before soaring into the stratosphere with Shorter’s soprano sax, at last taking flight. The rhythm section finally settles into a massive groove, one player shouting to another over the rolling thunder of Blade’s drums until they reach a final recapitulation of the theme.

“Valse Triste,” an arrangement of a Sibelius tune that Shorter first played on his 1965 recording The Soothsayer, is a genially shambling waltz tune in which the band pulls out some brilliant bits—imitative piano that follows Shorter’s cascading notes, drum work that seems to blend New Orleans drum tones and silvery cymbals in equal proportion, and a rock solid anchoring bass that underpins while moving the arrangement forward. By the time you notice all the parts working in concert you realize that they’ve left Sibelius far behind, just in time to find him again. When Shorter returns, it’s with a feathery, searching solo that seems to dart above the waves as they crash on the shore, and then soar out to sea.

“Valse Triste” segues seamlessly into “Go” via an introduction on the piano. We’ve met a version of this Schizophrenia-era tune before, as the melody to Kurt Elling’s “Stays”—one wonders if Danilo Pérez brought him the tune. Here the quartet delicately supports Shorter as he essays the melody across multiple verses, with Pérez exchanging harmonic ideas with Shorter, Patitucci both anchoring the tonality and arpeggiating around the corner to see what comes next, and Blade staying in the background, providing only touches of emphasis and ultimately stepping back to let the rest of the ensemble wind up the tune into silence.

The band propels “Aung San Suu Kyi” with a brisk syncopation, approximately 50% faster than Shorter’s rendition of the tune on 1+1. Patitucci’s bass is especially powerful here in a subtle but funky line that hints of a power beneath the simple melody. Pérez takes an angular solo in which Shorter makes gnomic observations, at one point triggering a burst of laughter from the rest of the band. Shorter finds a secondary melody that seems the inverse of the main theme as the rest of the band locks into another one of the massive grooves like the one they found on “Masqualero,” before the final recap.

Shorter then rips off the theme of “Footprints” at approximately the Miles Davis Quintet’s tempo as the forward motion leaps from Pérez to Patitucci to Blade. As each one pauses for breath the next member of the quartet pushes the theme forward. Shorter seems to comment cryptically on the tune with gnomic asides, even essaying a snippet of “Rockabye Baby,” before settling on a motif that feels like a major-key extension of the last four bars of the original theme. Again the band swarms on the newly improvised moment as Shorter dives and pulls up one melodic idea after another. The ideas end in a strangely tender place as Shorter’s saxophone tails off on a high note with Pérez supporting him.

“Atlantis” makes an appearance from Shorter’s 1985 album of the same name. It’s played here as a ballad with a Latin tinge and a muscular bass line. The band reaches an early summit collectively about three minutes in, but Shorter keeps exploring, and ultimately lands on a tune that climbs and circles, ultimately landing on the supertonic, where the piece ends with Pérez striking the strings of the piano. The work flows directly into “JuJu,” where Patitucci plays an arco melody over whistling by one of the band members. Blade plays a heavy funk beat as the players shout to each other and we realize that we’ve been in three all along, as Shorter limns the melody. He steps back as Patitucci and Pérez exchange snippets of the melody, ultimately finding a still quiet rendition of it. When Shorter re-enters, he freely improvises a melody both delicate and fierce before returning to the theme, which climbs up octaves before he locks back into a groove with the band, returning once more to the theme with a climactic outpouring of energy before Pérez winds things down to a finish.

By returning to the quartet format, Shorter found an ideal group to carry forward both his compositional ideas and his improvisational explorations. He would continue in this format, and with this group, almost to the end of his life, with varying emphasis on absolute freedom and composed exploration. We’ll hear another step on this journey next week when we bring this series to a close, for now.

You can hear this week’s album here:

Herbie Hancock, Mega-Mix/TFS

Album of the Week, November 16, 2024

I’ve hinted at it, I’ve teased it, I’ve done all but say it outright. Finally today we take a left turn out of jazz and into early hip-hop, following the steps of Herbie Hancock.

When not cutting traditional jazz albums like Herbie Hancock Quartet, Herbie had been making fusion records since at least 1972’s Head Hunters (a giant album that will melt your head if you aren’t prepared). But his taste radar seemed to go astray as he went further afield from funk into commercial R&B. Some of the late 1970s albums in between the VSOP dates are … well, calling them an acquired taste is probably accurate. They didn’t perform especially well commercially and were savaged by critics.

In the early 1980s he began to make changes, leaving longtime producer David Rubinson to cut Lite Me Up with Quincy Jones (RIP), which had a strong disco influence but didn’t move buyers (or critics). But other winds were blowing, and the duo of bassist Bill Laswell and keyboardist/producer Michael Beinhorn, collectively known as the band Material, approached Herbie to collaborate on material that left more traditional fusion behind for a postmodern, hip-hop sound. The result was the album Future Shock, which both went platinum and earned critical acclaim.

The standout track on the album, the one I remember being played on my school bus, at the bus stop, in the streets, really everywhere I went, was “Rockit.” As part of the work on the album the track was remixed by Grand Mixer DXT, together with other songs from the album (“Autodrive,” “Future Shock,” “TFS,” and “Rough”) and an updated version of the lead song from Head Hunters, “Chameleon.”

The resulting track, “Mega-mix,” was one of the first such remixes, a genre that built a medley out of whole sections of songs, often played over a single beat and joined together with scratching or other DJ techniques. As such, Grand Mixer DXT was a natural artist to innovate in this style, as he is credited as the first turntablist. The mix was issued as both a 7 inch single and a 12 inch extended play; I’m reviewing the single today.

“Mega-Mix” opens with an echoing clatter of percussion over which the beat from “Rockit” plays, interspersed with a man”s voice saying “Herbie… Herbie… Herbie” and the bass line to “Chameleon.” As the track carries on DXT intersperses samples of spoken word and synthesized percussion across the different segments of the track. It’s disorienting and danceable. It sounds like the future. But it also sounds like riding the bus in fifth grade and listening to this tune, and other pieces of electro-funk, coming in over slightly static-y airwaves. There’s very little direct performance by Herbie on it, save for the prominent synth line that is the main melody of “Rockit”—as well as the bass line from “Chameleon,” which he played on the ARP Odyssey.

“TFS” is less influenced by DXT, but that’s not to say it resembles a traditional Herbie Hancock track. The dominant voice here is producer and bassist Bill Laswell. Laswell got his start playing in funk bands in Michigan before moving to New York City in the early 1970s, where he started the long-running project Material with Beinhorn and drummer Fred Maher. The track he wrote for “TFS” is nervous and twitchy, with a squelchy bass line and gated percussion underlying Herbie’s melody piano and synth lines.

Herbie did three albums with the “Rockit” crew, but remained artistically restless, also recording collaborations with kora player Foday Musa Suso (who appeared on the second album, Sound System). In the early 1990s he made a definitive return to acoustic jazz on A Tribute to Miles, a sort of reunion of the V.S.O.P. band with Wallace Roney filling in for Freddie Hubbard, who had injured his lip. Aside from concert performances and one last Bill Laswell collaboration, he’s stayed in the acoustic vein since. A frequent collaborator on those records, especially 1+1 and River: The Joni Letters, was his fellow Miles Davis band mate Wayne Shorter. We’ll hear from Wayne next time.

You can listen to today’s music here:

Bonus: Here’s the song “Rockit” in full, with its slightly insane music video:

A history of the Mews

I wrote a while ago about the Mews, the outbuilding to Pavilion III at the University of Virginia that was the home of Virginia Glee Club conductor Harry Rogers Pratt while he was at the University. I did not visit the Mews while I was at UVa this past weekend, but I remember thinking that I ought to do a little more research on the history of the building and its role as both faculty residence and (earlier) home for enslaved laborers.

Imagine my delight when I learned this morning that someone had already done much of this research. The Mews: Historic Structure Report was published by the office of the University of Virginia Architect sometime in 2021 and contains a pretty thorough history of the building. It also put me on the trail of a book that Pratt’s wife, travel writer Agnes Rothery, wrote about their quarter of a century occupying the building and the changes they made to it. I’ve found a copy on eBay and will report back.

Herbie Hancock, Herbie Hancock Quartet

Album of the Week, November 9, 2024

In 1981, Herbie Hancock was still touring with the V.S.O.P. band—well, most of them. For a tour of Japan in July 1981, neither Freddie Hubbard nor Wayne Shorter were available. So for this record Herbie, Ron Carter and Tony Williams were joined by Herbie’s labelmate, a rising star of a trumpeter named Wynton Marsalis.

Wynton was born in New Orleans into a musical family. His father, Ellis Marsalis, was a pianist and music teacher who named Wynton after Miles’ former pianist Wynton Kelly. There was something in the water at the Marsalis household; Wynton’s older brother Branford became a jazz saxophonist (from whom we’ll hear more later), and his younger brothers Delfeayo and Jason played trombone and drums respectively. Supposedly, a six-year-old Wynton was at a table together with Clark Terry, Al Hirt and Miles Davis, when his father joked that the boy should have a trumpet too. Wynton went to school in New Orleans, became one of the youngest musicians admitted to the Tanglewood Music Center at age 17, and attended Juilliard.

From the beginning, Wynton’s technique was pristine; he could execute the crisp runs required for Baroque trumpet music as well as the post-bop jazz concepts that were part of his heritage from his father. This led to an interesting beginning to his career, where Sony marketed him as both a jazz and a classical artist. (We had a record featuring his performance of a Haydn trumpet concert in my house when I was growing up.)

Wynton’s technique is on full display on the opening track, a cover of Thelonious Monk’s “Well, You Needn’t.” (The blend of standards and Hancock compositions on the record leads me to imagine the musicians in the studio, trying to work out what Wynton could play from Herbie’s repertoire.) The arrangement is the one Miles’ first quintet played; the tempo is accelerated beyond even the faster tempos that he favored with the second quintet; and Wynton is on fire throughout, tossing off pristine runs and playing a series of sixth and seventh jumps precisely and almost casually. It sounds as though the band takes Wynton’s prowess as a challenge, with Williams especially laying down some fiery fills. Herbie responds to Wynton’s improvisations, but by the end the two musicians seem almost to be contending as Herbie goes into something of a Latin riff and Wynton throws off high descending glissandi. At the end Wynton stops time for a moment with a cadenza that, surprisingly, resolves into a blues ending.

“Round Midnight” is also given in the Miles arrangement (which leverages Dizzy Gillespie’s introduction to the tune), and Wynton channels the elder trumpeter, playing with a Harmon mute and generally playing it cool, except for a few tossed off glissandi. Herbie plays some abstract runs, and seems to try to move things along, but Wynton returns for a second run at the intro. His high trumpet part soars above Williams’ thunderous drums, though it lacks some of the urgency of Miles’ version. Herbie takes the solo, keeping it firmly in the second quartet’s idiom, with chromatic sweeps of chords driving through.

Tony Williams’ “Clear Ways” opens with a duet between Wynton and Carter, with the rest of the quartet joining soon thereafter. It’s a brisk number that wouldn’t have been out of place on E.S.P., with the opening Herbie solo featuring some Keith Jarrett-esque vocalizing in the background. Wynton’s solo is quick, crisp and pointed, and displays one of his limitations at this early stage of his career: while he is precise and fast in his improvised runs, he is innovating melodically but not improvising rhythmically. Carter’s solo, opening and closing with bold glissandos from the lowest string, similarly moves along with a sense of rhythmic inevitability without being at all predicable melodically.

“A Quick Sketch” is one of two Ron Carter compositions on the album, and is a completely different mood and color. More of a blues-flavored tune until Herbie and Wynton enter with descending chromatic scales, the tune is the longest one on the album and begins with an extended melodic introduction, followed by Wynton’s solo. Here he stretches out more, displaying greater rhythmic fluidity as Carter improvises on the repeated ground of the tune. Carter takes a solo on his own tune, and Wynton wraps up with a series of suspended notes that circle the tonic without ever landing there, at one point breaking into a quotation from Ted Grouya’s “Flamingo.”

“The Eye of the Hurricane” is the one Herbie Hancock work to repeat between the V.S.O.P. albums and Quartet. Wynton leads with another accelerated series of runs, but this time interrupts the string of sixteenth notes with other rhythmic patterns. The solo is oddly static, in that, while it is very busy, it ultimately seems to do nothing so much as circle around the central chord. Herbie’s solo builds in menace as it accelerates up until the “eye,” Tony Williams’ drum break, is upon the band.

“Parade” is the other Carter composition, and is restrained by contrast, opening with Herbie playing the tune as a free ballad. At about 2:30, the group enters, swinging into a gentle samba. Wynton plays a fiery solo atop the groove, urging the group forward, only to have it return to a reverie until the very end, where Williams and Carter pick up the double-time melody that Wynton began.

Herbie’s “The Sorcerer,” from the Miles album of the same name, is given a reading of similar intensity to “The Eye of the Hurricane.” At the end of his solo, Wynton plays a chromatic descending scale which Herbie picks up and makes the foundation for the opening of his solo; Ron Carter picks up on the same pattern, performing it in portamento.

“Pee Wee,” a Tony Williams composition also found on Sorcerer, here gets a sleepy reading courtesy of Wynton’s muted playing, contrasting Herbie’s surging piano. Wynton plays the tune an octave up from its original performance by Wayne Shorter, and the result loses some of the quiet urgency of the original performance. The contrast with Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn’s “I Fall in Love Too Easily,” the only tune on the album from the Great American Songbook, is strong; together Herbie and Wynton play an emotionally rich rendition of the ballad to close out the set, in a reading reminiscent of Miles’ approach to “My Funny Valentine.” Herbie’s coda, in a different tonality entirely, underscores the somber brevity of Cahn’s lyric, bringing the album to a close in a very different place from where it started.

After this album, Herbie and Wynton’s paths diverged. The same sessions that produced Quartet also produced Wynton’s debut album, where he and Herbie’s trio were joined by Wynton’s brother Branford on saxophone, as well as other musicians. Herbie spent most of the 1980s following a very different direction; we’ll get a peek of that next time.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

Exfiltration Radio: Prayer Meeting

The second of this week’s Exfiltration Radio playlists is a dive into the roots of jazz in New Orleans, and specifically a spin through the collision between jazz and hymnody that is a constant thread in hot jazz, also known as “Dixieland” jazz. (I won’t pretend that there aren’t other reasons for putting together a playlist of religious music on Election Day.)

The New York Jazz Ensemble is today known only for a single recording it released in 1993 with an amateur clarinetist — Woody Allen, before his downfall. For my money the band is pretty good, and “In the Sweet By’n’By” is one of the best cuts on the album; “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” a few tracks later, is the other.

There are a few tracks here from different incarnations of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. The first, from their 1977 survey New Orleans Vol. 1, is a good representation of their gospel ballads; “His Eye is on the Sparrow” dates from 1905 and has been recorded by artists as varied as Lauryn Hill, Jessica Simpson, Mahalia Jackson, and Whitney Houston. It’s essentially the same band, minus a few members, that returns for “Precious Lord,” a knockout track from their 1988 New Orleans Vol. IV album (coincidentally, the first of their albums I ever bought). An earlier incarnation of the band, as recorded on 1964’s Sweet Emma and Her Preservation Hall Jazz Band, is recorded only a few years after Pennsylvania-based tuba player Allan Jaffe began to manage the former art gallery in the French Quarter that had become a venue for local jazz musicians; “Sweet Emma” Barrett is on vocals “(Just a) Closer Walk With Thee.” It’s this earliest band that provides our closing rendition of “When the Saints Go Marching In.” Brothers Willie and Percy Humphrey are on all three recordings, spanning 24 years; Willie Humphrey was 88 years old when Vol. IV was recorded and his kid brother Percy was 83.

Kid Ory is one of the greats—the first great jazz trombonist, a bandleader who hired both King Oliver and Louis Armstrong during his career. “Joshua Fit De Battle of Jericho” is a spiritual that dates at least as far back as the early 19th century, and its message of walls tumbling down seems appropriate today. His track is followed by another pre-Civil War spiritual recorded by a much lesser-known musician. Sam Morgan was a New Orleans trumpeter and bandleader who recorded six sides in 1927, including this affecting version of “Down by the Riverside.”

The Firehouse Five Plus Two is one of those bands that would seem to be a fictional creation if it weren’t so well documented; as Wikipedia dryly notes, it was “a Dixieland jazz band, popular in the 1950s, consisting of members of the Disney animation department.” In particular, Ward Kimball, one of Disney’s “Nine Old Men,” played trombone when he wasn’t animating the Seven Dwarves or designing Jiminy Cricket or the crows in Dumbo, and other animators joined in; while Pogo cartoonist Walt Kelly was never a member, he was close enough to Kimball and the group to draw several album covers. “A Georgia Camp Meeting” is technically a cakewalk rather than a hymn or spiritual, but given that a “camp meeting” was a gospel revival, we’ll let it slide.

George Lewis & Papa Bue’s Viking Jazzband is a curiosity. Lewis was a New Orleans born clarinetist who played in a variety of hot jazz bands (including at Preservation Hall) until his death in 1968. The performance on this album comes from a radio show he recorded in Denmark in 1959 with “Papa Bue’s Viking Jazzband,” a Dixieland-style band that was given its name by the journalist and vocalist Shel Silverstein (yes, that Shel Silverstein). “The Old Rugged Cross” was a 1912 evangelical hymn that has become a gospel standard.

Ida Cox was a vaudeville singer in her early career, but her 1961 comeback album Blues for Rampart Street featured a hot jazz backing band that included Coleman Hawkins, Roy Eldridge and Milt Hinton, among others. Her original “Hard, Oh Lord” fits thematically with the spirituals in the rest of the album.

For every Preservation Hall Jazz Band, there seems to have been a Kings of Dixieland—an anonymous band that kept the hot jazz tradition alive but about whom little is known. “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” is an African-American spiritual originating in slavery but first published in 1867. It thrived in a variety of covers, including classical settings, and was Marian Anderson’s first hit in 1925.

The thing about New Orleans is that it keeps a great many of its traditions alive, including the brass band. The Liberty Brass Band is one of several contemporary bands whose performances are collected on the Smithsonian Folkways anthology New Orleans Brass Bands: Through the Streets of the City from 2015. The anthology also featured a performance by the Treme Brass Band, which takes its name from the Tremè neighborhood of the city and whose performance of “I’ll Fly Away” here closes out their 2008 album New Orleans Music.

It’s the earliest incarnation of the Preservation Hall band that provides our closing rendition of “When the Saints Go Marching In.” Brothers Willie and Percy Humphrey are on all four recordings of the band on this mix, spanning 24 years; Willie Humphrey was 88 years old when Vol. IV was recorded and his kid brother Percy was 83.

  1. “Amen, amen… what this world needs is more love” – Rev. Johnny L. Jones (Exfiltration Bumpers)
  2. In the Sweet By ‘n’ By – The New York Jazz Ensemble With Woody Allen (The Bunk Project)
  3. His Eye Is On the Sparrow – Preservation Hall Jazz Band, Narvin Kimball, Josiah Frazier, James Miller, Willie Humphrey, Percy Humphrey & Frank Demond (New Orleans, Vol. 1)
  4. Joshua Fit De Battle of Jericho – Kid Ory (The Great New Orleans Trombonist)
  5. Down by the Riverside – Sam Morgan’s Jazz Band (How Low Can You Go?)
  6. At A Georgia Camp Meeting – The Firehouse Five Plus Two (The Firehouse Five Plus Two Goes South)
  7. Closer Walk With Thee – Preservation Hall Jazz Band (New Orleans’ Sweet Emma and Her Preservation Hall Jazz Band)
  8. The Old Rugged Cross – George Lewis & Papa Bue’s Viking Jazzband (George Lewis with Papa Bue’s Viking Jazzband)
  9. Precious Lord – Preservation Hall Jazz Band (New Orleans – Vol. IV)
  10. What a Friend We Have in Jesus – The New York Jazz Ensemble With Woody Allen (The Bunk Project)
  11. Hard, Oh Lord (Album Version) – Ida Cox (Blues For Rampart Street)
  12. Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen – The Kings of Dixieland (Kings of Dixieland)
  13. Lily of the Valley – Liberty Brass Band (New Orleans Brass Bands: Through the Streets of the City)
  14. I’ll Fly Away – The Tremè Brass Band (The Treme Brass Band)
  15. When the Saints Go Marching In – Preservation Hall Jazz Band (New Orleans’ Sweet Emma and Her Preservation Hall Jazz Band)

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

Exfiltration Radio: Neue Deutsche Welle

It’s another Veracode Hackathon, which means it’s time for some Exfiltration Radio. This set had its origins in our trip to Germany and Austria this summer, particularly Vienna, where it seemed Falco (of “Rock Me Amadeus” fame) was around every corner. I didn’t spot the artsy mural above, but we did see him in a few other places:

After my kids stared at me blankly the third time I mentioned his name, I downloaded a greatest hits compilation and played them “Rock Me Amadeus,” then “Der Kommissar,” and then went off and listened to the rest of it. What I was struck by was how much the music reminded me of the New Wave that was being made around the same time by others. For instance, there’s a direct line between Gary Numan’s “Cars” and Falco’s “Helden von heute.”

So I went down a rabbit hole, and the result is the mix you have here.

I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge Musicophilia’s magnificent 1981 series of mixes, from which quite a few (okay, more than half) of the tracks here were drawn. In particular, the “briefcase,” multiple hours of unsequenced tracks, is the source for quite a lot here. I also apologize to any native German speakers for the introduction…

  1. Der Kommissar – Falco (Falco: Greatest Hits)
  2. 99 Luftballons – Nena (99 Luftballons)
  3. Computer Love (Edit) – Kraftwerk (1981 – Computer)
  4. Lust of Berlin – Neu Electrikk (1981 – Briefcase)
  5. Neue Straßen – Metro Pakt (1981 – Briefcase)
  6. Goldener Reiter – Joachim Witt (Silberblick)
  7. Deutscher Wald – Deutsche Wertarbeit (1981 – Briefcase)
  8. Microbes – Mekanik Kommando (1981 – Briefcase)
  9. Elefantendisco – Pyrolator (1981 – Briefcase)
  10. Ich Komme Aus Der DDR – Gleitzeit (1981 – Briefcase)
  11. Lesezirkel Melodie – Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle (1981 – Briefcase)
  12. Schlaglichter – Matthias Schuster (1981 – Briefcase)
  13. Ich Fress Dir Aus Der Hand (1981) – Splitter (1981 – Briefcase)
  14. Ein Jahr (Es geht voran) – Fehlfarben (Monarchie und Alltag)
  15. Helden von heute – Falco (Falco: Greatest Hits)
  16. Major Tom (Völlig losgelöst) – Peter Schilling (Major Tom / … dann trügt der Schein – Single)
  17. Kosmonautentraum 6 – Kosmonautentraum (1981 – Briefcase)

Do not attempt to adjust your set…

Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea, An Evening with Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea In Concert

Album of the Week, November 2, 2024

In the year following the V.S.O.P. tour, Herbie Hancock recorded a jazz-funk album, Sunlight, with the post-Headhunters band that appeared on his V.S.O.P. live album, plus Jaco Pastorius and Tony Williams. The album, which featured Herbie’s voice singing through a Sennheiser vocoder, was widely panned as being not only not jazzy, but not funky. (I will say that having heard him perform “Come Running to Me” live in concert a few years ago that the material here is stronger than the performances.) He was also playing traditional jazz in concert, and today’s record is one of the most unusual in his repertoire: a two-piano duet album with his successor in Miles’ band, Chick Corea.

Armando Anthony “Chick” Corea was born in Chelsea, Massachusetts, to the north of what is now Boston Logan International Airport, in 1941, to a Calabrian family. His father had played trumpet in a Dixieland band in Boston, and introduced him to music and jazz at a young age. Corea moved to New York where he attended Columbia University and then Juilliard before dropping out so that he could perform more. He played in a number of different bands before joining Miles’ group during the sessions that became Filles de Kilimanjaro, and played with Miles until 1970. He left with Dave Holland to form a band, then in 1972 formed the Return to Forever band with Flora Purim, Airto, Stanley Clarke, and Joe Farrell. He played both jazz fusion and acoustic music through the 1970s, and in 1978 began what became a series of duo concerts with Herbie Hancock in which they performed in formal attire, playing each other’s compositions and jazz standards. This album was recorded live in a series of concert performances in San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego and Ann Arbor in February 1978.

“Someday My Prince Will Come” illustrates the way the two great pianists approached the collaboration. In the opening few minutes, Corea (in the right channel, facing Hancock) plays freely as Hancock, listening carefully, accompanies him. At about the 3:30 mark the two finally swing into something approaching the chorus of the famous Snow White tune, but there’s still a lot of give and take between them as one idea after another enters, is imitated, and leaves. This is music to listen carefully to, and as you start to hear the imitative work it becomes fascinating. However, it does not lend itself to casual listening: with both pianists in the same octave and often improvising with runs and digressions from the tune, there are moments where it seems to almost scamper hither and yon, leaving the listener searching for the tune.

“Liza (All The Clouds’ll Roll Away)” starts a little more immediately; indeed, this is the only performance on the album that comes in at less than ten minutes. This one has a raggy flavor to it, with both pianists experimenting with stride style accompaniment on the Gershwin tune, until about the 4:30 mark when they begin experimenting with alternating short four or five note phrases, which then become alternating four bar phrases, quick flashes of improvisation and impromptu response. My favorite of these comes at 5:22 where Herbie plays a four-bar phrase in strong meter which Chick immediately accompanies with a clapped Latin rhythm. They keep the audience on the edge of their collective seats until the end, when they burst into rapt applause.

“Button Up,” credited jointly to Corea and Hancock, takes up the entirety of the second side and is a more introspective, and intricate, work, leaning into A flat minor. At the 1:35 mark Corea breaks into a minor key riff that Hancock begins to improvise over, and for a moment it seems like we might be in for a blues, but then they move on to a sonata-like interlude that tapers off into silence. Herbie breaks the silence with a fierce interlude that Corea responds to and they again approach a more rhythmic feeling, which Corea emphasizes by pounding out a thudding syncopated rhythm on middle C, which he dampens by pressing on the string with his other hand so that the tone sounds more percussive and less ringing. After interludes of more rhythmic and wistful music, they return to the thudding rhythm, this time with Herbie playing a melody that centers around the F while Corea continues to hold the C. The overall effect is something like a particularly inspired bit of Keith Jarrett solo playing; both players use the technique all the way through the last few minutes of the work.

“February Moment” is introduced by Corea, with a spoken appreciation for Hancock’s rare solo work. The piece, credited to Herbie alone, picks up where “Button Up” left off, only instead of a syncopated rhythm we get repeated left hand eighth note patterns in which the emphasis notes are played an octave up. Herbie’s right hand provides the melody, which is more of a reverie than anything else. About six minutes in, Hancock transitions away from the etude and begins playing a twelve bar blues, with the left hand playing a very slow fingered bass as the right provides different interjections above. The rest of the piece takes us from the blues into an absolutely furious interjection at top velocity and then back into the blues for a quiet conclusion.

The last two tracks, “Maiden Voyage” and “La Fiesta,” are played together as a single 30+ minute suite. As the notes from producer David Rubinson indicate, he decided to compress the music to fit the single side of the record rather than break them apart; as a result on my LP the sound of this last side is not as immediate as it is in the rest of the performance. I have to confess that this version of “Maiden Voyage” is not my favorite; Corea’s improvisations are busy and to me feel like interruptions of the oceanic sweep of the composition. But Herbie rolls with it, introducing new patterns that rise and fall like the waves against Corea’s runs. After about ten minutes, both pianists begin to improvise a new tune, a bridge between “Maiden Voyage” and “La Fiesta,” ultimately returning to the former tune for a brief interlude before beginning the latter in earnest. This time Herbie begins Chick’s tune, and Chick responds with an improvisatory aside that takes us into the ongoing performance. There are moments of noodling, of brisk Latin melody, of pathos, of thudded muted strings, of orchestral noise and (it must be said) some uninspired noodling in the 20-something minutes here. Again, this is music for close listening, and doesn’t really take off into a dance-like ecstatic rhythm until something like the last few minutes—but when it does, watch out because these are a few minutes of ecstasy like nothing else on the album.

Herbie Hancock continued to alternate jazz-funk records with acoustic jazz records into the early 1980s, but there was increasingly a sense that the jazz-funk side was becoming a priority. There were still plenty of jazz purists around, though, and acoustic jazz was about to make a resurgence. We’ll hear an important moment in that transition next week.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

V.S.O.P., The Quintet

Album of the Week, October 26, 2024

As we saw last week, Herbie Hancock was at a crossroads in 1976 when he assembled his retrospective concert, later released as V.S.O.P. He could have doubled down on the jazz-funk that had been an ingredient of his music since the beginning and had been in overdrive since the release of Head Hunters. He could have returned to the intensely cerebral, far-out sounds of the Mwandishi band. (Somewhere there is a world in the multiverse in which the Mwandishi band kept playing and getting further and further out there, until radio transmissions of its shows were intercepted by aliens who returned to take Herbie home.)

But instead, he kept going with the quintet that he had reformed from Miles’ Second Great Quintet, with Freddie Hubbard continuing to play the role of trumpet. The musicians did some studio sessions together; a day-long session on July 13, 1977 with Herbie, Ron Carter and Tony Williams saw tracks released both as Herbie Hancock Trio and as Carter’s Third Plane, with all three contributing to the compositions on the Carter album. And on July 16, the three musicians were joined by Wayne Shorter and Hubbard in a performance at the Greek Theatre at UC Berkeley, and then a second at the San Diego Civic Theatre on July 18. They were billed as V.S.O.P., and a live double album combining highlights from both shows was released in October 1977.

“One of a Kind” is one of two Hubbard compositions on the record, and one of two compositions that make their first appearance here. The band starts with a Tony Williams drum roll and arpeggios from Hancock, and then a fast beat on Carter’s bass. The horns come in with the melody, and we’re off to the races. As often happens in a Hubbard composition, the melody consists of a descending arpeggio, played precisely and cleanly. His tone is still a marvel at this date, taking all the pristine bell-like quality of a young Miles and turbocharging it. When Shorter comes in, it’s from left field, not directly following Hubbard’s lead but picking up a thread of his solo and deconstructing it. Hancock responds, not playing chords under his solo but responding to Shorter’s assays with terse runs and replies. Wayne eventually follows Hubbard into the stratosphere, but instead of soaring he swoops up and down in jagged attacks. Hancock flourishes a series of arpeggios in response to Shorter’s solo but drops back into a Twilight Zone-esque vamp behind Carter’s insistent rhythm as the horns return to play the head once more, closing on a high supertonic.

“Third Plane” was recorded three days prior as the title track to Carter’s album, but you’d never know the quintet hadn’t been playing it for years if Hancock didn’t announce it at the top. The Carter original is taken at a faster clip here, and the two horns dialog with each other over a melody that seems taken equally from Carter’s bassline and Herbie’s piano lead. In its quintet version the 8-bar modulation that lifts the tune briefly from B to B-flat is somehow less strange and more natural, maybe thanks to Shorter’s straight-ahead-with-a-twist solo. Hubbard plays flugelhorn for his solo, finding a pattern that he tosses back and forth with Herbie, before yielding to the piano, who plays what sounds like a stride-influenced solo over Carter’s insistent walking bass. Carter and Williams take a quick sixteen bar intro to the last two returns of the melody, and the band seems reluctant to let the tune go, hitting the end three times before bringing it to a close.

“Jessica” sees a welcome return of the sad ballad from Fat Albert Rotunda. Hancock outlines the chords while Carter and then Hubbard play the melody, followed by Shorter; the latter plays as if choking off a sob. Hubbard’s solo seems to consider all the different corners of the melody in a solo that’s less than 60 seconds long. When Shorter returns for his brief solo, it is with breathtaking sustained notes that seem to underline the sorrow in the work. Herbie’s solo, which takes three verses, plays with restraint and delicacy, accompanied only by Carter and the barest hint of Tony Williams. The horns return for one more run at the melody, then fall back as Carter and Herbie take the tune to an end.

“Lawra,” a Tony Williams composition from the Third Plane/Trio sessions, Herbie begins with a riff in parallel fourths that could originate anywhere from Aaron Copland to nursery school to—as Williams enters on massive drum hits—a classic rock song. The rest of the band joins in to state the theme, with Hubbard and Shorter already trading beats, and thoughts, in the introduction. They continue this way for two full iterations of the tune before Herbie falls back and they continue to duet through the first pass. (An aside: the engineering on the album is superb, especially for a concert recording; the presence in this tune makes you feel as though Freddie Hubbard is standing just to the left of you while Shorter is somewhat to the far right side of the stage, a bit of stereo separation that’s particularly effective here.) The rest of the quintet drops back as Williams plays a polyrhythmic solo that leads back into the opening riff.

After an introduction of the players, “Darts” is a Herbie composition that here makes its only appearance in his discography. It’s a gnarly tune in a minor key, so naturally Wayne takes the first solo. Freddie Hubbard plays a solo that darts around several different modes before entering a give-and-take with Herbie. Herbie then improvises an extended run that centers on a diminished triad before returning to the head. It’s a nice enough track, but it’s clear why Herbie didn’t return to it.

By contrast, “Delores,” by Wayne Shorter, is the song with the second-oldest roots on the album, having been first recorded by Miles’ quintet on Miles Smiles. Wayne essays the melody by himself for the first ninety seconds in free time, then gradually speeds up to performance tempo and is joined by Carter, Hancock and Williams. Hubbard enters as the band plays the opening melody together, then Wayne takes an extended solo that trades ideas with Herbie. As with the original recording, Herbie soon lays out, so he’s accompanied only by Carter and Williams. Ron Carter can be heard throughout, first walking the line, then improvising along the scale, sometimes down alongside Williams holding down the low end, then sliding up into a higher improvisation. Herbie signals the end of Wayne’s solo and anchors Freddie’s, not playing through but trading ideas with him. Tony Williams turns on the energy throughout Freddie’s solo, burning up the cymbals. The players then take an extended coda that improvises on the penultimate tone, trading ideas before returning once more to the head. This performance, more than any other, earns the blurb on the back of the album: “the charisma generated by five masters who listened to each other’s inner ears, spoke to each other at multiple levels, and, no matter how dense the musical content, conveyed their message to the audience with amazing clarity.”

For my money the band only runs low on steam on the penultimate number, “Little Waltz.” This is the other Carter composition on the record, having made its debut earlier that year on Carter’s solo album Piccolo. It’s a slow waltz that opens with Shorter and Carter duetting. The rest of the band enters, taking turns on the tune, but the tempo never gets faster than sleepy, though Shorter tries his best to pep it up in his extended solo. The closer, “Byrdlike,” is the second Hubbard composition and is also the oldest on the record, having first been recorded on Hubbard’s 1962 Blue Note album Ready for Freddie. The band has a merry romp through it at something like twice the tempo of “Little Waltz”; true to the name, Hubbard keeps his solo solidly in the hard bop lane, with echoes of Donald Byrd in his solo. Williams trades bars with Shorter, then Hubbard, and then slips directly into a fierce drum solo. The band briskly closes out the tune, with Hubbard and Shorter taking turns to see who can close out the number on the highest note.

Hancock and the quintet could easily have filled an entire evening with performances of compositions they played with the Miles Davis Quintet. That they chose to foreground material from an album recorded just a few days before shows that they were still dedicated to creating new music. The quintet would continue to record its live shows; the Tokyo Tempest in the Colosseum recording, also made in 1977 just a week later, is more of a “greatest hits” concert but demonstrates enormous firepower. They hit the road once more in 1979 and even went into the studio to record Five Stars, but after that the players didn’t get together again until the early 1990s. But Herbie Hancock, in particular, continued to explore new ways into his compositions, and we’ll hear another approach next time.

You can listen to this week’s album here: