Tag: hankmobley

Miles Davis, In Person Friday and Saturday Nights At the Blackhawk, San Francisco

Album of the Week, September 7, 2024

In the years following Kind of Blue, Miles’ great sextet dissolved, with both John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley choosing to begin their own careers as leaders. Perhaps responding to the change in personnel, Miles’ next album, Sketches of Spain, was another collaboration with Gil Evans in the mold of Miles Ahead (but even more so… we’ll have to review that record another day). We’ve seen how Miles convinced Coltrane to return, on Someday My Prince Will Come, recorded in March 1961. That record also featured Hank Mobley, who toured and recorded with Miles throughout 1961. We’ve heard his work on At Carnegie Hall; today we hear him with Miles, Paul Chambers, Jimmy Cobb and Wynton Kelly in one of the great trumpeter’s more famous live recordings.

Recorded almost a month before the Carnegie Hall set, on April 21-22, 1961 at the Black Hawk nightclub in San Francisco, the album is significant as a document of Miles’ live set and repertoire following Kind of Blue, in the same way that his Jazz at the Plaza captured the 1958 band at its peak. The album has been issued in various formats ranging from individual LPs of selections from the Friday and Saturday night performances, to a box set documenting the entirety of both nights, to today’s record, a two-LP set combining the individual LP releases from later in 1961. The copy I’m reviewing today is a mono first pressing.

Because of the wide deviation in groupings and track orders, I’m going to deviate from my normal practice of commenting on the album track by track. (Also, the most readily available versions of the album feature slightly different edits of the songs, and I’m not going to get into the differences here.) What I’ll start with is the sound. While this set features many of the same players that were with Cannonball Adderley on his In Chicago, there’s little of the soul that lingered at the edges of that recording. There’s also surprisingly little of the modal, cool sound of the Gil Evans recordings or Kind of Blue. This is a hot band, and (perhaps due to the vagaries of live recording) a lighter, more nimble sounding band.

Some of the credit for the former surely accrues to Hank Mobley. His solo on “Walkin’” is a taut, athletic bit of genius that gets to stretch out across a vast swath of choruses. He writes a different melody into “Bye Bye Blackbird” that seems to borrow equal parts from Johnny Hodges and John Coltrane. But he also seems at times to be apart from the band. Where Miles’ arrangements for the first great quintet or his sextet would have the saxophone(s) sharing the lead in harmonic writing with his trumpet, here the solos and recapitulations are Miles’s alone. One imagines Mobley standing near the back of the bandstand listening, stepping forward to play his solo, and stepping back again. The exception as always is “No Blues,” but in that gem the interplay between the horns is a part of the tune.

The longer performances also afford an opportunity for the rest of the rhythm section to stretch out. We get an arco solo from Paul Chambers in “Walkin’,” something we hear in other appearances by him but which had grown rather rare by this point. We don’t hear too many solo moments from Jimmy Cobb, who always preferred to provide unswerving, steady support from the background, but he and Chambers are flawless together as a unit and maintain a high degree of attention to the other players, particularly Kelly.

Kelly’s touch on the piano is a common thread between the two recordings, but here you can hear how his conception was drifting apart from Miles’. Where the bandleader was throwing out fiery, straight edged solos, Kelly maintained some of his soul-jazz leanings. There’s an interesting tension between the approaches that brings some bluesy notes to “Walkin’” and (ironically) “No Blues,” but the two don’t seem to be quite as telepathically joined as Miles would be with other accompanists.

That’s not to say there aren’t moments. Kelly’s intro to “Bye Bye Blackbird,” a Miles stalwart for years, seems to belong to a different recording, but when Miles unexpectedly changes mode in his first statement of the chorus, Kelly returns the favor in the chord voices under the second chorus. They seem to be prodding each other on. But Kelly’s playing on other cuts is less simpatico; for instance, his accompaniment “All of You” falls into decorative chords that seem to clutter rather than respond to Miles’ line.

The other noteworthy thing here is the material. Many of the standards here lean toward a lighter melodic approach, as do the originals. Miles was playing “No Blues” on Someday My Prince Will Come, as well as “Teo” (here called “Neo”), but the faster live tempo on “No Blues” knocks some of the languor off and turns the piece into what it remains today, a flexible almost-nothing of a tune that could be a 30-second signal for a set break or a 15-minute joyous improvisation.

This is also a rare opportunity to hear “Fran-Dance,” a lovely Miles ballad whose only studio recording came on Jazz Track, an “odds and sods” release from 1959 that collected three tracks from the Miles Davis Sextet together with the miraculous soundtrack to the Louis Malle film Ascenseur pour l’échafaud. Where the original studio version with the great sextet seems to straddle the line between mediative and lovely, the version here adds a touch of suggestiveness thanks to Mobley and Kelly’s more soulful playing. It’s a gift to have the recording; Miles stopped playing “Fran-Dance,” written for his first wife Frances Taylor (who also appears on the cover), after their separation in 1965.

The performances on In Person are an opportunity to hear Miles in a different place—not yet free of his harmonic conceptions from the Kind of Blue era, not yet with the new quintet that would take him to the birth of fusion. There are plenty of fantastic compositions and performances during this period, roughly from 1961’s Someday My Prince Will Come to 1964’s live masterpiece My Funny Valentine. But there was also darkness; Miles suffered from addictions to cocaine and alcohol that caused him to behave erratically, ultimately leading Frances Taylor to flee from him in 1965. He also began experiencing the hip pain that led to a series of operations in mid-1965; he finally recovered enough to return to recording in 1965, with E.S.P.

I don’t have more Miles recordings to dive into in this series, so we’ll let that thread of the story go; you can read more about what happened after this record starting with my review of Miles Davis At Carnegie Hall from the previous series. But I have lots more to talk about with the sidemen from that second great quintet; we’ll pick up with an album from one of them next week.

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:

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.

Miles Davis, At Carnegie Hall

Album of the Week, May 7, 2022.

Miles began his Columbia Records recording career alternating between small group sessions and “big band” recordings with Gil Evans at the baton. When it came time for him to make his Carnegie Hall debut, then, it was only natural that the performance include both sounds. The result is one of the more unusual albums in Miles’ career, and one of the most lush sounding albums he ever recorded.

We must first acknowledge the developments that led to this moment. Miles was, by 1961, a genuine star, and Columbia was investing in him like one. Few other jazz artists could have put on a show like this one, just based on cost alone. Gil’s orchestra wasn’t the famous “+19” that played on Miles Ahead—the players on stage numbered 22, counting Evans conducting. But some of the members were doing double duty, with Hank Mobley, Jimmy Cobb, Paul Chambers and Wynton Kelly returning from Someday My Prince Will Come as Miles’ quintet.

All the forces on stage join together for the opening number, an unusual arrangement of “So What” that combines the original Bill Evans opening, transcribed for Gil’s orchestra, and even slower and more contemplative in its tempo. Then Chambers enters with the famous bass figure and the whole orchestra plays the “So What” chord, amplified and augmented in several octaves, at which point the quintet picks up the arrangement at the faster tempo of the live versions heard on The Final Tour. This is “So What,” not as a nonchalant question, but as an angry demand. The quintet scorches through the tune, and Mobley’s hard bop roots show through in his solo.

When the next set with the big band comes, it turns the temperature down a bit, starting with a wistful Evans arrangement of Rodgers and Hart’s “Spring is Here” that was never recorded elsewhere, and a set from Miles Ahead: “The Meaning of the Blues,” “Lament,” and “New Rhumba.” Here, as on the original record, the rhumba is the standout, with some of the cool precision of the studio recording traded for a jaunty, swinging insouciance.

(I should note that the order of the tunes on this album depends on what version you have. The original 1961 LP omitted some tracks; the 1998 CD featured the whole concert in its original running order; and my 2LP set rearranges some of the tracks to fit the limits of the LP sides.)

The next set from the quintet is where the heart of this concert begins for me: an extended romp through “Teo” that lacks none of the fire from the studio version despite Mobley taking the tenor solo that Trane played in the first recording. The band segues into “Walkin’,” which by now was the theme for Miles’ group, and then proceeds into a quiet, wistful rendition of the opening chorus of “Someday My Prince Will Come.”

And then the fireworks start. The version of “Oleo” that the band uncorks shows off all Miles’ bebop bona fides, with a rapid fire statement of the melody and solo that would not have been out of place on a Dizzy Gillespie record. “No Blues,” formerly known as “Pfrancing,” while slightly slower, is no less assertive, and the band is hot as they play behind Miles, who throws off one impossibly cool trumpet line after another, blowing notes that from someone else would sound like mistakes but seamlessly blending them into his line. Mobley is more conventional here, but no less exciting, shifting in the second 8-bar pattern into double time and staying there for about 24 bars. You can hear why he’s known as the “middleweight champion of the tenor sax.” And the rhythm section gets a great spotlight too, with Paul Chambers showing why he was so widely regarded as a leader on his instrument.

The closing number of the quintet, “I Thought About You” is a stunning performance, with Miles equally tender and wistful before making a forthright declaration of intent, followed by a mid-chorus handoff to Mobley. But it’s Miles’ tune, and he closes quietly, defiantly, and with a shower of applause.

On the LP, the final number belongs to Miles and Gil, who revisit “En Aranjuez Con Tu Amor” from Sketches of Spain. It’s hypnotic, and the band seems to lift and enfold Miles’ trumpet line without ever overwhelming it. It’s a stunning performance.

As we’ve noted, this configuration wouldn’t last much longer. The concert at Carnegie Hall was in May 1961. Miles would record no more that year, returning to the studio with Evans in July 1962 for the abortive sessions for Quiet Nights, an album that ended up being their final joint statement until the late 1970s. By the end of 1962, Kelly, Chambers and Cobb left to perform as a trio, with Sonny Rollins (who had joined the quintet in the interim) departing soon after.

Miles, faced with having to pay thousands to settle cancelled gigs, pulled together a new quintet quickly, featuring Victor Feldman on piano, George Coleman on tenor sax, Frank Butler on drums, and Ron Carter on bass. That configuration recorded part of Miles’ next album, Seven Steps to Heaven, together, but Feldman and Butler would not leave the west coast permanently. So Miles found new members of the rhythm section: a teenage wunderkind drummer named Tony Williams, and a young pianist and composer named Herbie Hancock. We’ll hear more from Hancock next week.

I found my copy of Miles Davis at Carnegie Hall in the shop at the Moog factory in Asheville, North Carolina. You can listen to the album here.

Miles Davis, Someday My Prince Will Come

Album of the Week, April 30, 2022.

To interpret this album, we need to start with Dave Brubeck.

That’s not a sentence that begins many discussions of Miles Davis’s music. But in this case it fits, because the small group album released after Kind of Blue found Miles in a very different place than he was on that masterpiece. For once, he was not exactly blazing a trail.

He picked a good time to regroup, coming off two masterpieces—not just Kind of Blue but the followup album with Gil Evans and his orchestra, the miraculous Sketches of Spain (about which I may write one day, but which is not presently in my vinyl collection). But regrouping was needed. After the European tour, Trane had decided to strike out on his own, taking the tunes that he had explored onstage to the chords of “Kind of Blue” (“Impressions”) and “On Green Dolphin Street” (“Like Sonny”) along with his searching, experimental aesthetic, and forming his own quartet. (We’ll talk about their albums at some point, after I finish telling the rest of Miles’ story.)

Miles had auditioned a few saxophonists, doing live performances with both Jimmy Heath and Sonny Stitt, before landing on the young Hank Mobley. Mobley had been recording a string of ingenious albums for Blue Note, including the classics Soul Station and Roll Call in 1960, and brought with him some of the same athleticism that Trane displayed, tempered with a touch of soul. It was a good match in many ways for the rest of the quintet, which still included soul-flavored pianist Wynton Kelly as well as the redoubtable Jimmy Cobb and Paul Chambers.

But what Mobley didn’t bring was repertoire, at least, not in the same way that Bill Evans helped Miles tap the vein of modal jazz that underpinned the great 1958-1960 recordings. Miles had to bring that himself, which may explain why this recording featured several standards, including the title track. But why did a Disney song count as a standard? For that we have to thank Dave Brubeck (I told you I’d get there, eventually).

Brubeck in 1957 was a few years away from recording his own masterpiece, 1959’s Time Out, but he had built a strong working group of his own, with Paul Desmond’s distinctive alto providing a lyrical counterpart to Brubeck’s muscular approach to the piano. And Brubeck, while a substantial composer in his own right, was looking for new material that could showcase the quartet’s versatility. He found it, reportedly, at Disneyland, and then had to work hard to convince producer George Avakian to bet on a whole album of Disney covers. The lead-off tune on the second side of Dave Digs Disney? “Someday My Prince Will Come.” (We’ll talk more about Dave Digs Disney at some point, too.)

Miles had been listening to Brubeck for a while — remember, he covered “In Your Own Sweet Way” on Workin’ and “The Duke” on Miles Ahead. And he must have heard, in Brubeck’s version of “Someday My Prince Will Come,” something of the direction he wanted to take his quintet. The only problem was that Mobley, while a great tenor player, didn’t have the right sound for the arrangement.

And so it was that Miles called on Coltrane, one last time. Trane was reportedly reluctant to return to the studio with Miles’s group, being consumed with a much bigger project, the orchestra recordings that would be released as Africa/Brass. But return he did, and in two days in March 1961, he recorded “Prince” and Miles’ composition “Teo,” named for his long-suffering producer. (We’ll hear more about Teo Macero later.)

Something else strikes you about this album, maybe even before you open it: the portrait of the woman on the cover is more direct and beautiful than anything on Miles’ album covers to date. That’s appropriate; so is the music inside. Miles was in love, as it turns out, and his now-wife, Frances Taylor, was featured on the cover because Miles demanded that Columbia feature black women in the album art. The music is accordingly beautiful and melodic, with the Miles originals (“Drad-Dog,” “Teo,” and “Pfrancing” aka “No Blues”) alternating between wistful melodies and soulful blues. 

The recording was not just beautiful, though. Trane arrives late on the title track, after two solo turns by Miles and one by Mobley, but the power he brings to his turn injects it with new energy, simultaneously forthright and yearning.  His solo on “Teo” brings some of the energy and chordal approach that would appear on his own quartet recordings, and spurs Miles to feats of energy of his own, before the trumpeter deconstructs Trane’s approach to the melody. Miles’s second solo on the tune is additive, as he brings elements of his solos from Sketches of Spain, and subtractive, as he takes Trane’s statements and abstracts them, turning the arc of the solo into a stretched-out call that sounds over the rhythm section. 

By this recording, that rhythm section of Kelly, Chambers and Cobb was easily as tight a unit as Red Garland had formed with Philly Joe Jones and Chambers in the early days of the quintet. Kelly was more deeply steeped in the blues than Garland ever was, and his performance on this recording has a soul jazz sound that would rarely appear in Miles’ recordings. This unit would soon strike out on their own as a trio led by Kelly, and they would even record their own Someday My Prince Will Come. 

As for the originals on the album, “Pfrancing” and “Teo” would both be performed by other players, especially Joe Henderson, who brought both back in his tribute album, So Near, So Far (Musings for Miles). But if the tunes would stay, this band would not. This unit made no more studio recordings after this date, but they appeared in two legendary live sessions. The San Francisco sessions at the Blackhawk were issued as a pair of albums under the title Miles Davis in Person. We will discuss the other live album next time. 

You can listen to the album here.