bluenoterecords – Jarrett House North

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.)

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:

Wayne Shorter, JuJu

Album of the Week, September 28, 2024

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.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

Herbie Hancock, Empyrean Isles

Album of the Week, September 21, 2024

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)”:

Herbie Hancock, Inventions & Dimensions

Album of the Week, September 14, 2024

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’ Off and 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.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

McCoy Tyner, Extensions

Album of the Week, April 27, 2024

As McCoy Tyner continued on his post-Coltrane career, his version of the modal jazz that he had begun playing with Trane from the earliest days continued to evolve. We saw some of the developing hallmarks of the style with Expansions: use of minor modes, unusual percussion, and drones. These continue on Extensions, recorded by Tyner on February 9, 1970 at Van Gelder Studios in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, but not released by Blue Note until 1973, after he had already left the label.

Tyner brought to the sessions not only his compositional A game but an incredible band. Returning from Extensions were Gary Bartz, Wayne Shorter and Ron Carter; new members included his old bandmate Elvin Jones on drums, and another Coltrane—Alice—on harp.

Alice McLeod, born 1937 in Detroit, began her jazz career at an early age, performing on piano in Detroit clubs in the late 1950s and moving to Paris to study with the great Bud Powell. She married a jazz musician there, trumpeter Kenny “Pancho” Hagood, and had a daughter, but was forced to return to the States as Hagood’s heroin addiction worsened. She performed with her own trio and with vibraphonist Terry Pollard; she was playing in Terry Gibbs’ quartet in 1962-1963 when she met John Coltrane. They married in 1965, and Coltrane became her daughter’s stepfather; they had three children together. Alice joined Coltrane’s band in 1966 after McCoy Tyner’s departure and played piano in the quartet until Trane’s 1967 death. She encouraged Trane’s growing interest in spiritual matters from as early as A Love Supreme, and he encouraged her musical development, even ordering a full sized concert harp for her without her knowledge which was delivered after his death.

Alice Coltrane wasn’t the first to adopt the concert harp as a jazz instrument; others, notably Dorothy Ashby, pioneered the instrument in a jazz setting. But she was the first to bring its sound into spiritual jazz, where she denuded it of any classical affectations. The harp sound that she adds to the album evokes music from earlier traditions, including African and Middle Eastern, a connection reinforced by the album’s National Geographic inspired cover.

Together on Extensions, Tyner and Alice Coltrane conjured a jazz sound that took the hallmarks of Tyner’s spiritual jazz style and added an element of repetition, almost to the point of mantra, and groove. Trane had all but abandoned traditional meters by the time of his death, but the form of spiritual jazz that Tyner plays here is anchored in a constant heartbeat.

That heartbeat begins with Ron Carter, who opens “Message from the Nile” with a pulse on an open fifth. Alice Coltrane follows after four bars, adding harmonic complexity by bringing out the supertonic and seventh notes of the chord in her rhythmic harp patterns as Elvin Jones enters on cymbal and snare. Tyner enters, stating the melody with repeated, strongly rhythmic piano chords. Shorter and Bartz join at the second chorus, playing the melodic pattern in parallel fifths. The whole tune essentially consists of two tonal centers a minor sixth apart, and in each part of the tune the same melodic patterns are repeated four times, as if establishing a mantra for meditation; the static melodic and harmonic pattern still moves thanks to the strong rhythm established by piano, bass, drums and harp. Tyner solos, exploring the corners of the tonality established at the top, and then passes to Shorter, whose soprano saxophone echoes some of Coltrane’s melodic searching without dipping into the growled or smeared tones practiced by Trane. Those effects appear in Bartz’s solo as he returns over and over to the tonic. Alice Coltrane’s harp solo returns some measure of the opening ethereal meditation, underscored by a high-pitched wooden flute, uncredited but possibly played by Tyner himself (he was credited with playing the instrument on a subsequent Blue Note date). The whole thing is an active meditation, which WHUR-FM music director André Perry argued in the liner notes was influenced by the “history of the Black man … deeply rooted in the experiences that transpired on and along the Nile river.”

“The Wanderer” takes a more straightforward compositional approach and is the only track on the album on which Alice Coltrane does not appear. In contrast to “Message from the Nile,” the tune moves through eight chord changes in as many measures, the restlessness giving the tune its name. There’s a thematic connection to the prior tune, though, in the strong rhythmic pulse and in the playing of the theme in parallel fifths by the saxophones. However, there’s an abrupt gear shift about one minute in following the third statement of the melody, as Wayne Shorter takes off on a tenor exploration around the melody that’s underscored by Ron Carter’s running bass line. Carter indeed seems to find new tonal centers as he grounds the line in a sustained pulse on the tonic and the seventh. Shorter tapers off in a series of triple note runs, at which point Bartz picks up the solo torch in the alto that explores the ideas that Shorter was just playing with before returning to the melody, shifting it into a few different keys and then passing to Tyner. Tyner’s solo continues shifting the tonal center around until the players fall away and Jones wanders into several different rhythmic patterns, before transitioning back to the strong beat of the beginning as the band recapitulates the opening.

By contrast, “Survival Blues” begins with Tyner playing solo, an opening that seemingly straddles the spiritual jazz in which the record is centered with more traditional blues chords, even seeming to reach into some Duke Ellington inspired moments around the 30 second mark. At about the one minute mark, he settles into a strong rhythm backed by a repeated bass ground and supported by Jones in full polyrhythmic splendor, as well as by Alice Coltrane, who provides both chordal continuity and moments of chromatic accent. The tenor saxophone states the melody, which runs an octave via the seventh, three times before Shorter begins to shift things around, both chordally and rhythmically. His lines explore the entirety of the space around the melody before handing off to Tyner, who finds secondary rhythms and a second center of gravity around the fifth of the chord. Coltrane joins him on the second half of the solo, as she both picks up some of the secondary rhythms and reinforces the underlying chords with carefully chosen accenting notes in the upper octaves. Ron Carter takes a solo, accompanied by shaken sleigh bells, that walks the core rhythm around the entirety of the octave, finding unsettling tensions in the slide from the second to the third and down to the octave. The introductory melody returns before Jones takes an extended solo that explores the core pulse. The band returns, including Coltrane who performs an extended glissando into the restatement of the opening theme before Shorter returns once more to state the opening theme. (Bartz appears to have sat this one out.)

Coltrane brings that magnificent glissando back to open “His Blessings,” as Tyner explores the opening chord while Carter’s arco bass plays a melody that expands into a tremolo, Bartz pulses small fountains of sound, and Jones’ oceanic rolls keep things moving along. Shorter plays a line in the soprano saxophone that brings John Coltrane’s melodies on Sun Ship to mind while simultaneously calling back to In a Silent Way. Alice Coltrane takes a solo, performing glissandi in the upper strings while playing a melodic line with her other hand in the middle strings, over Carter and Tyner. Shorter returns for one more extended solo over a tremolo bass solo that hangs suspended on the fifth. If other tracks on the album call to mind some of Tyner’s earlier compositions, this one is unique, a spiritual meditation that seems to hang like a sphere in the air. The liner notes credit this as “the reflections of my life and the time afforded me with John Coltrane.”

In early 1970, Tyner was at the peak of his compositional and performing career, and Extensions reflects it. This was a peak period for his writing and performance that would continue even as he left Blue Note, a transition that delayed the release of Extensions for several years. But part of the credit for this album inevitably accrues to his players, especially Alice Coltrane. That debt becomes clearer when we listen to her work next week.

You can listen to the album here:

https://youtu.be/Yj1-m9Y_4KQ?si=vOycjqfYql86Yxw6

McCoy Tyner, Expansions

Album of the Week, April 13, 2024

The classic John Coltrane Quartet was no more after December 1965, as first McCoy Tyner then Elvin Jones despaired of being able to follow Trane to the places he was going. Trane died, unexpectedly and awfully, of liver cancer at the age of 40, on July 17, 1967. But Trane’s musical legacy lived on, most notably through those who played with him and the unmistakably audible legacy his works left in theirs. Tyner was one of those, and as we’ll hear over the next few weeks, Trane’s influence ran strong in Tyner’s works for years afterwards.

Following Tyner’s departure from the Quartet, he signed with Blue Note Records and recorded a series of albums that gradually expanded Tyner’s compositional and performing concept beyond the boundaries of the jazz quartet. On Expansions, the fourth in the series (following The Real McCoy, Tender Moments, and Time for Tyner), we get an intriguing mix of modal jazz, the avant-garde, and more traditional sounds, delivered by a septet of players that included Woody Shaw on trumpet, Gary Bartz on alto sax (and wooden flute), Wayne Shorter on tenor sax (and clarinet), Herbie Lewis on bass, Freddie Watts on drums, and Ron Carter, who plays cello here.

Shaw would go on to record on sessions with Joe Zawinul (he actually appears on Zawinul), as well as . Gary Bartz had previously performed with Tyner in Charles Mingus’s workshop and would record with him again before working with Miles Davis in 1970 (resulting in the Live-Evil album) and beginning his own influential band, the NTU Troop. Herbie Lewis recorded with a long list of influential 1960s players including Cannonball Adderley, Stanley Turrentine, Bobby Hutcherson, Freddie Hubbard, Jackie McLean, Archie Shepp, Harold Land, and others. And Freddie Watts worked with Max Roach, Kenny Barron, Andrew Hill, Joe Zawinul, Freddie Hubbard, and others.

When you hear “Vision,” you could be forgiven for thinking you were hearing a leftover melody from a Coltrane session, at least until the horns enter. Tyner’s harmonic imagination is strongly influenced by Trane’s modal material. But the horns, who play the opening statement of the melody add a new element that’s distinct from the Coltrane style. And Ron Carter’s cello solo, which provides both melody and texture by playing with light pressure on the fingerboard while bowing (sul ponticello), takes the tune even further into unknown reaches. Wayne Shorter, Gary Bartz, and Woody Shaw each take a solo. Shorter’s harmonic imagination is interesting here as he plays unusually aggressively compared to his performances as a group leader. There are touches of some of his playing on Miles Smiles in the speed and bite of his playing. Bartz plays more melodically by contrast, but brings in some distortion in the saxophone. And Shaw goes even further out, playing into the upper reaches and moving well beyond the chords of the tune. The overall tune pushes beyond traditional jazz forms, urged on by Tyner’s percussive playing and Freddie Watts’ drums.

“Song of Happiness” comes from a more meditative center. The opening is played over a static chord with the piano and bass constantly in motion without moving far from the central tonality. A melody starts in the bass and is accompanied by the constantly rolling piano and, ultimately, by wooden flute and clarinet, played by Bartz and Shorter. Finally, the horns come in on a secondary melody and are answered by the bass and piano, tossing the development of the melody back and forth in eight bar patterns. Solos follow from Tyner and Shorter, and the group returns to the flute for the long coda. There’s more than a hint of the East in the arrangement, and it shows how Tyner’s imagination was broadening beyond the minor key workouts of the classic quartet.

“Smitty’s Place,” by contrast, feels almost like an Archie Shepp workout, with a clear melody alternating with free playing from the band. Shorter’s solo here is much closer to his normal playing of the late 1960s, with shadows of his Schizophrenia. The pizzicato cello solo by Carter is one of the farthest-out things on the whole record, and Tyner’s closing solo definitely the funniest.

“Peresina” finds us back in a familiar minor modal groove, led by Tyner’s assertive solo and followed by the melody which is stated in the horns. But at about the two minute mark the tune takes a left turn into something more complex chordally, and suddenly the feel is less percussive, more dancelike. It’s an interesting tune, well played by the band; again, Shorter’s solo stands out for its left turns into unusual tonalities and moments.

Last, “I Thought I’d Let You Know” is the only non-Tyner composition on the album. Written by Cal Massey, who played with Tyner and Jimmy Garrison in Philadelphia in the 1950s, the work opens with a cello feature by Carter before turning to a tender piano solo from Tyner. The two alternate with support from the rhythm section throughout. The overall effect has the serenity of “Song of Happiness” in a more traditional format, as if to say: this, too, remains.

On Expansions, McCoy Tyner’s compositional skills and range are on full display. While still touched by the shadow of Trane’s influence, tracks like “Song of Happiness” and “Smitty’s Place” show that Tyner could stretch convincingly into his own definition of the avant-garde and could command a substantially broader tonal palette. We’ll hear more of that in coming recordings from him; next week, though, we’ll check out another post-Trane recording from one of his later collaborators.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

Kenny Dorham, Afro-Cuban

Album of the Week, October 15, 2022

We’ve seen a lot of different influences in jazz: classical music, blues, rock. But one big strain that didn’t really touch Miles, but influenced a lot of other jazz musicians, is Cuban music. Arriving in the US in the 1940s, by the mid-1950s it was a well established strain of jazz music, championed by Dizzy Gillespie and Chano Pozo, among others. And trumpeter and composer Kenny Durham dove into the music for this, his second album as a leader and first for Blue Note Records.

As we’ve seen with Herbie Hancock’s early Blue Note recordings, dates for the label often drew on different groups of players who were also recording for the roster, meaning that when you pick up a Blue Note recording made in 1955, you stand a very good chance of seeing familiar names in the line-up. Afro-Cuban is no exception, with a group boasting J. J. Johnson on trombone, the great Horace Silver on piano, Hank Mobley on tenor sax, Cecil Payne on baritone, Oscar Pettiford on bass, and Art Blakey on drums. To this assemblage were added Carlos “Patato” Valdes on conga and Richie Goldberg on cowbell. The album was actually recorded in two sessions, with the musicians above appearing in session on March 29, 1955, and the first four tracks on the album were originally released on a 10” LP. Blue Note decided to reissue the record in 1957, adding three tracks from an earlier session recorded January 30, 1955 without Valdes and Goldberg, and substituting Percy Heath for Pettiford on bass.

The album opens with strong Afro-Cuban flavor with “Afrodisia,” the congas telegraphing the artistic direction of the album at once. After the brass line states the opening theme, Dorham’s trumpet provides a solo that combines the Cuban flavor with his own hard bop approach to the music, with hard bop changes alternating with the melodic licks across several choruses. Mobley’s refined sax follows, kicking the group briefly into a different unsyncopated pattern before he settles back into the swing of things and passes it to J.J. Johnson, who takes two choruses before letting Blakey and Valdes trade eights with the entire horn line.

“Lotus Flower” is a slower ballad, with the horns introducing the melody over a gently loping bass and conga pattern. Dorham provides a good opportunity to hear the differences in his approach to the horn from other players like Miles. There’s no mute here, and a good deal more motion in the line; Miles would likely have played half as many notes, but Dorham’s approach is equally lovely. The interlude is brief; “Minor’s Holiday” returns to the Cuban dance rhythms of the opening, with Dorham briskly soloing over Valdes’ Cuban rhythms and Blakey’s customarily volcanic drumming. Indeed, while Blakey is normally no slouch in bringing energy to the recording session, here he sounds positively charged by Valdes.

The only composition not by Dorham on the record, “Basheer’s Dream” (written by the redoubtable Gigi Gryce, some seven years before he adopted the Islamic name Basheer Qusim) is here steeped both in the Cuban rhythms of the opening and the post-bop approach that Gryce introduced in his work with Miles on Birth of the Cool. Johnson’s trombone solo is especially tasty here, as he pulls a minor countermelody out of the chord progressions of the song, contrasting with the high solo lines of both Dorham and Mobley.

The second side of the album reads as more straight-ahead hard bop, but it’s no less delightful, thanks to the continued excellent work of the front line. “K.D.’s Motion,” true to its name, roams all over the chords in the opening chorus and in Dorham’s solo before he passes to Cecil Payne for a rare baritone solo. The transition between Payne and Mobley is almost telepathic, with the latter picking up Payne’s swing for a brief turn before passing it to Silver who gets a relatively rare moment atop the rhythm section before the chorus returns.

Dorham’s “La Villa” begins where “K.D.’s Motion” ended, with a propulsive statement on the drums from Blakey. The tune, which can also be found under Sonny Rollins’ name in several compilations thanks to his presence on a later Dorham session, is blistering throughout as the band navigates through the changes. Solos from Dorham, Mobley and Payne are followed by a spate of trading fours with Blakey and a final statement of the theme. “Venita’s Dance” closes the second side in a mid-tempo statement that’s kept lively by Blakey and Silver’s insistent underpinnings; indeed, it’s eye-widening to listen to Silver’s melodic approach to the chords underneath each of the soloists and to reflect on the two completely different melodies at work each time.

Dorham was perpetually underrated, a situation not helped by his movement across several labels during his career in the 1950s and 1960s; he recorded four more sessions for Blue Note in between records for Riverside, Time, Prestige/New Jazz, and (after he moved to Europe) SteepleChase. He ultimately died young of kidney disease in 1972. But sessions like Afro Cuban offer tantalizing glimpses of what might have been, and are a good reminder of the pleasures to be found in what might otherwise seem to be just another Blue Note session.

You can listen to the album here:

Wayne Shorter, Super Nova

Album of the Week, September 3, 2022.

We’ve tipped over the edge of the world with today’s Album of the Week. Super Nova is our first post-Bitches Brew album, the first Wayne Shorter solo album to feature him on the soprano sax, the first album to tip from post-bop to free jazz that we’ve featured. It’s by turns intoxicating and disorienting. When I bought it in college, I had no idea what to make of it, and I’m still learning my way through it. It’s a ferocious album from an extraordinary group of musicians, deployed in a most unusual way.

For this session, recorded beginning eight days after the last session for Miles’ fusion masterpiece Bitches Brew, Wayne assembled an all-star cast of early fusion players. Guitarist John McLaughlin returned from Bitches Brew and In a Silent Way, playing guitar; he was joined on drums and vibes by Chick Corea (!!). Chick brought Miroslav Vitouš, a young Czech bassist who had played on several of his recent recordings and done sessions with Herbie Mann and Roy Ayers. From Miles’ Bitches Brew band, Jack DeJohnette was the primary drummer for the sessions and also played the kalimba; he was joined on percussion by Airto, the mononymous percussionist that was starting to appear with regularity on jazz fusion albums. Rounding out the band were avant-garde electric guitarist Sonny Sharrock and Niels Jakobsen on claves. And Walter and Maria Booker would memorably appear on one track together as well, on acoustic guitar and vocals.

The title track opens the album in full free jazz mode. Part of the dislocation of the album is immediately apparent in the instrumentation. With no keyboard instrument to center the chords, the soprano sax is the focus of the tonal energy, serene above a swarm of guitar and bass. What sound like screams reveal themselves to be interjections from Sonny Sharrock’s electric guitar. The whole thing might be as close as Shorter gets to the energy of some of Coltrane’s post-A Love Supreme recordings.

“Swee-Pea” opens more peacefully, with the vibes, chimes and guitars creating a bed for Shorter’s tranquil soprano sax melody. We’ve heard this tune before, as “Sweet Pea,” on the Miles compilation album Water Babies. Here, Shorter’s threnody for Billy Strayhorn subtracts much of the lushness of the arrangement of the earlier recording, revealing a melody simultaneously more powerful and more fragile on the soprano sax.

“Dindi” is a completely different thing again. The opening gives us chaos, in the form of percussion and guitars underpinning the single note solo on the soprano saxophone, all riding over the ostinato bass note that pulses a relentless rhythm. Then everything falls away except for the acoustic guitar of Walter Booker, accompanying the plaintive Portuguese vocals of his wife Maria. Overcome as she begins the second chorus, Maria’s solo ends in a choked sob, and the chaos returns. This was the track that made me put the album down for several years when I heard it as a college student; I just wasn’t ready for the naked emotions at play here.

“Water Babies” is sonically worlds away from the version recorded by Miles a few years earlier. And then again: many of the bones are there, only reconfigured. The pulsed base note of Miroslav Vitouš grounds us in waltz time, and the melody, here are in the soprano sax, retains some of its plaintiveness. But the performance is freer. And the ringing chords in the guitar, while continuing to locate the tone in the same minor mode as the prior performance, here leave more possibilities for the other players to explore.

“Capricorn” seems destined to be another exploration into chaos, with the intensely powerful opening by bass, electric guitar and drums. Indeed, Jack DeJohnette‘s drums continue throughout the song to roll chaos in the deep. But Wayne Shorter and John McLaughlin are up to something else. Shorter’s solo, by turns serene and fiercely impassioned, takes us to the emotional center of the album, and McLaughlin’s chords support the melody, turning it almost into a second conversation within the cacophony of the rhythm section. It’s a powerful contrast and a stunning performance.

“More Than Human” closes the album, with Shorter’s melody seemingly having completely committed to the sonic world created by DeJohnette, Airto and Sharrock. The soprano melody descends chromatically as though landing on the surface of an alien world, buffeted by gusts from Sharrock’s guitar and Airto’s percussive attack. At the end, Shorter steps away from the microphone, still playing, as though exploring the new vista unfolding before him.

The final track’s title gives a clue to a thematic impulse behind the album. More Than Human, the Theodore Sturgeon novel that was published in 1953, is about the gestalt, humans who can pool their minds and abilities together into a whole that is far more than the sum of its parts. It’s a good description for what Shorter’s band accomplishes on this unusual outing. It also explains the album cover, which feels a bit like a pulp science fiction novel itself.

You can listen to the album here.

Wayne Shorter, Schizophrenia

Album of the Week, July 16, 2022

Miles may have gone through some quieter periods between 1964 and 1966, but he and the quintet were now, it seems, determined to make up for lost time. We’ve entered a period of the discography where it’s difficult to cover the recordings in strict chronological order, between the albums that were all laid down in one session and the others that are made up of tracks from a variety of sessions, sometimes spanning several years. But before we commence the later part of the Second Great Quintet, there was still room for members of the group to record their own solo albums in between quintet sessions. And so we find Wayne Shorter on March 10, 1967, entering Van Gelder Studios once more for Blue Note, this time with a sextet: Curtis Fuller on trombone, James Spaulding on alto sax and flute, Herbie Hancock on piano, Ron Carter on bass, and Joe Chambers on drums, to record Schizophrenia.

The album gets off to a strong start, with a Shorter original we’ve heard before, now in a fuller arrangement. “Tom Thumb” here benefits from Herbie Hancock’s sambaesque introductory statement, as well as James Spaulding’s distinctive tone on alto and the remarkable timbre of Curtis Fuller’s trombone. Herbie’s solo, full of unusual chordal clusters and tones, is notable after all the right-hand-only solos we heard on Miles Smiles, just six months before; it’s a reminder of how much of a full orchestral sound he can bring to the party. James Spaulding’s solo on alto is striking as well, covering a range of two plus octaves and playing with the time before returning to the contours of the melody. After the rocky terrain of The All Seeing Eye, this is almost Wayne Shorter as pop artist, though there’s nothing watered down about those solos.

As if to remind us of the earlier album, “Go” opens with an out-of-time modal chord progression from the horns, but then enters a more wistful balladic feel as they settle into a gentle samba-influenced melody. The group plays freely with time through the intro, but you can always feel the pulse just below the surface. When Spaulding enters on flute, it’s breathtaking, as is the handoff from the diminuendo in the flute into Shorter’s tenor entrance. The concluding chorus opens with Shorter alone before the rest of the horns come in to provide melancholy counterpoint. It’s one of those remarkable Shorter compositions that sneaks under the blankets of your mind.

The title track, true to its name, seems to have a split psyche, opening in a slow out-of-time statement by the horns before kicking into a higher gear as a fast modal workout for the whole band. Shorter’s solo is appropriately fiery, of course, but we also hear Fuller on a blistering trombone solo and Spaulding seems to fan the flames.

“Kryptonite” is a James Spaulding composition, and features him on flute in the opening statement of the theme, alongside the rest of the horns, and then into a flute solo that starts with the opening chords and then finds its way into adjoining tonalities, all while holding onto the rhythmic drive of the theme. It’s a strong opening statement, and Shorter’s solo goes in a different direction, picking up a rhythmic figure from Spaulding and then making his own scale out of the raw material of the chords, before returning to the opening theme and his opening rhythmic statement. Hancock’s solo vamps over or two chords from the theme but is mostly a right-hand statement, before the final chorus comes in.

“Miyako,” named for Shorter’s daughter with his ex-wife Teruko Nakagami (who appears on the cover of Speak No Evil), is a ballad in the spirit of “Infant Eyes,” which was also dedicated to her. The melody is simple here, but the richness of the arrangement—where would this album be without Curtis Fuller’s trombone??—sets it apart, as does the chord progression that takes us from minor to relative major to lands unexplored in just a few bars. It’s stunning…

… but not quite as stunning as the opening of “Playground,” a full band workout that seems to flash from darkness to valediction to schoolyard namecalling in the first minute. We’re not in pop music territory here anymore, but the freer statement feels closer to where Shorter’s muse was taking him. Still, the closing is nowhere near as dark as The All Seeing Eye. Despite (or perhaps because of) the freedom of Shorter’s approach, we still find ourselves unexpectedly in a gospel moment as Hancock exchanges chords and comments under Fuller’s solo. Spaulding’s solo complements the gospel moment, but his repetition of the thematic idea is more free jazz than gospel shout. Hancock takes us back to the darkness from the opening theme, but playfully, with runs in the right hand against rumbled chords in the left, leading into the final chorus with the horns. A repeated blare on the final chord takes the song, and the album, out.

Schizophrenia is as wide reaching as its title suggests, finding Shorter revisiting some of the musical approaches from his earlier albums at the same time as he feels his way into new ways to approach free jazz. It’s a fun record, if measured by nothing else than it seems to end too soon. Some of the fun of the record would return in Shorter’s compositions on the next Miles Davis Quintet album; we’ll hear that next week.

You can listen to Schizophrenia here.

Wayne Shorter, The All Seeing Eye

Album of the Week, June 25, 2022.

As 1965 ran on, Miles Davis continued with health problems and personal setbacks. His hip replacement in April had failed, but he checked himself out of the hospital due to boredom in July. In August he was back in the hospital for another go at the hip replacement, this time with a plastic ball joint. The band continued recording, though. We’ve listened to Hancock’s Maiden Voyage. Tony Williams recorded his debut solo album Spring in August with Wayne Shorter and Hancock alongside. And Shorter recorded The Soothsayer in March, The Collector in June, and recorded the Lee Morgan album The Gigolo with his old Jazz Messengers bandmate in June and July. And in October, Shorter returned to Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey with an octet to record his next album, The All Seeing Eye.

To say that this new album was a radical departure from what came before is accurate, and might understate how dramatic a development this was for Shorter the composer. Not only was this the largest group he had ever written for — with Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Freddie Hubbard returning from Speak No Evil, and now augmented by trombonist Grachan Moncur III, alto sax James Spaulding, drummer Joe Chambers, and Shorter’s brother Alan composing and playing flugelhorn on the final track — but compositionally this was far from the normal territory he covered. Even coming after some of the danker tracks on E.S.P. we are in new territory here. There is little of the blues or standards jazz on this album. We teeter over the abyss.

Shorter meant this as a concept album, exploring the meaning of life and the existence of God and the Universe. It’s easy to hear a search for the divine in the title track, which opens the album. In some ways the tune here is the most conventional one on the album, but the thick chords take it to a completely different place. Hubbard has a blazing solo that Shorter picks up and carries forward. Hancock slows things back down with his solo and the band comes back at the end to close things down.

The opening track is wild, but nothing prepares the listener for the free opening to “Genesis,” which presents a full keyboard chromatic scale by Hancock that builds from the abyss to a modal statement of the theme, first in the piano, then continued in the horns. Coming out of the band’s opening statement, first Carter and then Shorter take their own free statement of the melody. Shorter builds to a rhythmic pattern that he repeats on a single note for four measures before Hancock picks up the pattern, while Shorter spins back out. Hubbard takes the next solo, keeping in free time while exploring different tones and octaves with his horn. Moncur slowly explores an ascending chromatic scale as the part of Creation that he surveys unfurls. At the end the main theme comes back with the chords from the horns, followed by the piano theme to bring the composition full circle. Twelve bar blues this ain’t.

“Chaos,” despite its title, is more conventional, albeit deep in modal jazz. Shorter has called this “what man has done… to God’s creation,” and the music reflects a deep tension, conflict and warring voices, all over the constant pulse of Carter and Chambers. First Shorter, then Hubbard and Hancock make fiery statements before the ensemble plays out the theme again and begin to spiral back out, ending the track in a rare fade-out.

“The Face of the Deep” is a relatively more conventional slow ballad, rendered fresh both by the dense voicing of the horn quartet on the theme and by Hancock’s contemplative solo, accompanied by sensitive work from Chambers on the cymbals and a slow heartbeat from Carter. As an aside, this record features some of Carter’s earliest use of the portamento that would eventually become one of his signature techniques. Shorter’s solo here is reminiscent of his work on “Infant Eyes,” with an approach as much about space as about his notes. The horns return after to restate the theme with an ominous swell that leads into the final track.

“Mephistopheles,” the sole composition by Alan Shorter on the album, seems at first puckish, with an angular melody in the horns that is played in clusters of notes. But then the rhythm section enters with an insistent ground played in the bass and piano accompanied by subtle cymbal work by Chambers, and the horns return with an ominous restatement of the theme followed by a scream. Shorter picks up the solo over rolling drumwork and that continuing ground, sketching a portrait of an uneven, unpredictable ruler of the underworld. His brother follows with a flugelhorn solo that continues the exploration of the Hadean region, playing against stabbing chords in the piano as he circles the melody, raising it higher and then descending back into the pit. Moncur gets the last word from the horns, with a solo that reflects less fire and more heat, taking the persistent beat of the ground and adopting it for his own descending solo. Chambers takes the ground and double times it for his own solo, then breaks free of the boundaries of the bars before returning to the ground beneath the horns who restate the melody once more, finishing with a final scream.

Shorter would explore many more boundaries of music, both with his solo recordings and his work with the Miles Davis Quintet, but The All Seeing Eye stands as a conceptual milestone in his catalog, both forbidding in its thorny complexity and inspiring in its dark beauty. It was not a permanent change of direction, and next time we’ll explore yet another side of him as a composer and sideman alongside another of his Art Blakey bandmates.

My copy of the record (top) is the recent Tone Poet reissue from Blue Note, which sounds superb. You can listen to the full album here.

Herbie Hancock, Maiden Voyage

Album of the week, June 18, 2022

Listening to the opening of “Maiden Voyage,” it’s hard to believe that it was recorded just two months after E.S.P.—and with three of the same members. It’s also hard to believe that it opens Hancock’s fifth solo album in four years—to say nothing of his work with Miles.

The band that entered Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs on March 17, 1965 bore some strong resemblances to the one that had recorded with Miles at Columbia Studios in Hollywood on January 20-22. In addition to Hancock, Ron Carter and Tony Williams returned to the rhythm section; they had performed with Hancock on his preceding album, Empyrean Isles, as had Freddie Hubbard. George Coleman, who had played with Herbie on the live recordings of the Miles Davis Quintet from Carnegie Hall, My Funny Valentine and “Four” and More, rounded out the group on tenor sax. But though many of the players on the album had played with Miles, this album is distinctively Herbie Hancock’s work.

I write a lot about chordal structure, rhythmic interplay, and other facets of jazz improvisation in this series, but there is one essential element without which no jazz album can reach greatness: melody. One of the few weak points of E.S.P., to my ear, is the lack of distinct melodies on the second side, after the strong opening of the title track, “Eighty-One” and “Little One.” There’s no such weakness here, and “Maiden Voyage” opens the album with one of the all time great jazz melodies. It’s simple, persistent, and yearning, with a simple tune—up a fourth, then down a whole step and a four note run up a minor scale. But it’s slippery, with the same pattern repeated at a different part of the scale a few bars later, and the whole thing is set over suspended seventh chords, evoking a sense of mystery. It conveys everything about the sense of wonder of the beginning of a solo journey, combined with the mystery of the ocean. It is also unforgettable, and a substantial step forward from the Herbie Hancock who wrote the calculated hit tunes “Watermelon Man” and “Blind Man, Blind Man.”

The whole track is a remarkable performance, but especially worth listening to is Tony Williams’ drum work under Hancock’s solo. Through a combination of cymbal work, snare rolls, and a bass drum heartbeat that slightly anticipates Ron Carter’s bass line. It’s an amazing evocation of the ocean, complete with creaking timbers and salt spray, and yet it’s utterly placid on the surface.

From the tranquility of the opening track we are immediately dropped into a storm. “The Eye of the Hurricane” provides an opportunity for Freddie Hubbard to demonstrate the combination of keen melodic sense, rhythmic complexity, and sheer technical acumen that would become his signature sound for the next fifteen years. His solo is astonishing. Coleman’s tenor solo following is less technically precise but is propulsive and carries the energy forward into Hancock’s solo, which is carried out almost entirely in the right hand as the chords drop way back, providing a feeling of calm at the center of the work. It’s a neat trick, but it makes me wonder what the piece would sound like in the hands of McCoy Tyner.

Hancock’s “Little One” follows, and he wisely rearranges the solos a little compared to the version on E.S.P. Here, both horns play the opening phrase, while Hubbard takes the following climb upward over Coleman’s lower accompaniment, and Hancock plays the yearning part that was Wayne Shorter’s on the earlier version. When the waltz comes in, George Coleman creates an entirely new melody over the opening, demonstrating the versatility of the tune and his own unique melodic gift. Freddie Hubbard follows the trail blazed by Coleman but quickly takes the melody to his own territory before passing it back to Herbie Hancock. His work on the solo finds him deep in impressionistic territory. Indeed, with his rhythmic chords alternating with melodic runs, he sounds like a livelier Bill Evans—a distinctively new voice from Hancock, who stretches out in several new directions on the record.

The furthest out direction he visits comes to the fore on “Survival of the Fittest.” What was I saying about melody? Here the hook is memorable but not hummable: slowly crescendoing chords, a saxophone line that sounds a lot like the opening to Wayne Shorter’s “Yes or No” (recorded seven months earlier), a scream in the trumpet, stabbing chords from the horns, a quick fragment of a melody, and then… burnout. Not in the pejorative sense, but in the sense that Branford Marsalis’s band has used it. Solos stretch past boundaries of bars and choruses and into different times and tonalities, anchored by Williams’ frantic drumming. Even here Hancock finds lyrical melody, but in a constantly shifting tonality and tempo. Finally the rest of the rhythm section falls away and it’s just Herbie playing a scherzo over chords that rock back and forth between two minor modes. It’s stunning and time stopping, and when Tony Williams comes back in he maintains the timeless feel with rolling drums in the deep. The horns come back in six bursts, restating the opening melody before abruptly halting.

And then: a surprise. “Dolphin Dance” swings gently and offers us the second most memorable melody of the record, an ascending run from the third to the fifth of the scale then down to the second, an easygoing pattern that continues with the same intervals but then starts from the tonic, the sixth and the third. It’s a vivid image, suggesting dolphins breaching out of the water one after another. And the soloists follow. Freddie Hubbard breaks out of the second repetition of the melody, taking flight for a moment, swimming along with the melody, then kicking it into a new key before passing it to George Coleman. The saxophonist swings his solo hard before going into double-time and eventually employing something like Coltrane’s “sheets of sound.” Hancock brings it back to the circling pattern, touching the other points of the scale before generating a new melody that reaches upwards, pauses, then climbs once more. The final recapitulation underscores the serenity of the melody, drifting into the distance.

It’s a fitting sendoff for the album, which stands as one of the high points of Hancock’s work—and of Blue Note Records in general. Next time we’ll hear a very different work from another member of Miles’ quintet.

You can listen to the album here.

Wayne Shorter, Speak No Evil

Album of the week, June 4, 2022.

Many of the musicians in this series must be described in the past tense, but Wayne Shorter is still with us. We heard his tenor voice last time as a member of Miles Davis’ band. Today we’re going to look at an album he recorded after that run of dates on the road—an album that still stands among the greatest small group jazz recordings ever.

Wayne Shorter started his career in the Army, serving for two years after graduating from New York University, and playing in a combo with Horace Silver. He was subsequently hired by Art Blakey, who made a career out of finding promising young players and giving them opportunities to shine. During the time when Shorter was in the Jazz Messengers, Blakey’s band, he played alongside trumpeter Lee Morgan, pianist Bobby Timmons, trombonist Curtis Fuller, bassist Reggie Workman, Freddie Hubbard, and pianist Cedar Walton at various times. (We’ll hear from many of these artists later.) Even among this group of young giants, Shorter stood out, eventually becoming the band’s musical director.

Shorter played a few gigs with Miles in 1962 but stayed committed to Blakey’s group, finally giving in and joining Miles for good in the summer of 1964. The group toured extensively through Europe that summer and fall; in addition to the Berlin date we wrote about last time, there are also radio sessions documenting concerts in Paris, Sindelfingen (West Germany), and Copenhagen. When the band returned, with no Davis recording sessions imminent, he hit Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. The first session, in November, yielded three takes that were rejected by Blue Note. The second session, on Christmas Eve, 1964, yielded a masterpiece.

Shorter had already recorded two albums for Blue Note in 1964, with a group consisting of Coltrane sidemen (McCoy Tyner, Reggie Workman, and Elvin Jones) that established his abilities as a leader and a composer, but cast him as a Coltrane disciple. This time around the compositional voice was more assured and also beginning to speak a different language, with modal influences from Miles. That’s not all the record borrows from his work with the Miles Davis Quintet; his bandmates Herbie Hancock and Ron Carter joined him for the recording, alongside trumpeter Freddie Hubbard and John Coltrane Quartet drummer Elvin Jones. (We’ll hear more about all these musicians.)

Shorter starts off the album with “Witch Hunt,” a modal, bluesy track that features strong playing from Hubbard over a relaxed groove courtesy of Hancock and Carter. Hancock’s time in Miles’ group is apparent in his accompaniment, which drops chords into the spaces left by the horns as he brings the band along on the changes. Elvin Jones keeps the time with a relaxed swing, but turns up the heat as the group shifts gears into the chorus and as Shorter’s solo gets hotter, finding a new rhythmic pattern. Carter keeps an implacable heartbeat below all the players. And Shorter and Hubbard trade solos over the rhythm section, finding different approaches to the loping melody that opens the track.

“Fee Fi Fo Fum” is in nearly the same tempo, but relaxes further into the groove and drops a minor third down the chord that “Witch Hunt” explores, lending the impression of continuing the thought that the opening track started. Here Hubbard opens with a brief solo before yielding the floor to Shorter, who brings several different tonalities around the melody before passing the ball back to Hancock.

“Dance Cadaverous” continues the groove in waltz time. The first side of the album, in fact, feels like a slowly unfolding exploration of the same musical idea, with different melodic ideas continuing in the same mode. The sound continues to swirl around the same tonality in a series of hypnotic melodies, but you’d be forgiven for thinking of the songs as slightly interchangeable.

That changes in a big way with the title track, which opens the second side of the album. Here the melody is both simpler, reliant on just three notes to express the statement of the core idea, and more developed, as it moves in and out of the opening tonality, then climbs chromatically up the octave topping out a ninth above, with Hancock closing the pattern with a cluster of chords that descends back to the tonic. The tune is memorable and insistent and sticks around as Jones and Carter dig into the swing underneath while Hancock sketches out the scale, exploring both the chordal patterns and different rhythms. As with other songs in this session, Hubbard’s solo goes high, but Shorter stays in the same range as the melody, persistently circling round the melodic idea.

Things get stripped back even further on “Infant Eyes,” a slow ballad where Shorter and Hancock both strip out all but the most essential notes. Carter’s bass heartbeat is the pulse that moves the ballad forward, functioning in much the same way that Paul Chambers’ bass work did on Coltrane’s “Naima.” Shorter’s solo seems suspended in mid-air above the bed of Hancock’s delicate chord work throughout (Freddie Hubbard sits this one out). It’s stunning and points the way toward a path that Shorter would walk throughout his career.

The album closes with another statement in three. “Wild Flower” is, even more than “Dance Cadaverous,” a waltz, with the two horns playing in close harmony on the opening statement, only to come into unison on the second part of the theme as though two flowers twined around each other and grew toward the sky. The soloists follow the melody into and out of minor keys, exploring around the theme above the ground held by Elvin Jones and Ron Carter, with Herbie Hancock’s slightly off-beat chords giving the impression of someone wandering onto the dance floor with one leg slightly shorter than the other. Like the entire album, it’s mysterious, moody, and more than a little joyous.

Shorter would record more albums for Blue Note (and we’ll hear some of them), but this is undeniably his best known outing for the label. A statement of his compositional and soloistic gifts, it’s a performance that’s rarely been equalled on record. Next week we’ll see what happens when three of these players return to the context of the Miles Davis Quintet not quite a month later.

My copy of the album is the Blue Note 75th Anniversary re-pressing. I’ve picked up a few Blue Note reissues in various lines and have always been pleased, perhaps no more so than with this one, which has the sound of the musicians completely present and lifelike. You can listen to the album here.

Herbie Hancock, My Point of View

Album of the Week, May 21, 2022

Say you’re Herbie Hancock. You have, at the age of 22, released your first album for Blue Note Records, and it’s a hit. The single cracks the Top 100, and your friend Mongo Santamaria’s re-recording of it cracks the Top 10. You’ve demonstrated that you can compose soul jazz, modal jazz, and ballads. What do you do for an encore? Well, if you’re Herbie Hancock, almost a year to the day you get back in the studio, and you do it again, with a bigger band.

To call My Point of View similar to Takin’ Off is a little unfair. The writing is more assured and distinctive, for one thing. Where you could be forgiven for mixing up “Three Bags Full” and “Empty Pockets” on the first album, each tune on My Point of View is distinctive. And the orchestration is fuller. In fact, the band on this date reads like a Who’s Who of early 1960s Blue Note, with Donald Byrd stepping in for Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, Hank Mobley (fresh off his stint with Miles’ band) replacing Dexter Gordon, and Chuck Israels, who did not release albums for Blue Note as a leader but who would later anchor one of Bill Evans’ most essential trios, on bass. Two other Blue Note luminaries, the brilliant guitarist Grant Green and the cerebral composer and trombonist Grachan Moncur III, appear on half the tracks.

And on the drums: Tony Williams. Aged seventeen years and three months when he went into the studio, Williams was already demonstrating his genius behind the kit, keeping things boiling even on tracks that might have been sleepier ballads like “A Tribute to Someone,” and positively lighting up the stage on the modal burner “King Cobra.”

So where’s the similarity? Mostly it is in the consistency of Herbie’s compositional voice. When he writes a soul jazz number like “Blind Man, Blind Man”—written, as he says in the liner notes, as a conscious evocation of his Black childhood—or “And What If I Don’t”—you can immediately hear the kinship to “Watermelon Man” from his first record. They are still catchy tunes, but there’s not a lot of compositional development from one to the next.

I mean, yes, Herbie’s arranging prowess leaps ahead substantially. The guitar lick that Grant Green drops at the turn in the chorus of “Blind Man, Blind Man” is a note of genius, as are the thick blocks of chords that open “King Cobra.” But in the end, you’d be forgiven for thinking that both albums were recorded in the same delicious session.

The album was revolutionary in one way, though, at least for Herbie’s career; it introduced him to Tony Williams. By June of 1963, they would both be playing with Miles, whose next great quintet was beginning to take shape. We’ll hear the first recorded (but not first released!) album from that group next time.

You can listen to My Point of View here.

Herbie Hancock, Takin’ Off

Album of the Week, May 14, 2022.

There aren’t too many jazz players who start a career the way Herbie Hancock did. A Chicago kid who went to Grinnell College and graduated with degrees in electrical engineering and music, he was already an accomplished performer, having made his public debut at the age of 11 performing a movement of a Mozart piano concerto with the Chicago Symphony. He learned harmony from jazz musician Chris Anderson, and from the Hi-Los. He signed a contract with Blue Note Records fresh out of college and released his first album at the age of 22. And the very first song on his first album for the label became a top 100 single, then was re-recorded by Mongo Santamaria and reached number 10.

The band on that first album, Takin’ Off, had something to do with his early success. Dexter Gordon was a well-known player who had been an early bebop standout, but had some troubles (with heroin) in the 1950s. At the same time, he absorbed some lessons from both John Coltrane and West Coast jazz, broadening his style with modal influences, and when he signed to Blue Note in the early 1960s he experienced a Renaissance of his career. Butch Warren was a reliable house bassist for Blue Note, and Billy Higgins brought a deep well of innovation on the drums. And at the trumpet was another star of the Blue Note roster of the early 1960s, Freddie Hubbard.

Hubbard had gotten his start in New York in 1958, and had already recorded with both Ornette Coleman (on Free Jazz), John Coltrane (Olé Coltrane and Africa Brass), and Art Blakey, as well as two albums under his own name, by the time he entered the studio in May 1962 with Hancock’s group. He brought with him a burnished tone and solid technique, as well as a clear comfort with the modal-influenced post-bop tunes that Hancock brought to the session.

It’s Hancock’s compositions that ultimately stand out from this session. The opener, “Watermelon Man,” was a hit, which was a calculation by Hancock; he wanted something to start his career off strong, and he found it in the modified twelve-bar blues, which combined with a strong soul influence and a highly rhythmic approach was enough to loft it onto the pop charts in 1962. That’s when Mongo Santamaria, a Cuban percussionist and bandleader who heard something wilder in Hancock’s tune. Santamaria’s recording paid Herbie’s bills for several years. Hancock returned to the easygoing soul-jazz vein for “Driftin’,” the penultimate track on the album.

In between, though, are several more challenging works. “Three Bags Full” opens with a modal figure that would have been at home on Coltrane’s Atlantic records, but played with a swinging rhythm. “Empty Pockets” is in a similar mood, with a modal theme that is fiercely swung by the rhythm section and jauntily soloed by both Gordon and Hubbard. And “The Maze,” which opens the second side, is a deceptively straight-ahead sounding workout that twists and turns through a circle of chords, returning again and again to the same progression. This piece is ultimately a showcase not just for the soloists, but also HIggins, who explores more complex rhythms and timbres against each soloist in turn.

The last track on the album, “Alone and I,” is the farthest step on the album, a tender ballad that showcases not only Gordon’s romantic side but also Herbie’s sensitive, tender voice, with a solo that carries echoes of 19th century Romantic composers but that is also steeped in jazz. It’s a distinctive voice, and following the soul jazz and modal workouts of the rest of the album is something wholly new. Takin’ Off was aptly named: Hancock was definitely going places. We’ll hear the next stop on his journey next time.

You can listen to the album here.