October 2024 – Jarrett House North

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:

Herbie Hancock, V.S.O.P.

Album of the Week, October 19, 2024

What comes after a career arc like the one Herbie Hancock had from the early 1960s through 1976? We’ve talked about many of his Blue Note Records albums during this run—Takin’ Off, My Point of View, Inventions & Dimensions, Empyrean Isles, Maiden Voyage. We’ve written about a great many of his appearances as a sideman during that same time—Speak No Evil, The All Seeing Eye, Adam’s Apple, Schizophrenia, Life Time. We’ve written about his great run with Miles, from the early live appearance on Miles In Berlin through the untouchable run of E.S.P., Miles Smiles, Nefertiti, Miles in the Sky, Filles de Kilimanjaro, Water Babies and In a Silent Way. And we’ve touched on some of what he did in the late 1960s and 1970s, from more sideman appearances on Infinite Search, Zawinul, Road Song, Red Clay, Straight Life, First Light, Moon Germs, Sunflower, In Concert, Vol. 1, and Penny Arcade to his own classic Fat Albert Rotunda.

And, amazingly, that’s only a fraction of what he got up to during this time period. In particular, my record collection doesn’t cover the two great next phases of his career following Fat Albert Rotunda. First, he put together a sextet featuring Buster Williams on bass, Billy Hart on drums, Bennie Maupin on reeds, Julian Priester on trombone, and Eddie Henderson on trumpet, and recorded an amazing trio of out-there albums Mwandishi, Crossings, and Sextant. (I included one of the songs from Mwandishi on my collection of late-1960s/early-1970s “space jazz” from a few years ago; one of these days I’ll add that amazing album to my physical collection). And then he made a hard left turn into jazz-funk with his Headhunters band, famously after observing that his Mwandishi band and their impeccable explorations didn’t get nearly as much excitement from the audience as when the Pointer Sisters entered the venue on roller skates. The Headhunters band made six albums all told.

And after that? Well, in June of 1976, Herbie mounted a retrospective concert at the Newport Jazz Festival in New York City. Billed as covering three different stages of his career, the performance featured the then-current evolution of his jazz funk band, the reunion of the Mwandishi sextet, and what was billed as a reunion of the Miles Second Great Quintet—including Miles. That would have been quite a feat as Miles had temporarily retired by then, and had stopped playing acoustic jazz in favor of increasingly “out there” explorations of jazz fusion. On the night of the concert, a notice on the door stated that Miles couldn’t perform, and that appearing in his place would be trumpeter Freddie Hubbard. So effectively, what appeared during the first set was an amalgam of the Second Great Quintet and Herbie’s band on Maiden Voyage.

“Piano Introduction” features Herbie alone—not on the acoustic piano, but on a Yamaha Electric Grand Piano. He improvises across a series of chords, landing on a suspension on the 6th of the scale, then begins the opening chords of “Maiden Voyage” to the excited applause of the audience, who also give audio cues through their cheers as Ron Carter, Tony Williams, Wayne Shorter, and Hubbard take the stage. Carter, who by now has evolved a glissando technique on the strings that, along with amplification, renders his bass a more forthright presence, plays along with eight bars of the intro, before the rest of the band joins (the crowd cheering as the horns play the opening melody). Wayne Shorter takes the first solo, and at first it’s colored by his own experiments in jazz fusion; then he starts playing in bursts and runs, and it’s as if we’re hearing something like a straight line from his late-1960s works. When Freddie Hubbard comes in, it’s similarly informed by his precise, nuanced Blue Note playing rather than his jazz-funk work from the immediately preceding run on Columbia, which was even more commercial than his CTI work (which is really saying something). Throughout both horn solos, Carter keeps a steady double-time pulse, Williams drops bombs a-plenty, and Herbie sounds like he’s having the time of his life digging into the corners of this signature composition. A breath as Hubbard drops back to the slower tempo, and Hancock takes his solo, with a more prominent Carter underscoring the shifts in tonality with one glissando after another. Hancock likewise moves into the faster tempo until the wave crests and the band settles back into the rocking groove at the beginning.

The second number by the quintet, “Nefertiti” loses a little of its strangeness from its original incarnation with the Second Great Quartet; Hubbard isn’t quite as sure of his approach as was Miles, but the rest of the band carry ahead with gusto. Shorter in particular seems to have grown into the tune since its original writing, playing it at a brisker tempo, and the rhythm section freely innovate under it as on the original recording. At the very end, Hubbard gets comfortable enough to play with it, entering behind Shorter and setting up a dialog, and only then do we get to the dark strangeness at the heart of the tune.

Hancock gives us a tongue-in-cheek introduction to the players, declaring each of them “the greatest” as they enter with a quick solo, and then settling into a groove that becomes “Eye of the Hurricane” (also from Maiden Voyage) upon Shorter’s entry. He rips through a blistering improvisation that turns the corner into the quick chordal runs of the tune. Hubbard then rips a lightning fast solo, alongside which Hancock locks into a telepathic dialog. Shorter returns with another super-fast solo, playing runs at about twice the speed of Carter’s walking bass, before slowing down into a different rhythm and finally passing to Herbie. He follows the path of general mayhem that the others have blazed until, as though at a lookout point, he locks into a different groove entirely before hurtling back down the hill, as it were. The other players drop away as only Hancock, then Carter and Williams, go on playing in the relative stillness of the “eye.” You find yourself marveling that these musicians had never played together in this full configuration (though certainly the individual players had all collaborated many times over the years), and also that all of the above happened just on the first two sides of this double live album!

The Herbie Hancock Sextet, also known as the “Mwandishi” band, takes the stage with “Toys,” which actually predates the band, having originally been recorded on the Speak Like a Child album with a different lineup of players. That may explain why it feels like a completely different mood than the uncompromisingly avant-garde numbers the sextet was known for on their original three albums, but it serves as a pretty effective link from the material performed by the Quintet. Sonically, Eddie Henderson’s flugelhorn comes across with less of a brilliant edge than Freddie Hubbard’s trumpet but is no less adventurous. The sextet (after an introductory interlude in which Hancock introduces Henderson, Bennie Maupin, trombonist Julian Priester, Billy Hart, and Buster Williams as “the finest” and gives their Swahili as well as Christian names), then pivots into “You’ll Know When You Get There,” still the most mind-expanding of Hancock’s explorations into what he has called “space jazz.”

While not as long as the album version, this live rendition manages to get to the same strange heights. The composition alternates two different heads, or main melodies. The first melody features a melody in the trombone and flugelhorn in rising fourths and fifths that is repeated several times until suddenly everything stops and Henderson’s flugelhorn plays through a distorted effects pedal, as though disappearing down a dark tunnel—or entering a space warp. The band burbles beneath his improvisation until they come together in the second main melody, a five note pattern that rises in a major scale and falls in a minor one, that then links back to the first melody. Where in the album version there’s a solo opportunity for Priester and Maupin, here the tune ends on a quiet note from Hancock’s synthesizer.

The last side of the album is given over to jazz-funk with what’s here called “the Herbie Hancock Group,” consisting of “Wah Wah” Watson on guitar, Paul Jackson on electric bass, Bennie Maupin on saxophone, James Levi on drums, Kenneth Nash on percussion, and none other than Ray Parker Jr., of “Ghostbusters” fame, playing second guitar. “Hang Up Your Hangups” and “Spider” are tight jazz-funk workouts, unfortunately sounding dated to the modern listener thanks to the chicken-scratch guitar. There’s plenty to like in the sound, but it’s no Mwandishi band, and it doesn’t reach the improvisational heights of the quintet.

Some versions of jazz history call out V.S.O.P. as a pivot point in the history of the music, in which an audience that had grown fatigued with the ongoing jazz funk fusion trends of the decade could celebrate the resurgence of a more traditional style, paving the way for other neo-traditionalists to claim the stage as the 1970s turned into the 1980s. What seems clear is that Hancock, always the most commercially canny of the major jazz artists of the 1960s and 1970s, saw that there was an audience for the music—one that could fill an arena, as opposed to just a club. He would leverage this observation again, as we’ll hear next time.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

Wayne Shorter, Adam’s Apple

Album of the Week, October 12, 2024

Wayne Shorter as a composer in the 1960s was stretching his wings. Over the course of a few albums for Blue Note, he went from the Trane-inspired writings of JuJu to the incredible cool of Speak No Evil to the avant-garde leanings of The All Seeing Eye. For those who might have been expecting more of that latter album, recorded in late 1965, Adam’s Apple must have initially seemed a throwback. But this February 1966 recording, coming during the long break between E.S.P. and Miles Smiles, highlights two aspects of Shorter’s genius—his knack for a great melody and his prowess as a soloist. Supported by familiar bandmates Herbie Hancock, Reggie Workman, and Joe Chambers, the smaller forces on this album put a stronger spotlight on Shorter’s saxophone prowess, and it really shines.

“Adam’s Apple,” the lead track, is an insanely catchy blues that somehow answers the question “what if you combined the pop instincts of Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter on the same song?” The liner notes by Don Heckman call it a blend of jazz and dance music, but I think only in the sense that Vince Guaraldi’s “Linus and Lucy” is dance music (which it absolutely is). What’s striking here is Wayne’s solo, which manages to be bluesy and perfectly melodic without succumbing to the temptation to play all the notes, all the time. He leaves a lot of air around his playing in the arrangement, which Herbie happily colors with a soulful chord-forward accompaniment and solo. (This is presumably before Miles had the “butter notes” conversation with Herbie; his playing still has some of the exuberance of his earliest work here.)

“502 Blues (Drinkin’ and Drivin’)” is the sole cover on the album. Written by Jimmy Rowles, the work, despite the “party time” title, is unexpectedly subdued. It opens with a figure in Herbie Hancock’s piano for four bars, then continues with the tune, a ballad in A minor. Shorter’s solo seems to peek around the corner at us, wandering into a relative major for a brief moment before circling back to the original tone via a circular path, as if climbing a staircase. Herbie’s solo digs into the soulful corners of the tonality over the crisp swing of Joe Chambers’ snare and cymbal work.

“El Gaucho” opens with a brisk Latin rhythm in the bass and drums, leading us to ask whether a samba might be afoot. Perhaps one played by aliens; the tune takes us through five different keys, building on the same rhythmic backbone in each key, then rolling into a Wayne Shorter solo that seems to revel in hoquetus and interruption as much as it does in melody. The tempo is bubbly and the overall performance is too, with Hancock keeping things moving along. The pianist’s solo leans into the slightly Caribbean rhythms while also embracing chromatic movement between the different keys of the work. When Shorter returns with the melody, it’s as if to remind us of the mystery at the heart of it all—the tune circles around without resolution, constantly repeating and never really ending.

The most famous of Shorter’s compositions on the album is undoubtedly “Footprints.” Here in its first recording, about eight months before the Quintet essayed it for Miles Smiles, the tune is the same but the performance is totally different. For one thing, Wayne’s original tempo is more restrained than Miles’ (the evolution of which you can hear on Freedom Jazz Dance: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 5). This performance also swings more, led by Joe Chambers and Reggie Workman’s rhythm section. Again, we are in a blues, but one built on echo-like repetition throughout the main melody. Wayne’s solo pushes at the edges of that repetitive melody, finding other melodic patterns and at one point even beginning what feels like a “Love Supreme” like circle-of-fifths migration before handing back over to Herbie Hancock. Herbie plays an unusually verbose solo, responding to some of the “sheets of sound” like hints in the end of Wayne’s solo before finding a countermelody and alternate rhythm that seems to point ahead to the ingenious polyrhythm that Tony Williams famously found in the piece when the Second Great Quintet got into it. Reggie Workman’s solo finds unexpected scale runs in between the chords before the tune returns once more.

“Teru” is cut from a similar cloth to Wayne’s other great ballads from this period, looking back to “Iris” and anticipating “Nefertiti” and “Fall.” It’s contemplative and a quiet miracle, as Wayne and Herbie appear to read each others’ minds throughout the piece, which is played more as a duet with quiet rhythm section accompaniment than a solo with trio backing. One can only imagine what the Quintet would have done with this one; Joe Chambers is lovely in his solo but Ron Carter would have eaten this one up.

“Chief Crazy Horse” closes out the album (at least in the original vinyl release; later CD and digital reissues append “The Collector,” a Herbie Hancock composition recorded during the sessions but not issued until 1979, when it became the title track for a Japanese release of other Shorter odds and sods). The ending track is strong, with the rhythm section swinging through as though being suspended on swinging iron chains—moving, but with some serious momentum. Wayne subverts the climbing tune by diving down an octave at the opening of his solo and seemingly side-stepping into a completely different tonality; whenever Herbie piles on the chords, he responds with suspensions and slow moving notes, until the pianist gives room and he responds with a step forward, swinging through the changes. Herbie’s solo brings all the momentum forward, exchanging pounding chords with Joe Chambers’ truly apocalyptic drum rolls. This may be the only of Wayne’s compositions to dwell so happily in triplet meter; even when Herbie’s solo starts out in common time it soon finds its way to triples. The final melody, like “El Gaucho,” fades rather than ending; we imagine the chief riding into a desert sunset aboard a horse with waltz-like tendencies.

As Wayne’s impeccable series of small group albums on Blue Note continued through the decade, the cheery optimism of Adam’s Apple was soon to give way to the more abstract searchings of Schizophrenia and Super Nova. But this album stands as a milestone among Wayne’s 1960s output as a showcase for both his composition and his soloistic verve.

Next week we’re going to hop ahead about ten years, past the dissolution of the Quintet and the advent of jazz fusion, and check in with our players on the other side of that historic movement.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: While “Footprints” was covered almost from the moment of its writing, the other compositions on Adam’s Apple are also endlessly coverable, and have been visited by young jazz artists in the past 20 years as they encounter Wayne’s legacy. I put together an alternate running of the album with covers of each of the tunes to show you what I mean. (Updated to point to an Apple Music playlist since one of the videos on the original YouTube playlist became unavailable.)

Cocktail: Veni Creator Spiritous

We’re doing Mahler’s 8th Symphony this weekend. It’s the first time for me since 2015 and only the second since I joined the Tanglewood Festival Chorus 19 years ago. (I wrote about that experience performing with James Levine, the late great Johan Botha, Deborah Voigt, and Heidi Grant Murphy (the soprano in the rafters) among others, at the time.)

The work remains galactic in its scope and stentorian in its volume. (We have a little grassroots decibel reading practice among the choristers; last night reached “only” 106 from my position on the fifth bench, and we’ve hit as high as 108 in rehearsal.) But it feels different. For one thing, years of in-rehearsal vocal coaching from the TFC’s music director James Burton have made it much easier to sing properly, and “bloomin’ loud” as he’s said on at least one occasion, without screaming. Which is a skill you need if you’re going to be hitting those decibels.

For another, I’m an experienced hand now. While I won’t have a special marking next to my name in the program book until I complete this year plus five more, there are far fewer in the chorus who have a double digit tenure than when I started.

And so, it felt appropriate to mark this weekend’s performances, again, with a special cocktail. As I did for Mahler’s Second, I took inspiration from the text. While it was tempting to just go with the memorable text from Part II’s opening (“Waldung, sie schwankt heran/Felsen, sie lasten dran/Wurzeln, sie klammern an/Stamm dicht an Stamm hinan/Woge nach Woge spritzt…”) and make a “spritzt,” that didn’t feel sufficiently … impactful for a piece that featured two full choirs and boys’ choir, offstage brass, eight soloists, four harps, a harmonium, a pipe organ, and two mandolins. (There were around 300 of us on stage last night.)

So I went with the opening text instead, and made a “Veni Creator Spiritous.” (Groan.) The jumping off point was a Sazerac, but I switched everything up while keeping the overall slightly boozy affect… and, as with the Aufersteh’n, made sure to include herbal liqueurs in honor of Mahler’s vegetarianism.

As always, you can import the recipe card photo into Highball. Enjoy!

Tony Williams, Life Time

Album of the Week, October 5, 2024

Of all the members of Miles’ second great quintet, the one we’ve written the least about is the youngest member, drummer Tony Williams. Just 17 when he joined the quintet in the spring of 1963, he was already a modern jazz veteran, having begun playing with brilliant free jazz saxophonist Sam Rivers when he was just 13 years old. A gig with Jackie McLean at age 16, during which he recorded on Jackie’s pivotal album One Step Beyond, brought him to the attention of Miles Davis, and the rest is history.

Or so the story goes. But Williams continued to record sessions with other Blue Note artists, and shortly after he joined Miles’ quintet, he recorded his own sessions at Rudy Van Gelder’s home studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, on August 21 and 24, 1964. The earliest of those sessions, collected as Life Time, are our subject today, and they make for more adventurous listening than the work his bandmates in Miles’ group were recording (though some of those same bandmates joined him). The record features Sam Rivers on tenor sax (four months before Williams would join Rivers on his pivotal Fuchsia Swing Song), Bobby Hutcherson on vibes and marimba, and Herbie Hancock on piano, with Ron Carter, Richard Davis, and Gary Peacock joining on bass with the different configurations of players.

Album opener “Two Pieces of One,” true to its title, comes in two parts, “Red” and “Green,” that comprise the entirety of side one. A sparely led group featuring just Williams and Rivers backed by both Peacock and Davis on bass, the work highlights Williams the composer rather than the virtuoso drummer. It opens with the sax and basses playing the opening melody chords, opening up to a repeating figure in Richard Davis’s arco bass, and then closing down again with a splash of Williams’ cymbals. The two bassists duet, with Peacock’s fierce pizzicato over Davis. Then finally something approaching a “normal” post-bop sound, with Rivers improvising over a steady yet kaleidoscopically evolving beat from Williams. This segment closes with another duet between the basses, who seem to be discussing what’s just transpired, and a repetition of the opening chorus.

“Green” opens with a duet between Rivers and Williams, in which Rivers throws out at least six or seven melodic ideas around the central progression. Williams falls back to cymbals and accompanies Rivers as he slows in contemplation, then surges forward when Rivers finds a major melody. Williams takes a solo next that’s notable both for the rhythms and the timbres he explores across his snares, toms and cymbals. At the very end the basses rejoin as Rivers recapitulates what originally seemed to be an improvised idea from the opening but which actually turns out to have been the composed melody; the track closes with a fiercely propulsive solo from Williams.

“Tomorrow Afternoon” has something much more like a traditional melody, performed as a trio by Rivers, Williams and Peacock. Rivers leads the charge with a bright melodic statement, but underneath Williams and Peacock are constantly shifting, and a pulsing pattern from Peacock leads into his rapid solo, which is joined by Rivers before Williams swings the trio back into the opening theme. It’s a concisely argued bit of free jazz.

“Memory” is a different beast entirely. Williams and Bobby Hutcherson play polyrhythmically, trading ideas and beats, for the first part of the piece. Herbie Hancock steps in about three minutes in, improvising along Hutcherson’s melody in the right hand before jumping to another pattern. Hutcherson takes a solo that sounds like something out of Steve Reich’s “Six Marimbas,” which Hancock responds to with another idea, which seems to spur another recollection from Williams. The whole work plays out as these interchanges of ideas and melodies bounce from one instrument to the other.

Hancock introduces “Barb’s Song to the Wizard” with the telepathic Ron Carter, who plays the melody as Hancock provides a rhythmic chord progression in the upper octaves of the piano. The players switch roles as they break into something like a somber waltz, then a ballad. Ultimately the track comes to a delicate close as you realize that Williams only appears as the composer here—an unexpectedly generous gesture from the young artist on his first album.

Williams reveals himself on this inaugural outing to be an inspired composer, albeit not in a traditional mode. His other album for Blue Note, Spring, is perhaps better known precisely because it has more recognizable song structures, but it’s still more “out” than most of what the Second Great Quintet recorded during this time… at least until later in the decade. Next up, we’ll hear more from a Williams bandmate who made a practice of blending approachable and ambitious.

You can listen to this week’s album here: