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Guitarist Charlie Byrd was invited to travel and play in Brazil during a cultural goodwill tour sponsored by the Kennedy administration in 1961. He was completely enamoured by the music, and when he returned, he headed straight for the recording studio to make the now classic Jazz Samba. Collaborating with Stan Getz on tenor sax and backed by a band that included Gene Byrd (bass, guitar), Keter Betts (bass), and Buddy Deppenschmidt and Bill Reichenbach (drums), Byrd forged a new and brilliant sound. American record companies were to churn out hundreds of watered bossa-pop albums that have since given the style its lounge-addled image, but this album stands as a tribute to the vitality and adaptability of jazz. --Louis Gibson
If you don't own it....get it....a great album.
Quote from: lonewolfny42 on 26 May 2008, 06:46 pmIf you don't own it....get it....a great album. And while they're buying Jazz Samba they might as well add the following to their shopping cart... Stan Getz, Joao Gilberto - Getz/GilbertoStan Getz collaborates with Joao Gilberto and Antonio Carlos Jobim to create a jazz masterpiece and the finest bossa nova album ever produced. If you don't have this album you should be clicking right now!--Jerome
Before Freddie Hubbard signed with CTI Records in 1970, he was already considered one of the most brilliant jazz trumpeters in the world. RED CLAY, his debut album on the label, is an exceptional set of plugged-in hard bop fused with funk - and reportedly the album he considers his best. Joining him on five of the six cuts, is a crack quintet featuring longtime colleagues Joe Henderson and Herbie Hancock, on tenor saxophone and keyboards respectively. The final number, a previously unissued, extended live jam on the title tune, finds Hubbard fronting an all-star septet that includes such fellow CTI stars as George Benson and Stanley Turrentine.
This may be Freddie Hubbard's finest moment as a leader, in that it embodies and utilizes all of his strengths as a composer, soloist, and frontman. On Red Clay, Hubbard combines hard bop's glorious blues-out past with the soulful innovations of mainstream jazz in the 1960s, and reads them through the chunky groove innovations of 1970s jazz fusion. This session places the trumpeter in the company of giants such as tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson, pianist Herbie Hancock, bassist Ron Carter, and drummer Lenny White. Hubbard's five compositions all come from deep inside blues territory; these shaded notions are grafted onto funky hard bop melodies worthy of Horace Silver's finest tunes, and are layered inside the smoothed-over cadences of shimmering, steaming soul. The 12-minute-plus title track features a 4/4 modal opening and a spare electric piano solo woven through the twin horns of Hubbard and Henderson. It is a fine example of snaky groove music. Henderson even takes his solo outside a bit without ever moving out of the rhythmnatist's pocket. "Delightful" begins as a ballad with slow, clipped trumpet lines against a major key background, and opens onto a mid-tempo groover, then winds back into the dark, steamy heart of bluesy melodicism. The hands-down favorite here, though, is "The Intrepid Fox," with its Miles-like opening of knotty changes and shifting modes, that are all rooted in bop's muscular architecture. It's White and Hancock who shift the track from underneath with large sevenths and triple-timed drums that land deeply inside the clamoring, ever-present riff. Where Hubbard and Henderson are playing against, as well as with one another, the rhythm section, lifted buoyantly by Carter's bridge-building bassline, carries the melody over until Hancock plays an uncharacteristically angular solo before splitting the groove in two and doubling back with a series of striking arpeggiatics. This is a classic, hands down.
