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+1and 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:
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.
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.
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.
“Amen, amen… what this world needs is more love” – Rev. Johnny L. Jones (Exfiltration Bumpers)
In the Sweet By ‘n’ By – The New York Jazz Ensemble With Woody Allen (The Bunk Project)
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)
Joshua Fit De Battle of Jericho – Kid Ory (The Great New Orleans Trombonist)
Down by the Riverside – Sam Morgan’s Jazz Band (How Low Can You Go?)
At A Georgia Camp Meeting – The Firehouse Five Plus Two (The Firehouse Five Plus Two Goes South)
Closer Walk With Thee – Preservation Hall Jazz Band (New Orleans’ Sweet Emma and Her Preservation Hall Jazz Band)
The Old Rugged Cross – George Lewis & Papa Bue’s Viking Jazzband (George Lewis with Papa Bue’s Viking Jazzband)
Precious Lord – Preservation Hall Jazz Band (New Orleans – Vol. IV)
What a Friend We Have in Jesus – The New York Jazz Ensemble With Woody Allen (The Bunk Project)
Hard, Oh Lord (Album Version) – Ida Cox (Blues For Rampart Street)
Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen – The Kings of Dixieland (Kings of Dixieland)
Lily of the Valley – Liberty Brass Band (New Orleans Brass Bands: Through the Streets of the City)
I’ll Fly Away – The Tremè Brass Band (The Treme Brass Band)
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.
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…
Der Kommissar – Falco (Falco: Greatest Hits)
99 Luftballons – Nena (99 Luftballons)
Computer Love (Edit) – Kraftwerk (1981 – Computer)
Lust of Berlin – Neu Electrikk (1981 – Briefcase)
Neue Straßen – Metro Pakt (1981 – Briefcase)
Goldener Reiter – Joachim Witt (Silberblick)
Deutscher Wald – Deutsche Wertarbeit (1981 – Briefcase)
Microbes – Mekanik Kommando (1981 – Briefcase)
Elefantendisco – Pyrolator (1981 – Briefcase)
Ich Komme Aus Der DDR – Gleitzeit (1981 – Briefcase)
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.
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 Colosseumrecording, 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.
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.
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.)
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!
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.
Miles’ Second Great Quintet took a while to gel, and the hardest position to settle was the second horn. Miles had worked with John Coltrane in the first quintet, and whether through conscious comparison to that titan’s stature or by some other means, the saxophonists—including Hank Mobley and George Coleman—who joined the quintet would leave without making much of an impact. It took the arrival of Wayne Shorter in late 1964 to bring all the pieces together; we’ve listened to the document of that beginning, in the recording of a live performance of the quintet from September 1964 released as Miles in Berlin.
But Shorter was hardly sitting on his hands prior to joining the quintet. In April 1964 he recorded his first album as a leader for Blue Note Records, Night Dreamer. He followed this with today’s session, recorded August 3, 1964 at Van Gelder Studios in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, just about six weeks after Herbie Hancock’s session that became Empyrean Isles. Unlike Hancock’s session, though, JuJu featured not his bandmates in Miles’ quintet, but the rhythm section of a different saxophonist entirely: McCoy Tyner, Elvin Jones, and Reggie Workman, all of whom had worked with John Coltrane. In fact, Tyner and Jones had been in Van Gelder’s studio with Coltrane a week after Hancock’s band, on June 24, 1964, recording the tracks that would be released over fifty years later as Blue World.
The use of Coltrane’s rhythm section was controversial at the time for Shorter, who was fighting a mistaken impression in some quarters that he was only a Coltrane imitator. But JuJu would prove how wrong that impression was by foregrounding not only Shorter’s brilliant improvisation but also his compositional genius in a way that hadn’t been exposed to this point.
Shorter has said that “Juju” was inspired by African chant, which it may well have been, but what is most striking about it is its use of whole tone sequences in the descending opening note, over huge block chords from McCoy Tyner. Tyner takes the first solo, and it’s striking how without Shorter’s melodic line and that whole tone scale how normal everything sounds, at least until the head of the melody comes back. When I first heard this tune, on the Blue Note Best of Wayne Shorter compilation sometime in my early college years, I was struck by the echoes of Coltrane’s sound. Listening now, many years later, there’s definitely the sound of Coltrane’s band, but Wayne’s soloing is a completely different thing. He finds different corners of the melody and scale around which to improvise but never seems to disappear into the music the way that Trane was doing in 1964. The incredible moment for me in this work comes near the end, where after two minutes of intensely rhythmic soloing, Wayne surrenders to the harmonic imperative and simply blows a trill, then returns to his solo with octave jumps and shorter phrases as though he’s catching breaths. But he isn’t surrendering to the dance, as the inversion of the melody he plays at 5:30 shows; he continues to play consciously through the whole work. An intense drum break from Jones separates Shorter’s solo from the final choruses, and even here Shorter doesn’t bring the piece to a neat close; in the last 30 seconds he’s found a new melodic pattern, and Van Gelder fades out the end as the band still explores.
“Deluge” opens out of time, but quickly pivots into a swinging minor melody that is pretty conventional… until Shorter’s solo descends its scale from the supertonic and we’re reminded that we’re in the presence of a harmonic genius. Tyner’s solo remains grounded in the original chords. For a player who was himself no compositional slouch we can hear the difference in their imaginations and approaches to the music at this stage, as Tyner improvises across chords and rhythm while Shorter thinks melodically across a wide harmonic range.
“House of Jade” opens with a meditative arpeggio that might have appeared on one of Tyner’s later Blue Note albums, but was actually written by Shorter’s then-wife Irene. When Shorter’s saxophone enters it returns us to the moment with a 16 bar minor key melody that then transitions into a series of held suspensions, played as delicately as possible. The reverie lasts even as Shorter and the band take the melody into a double-time section, then back into the slower reflection to close.
“Mahjong” opens with that greatest of gifts, a sixteen-bar Elvin Jones drum solo in which we get to hear his full harmonic and rhythmic command of his instrument. Nat Hentoff’s liner notes point out that the tune is structured in a way—four bars melody, “4 rhythm, 4 melody, 4 rhythm, 4 bridge-type melody, 4 melody, 4 rhythm … the 4 bar sections of rhythm without melody suggest players pausing to think of their next move.” Mostly, though, the piece gifts us another brilliant Shorter improvisation, particularly at the end where his descending scales taper into a crepuscular hush…
… which makes the impact of the opening run of “Yes or No,” probably the second best known of the compositions on the album after the title track, all the greater. While the form of Shorter’s melody is blueslike, we’re definitely not in the harmonic language of the blues; the tune arpeggiates around a major triad but then leaps the octave and drops a minor third down to the 6th, repeats the pattern, and then climbs up a minor scale and descends down a set of minor triads to return to the tonic. All those words aside, it’s an immensely memorable melody and one that, even with the minor colors in the last four measures of the tune, is upbeat and exuberantly happy. McCoy Tyner follows, picking up from Wayne in the middle of a chorus, and playing through the changes with a gorgeous light touch, only occasionally falling back on the heavy clusters of chords that mark so much of his playing through the rest of the album. Elvin Jones’ extroverted drumroll at the end puts the cherry on top of what is a delightfully rich sundae.
“Twelve More Bars to Go” is, as Shorter says, both a nod to the 12-bar blues form of the piece and a picture of “someone having a very good time, going around to every bar in town.” The portrait plays out through the solo, as Shorter injects an inversion of the harmonic pattern at the very beginning, as he says, “to picture a man, slightly intoxicated, who, as he tries to go forward, backs up.” There are intermittent pauses, long stretches of fluent playing, repeated ideas — it sounds as though Shorter’s narrator has been having a wonderful time. As have we.
Wayne Shorter wasn’t done recording outstanding music with JuJu. On Christmas Eve 1964 he went on to record Speak No Evil, and the following month began recording E.S.P. with Miles. All told, Shorter and the other members of Miles’s band were on track to make the 1964-1965 period one of the most fruitful in modern jazz recording. We’ll hear another album from one of the members of the quintet that was also recorded at the same time, with some of the same players, next week.
Randall Thompson at the piano at the University of Virginia with Glee Club members (including Paul Webb Bourjaily) and Glee Club director Stephen Tuttle
In addition to summarizing the received critical wisdom about the work (“popular rather than original”), Meconi’s essay calls out a point that I missed: that the longevity of the work may in part be due to Thompson’s completing its symphonic orchestration in time for the Boston Symphony to use it in their memorial concert for Franklin D. Roosevelt at Carnegie Hall. She also notes the irony of the original TTBB setting, due to the fact that UVa’s undergraduate program was not coeducational at the time (though, as we know, the woman’s Madrigal Singers group, made of students from the University’s other schools, would perform with the Virginia Glee Club several times during the war years).
Anyway, the essay is worth a read, as are the other essays on her site, which she collectively calls “The Choral Singer’s Companion.”
Herbie Hancock’s 1960s Blue Note records were often a study in contrasts, with pure soul hits alongside deeply complex improvisations. Today’s record, made on June 17, 1964 at Van Gelder Studios in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, is the best example, featuring one of his best-known hits alongside a thirteen minute free jazz odyssey.
For this outing Hancock brought along the rest of the rhythm section from Miles’ Second Great Quintet, with Ron Carter on bass and Tony Williams on drums. For a horn, he asked another member of the young Blue Note roster, trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, to join (this time playing cornet). We’ve listened to a lot of Hubbard’s 1970s output, but at the beginning of his career he was as melodically and technically advanced a player on his instrument as anyone in the world, and in many ways this record is a showpiece for his playing as much as it is for Hancock’s compositions.
“One Finger Snap” is a case in point. Opening with the trumpet and piano playing the slightly knotty theme together, the trumpet takes a brilliant solo turn, with Hancock supporting and anticipating him at every step, including Hubbard’s cascading “sheets of sound” like repeated arpeggios which show up as a motif at several points. Carter supports the proceedings with a walking bass line that hugs the high end of the octave and drops down to give a little more color under Hubbard’s line, then drops back down into the lower ranges when Herbie takes his solo. Hancock does some surprising things with his line, not content to merely arpeggiate or play scales (though he does some of this) when he can jump by thirds and sixths within the line; in the context of an ascending run causing the listener to mutter, “wait, what was that?” Throughout Tony Williams keeps the time and also adds accents as a kind of running commentary. When the melody returns, Hubbard finds a second tune for a moment before rejoining the group, only to fade away with everyone but Williams who provides a thunderous but tuneful solo before the final chords.
“Oliloqui Valley” begins with a bass obbligato from Carter that wouldn’t feel out of place on one of Freddie Hubbard’s 1970s CTI albums. The melody shifts from minor mode to major between the first and second chorus, and then gives over to a solo from Hancock that foretells some of the modes he would investigate on the very next Blue Note outing. Carter plays more freely here, supporting the major key choruses with an octave suspension and exchanging bursts of energy with Williams. When Hubbard enters, it’s in his melodic mode, demonstrating the brilliant clarity of tone and easy technique on swift runs that made him so in demand as a sideman at this stage of his career. Carter takes the next solo turn, with some pauses in the melody that he fills with portamento and chordal beats before the band takes a deep breath with him and re-enters the chorus.
“Cantaloupe Island” is far and away the most well-known track on this album. Opening with the familiar chords of Hancock’s piano opening over a simple bass figure by Carter and a straight ahead drum pattern on the cymbals and snare by Tony Williams, the main theme is Freddie Hubbard’s, a modal blues that circles around the minor root of the scale. Initially the trumpeter plays it cool, but as he goes through multiple choruses he gets increasingly fiery, ultimately carrying the tune into about four or five different modes. When Herbie Hancock’s solo comes he brings the temperature back down, as the rest of the band drops to a simmer around him. Hubbard’s return likewise plays it cool again on the chorus, which is one and out; the track fades out on the rhythm section continuing to stoke that magnificent bluesy engine. Special note must be paid to the snare hit that Tony Williams hits after each chorus (the first one is at around 34 seconds). Just a paroxysm of cool.
We’re in a different isle entirely for “The Egg,” literally. Aside: I’m not sure how I got this far into the review without mentioning the bonkers story by Nora Kelly that makes up the majority of the liner notes, literally laying out the mythology of the Empyrean Isles, but with “The Egg” I feel I have no recourse but to refer to Kelly’s description:
On clear, windy days, when the breezes are strong enough to dispel the vapours, it is possible to discern the smooth, shining, dome-shaped peak of The Egg, a mountain about which the strangest mists and tales are woven. Veiled, inscrutable bastion of strength, its silent presence suggests ever-present danger, dormant perhaps, but ominous in its potential. And occasionally, when some vast tremor from the bowels of the earth shakes the waves and sends towering mountains of water across the placid Eastern Sea, people say that The Egg is ripening and becoming impatient at its long confining.
Later reissues of the album have suggested that Kelly’s story came first and that Herbie wrote the tunes to match. I suspect that’s balderdash. Whatever the case, “The Egg” begins as a free improvisation in 9/8, with the rhythm section locked into a circling pattern as Freddie Hubbard pushes at the edges of it, as if trying to break free. The pattern eddies and shimmers, changing key and morphing into a four beat as Tony Williams finds new rhythmic patterns. Herbie and Freddie exchange patterns, then bleats, and there seems to be hope that the pattern will break—right up until the point that it reforms. Then a clearing: the bass drops out for a minute, then reenters with a bowed line that stops time, with occasional pings from the piano and Williams’ cymbals echoing off the chamber walls. The bass gives way to Hancock playing an almost sonata-like solo, followed by splashes of arpeggio, then a fast chase-like melody that almost feels like incidental music to a film noir. It’s slippery, though, and keeps morphing until it seems to melt into a puddle, then reforms into the film music, then into a careful exploration, the explorer’s snare-drum heart echoing in the silence. But then: the bass insistently starts back into a repeated pattern, the drums splash up around us, and the piano comes back to that circular motif from the beginning. And the trumpet, which once pushed against the gyre, now rides it as we realize there is no escape.
Empyrean Isles, maybe more than any of Herbie Hancock’s other 1960s Blue Note records, revealed the breadth and depth of his compositional and performing skills. The follow-up, Maiden Voyage, would cement this reputation through a combination of brilliant tune writing and fantastic arrangements. But Hancock was not the only great compositional mind in Miles’ second great quintet. We’ll hear from another such member next time.
You can listen to this week’s album here:
BONUS: Donald Byrd did a pretty funky version of “Cantaloupe Island” on his Up With Donald Byrd in 1964—with Herbie Hancock on piano and arrangements. Here it is:
BONUS BONUS: While Us3’s album Hand on the Torch arrived in the era of sampling, there were also some live horns to go with the band’s substantial re-purposing of “Cantaloupe Island” as “Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia)”:
When we looked at Herbie Hancock’s career before joining Miles Davis’s quintet before, we heard his first two Blue Note albums and then jumped to Miles in Berlin. But he had a very busy 1962 through 1964, releasing an album a year (or more) under his own leadership as well as touring with Miles. Today we look at the most unusual of the albums from that early Blue Note period, Inventions & Dimensions, recorded on August 30, 1963 at Rudy Van Gelder’s Englewood Cliffs studio.
While the album is far from atonal, it’s definitely one of Herbie’s more experimental outings. Rather than the more traditional hard bop small groups of Takin’ Offand My Point of View, this session finds him with Latin drummer and percussionist Willie Bobo. Bobo grew up in Spanish Harlem and studied with the great Mongo Santamaria and recorded with Mary Lou Williams, before joining Santamaria in Tito Puente’s band. The two percussionists left to work with vibraphonist Cal Tjader in the late 1950s but as of the time of this recording he hadn’t yet made a huge impact outside the bounds of the mambo craze. (That was soon to change.) Redoubtable Miles Davis bassist Paul Chambers and percussionist Osvaldo “Chihuahua” Martinez rounded out the group, but the majority of the interesting musical happenings here are between Hancock and Bobo.
That may very well be because, apart from “Mimosa” on side two, the entire album is made up of spontaneous improvisations by Hancock, with Bobo grounding him with inventive but in-the-pocket drumming while Martinez and Chambers provide color and a heartbeat, respectively. Chambers in particular doesn’t seem to light up in this format and seems content to stay in the background.
But Hancock more than makes up for any reticence on the part of the other band members. Opening track “Succotash,” like its namesake, combines the widely diverse ingredients of the band into a harmonious whole. It begins as an introduction to the band, with Bobo, Chambers, Martinez, and finally Herbie joining over the course of eight bars. The meter is complex in the opening, with Hancock playing triplet rhythms against what eventually turns out to be a straight four in the percussion, for an effect that seems straight out of Steve Reich’s playbook (though the great minimalist composer’s first experiments with phasing were over a year away). Herbie plays a bunch of different tricks with the track-length improvisation here, going back and forth from the triple meter to straight time before finally returning to a triple meter crescendo. The one moment that Herbie drops away gives Bobo and Martinez the chance to play against each other, and the rhythms are infectious and hypnotic. When Hancock returns, he finds another melodic line before returning to the original triple meter.
“Triangle” begins as a more straightforward blues, but Hancock’s creatively dissonant voicings on the opening chords, sounding like Vince Guaraldi’s “Charlie Brown” theme in two different keys at once, signal that this is going to be anything but routine. The band digs into the pocket anyway, leaving Herbie free to find some deeply soulful patterns over the chords. Chambers may still be somewhat backgrounded throughout but he acquits himself well anyway, the less crowded arrangement here giving him more room to contribute a solid walking bass line. Hancock is still the star here, though, moving from that opening blues line to a pounding improvised passage that sounds a lot like Dave Brubeck in a declaratory mode.
“Jack Rabbit,” true to its name, is a faster romp, and features Bobo on cymbals and Martinez on congas pushing the beat forward. While the opening melody sounds a lot like a faster version of that “Charlie Brown” theme, Herbie’s improvisation overall is freer here, jumping from idea to idea at high speed. This is one that wouldn’t have been out of place (with different percussion) on one of the early Second Great Quintet albums.
“Mimosa” is the sole arranged track on the album, and even it is on the loose side. Starting with a symphonic introduction out of time that feels a bit like Bud Powell’s “Glass Enclosure,” the percussionists take us back into time and lead into Hancock’s main melody, which feels both wistful and romantic in roughly equal proportions—a feat when the melody is arguably just a vamp on the main chord changes. He moves from the initial statement into more elegiac melodic improvisations, all while Martinez and Bobo keep the beat with a steady, gently lilting samba pattern kept fresh by Bobo’s continually evolving cymbal washes. Chambers gets a solo starting at the six-minute mark and it’s a wonder, moving from the slow samba pulse into a double-time excursion around the wobbly rail of the changing chords. Overall though the track stays just on this side of disappearing into the background.
The album closes with “A Jump Ahead,” which is impelled by the urgency and drive of Bobo’s drums and a recurring movable octave in Chambers’ bass that sounds on wherever Herbie’s melody lands. The improvisation appears to center around these jumps of the melodic path, from the tonic to the sixth to the minor third to the fifth, with various exciting things happening in between. Herbie’s solo is more like his later work with Miles here, the chordal structure notwithstanding, in that he organizes his improvisation around an increasingly widening gyre of a right hand solo with sparse left hand accompaniment. And it does seem to be deeply improvised; you can even hear him doing the Bud Powell/Keith Jarrett sung accompaniment, a tribute to how deeply he’s concentrating throughout. Before taking it back to the melody, he bangs out a high rhythmic pattern on a single tone (in octaves), and then closes it out with a vamp on the tonic to the supertonic. It’s high concept in composition, but almost funky in execution.
Inventions & Dimensions is misleading in its seemingly casual nature. While much of the material is clearly freely improvised, it has early-1960s Herbie Hancock doing the improvisation, and that’s worth two or three lesser composers’ worth of fully fleshed out material. While the four musicians here never worked together again, the album stands as testimony to Hancock’s willingness to go far afield—a tendency we’ll see in spades on his more “conventional” album next week.
