A sonic exploration and tonal analysis of contemporary creative music in a myriad of improvisational/composed settings, textures, and expressions.
Welcome to Sound Projections
I'm your host Kofi Natambu. This online magazine features the very best in contemporary creative music in this creative timezone NOW (the one we're living in) as well as that of the historical past. The purpose is to openly explore, examine, investigate, reflect on, studiously critique, and take opulent pleasure in the sonic and aural dimensions of human experience known and identified to us as MUSIC. I'm also interested in critically examining the wide range of ideas and opinions that govern our commodified notions of the production, consumption, marketing, and commercial exchange of organized sound(s) which largely define and thereby (over)determine our present relationships to music in the general political economy and culture.
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So please join me in this ongoing visceral, investigative, and cerebral quest to explore, enjoy, and pay
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Saturday, September 10, 2016
Bobby Hutcherson (1941-2016): Legendary, iconic, and innovative musician, composer, arranger, ensemble leader, producer, and teacher
SOUND PROJECTIONS
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
FALL, 2016
VOLUME THREE NUMBER TWO
ERIC DOLPHY
Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:
BOBBY HUTCHERSON September 10-16
GEORGE E. LEWIS September 17-23
JAMES BLOOD ULMER September 24-30
RACHELLE FERRELL October 1-7 ANDREW HILL October 8-14
Bobby Hutcherson: January 27, 1941 - August 15, 2016
We are heartbroken to announce the loss of our dear friend, jazz legend Bobby Hutcherson, who passed peacefully on Monday, August 15 at age 75, surrounded by his family and loved ones.
The most accomplished vibraphonist and composer to emerge in the
latter half of the 20th Century, Bobby redefined the role of the
instrument in modern jazz, bringing new levels of technical mastery and
harmonic sophistication that had never been heard before. Inspired by
Modern Jazz Quartet vibraphonist Milt Jackson, he made his recording
debut with pianist Les McCann in 1961 and began an unprecedented 24-year
association with the Blue Note Records label on saxophonist Jackie McLean’s 1964 landmark One Step Beyond. From the crucial harmonic structures and pointillistic stabs of color on Eric Dolphy’s avant-garde masterpiece Out To Lunch and his soloistic fire on Joe Henderson’s epochal Mode For Joe to the soul jazz grease of Donald Byrd’s Ethiopian Knights,
Bobby made indelible contributions to over 250 albums during his Blue
Note tenure, and led 23 recordings that introduced the world to the
standards “Little B’s Poem,” “Bouquet,” “Components,” “Montara,” and
others.
Since moving to the Bay Area in the late 1960s, he developed fruitful
musical partnerships with both saxophonist Harold Land and pianist
McCoy Tyner, and released a string of sessions on the Blue Note,
Columbia, Landmark, and Kind of Blue labels. In 2010, the National
Endowment for the Arts named Bobby an NEA Jazz Master
for his lifetime of contributions to the art form – the highest honor
the U.S. bestows on jazz musicians. A great friend and artist with a
long history performing on SFJAZZ stages, beginning with a performance
at the very first Jazz in the City Festival in 1983, Bobby was a
founding member of the SFJAZZ Collective composing,arranging, and performing with the band from its inception in 2004 through 2007 (video). He was the honoree at the 2010 SFJAZZ Gala, spoke at the groundbreaking event for the SFJAZZ Center in 2012, and performed during the historic Opening Night concert in January, 2013.
Bobby will be greatly missed. We are honored to have known him. He's
survived by wife Rosemary, sons Teddy and Barry, and grandchildren Ruby
Rose and Bobby James.
A Memorial for Bobby Hutcherson to benefit Hutcherson family medical expenses will take place Sunday, October 23, 7:30pm at SFJAZZ Center. More information here.
Bobby Hutcherson (w/ McCoy Tyner Trio), SFJAZZ Spring Season 2009 (Photo by Mark Brady)
Bobby Hutcherson (1941-2016) Artist Biography by Steve Huey
Easily one of jazz's greatest vibraphonists, Bobby Hutcherson epitomized his instrument in relation to the era in which he came of age the way Lionel Hampton did with swing or Milt Jackson
with bop. He wasn't as well-known as those two forebears, perhaps
because he started out in less accessible territory when he emerged in
the '60s playing cerebral, challenging modern jazz that often bordered
on avant-garde. Along with Gary Burton, the other seminal vibraphone talent of the '60s, Hutcherson
helped modernize his instrument by redefining what could be done with
it -- sonically, technically, melodically, and emotionally. In the
process, he became one of the defining (if underappreciated) voices in
the so-called "new thing" portion of Blue Note's glorious '60s roster. Hutcherson gradually moved into a more mainstream, modal post-bop style that, if
not as adventurous as his early work, still maintained his reputation as
one of the most advanced masters of his instrument.
Bobby Hutcherson
was born January 27, 1941, in Los Angeles. He studied piano with his
aunt as a child, but didn't enjoy the formality of the training; still,
he tinkered with it on his own, especially since his family was already
connected to jazz: his brother was a high-school friend of Dexter Gordon and his sister was a singer who later dated Eric Dolphy. Everything clicked for Hutcherson during his teen years when he heard a Milt Jackson record; he worked until he saved up enough money to buy his own set of vibes. He began studying with Dave Pike and playing local dances in a group led by his friend, bassist Herbie Lewis. After high school, Hutcherson parlayed his growing local reputation into gigs with Curtis Amy and Charles Lloyd, and in 1960 he joined an ensemble co-led by Al Grey and Billy Mitchell. In 1961, the group was booked at New York's legendary Birdland club and Hutcherson wound up staying on the East Coast after word about his inventive four-mallet playing started to spread. Hutcherson was invited to jam with some of the best up-and-coming musicians in New York: hard boppers like Grant Green, Hank Mobley, and Herbie Hancock, but most importantly, forward-thinking experimentalists like Jackie McLean, Grachan Moncur III, Archie Shepp, Andrew Hill, and Eric Dolphy. Through those contacts, Hutcherson became an in-demand sideman at recording sessions, chiefly for Blue Note.
Hutcherson had a coming-out party of sorts on McLean's seminal "new thing" classic One Step Beyond (1963), providing an unorthodox harmonic foundation in the piano-less quintet. His subsequent work with Dolphy was even more groundbreaking and his free-ringing, open chords and harmonically advanced solos were an important part of Dolphy's 1964 masterwork, Out to Lunch. That year, he won the Down Beat readers' poll as Most Deserving of Wider Recognition on his instrument.
Hutcherson's first shot as a leader came with 1965's Dialogue, a classic of modernist post-bop with a sextet featuring some of the hottest young talent on the scene -- most notably Freddie Hubbard, Sam Rivers, and Andrew Hill, although drummer Joe Chambers would go on to become a fixture on Hutcherson's
'60s records (and often contributed some of the freest pieces he
recorded). A series of generally excellent sessions followed over the
next few years, highlighted by 1965's classic Components (which showcased both the free and straight-ahead sides of Hutcherson's playing) and 1966's Stick-Up! In 1967, he returned to Los Angeles and started a quintet co-led by tenor saxophonist Harold Land, which made its recording debut the following year on Total Eclipse. Several more sessions followed (Spiral, Medina, Now)
that positioned the quintet about halfway in between free bop and
mainstream hard bop -- advanced territory, but not entirely fashionable
at the time. Thus, the group didn't really receive its due and dissolved
in 1971.
By that point, Hutcherson was beginning a brief flirtation with mainstream fusion, which produced 1970's funky but still sophisticated San Francisco
(named after his new base of operations). By 1973, however, he'd
abandoned that direction, returning to modal bop and forming a new
quintet with trumpeter Woody Shaw that played at that summer's Montreux Jazz Festival (documented on Live at Montreux). In 1974, he re-teamed with Land,
and over the next few years he continued to record cerebral bop dates
for Blue Note despite being out of step with the label's more commercial
direction. He finally departed in 1977 and signed with Columbia, where
he recorded three albums from 1978-1979 (highlighted by Un Poco Loco). Adding the marimba to his repertoire, Hutcherson
remained active throughout the '80s as both a sideman and leader,
recording most often for Landmark in a modern-mainstream bop mode. He
spent much of the '90s touring rather than leading sessions; in 1993, he
teamed with McCoy Tyner for the duet album Manhattan Moods. Toward the end of the decade, Hutcherson signed on with Verve, for whom he debuted in 1999 with the well-received Skyline.
Bobby Hutcherson, Vibraphonist With Coloristic Range of Sound, Dies at 75
The Bobby Hutcherson Quartet performing at a club at Jazz at Lincoln Center, in New York, in 2006.Credit
Marvi Lacar for The New York Times
Bobby
Hutcherson, one of the most admired and accomplished vibraphonists in
jazz, died on Monday at his home in Montara, Calif. He was 75.
Marshall
Lamm, a spokesman for Mr. Hutcherson’s family, confirmed the death,
saying Mr. Hutcherson had long been treated for emphysema.
Mr.
Hutcherson’s career took flight in the early 1960s, as jazz was
slipping free of the complex harmonic and rhythmic designs of bebop. He
was fluent in that language, but he was also one of the first to adapt
his instrument to a freer postbop language, often playing chords with a
pair of mallets in each hand.
He released more than 40 albums and appeared on many more, including some regarded as classics, like “Out to Lunch,” by the alto saxophonist, flutist and bass clarinetist Eric Dolphy, and “Mode for Joe,” by the tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson.
Both of those albums were a byproduct of Mr. Hutcherson’s close affiliation with Blue Note Records,
from 1963 to 1977. He was part of a wave of young artists who defined
the label’s forays into experimentalism, including the pianist Andrew
Hill and the alto saxophonist Jackie McLean. But he also worked with
hard-bop stalwarts like the tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon, and he
later delved into jazz-funk and Afro-Latin grooves.
Mr. Hutcherson had a clear, ringing sound, but his style was luminescent and coolly fluid. More than Milt Jackson or Lionel Hampton, his major predecessors on the vibraphone, he made an art out of resonating overtones and chiming decay.
This
coloristic range of sound, which he often used in the service of
emotional expression, was one reason for the deep influence he left on
stylistic inheritors like Joe Locke, Warren Wolf, Chris Dingman and
Stefon Harris, who recently assessed him as “by far the most
harmonically advanced person to ever play the vibraphone.”
Robert
Hutcherson was born in Los Angeles on Jan. 17, 1941. His father, Eli,
was a brick mason, and his mother, Esther, was a hairdresser.
Growing
up in a black community in Pasadena, Calif., Mr. Hutcherson was drawn
to jazz partly by way of his older siblings: His brother, Teddy, had
gone to high school with Mr. Gordon, and his sister, Peggy, was a singer
who worked with the Gerald Wilson Orchestra. (She later toured and
recorded with Ray Charles as a Raelette.)
Mr.
Hutcherson, who took piano lessons as a child, often described his
transition to vibraphone as the result of an epiphany: Walking past a
record store one day, he heard a recording of Milt Jackson and was
hooked. A friend at school, the bassist Herbie Lewis, further encouraged
his interest in the vibraphone, so Mr. Hutcherson saved up and bought
one. He was promptly booked for a concert with Mr. Lewis’s band.
“Well, I hit the first note,” he recalled of that performance in a 2014 interview
with JazzTimes. But, he added, “from the second note on it was complete
chaos. You never heard people boo and laugh like that. I was completely
humiliated. But my mom was just smiling, and my father was saying,
‘See, I told you he should have been a bricklayer.’”
Mr.
Hutcherson persevered, eventually working with musicians like Mr.
Dolphy, whom he had first met when Mr. Dolphy was his sister’s
boyfriend, and the tenor saxophonist and flutist Charles Lloyd. In 1962,
he joined a band led by a pair of Count Basie sidemen, the tenor
saxophonist Billy Mitchell and the trombonist Al Grey, and it brought
him to New York City for a debut engagement at Birdland
The
group broke up not long afterward, but Mr. Hutcherson stayed in New
York, driving a taxicab for a living, his vibraphone stashed in the
trunk. He was living in the Bronx and married to his high school
sweetheart, the former Beth Buford, with whom he had a son, Barry — the
inspiration for his best-known tune, the lilting modernist waltz “Little B’s Poem.”
Mr.
Hutcherson caught a break when Mr. Lewis, his childhood friend, came to
town and introduced him to the trombonist Grachan Moncur III, who in
turn introduced him to Mr. McLean. “One Step Beyond,” an album by Mr.
McLean released on Blue Note in 1963, featured Mr. Hutcherson’s
vibraphone as the only chordal instrument. From that point on, he was
busy.
The
first album he released as a leader was “Dialogue” (1965), featuring
Mr. Hill, the trumpeter Freddie Hubbard and the saxophonist and flutist
Sam Rivers. Among his notable subsequent albums was “Stick-Up!” (1966),
with Mr. Henderson and the pianist McCoy Tyner among his partners. He
and Mr. Tyner would forge a close alliance.
After
being arrested for marijuana possession in Central Park in 1967, Mr.
Hutcherson lost his cabaret card, required of any musician working in
New York clubs. He returned to California and struck a rapport with the
tenor saxophonist Harold Land. Among the recordings they made together
was “Ummh,” a funk shuffle that became a crossover hit in 1970. (It was later sampled by the rapper Ice Cube.)
In
the early ’70s Mr. Hutcherson bought an acre of land along the coast in
Montara, where he built a house. He lived there with his wife, the
former Rosemary Zuniga, whom he married in 1972. She survives him, along
with their son, Teddy, a marketing production manager for the
organization SFJazz; his son Barry, a jazz drummer; and two
grandchildren.
After
his tenure on Blue Note, Mr. Hutcherson released albums on Columbia,
Landmark and other labels, working with Mr. Tyner, the tenor saxophonist
Sonny Rollins and — onscreen, in the 1986 Bertrand Tavernier film “Round Midnight”
— with Mr. Gordon and the pianist Herbie Hancock. From 2004 to 2007,
Mr. Hutcherson toured with the first edition of the SFJazz Collective,
an ensemble devoted equally to jazz repertory and the creation of new
music. He was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in
2010.
After
releasing a series of albums on the European label Kind of Blue, he
returned to Blue Note in 2014 to release a soul-jazz effort, “Enjoy the
View,” with the alto saxophonist David Sanborn and other collaborators.
Speaking
in recent years, Mr. Hutcherson was fond of citing a bit of insight
from an old friend. “Eric Dolphy said music is like the wind,” he told
The San Francisco Chronicle in 2012. “You don’t know where it came from,
and you don’t know where it went. You can’t control it. All you can do
is get inside the sphere of it and be swept away.”
A version of this article appears in print on August 17, 2016, on page B14 of the New York edition with the headline: Bobby Hutcherson, 75, Jazz Vibraphonist With Luminescent and Coolly Fluid Style.
Influential jazz vibraphonist admired for his eloquent improvisations
by Richard Williams August 17, 2016 The Guardian (UK)
On what would prove to be the last occasion he appeared in London,
half a dozen years ago, the American vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson left
his audience at Ronnie Scott’s jazz club spellbound
with a performance that demonstrated the eloquence of his
improvisations on ballads. Every now and then, however, as the echoes of
tunes such as For Sentimental Reasons and Nancy (With the Laughing
Face) hung elegantly in the air, he would slip off stage to inhale from
an oxygen cylinder to counter the emphysema that would shortly put an
end to his public appearances.
Hutcherson, who has died aged 75, was one of the most important
vibraphonists in the history of jazz. A prodigy who was already taking
the stage with first-rank musicians in his native California at the age
of 15, he spent his early 20s in New York, where he was quickly accepted
into the Blue Note label’s distinguished repertory company, establishing his reputation on recordings alongside the saxophonists Jackie McLean and Eric Dolphy, the guitarist Grant Green, the pianists Herbie Hancock, McCoy Tyner and Andrew Hill, and others.
His dark, ringing tone added an emotional charge to any session and
the degree of melodic and harmonic sophistication inherent in his
improvisations made it hard to believe that he was almost entirely
self-taught. If that supreme artistry with a ballad was a late-flowering
facet of his talent, then a certain lyricism had always been implicit
in his playing, even in the more austere and challenging environment of
the 1960s, when the music was characterised by strategic dissonance and
asymmetry.
He was born in Pasadena to Eli, a stonemason, and Esther (nee Folke),
a hairdresser. Thanks to his older siblings, there was always music
around the house: his brother, Teddy, had been a high-school classmate
of the saxophonist Dexter Gordon; and his sister, Peggy, was a singer
who eventually joined Ray Charles’s Raelettes. Encouraged by his schoolfriend Herbie Lewis, who was on his way to becoming a distinguished bassist, and inspired by the playing of Milt Jackson
on a Miles Davis album, Hutcherson saved money from a summer job with
his father to buy a vibraphone, his only previous practical experience
of music having come via a handful of piano lessons.
He and Lewis rehearsed in a garage, their band soon landing a regular
engagement at a Sunset Strip club called Pandora’s Box. The garage
gradually became a rendezvous for musicians to jam, although the band’s
progress was hindered when white classmates from their recently desegregated high school set fire to it, destroying their instruments.
While still in his teens, Hutcherson demonstrated his precocity on
recordings with the pianist Les McCann and the saxophonist Curtis Amy.
Soon the trombonist Al Grey,
a former member of Count Basie’s band, asked him to join the quintet he
co-led with the saxophonist Billy Mitchell. A two-week engagement in
San Francisco eventually led to a trip to New York, where Hutcherson
decided to stay in order to test himself against the stiffest
competition in the jazz world.
Through the trombonist Grachan Moncur III
he landed a gig with the quintet of McLean, which included the
16-year-old drummer Tony Williams, soon to become famous with Miles
Davis. Between 1963 and 1965, while sometimes driving a cab to
supplement his income, Hutcherson appeared on McLean’s One Step Beyond
and Destination … Out, Moncur’s Evolution,
Dolphy’s Out to Lunch and Hill’s Judgment, all albums that mapped new
territory for jazz. His own early Blue Note recordings, Dialogue and Components,
demonstrated a generous willingness to favour the work of composers
whose writing he admired, such as Hill and the drummer Joe Chambers,
over his own well-turned compositions.
In 1965, with the saxophonist Archie Shepp’s
group, he made his first appearance at the Newport jazz festival. It
was already apparent that he had taken a place in the lineage of the
vibraphone after Lionel Hampton,
who introduced the instrument to jazz in the 30s, and Jackson, a master
of bebop techniques whose sound became the defining element of the
immensely popular Modern Jazz Quartet.
A minor drug infringement for smoking marijuana in 1967, and the consequent withdrawal of
his police permit to work in New York nightclubs, led Hutcherson to
return to California, where he would be based for the rest of his life.
In 1969 he appeared as a bandleader in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, Sydney Pollack’s
film about dance marathons in the Depression. There was a featured role
for him, alongside Dexter Gordon, in Round Midnight, Bertrand
Tavernier’s 1986 film about expatriate American jazz musicians in Paris.
He
continued to record for a variety of labels and appeared alongside his
friend Harold Land, the saxophonist, in a band called the Timeless All
Stars. In 1970 the success of his jazz-funk tune Ummh
enabled him to buy an acre of land 20 miles south of San Francisco, on
which he built a house for his family. From 2004 to 2008 he was a member
of the SF Jazz Collective,
whose younger musicians, including the trumpeter Nicholas Payton and
the saxophonist Joshua Redman, valued the company of an elder of such
charm, wisdom and manifest integrity. His influence can be heard in the
playing of many younger exponents of the vibraphone, such as Stefon
Harris, Warren Wolf and Lewis Wright. He was married first, in 1960, to Beth Buford, whom he met in high
school and with whom he had a son, Barry. The marriage ended in divorce.
In 1972 he married Rosemary Zuniga, with whom he had another son,
Teddy. Rosemary and his sons survive him.
•Robert Hutcherson, vibraphonist and bandleader, born 27 January 1941; died 15 August 2016
Easily one of jazz’s greatest vibraphonists, Hutcherson helped
modernize his instrument by redefining what could be done with it sonically, technically, melodically, and emotionally. In the process, he
became one of the defining voices in the so-called “new thing” portion
of Blue Note’s glorious ’60s roster. Hutcherson gradually moved into a
more mainstream, modal post-bop style that, if not as adventurous as his
early work, still maintained his reputation as one of the most advanced
masters of his instrument.
Attracted foremost to more experimental free jazz and post-bop,
Hutcherson, inspired by the style began recording on the Blue Note label
with Jackie McLean, Eric Dolphy, Andrew Hill, Grachan Moncur III, Joe
Chambers, and Freddie Hubbard, both as a leader and a sideman. In spite
of the numerous avant-garde recordings made during this period however,
Hutcherson’s first session for Blue Note, The Kicker (1963) (not
released until 1999), demonstrates his background in hard bop and the
blues, as well as the early session Idle Moments for Grant Green.
In addition to his own recordings and tours, Hutcherson also appears
on other artists’ records, including Tyner’s Manhattan Moods (1993) and
Hammond B-3 organist Joey DeFrancesco’s Organic Vibes (2006). Hutcherson
continues to perform at a masterful level on his instrument, playing
with both his contemporaries and the new generation of jazz musicians.
Hutcherson’s work remains entirely compelling. He brings something
special every time he plays. In recent years, it’s especially noticeable
on his recordings as a sideman. If he doesn’t play on a particular
track, you miss him. When he does play, everyone sounds better.
Bobby had (and still has) a work ethic, a brilliant mind, a profound,
non-ritualistic spirituality, an innate wisdom and warmth that made for
the ingredients of an outstanding jazz artist as well as a hell of a
human being.
“Bobby Hutcherson can move easily across a vocabulary of
such breadth that it would neutralize the identity of a less talented
player.” —Stanley Crouch
Marc Myers writes daily on jazz legends and legendary jazz recordings
August 18, 2016
Bobby Hutcherson: 1941-2016
Bobby
Hutcherson, whose swinging, ringing modal approach on the vibraphone
not only revolutionized the instrument's role and personality but also
captured the angst of the tumultuous 1960s and early 1970s, died on Aug.
15. He was 75.
Of
all the jazz musicians who recorded important albums in the 1960s,
Hutcherson (and Wayne Shorter) perfectly illustrated the era's growing
frustration and confusion, particularly among African-Americans. During
this period, the musical landscape tilted in favor of youthful pop,
leaving many young jazz artists culturally disenfranchised. In this
regard, Hutcherson's early leadership albums embodied the feeling of
suspended animation, philosophical thought, uncertainty and protest.
His first leadership album to address the decade's highly charged ethos was Components (1965), particularly the title track and Little B's Poem, an original waltz that is achingly poignant in its gentle articulation.
From
1965 forward, Hutcherson's work became increasingly introspective and
expressive. Unlike other prominent jazz artists of the decade,
Hutcherson managed to combine tenderness and the avant-garde to create
message songs that remain relevant today. His significant leadership
albums for Blue Note in the '60s were Happenings (1966), Oblique (1967), Stick-Up! (1968), Patterns (1968), Spiral (1968), Medina (1969), Now! (1969) and, most notably, Total Eclipse (1968), which remains a spiritual masterpiece.
Hutcherson
retained this socially aware feel through the decades that followed and
was a significant influence on younger generations of jazz, soul and
rock artists. One can hear his searching sound in the albums of Steely
Dan, Earth Wind & Fire, Roy Ayers, the Crusaders, Stevie Wonder,
Terri Lyne Carrington, Naz, Esperanza Spalding, Jason Moran and Robert
Glasper among others. Unlike other jazz artists in the 1960s who
delivered thunderous "lectures," Hutcherson's albums were engaging
dialogues with the listener that appealed to the heart. Hutcherson's
vibes seemed to question rather than merely express outrage. In his
hands, the instrument had the intellectual capacity to help make sense
of baffling social upheavals.
Here are seven of my favorite Hutcherson tracks:
Here's Hutcherson's Little B's Poem from Components...
And here's Harold Land's Black Heroes from Now! (1969), with lead vocal by Gene McDaniels (A Hundred Pounds of Clay and writer of Roberta Flack's Feel Like Makin' Love)...
Vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson, an NEA Jazz Master who influenced generations of musicians as an improviser and composer, died Monday at the age of 75 after a protracted struggle with emphysema.
A longtime resident of the seaside hamlet Montara, about 20 miles
south of San Francisco, Hutcherson grew up in Pasadena and made a name
for himself in the early 1960s as a creative catalyst for a cadre of
brilliant young musicians associated with the Blue Note label. As a
composer, bandleader and recording artist, Hutcherson created a body of
work that ranks among the most profound and widely celebrated in an
often divisive era marked by a proliferation jazz aesthetics
Bobby HutchersonIntroduced to the Blue Note fold by veteran alto saxophonist Jackie
McLean, Hutcherson quickly joined a loose confederation of creatively
ambitious New York musicians inspired by the rhythmic and harmonic
innovations of free jazz patriarch Ornette Coleman but dedicated to
experimenting with compositional form. With his thick, ringing
four-mallet chords and exquisitely chiseled melodic lines, he played a
defining role on several dozen era-defining albums, such as Eric
Dolphy’s Out To Lunch, Lee Morgan’s The Procrastinator, McCoy Tyner’s Time For Tyner, Joe Henderson’s Mode For Joe, Tony Williams’ Life Time, Grachan Moncur III’s Evolution, and McLean’s One Step Beyond.
“Jackie McLean opened up a whole world to me, and during those years
in New York I was running into all these players and recording all the
time,” Hutcherson told me in an interview several years ago. “It seemed
like everybody had an original sound. Everybody was writing music and
the world was going crazy. It seemed like everywhere you went there was
just unbelievable things, the war, riots, assassinations, and the music
was definitely a reflection of everything that was going on.”
Bobby Hutcherson’s ‘Dialogue.’
During his 13 years with Blue Note — a tenure exceeded only by
pianist/composer Horace Silver — Hutcherson recorded a series of classic
albums under his own name, including Dialogue, Components, Medina, and Stick Up!
He had arrived in New York City in 1962 with a band led by Al Grey and
Billy Mitchell and ended up driving a cab when the group broke up. He
credited his fear of returning home to Los Angeles as a failure with
pushing him to jump into the experimental-minded post-bop fray, where
every recording seemed to introduce a new harmonic vocabulary. “I was going to do anything to not have to go back home and say that
New York kicked my ass,” he said. “Luckily, what was in my favor was I
was playing four mallets. And I was playing chords. It gave me something
more than just sitting there playing melodies… We’re in Brooklyn at the
Coronet, which is a real gangster-like club, and here we are playing
some out stuff. The crowd used to love to hear Jackie get on the
microphone and announce what we were playing. Jackie would say, okay, we
are now going to play ‘Frankenstein’s Mama,’ and the crowd would go
crazy… We had a great time.” A New York drug bust in 1968 led him to move back to Los Angeles,
where he played with the Gerald Wilson Orchestra and forged an enduring
and creatively fecund partnership with tenor saxophonist Harold Land.
Before long he moved up the Bay Area, but it was a minor hit on San Francisco,
his 1970 album with Land and pianist Joe Sample, that made Hutcherson a
permanent resident. When he got the royalty check for the funk-driven
track “Ummh” he decided to buy an acre of land on an undeveloped Montara
hillside.
Eric Dolphy’s ‘Out to Lunch,’ on which Hutcherson played a key role.
“When ‘Ummh’ became a hit I thought, what am I going to do with this
money?” Hutcherson recalled. “I came down here bought an acre of land
for $10,000 and I built this house for $30,000. I’m 20 minutes from San
Francisco, and about 20 minutes to the airport. For a long time I kept
saying, ‘I think I made the right choice.’”
When Todd Barkan launched Keystone Korner in 1972, Hutcherson became
one of the North Beach jazz club’s presiding spirits, performing
regularly with masters such as trumpeters Woody Shaw and Freddie
Hubbard, pianist Cedar Walton, and tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson (a
fellow Bay Area resident). The latter years were well-documented on live
recordings such as Hutcherson’s Farewell Keystone (Evidence), and two Keystone Bop volumes under Hubbard’s name on Milestone. Some 25 years later, Hutcherson was a founding member of the SFJAZZ Collective.
Like so many musicians, Barkan treasured Hutcherson’s music and
soulful presence on the scene. “He’s been a guiding light to all of us
who love and live by this music for many decades,” Barkan says. “One of
the most swinging master musical storytellers of our age, Bobby’s music
never fails to keep us in closer touch with the most tender and
welcoming parts of our hearts. As he wrote on the wall in the Keystone
Korner, ‘True love asks nothing in return.’”
Hutcherson on the cover of the 1971 LP, ‘Head On.’Interviewing Hutcherson could be a challenge. He was a gifted
raconteur whose stories often swerved in unanticipated directions (much
like his solos). On stage he often played the genial trickster, standing
in front of his vibes seemingly lost in thought, only to look up
quickly and feign wide-eyed surprise at finding himself in front of an
audience. A remarkably consistent performer, Hutcherson evolved into one
of jazz’s greatest balladeers. But his greatest contribution may have
been as a composer of dozens of extraordinary and often harmonically
mysterious tunes.
Hutcherson credits drummer Joe Chambers, a noted composer and early
New York collaborator, with encouraging him to start generating his own
music as a vehicle for documenting creative evolution.
“Joe Chambers told me that in order to complete your cycle you have
to write, that way you can document what was going through your mind and
where you were harmonically, theoretically, historically, to kind of
show the things that you were thinking about, how you were feeling and
the things you were working on,” Hutcherson said. “Are you working on a
theory to create a puzzle, to be able to go in this side and get through
the maze? Are you just looking for little situations, small motifs,
little questions and answers? Are you looking for secondary melodies to
come in, completely different from this but they will all add up? Then
there’s the sound of the elements, the sound of wind, the sound of rain,
how the notes and melodies are contained in a sunny day or a rainy
day.”
‘California Dreamer’ Jazz Master Vibraphone Virtuoso Bobby Hutcherson Passes Away at 75
August 22, 2016
Huffington Post
by Dan Ouellette ZEALnyc Senior Editor
The jazz world
lost a legend on Monday, August 15th when 75-year-old vibraphonist Bobby
Hutcherson passed away at the home that he built in northern
California, losing his long fight against emphysema. He had been awarded
with the prestigious National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master honor
in 2010 after recording as a leader and sideman beginning in the ‘60s
and continuing up till recently.
In the past twenty years I had the opportunity to spend time with Hutch—first as reporter in the ‘90s for the San Francisco Chronicle
when discussing an upcoming show he was playing in the Bay Area. He
seemed spaced out at times in our conversation, but also quick to crack a
joke about one of his early-year experiences. A few years later I
decided to put Bobby on the hot seat of DownBeat‘s Blindfold
Test—trying to guess who a player was and reflect on the music he was
hearing—in front of a live audience at the Monterey Jazz Festival.
However, I was worried. Would he be the spaced-out jazz elder or the
good-times entertainer he so thoroughly put on display when he
performed? As it turned out, he had the crowd in stitches as he listened
to a series of recorded vibraphonists and weighed in on their prowess
or lack thereof.
The next year I
ran across Bobby at the breakfast table at the North Sea Jazz Festival,
then being held at The Hague in the Netherlands. A constant flow of
people passed by and exchanged hugs with Bobby as he sat and told story
after comical story of the old days.
We connected
again in 2013 to talk about his career. It takes a journey to get to
where he lives. The picturesque stretch of Highway 1 along the Pacific
Ocean coastline between San Francisco and Santa Cruz may not be as
dramatic and isolated as the spectacular Big Sur drive further south
below Monterey. But, except for a few close-to-the-cliff curves where
cars on occasion soar off the pavement and plunge some one hundred feet
to the jagged, salt water-drenched rocks below, this relatively unknown
span of two-lane blacktop makes for a cruiser’s paradise. Huge crashing
waves (most notably the Mavericks where surfers flock in the winter to
attempt to negotiate breakers that have been known to crest at 80 feet),
spooky fog (where visibility at times is only a few feet), windswept
cypress trees (growing sideways) and in the midst of the winter rainy
season a mad rush of precipitation hurled to the shoreline (the
downpours sometimes trigger landslides that shut Highway 1 for months).
Twenty miles
south of San Francisco on Highway 1 sits the sleepy, idyllic town of
Montara, population just shy of 3,000. Its still-standing lighthouse
built on the point in 1875 today has been repurposed into a popular
hostel, and the mile-long state beach is arguably one of the finest on
the coast.
Just off the
main drive, hunkering down for yet another damp winter by feeding his
brick fireplace with split Monterey pine, sat Hutcherson, the innovator
who forever changed the potential for the vibraphones with his
progressive improvisational mallet prowess.
While he didn’t
pioneer the full blooming of the vibraphone from being a novelty
instrument—Lionel Hampton deserves the props, followed by Red Norvo,
followed radically by Milt Hinton—Hutcherson took the vibes to a new
level of jazz sophistication with his harmonic inventions and his
blurring-fast, four-mallet runs across the metal bars amplified with
motor-driven resonators. Today, he’s the standard bearer of the
instrument and has a plenitude of emulators to prove it.
Even though
Hutch’s stick action may have slowed a tad, his passion for music surely
hasn’t, evidenced by last year’s Kind of Blue Records album Somewhere
in the Night. Recorded live in 2009 at Dizzy’s Club at Jazz at Lincoln
Center, the disc captures the vibraphonist collaborating with B-3 organ
maestro Joey DeFrancesco and his trio.
It’s a rousing
bebop-to-blues-to-ballads outing where DeFrancesco delivers fire with
his brio and brusque voicings while Hutcherson gracefully dances with a
cool finesse that thrills and even tosses in vibes fillips to complement
his partner’s sprightly velocity on Duke Ellington’s “Take the
Coltrane.”
But since the
gig, Hutcherson has been laying low for several reasons, one of which is
a well-deserved respite from the career-long full-tilt action that made
him one of jazz’s most prolific recording artists, as a leader and as
an in-demand session man. And he was happy to be in Montara—home.
The Los Angeles
native made his way to New York in the early ‘60s and then unlike most
of his peers returned to the Golden State in 1967, continuing his
band-leading duties for Blue Note Records from his West Coast base,
first in L.A. and then later in San Francisco. It was his 1971
experimental soul-blues Blue Note recording, San Francisco, featuring
the funky hit tune “Ummh,” that solidified his stay.
“That song and
album got a lot of airplay, so I made some money,” Hutcherson said with a
laugh. “My wife and I agreed that we should do something special. So in
1972, I bought an acre of land in Montara and built a small house on
it. The acreage and house cost me $39,000. That was one of the smartest
investments I’ve ever made.”
Born in
Pasadena in Los Angeles County, Hutcherson grew up playing a piano in
his house and listening to church music at the First African Methodist
Episcopal Church. But his true education came from his older brother
Teddy, a big jazz fan who listened to records by the likes of Art Blakey
in his room with his friend, Dexter Gordon—the future tenor star who
Bobby was destined to play with years later (on records as well as in
the CBS All-Stars band at Havana Jam in 1979 and in the Bernard
Tavernier film Round Midnight in 1986).
Bobby’s older
sister, Peggy, was a singer who performed in Gerald Wilson’s 17-piece
jazz orchestra (she was later a Ray Charles Raelette) and who dated
locally based reedsman Eric Dolphy and later tenor saxophonist Billy
Mitchell.
Even though the
young Hutcherson was surrounded by jazz, he didn’t fully dive in until
he was 12 when he was walking down a Pasadena street and heard Milt
Jackson’s swinging vibes blaring from a record store. The tune was
“Bemsha Swing” and the Prestige album was Miles Davis And The Modern Jazz Giants.
Hutcherson bought it, wore it out listening to it, then began saving
money bricklaying with his mason father to buy a vibraphone like his new
hero. After he got it, he began playing in town with friends, including
bassist Herbie Lewis who told him he could earn spending change, plus
meet young women. (A novice on the vibes, Hutcherson had Lewis mark the
notes of the tunes on the keys, which were “cleaned off” by a
conscientious stage manager, resulting in a disastrous debut
performance.) Hutcherson played with Dolphy as well as Charles Lloyd at
such venues as Pandora’s Box on the Sunset Strip.
Through his
sister, Hutcherson got to know Mitchell who had recently left the Count
Basie Band in 1961 and co-formed a new group with ex-Basie trombonist Al
Grey. “Billy needed someone to play piano parts on the vibes,”
Hutcherson said. “My first gig with them was at The Jazz Workshop in San
Francisco opposite Charles Mingus. Billy then asked me if I wanted to
go with them to New York where they playing Birdland at 52nd and
Broadway, opposite Art Blakey.”
That’s where he
got his first taste of the city’s strange grit. The date was a two-week
stint. As Hutch was assembling his vibraphone for the first night, the
cigar-smoking emcee of the club, Pee Wee Marquette, blew smoke in his
face and told him to get off the stage. “We don’t need you,” he said.
“We’ve already got Lionel Hampton and Milt Jackson.” And to make matters
worse, Marquette was known for making it hard for emerging youngsters
to get recognition by deliberately mispronouncing their names.
“He’d mess your
name up unless you gave him a nice tip for the announcement,” said
Bobby. “At first he called me Bubba Hutchins. People laughed. Finally
after the first week, I gave him five bucks. The next week he introduced
me as Bobby Hutcherson.”
The
Mitchell-Grey band went on the road, mostly on the chitlin circuit, then
broke up, leaving Hutcherson to fend for his own in New York. He
settled in, living in the Bronx on 165th Street, a few blocks from
Yankee Stadium. “I grew up with grass and trees,” he said with a laugh.
“New York City was quite a different spot. But I knew I had what was
best there to get things going musically.”
Even though the
Mitchell-Grey band disintegrated, Hutcherson contributed to recording
dates by both musicians as well as took on moonlighting gigs as a taxi
driver to make his rent. As he began branching out more on his own, he
soon faced the New York scene full on. He relinked up with Lewis who was
playing with Art Farmer and Benny Golson in the Jazztet where Grachan
Moncur III was playing trombone. Lewis was hosting jam sessions at his
pad, and Moncur, after hearing Hutch play, said that it would be good
for him to meet Jackie McLean, whose band he was also playing in.
“Jackie liked
what I was doing with four mallets, so he asked me to play with him at
the Club Coronet where he was introducing a young drummer from Boston,”
said Hutcherson, who didn’t feel that he needed to ID the obvious:
then-17-year-old Tony Williams. “Jackie called Alfred Lion at Blue Note
to see the band. Lion wanted to record the group, so we all went off to
Rudy Van Gelder’s.”
The 1963 album was McLean’s classic One Step Beyond.
Hutcherson continued playing with an assortment of Blue Note artists,
including Moncur, Andrew Hill, Grant Green and L.A. pal Dolphy. “Eric
had heard about this new young band Jackie had put together for the
Coronet date,” Hutcherson said. “He came in and was surprised to see me.
He told me that he wanted me to do some gigs. Eric had a thing. He
played two octaves, playing the chords from the first octave followed by
chords from the second. He opened up these amazing possibilities.”
Case in point: Dolphy’s sole Blue Note album, 1964’s gem, Out To Lunch,
where he displayed the avant-garde modus operandi to expect the
unexpected, with a band comprising Freddie Hubbard, Richard Davis and
Williams. Offering unpredictable floating accents and wink-in-the-eye
drop-ins, Hutcherson shines throughout, including the Dolphy-penned
track “Hat And Beard” (inspired by Thelonious Monk) where the
vibraphonist contributed plunks, splashes and shimmers that have a
prankster vibe.
“I began
hearing all these other ways of playing,” Hutcherson said. “That was
wonderful for me to be living in New York and to be a part of the jazz
renaissance of that time.” Early in his Blue Note career (which
continued to 1977), Lion gave him carte blanche to record his own albums
as a leader. “I told Alfred that I wanted to do some different things
and he told me, ‘Listen, you make all the albums you want. Just call me
and you can record.’ So that’s what I was doing every couple of months.”
This estimation
confirmed what others in the jazz world had already realized: that
Hutcherson was an adventurous improviser who wasn’t afraid to barrel
down the barriers of the dominant hard-bop jazz world.
Hutcherson’s official Blue Note debut, The Kicker,
was recorded at the end of 1963 but mysteriously shelved until 1999
(the Blue Note label at the time was recording prolifically). Other
trackings met with the same stockpile treatment, including Spiral, recorded in 1968, and Medina,
recorded in 1969, which were released on CD in 1998 as a double album.
But several of his outings managed to see the light of day in the ‘60s,
including his first issued album Dialogue (during the time that he was playing in Archie Shepp’s quartet) in 1965, and his 1966 masterpiece, Stick Up!, his first date with McCoy Tyner and featuring his collaboration with Joe Henderson.
Hutcherson also
delved into the highly charged political vibe of the city, packing his
cumbersome vibraphone into cases at his Bronx home, loading them onto a
dolly for the subway ride and sometimes stopping off in Harlem to hear
Malcolm X speak on his way to gigs and rehearsals.
But
Hutcherson’s New York experience came to an abrupt close in 1967 while
he was recording a date with Hill. At the rehearsal he and bassist Joe
Chambers took a break and scored a couple of joints to kick back in
Central Park. However, they were busted by the police, handcuffed and
thrown into jail. Musician friends at the club Slugs passed the hat to
post bail for him. But Hutcherson lost not only his cabaret card (the
guarantee to perform anywhere in New York that was abolished not long
after) but also his taxi driver’s license.
So, he moved
back to Southern California where he joined up with hard-bop tenor
saxophonist Harold Land and began their long-running creative union,
starting with Land’s quintet record, The Peace-Maker, released
in 1968 on the Cadet label. When the cabaret card was no longer required
in New York, Alfred Lion called Hutcherson to continue his
recordings—this time as a collaboration with Land. The underappreciated
band recorded seven albums for Blue Note, beginning with 1968’s Total Eclipse (with Chick Corea on piano) and continuing through 1975’s Inner Glow.
The former proved to a marquee outing for the group, where hard-bop
entered into the exploratory zone. The album dips in and out of
Hutcherson’s daredevil sensibility, with exciting vibes romp and
elation. The trippy finale, “Pompeian,” is a questing voyage with a
whimsical open and close and a complex middle section that is
avant-leaning and charged as Hutcherson paints dark colors on the
marimbas.
“I had been
doing a lot of writing then,” he said. “I was experimenting with moving
intervals in my playing, doing seconds and thirds to fourths and fifths.
It was creating a different sound instead of typical jazz lines. The
intervals were opened up. The idea was to try to make it sound simple
even though the music was hard to figure out. Harold started playing the
intervals too so that we could bounce off each other. Actually, I got a
lot of my ideas from Joe Chambers who was always trying to change the
recipe. ‘Pompeian’ is full of the intervals playing—which actually
reflected the scene that was going on in San Francisco at the time.”
In addition to
Corea, other pianists joined the Hutcherson-Land band, including Joe
Sample and Stanley Cowell. “Joe Chambers hipped me to Stanley,”
Hutcherson said. “He was a guy with a direction. He had great ideas and
he showed me a lot about beats—playing on top of the beat or in the beat
or behind the beat. He would create a whiplash situation, like a
weather system that comes in and creates a pow. And then it circles
around and boom! It’s almost like a punch line. It’s the kick like the
tail end of a cup of coffee. That’s what Stanley had.”
Then the
chairman of the jazz program and professor of jazz piano at Rutgers
University, Cowell began his New York experience in the ‘60s with Max
Roach. Then he was called by Miles Davis, but quit after playing two
gigs with him in Montreal and Boston. It was a too controlled—and no
doubt, chaotic—a situation for him, so he worked with Charles Tolliver
and then Stan Getz, connecting often with Chambers who brought him into
the Hutcherson-Land fold.
“Bobby was one
of the most relaxed people,” Cowell said. “He was a wonderful player,
but he did it in a relaxed way. When we were touring, he never rushed to
the airport. We’d all be panicked that we were going to be too late,
but he just relaxed and took his time—and we never missed a flight.
Behind his back, we called him California Dreamer.”
Cowell says
that with Hutcherson’s penchant for stretching beyond, the band was
definitely in the zeitgeist of the tumultuous anti-establishment era.
“We were all embracing the political content of the music versus issuing
the traditional and conventional,” he says. “Our approaches varied. We
used sounds prevalent at the time and played in a free form. Our
resources were expanded as we set out to re-examine the music. The apex
for me came at a concert we had in Antibes [France]. You can view it on
YouTube. There were great moments at that show where we combined pulses
with a great deal of freedom within a fixed form. Bobby was doing these
incredible cadenzas. The last time I saw him, he still was. He’s a happy
person.”
Bobby’s move
from SoCal to San Francisco was hastened by a Pasadena friend, Delano
Dean, who opened up the Both/And club (which is where he met his second
wife Rosemary Zuinga, who was a ticket taker). There was a lot of
activity there, not only at Keystone Korner, The Jazz Workshop and the
Blackhawk, but also in Golden Gate Park. He set up roots in the city and
later Montara.
Joe Henderson
also made the move to San Francisco. The tenor saxophonist and vibist
formed a trio with drummer Elvin Jones and traveled the country. “Joe
and I became very close,” Hutcherson said. “He always had a haircutter
in the city. So, when we were on the road, I brought along a pair of
sheers and gave him haircuts.”
Hutch noted
that he’s slowing down. “I’m not the dynamo I used to be,’ he says,
laughing again. “I have emphysema, and I’m breathing oxygen while I’m
talking to you. I can’t play long solos like I used to be able to, and I
don’t play quite as fast because that takes a lot of oxygen.”
During the
winter months with Montara’s cold, damp weather, it’s been rough for
Hutcherson, who has ended up in the hospital every February for four
years in a row. Still, he says, “My doctor keeps telling me I’m doing
well. That way I can continue to share my life and my music. What a
reward that is.”
One time in
recent years when Hutcherson was totally out of his element was when he
was asked in 2003 to be a founding member of the SFJAZZ Collective,
where he was the elder working with an array of young jazz stars through
2007, including artistic director Joshua Redman, Miguel Zenón, Dave
Douglas, Renee Rosnes, and several others.
“That was four
wonderful years, and I was the old guy in the group,” Hutcherson said.
“It was something completely new to me. I was thrilled to play, but I
was also very humbled. What a learning experience that was being with
the younger players. I learned forgiveness, to forgive myself. I wasn’t
able to play as fast, and sometimes I’d miss notes and feel bad. But all
the players made me realize that I had to forgive myself and keep
going. That was the biggest lesson. And I continue to work on this every
day. It’s a good practice.”
Looking back at
his career, Hutcherson waxed philosophic. All the trophies he’s
received and the plaques pegged on his walls aren’t the point, he said.
“Slowing down, I see a lot more,” he said. “The real plaque for me is to
be able to share my music with others.” He paused and then added,
“There’s still a lot to be revealed.”
As it turned out, a year later in 2014 he recorded his final album, Enjoy the View, returning to the label where he began his career: Blue Note.
“When you think about music it’s got to be
that way. Just the thrill of being able to play another note, not to win
anything or get a trophy.”
By Michael Ullman
Few musicians have been as chameleonic, or as expansive, as the late
vibraphone player Bobby Hutcherson, who over a nearly sixty year
career made over 200 recordings, moving with ease from bop to the
furthest reaches of the avant-garde. (He even made a Latin record,
1989′s Ambos Mundos, which features an unforgettable version of “Besame Mucho.”) He died of emphysema at the age of 75 on August 15.
Self-taught on the vibes, Hutcherson embodied the adventurous spirit
of jazz in the mid-sixties. Paradoxically, no matter how far out he went
musically, Hutcherson connected with serious jazz fans in a way that
other, equally venturesome vibes players, such as Walt Dickerson and
Karl Berger, could not. The latter rumbled around in avant-garde
circles; Hutcherson somehow managed to fuse experimental verve and
mainstream success. Hutcherson made his first recording in 1960, when he
was still a teenager living in Pasadena. He developed quickly, finding
his own path in modal tunes, in free jazz, and in more traditional
music. He observed that his soft-toned instrument didn’t always fit the
demands of abrasive or aggressive music. Instead, he generally used his
sound to suggest and cajole. In the notes to his 1965 album Action,
alto saxophonist Jackie McLean describes Hutcherson’s contribution to
the title cut: “Once the solo improvisations start, there are no chord
changes and no scales to follow. The soloist has to listen, therefore,
to Bobby Hutcherson for leads to where to go. That’s why Bobby lays out a
lot. Every once in a while, he comes in and points a new direction, and
then he cuts the soloist loose again.”
He could also be assertive. In the title cut of Action,
Hutcherson’s cheery melody statement is interrupted repeatedly by the
braying punctuation of the horns. He works hard to stay in the
spotlight. More often he is content to help open things up, sometimes by
taking a tune out of tempo or by implying a different tempo. Sometimes
he plays on the edges of the chords. In “Hat and Beard,” the opening
number on Eric Dolphy’s Out to Lunch, there is a typically
furious solo by Freddie Hubbard. Hutcherson enters with a series of
broken statements — a few notes followed by lots of space — then he
suddenly strikes a dissonant clang (repeated twice), which leads to some
vague, searching phrases, and a glissando. His solo displays a special
logic, but it is far from bebop. Again, on the title tune, Hutcherson
sees it as his role to quiet things down, to open up space and make
intriguingly enigmatic statements, often in a stage whisper. He, along
with the listener, seems to be discovering a new kind of music, a fresh
sound.
In the early sixties, when Hutcherson moved to New York, he found
himself in the midst of a budding avant-garde scene. He quickly became
part of a cadre of young musical searchers: he often appeared with the
likes of Herbie Hancock, McCoy Tyner, Andrew Hill, Freddie Hubbard, Sam
Rivers, and drummer Tony Williams, whom he said could play the beat
backwards. He embraced the searching quality of the music, but also its
joy. He reveled in the period’s creative frenzy: “So here were all these
possibilities that regular people who were playing bebop weren’t doing.
This was some new stuff. … [being] able to [make it] come off was the
fun, where you don’t have somebody saying, ‘now this is what you got to
do.’ It was more like, whoo hoo! The thrill of the note and the thought
makes you think — would make your imagination run.”
In the sixties, recording for Blue Note, Hutcherson seemed to be
ubiquitous. He was nuancing the moods on key recordings led by Jackie
McLean, Grant Green, Dexter Gordon, Grachan Moncur, and Eric Dolphy.
It’s hard now to conceive of just how amazingly productive he was. In a
period of a year — starting at the end of April 1963 — Hutcherson was on
Jackie McLean’s One Step Beyond and Destination Out!, Eric Dolphy’s Iron Man and Out to Lunch, Grant Green’s sublimely laid back Idle Moments, Grachan Moncur’s Evolution, Andrew Hill’s Judgment, and his own The Kicker. All of these are remarkable, history-making recordings.
Hutcherson let his musical imagination run far and wide from early
on. He was born in Los Angeles in 1941 and raised in Pasadena. He
couldn’t have been luckier in his siblings. In an interview for the
Smithsonian Institution’s oral history project, he noted that his mom
was often sick during his first four years. His older brother used to
babysit….with his friend, the teenaged Dexter Gordon. (In 1965,
Hutcherson would make Getting’ Around with the legendary
saxophonist.) His own best friend from age four was Herbie Lewis, who
would become a prominent bassist. His older sister, a singer who
performed with Duke Ellinton, went out with pianist Sonny Clark and
saxophonist Eric Dolphy. When Dolphy moved east, she began dating tenor
saxophonist Billy Mitchell, with whom Hutcherson would record the 1962
album This is Billy Mitchell.
Hutcherson lived in a fabulously musical neighborhood. He was walking
along the street when he heard the recording that changed his life:
Miles Davis’ “Bemsha Swing” in a recording that featured vibist Milt
Jackson. (Astonishingly, Red Norvo, jazz’s first famous vibraphone
player — he started out on xylphone — played repeatedly at Hutcherson’s
junior high school. But he didn’t appeal to Hutcherson.) After hearing
Milt Jackson, Hutcherson told his mom he wanted to play vibes. His
mother may have had her doubts. He had taken piano lessons with his aunt
Addie, who scared the kid near to death when she suddenly announced one
day that the Holy Ghost was sitting on the piano bench with them.
Hutcherson refused to go back.
But he got the vibes. A couple weeks later Hutcherson give his first
performance. Prompted by his friend Herbie Lewis, the outing turned out
to be an unmitigated disaster. He barely knew what notes to play, so his
friends wrote numbers on the individual keys. Just before he went on,
Hutcherson was informed by a helpful stage manager that he had wiped the
numbers off. According to Hutcherson, his performance was so bad the
audience almost died laughing. All except his mom. Afterwards he
apologized to her: “My mom looked back at me, and she — I could see
through her eyes. She said, ‘I don’t care what you do. I love you, and
I’m here to be by your side. Whatever happens, I’m with you.’ That was
the biggest lesson I’ve ever had.”
He took a few more lessons from vibist Dave Pike, a nearly forgotten
figure today, while at the same time steeping himself in the music of
the neighborhood, which seemed full of players just about his age doing
some mighty interesting things: “You’d go to a barbecue joint. Ornette
(Coleman) would be in there playing. Eric (Dolphy) would be in there
playing. Joe Gordon would be in there playing. Teddy Edwards, Red
Callender, Gerald Wiggins, great musicians. ..Sonny Clark. They were all
writing music. There was so much going on. It was like — you would walk
in one place, and it would be another world going on. You’d walk over
here. Everything was a different world with something going on.”
Early on Hutchinson decided he wouldn’t imitate Milt Jackson: “After a
while I realized that’s Milt’s cookies. What are you doing trying to
mess with Milt Jackson? Milt Jackson was so fluid. Leave that alone.”
Trumpeter Don Cherry showed him some new intervals, and gave him advice,
such as “‘Don’t mess with the tonic. Play with the fourth first, as
though it’s the tonic.’” Ornette Coleman helped in a much more enigmatic
way. “Then Ornette would say, ‘It’s all about the next note.’ “The next
note, huh.” ‘Yeah, the interval to the next note.’ “You said, oh wow.
I’m just trying to learn to play a major scale. A major scale was
kicking my butt. To try to figure those things out and have somebody not
only talk about it, but demonstrate it and then use it in the music –
and then do it in the music and make it sound as though it’s very
simple.” He started hosting jam sessions in his parents’ garage: Charles
Lloyd, Phineas Newborn, and Joe Gordon were among the attendees. He
also got his first job playing with Herbie Lewis in a coffee house …
Pandora’s Box. He taught himself to play with four mallets when Billy
Mitchell hired him to play opposite Charles Mingus at the Jazz Workshop
in San Francisco.
Hutcherson made his first recordings in 1960, a session with tenor
saxophonist Curtis Amy among them. Amy must have respected the
youngster: he gives Hutcherson the melody and the first long solo on the
ballad “Beautiful You.” (This session with Hutcherson can be found on Curtis Amy,
Mosaic Select 7.) From the beginning, this was a vibist who could do a
luscious ballad justice. (Later he would write some killer ballads as
well: I recommend his “Bouquet,” found on Highway One.) He
recorded with his friend Billy Mitchell, who prompted the next big step
in his career when he landed a job playing at Birdland in New York. With
bassist Doug Watkins, Hutcherson motored across the country and began
to explore new musical horizons. (Eventually he would move back to
California.) What he hadn’t realized is that — along with Don Cherry,
Ornette Coleman, and Eric Dolphy — he would become one of the
initiators/practitioners of the next movement in jazz:
It wasn’t until I got to New York and I got with Jackie
[McLean] and Grachan [Moncur III ] that I saw all of a sudden these new
possibilities of things happening. With Tony [Williams], all of a sudden
I saw that things could be played backwards. With Eric [Dolphy] now
coming in on the scene – because Eric used to come to the Coronet, and
Eric saw me playing with Jackie. I used to go over to Eric’s loft. Eric
had scales that ran for more than an octave. One scale ran for two
octaves, and in the second octave was a complete new set of notes. So
all of a sudden we started looking into longer scales, different
situations, different rhythms, different instrumentation.
Different moods as well. The Grachan Moncur composition “Frankenstein” (on McLean’s One Step Beyond)
is, given its title, understandably threatening. Its stop-and-go
melody builds to an ominous thud on its final note. Both McLean and
Moncur contribute emotionally driven solos. Hutcherson is engaged as
well, but differently, in a more detached way. Once Moncur finishes his
solo, Hutcherson lets a few bars go by in silence and then enters
quietly, with a brief statement followed by a pause. As his solo
develops, Hutcherson works with the melody in a recognizable way, but
adds his own brand of subtle mystery. On the next tune though (“Blue
Rondo”) the vibist lets it rip. About this time Hutcherson began making
his own Blue Note recordings, including the one that is possibly my
favorite, the quartet recording featuring Herbie Hancock: Happenings, from 1966, made a short time after Dexter Gordon’s Getting’ Around. He rounded out the sixties with another flurry of LPs, including his own Patterns and Total Eclipse. And there was a record led by his friend McCoy Tyner: the wonderful Time for Tyner.
Bobby Hutcherson at Boston’s Jazz Workshop, sometime in the late seventies. Photo: Michael Ullman.
The seventies were different. His peers largely went off in their own
directions. Hutcherson travelled with tenor saxophonist Harold Land and
with his quartet, which included pianists such as Stanley Cowell and
George Cables. Hutcherson’s recordings were deliberately intended to be
mixed bags. There were a number of large ensemble recordings, evidently
made in envy of the success of CTI Records. Some of these crowded
excursions barely left Hutcherson room to breathe. The change in album
titles is suggestive of the shift in spirit. In the sixties you had Destination Out!; in the seventies it was The View from Inside.
During that period Hutcherson experimented with multi-tracking and
wrote a series of pieces that elaborated on simple melodies and a
repetitive bass line. Listeners who were waiting for Hutcherson to flip
the mood or transform the beat were disappointed: the structure made
that kind of variation impossible. There were bright moments, but to my
ears he only got back on track again in the eighties, when he signed
with Orrin Keepnew’s Landmark Records and made small group recordings,
such as Good Bait.
On stage he projected a playful, even mischievous, persona. Some may
remember Hutcherson from his acting role in Bernard Tavernier’s Round Midnight.
(He was first filmed in a Kim Novak movie.) I remember an evening at
Boston’s Jazz Workshop during the late seventies: Hutcherson called for a
tune — evidently a slow one. He then started to play a song at a
furious clip. His trio stared at him in utter disbelief. Hutcherson
broke down in laughter. So did we all. But after that he couldn’t get it
together. He would start playing and then break down. It reminded me of
a story he tells in the Smithsonian interview. The vibist was
performing on the same bill as comedian Redd Foxx in Chicago. He was
asked to leave the room when Foxx was on stage because he kept falling
over with laughter, distracting the audience.
Hutcherson was very much about exhilaration. He liked to say he
performed for the thrill of it. In fact, thrill was a favorite word of
his. “I think the most important thing that I can offer young musicians
is once you get up on the bandstand, understanding that you’re now
asking this prayer to come through you. When you think about music it’s
got to be that way. Just the thrill of being able to play another note,
not to win anything or get a trophy.”
“Your spirit is eternal,” he told the Smithsonian. “So it’s important
to realize, as you’re playing music that you want people to remember
your spirit, your love of life, your thoughtfulness, your peace of mind,
where you stand, God, your family, and your children, your friends
around you.” He told a sad, but inspiring, story about his friend,
collaborator, and one-time babysitter Dexter Gordon. After Gordon had
been diagnosed with throat cancer, he decided to have a dangerous
operation. Why?, Hutcherson asked. Gordon replied, with difficulty, that
it might make it possible for him to play just one more note. I hope
Bobby Hutcherson got his last note in. Michael Ullman studied classical clarinet and was
educated at Harvard, the University of Chicago, and the U. of Michigan,
from which he received a PhD in English. The author or co-author of two
books on jazz, he has written on jazz and classical music for TheAtlantic Monthly, TheNew Republic, High Fidelity, Stereophile, TheBoston Phoenix, TheBoston Globe,
and other venues. His articles on Dickens, Joyce, Kipling, and others
have appeared in academic journals. For over 20 years, he has written a
bi-monthly jazz column for Fanfare Magazine, for which he also
reviews classical music. At Tufts University, he teaches mostly
modernist writers in the English Department and jazz and blues history
in the Music Department. He plays piano badly.
THE MUSIC OF BOBBY HUTCHERSON: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH MR. HUTCHERSON:
Bobby Hutcherson - “Herzog” -- (Composition by Bobby Hutcherson)
From "Total Eclipse" (1968):
Bobby Hutcherson (Vibraphone) Harold Land (Tenor Saxophone and Flute) Chick Corea (Piano) Reggie Johnson (Bass) Joe Chambers (Drums)
Opening
track from Hutcherson's 1965 "Dialogue" album.
Bobby Hutcherson
(vibraphone); Sam Rivers (tenor saxophone); Freddie Hubbard (trumpet);
Andrew Hill (piano); Richard Davis (bass); Joe Chambers (drums). "Catta" it's an Andrew Hill composition.
Recorded at Van Gelder Studios, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey on April 3, 1965.
BOBBY HUTCHERSON, 'Happenings' (1966) Roger rogerjazzfan 1/7 videos: "Aquarian Moon” is the opening track from the Hutcherson's "Happenings" album. Recorded on February 8, 1966 Personnel: Bobby Hutcherson (vibes); Herbie Hancock (piano); Joe Chambers (drums); Bob Cranshaw (bass).
Bobby Hutcherson - "Patterns"
Beautiful track from the "Patterns" LP, recorded in 1968 but unreleased until 1980. Blue Note records:
Personnel: Bobby Hutcherson – vibraphone James Spaulding – alto saxophone, flute Freddie Hubbard – trumpet Herbie Hancock – piano Ron Carter – double bass Joe Chambers – drums
Bobby
Hutcherson was born to Eli, a master mason, and Esther, a hairdresser.
Hutcherson was exposed to jazz by his brother Teddy, who listened to Art Blakey records in the family home with his friend Dexter Gordon. His older sister Peggy was a singer in Gerald Wilson's
orchestra. Hutcherson went on to record on a number of Gerald Wilson's
Pacific Jazz recordings as well as play in his orchestra. Hutcherson's
sister personally introduced Hutcherson to Eric Dolphy (her boyfriend at the time) and Billy Mitchell. Hutcherson was inspired to take up the vibraphone when he heard Milt Jackson play "Bemsha Swing" on the Miles Davis and the Modern Jazz Giants
album at the age of 12. Still in his teens, Hutcherson began his
professional career in the late fifties working with tenor saxophonist Curtis Amy and trumpeter Carmell Jones, as well as with Dolphy and tenor saxophonist Charles Lloyd at Pandora's Box on the Sunset Strip.[3][8][9]
He made his recording debut on August 3, 1960, cutting two songs for a 7-inch single with the Les McCann trio for Pacific Jazz (released in 1961), followed by the LP Groovin' Blue with the Curtis Amy-Frank Butler sextet on December 10 (also released by Pacific Jazz in 1961). In January 1962, Hutcherson joined the Billy Mitchell–Al Grey group for dates at The Jazz Workshop in San Francisco and Birdland
in New York City (opposite Art Blakey). After touring with the
Mitchell–Grey group for a year, Hutcherson settled in New York City (on
165th street in The Bronx) where he worked part-time as a taxi driver, before fully entering the jazz scene via his childhood friend, bassist Herbie Lewis.[8][9][10]
Blue Note Records
Lewis was working with The Jazztet and hosted jam sessions at his apartment. After hearing Hutcherson play at one of Lewis' events, Jazztet and Jackie McLean band member Grachan Moncur III felt that Hutcherson would be a good fit for McLean's group, which led to Hutcherson's first recording for Blue Note Records on April 30, 1963, McLean's One Step Beyond.[8] This was quickly followed by sessions for Blue Note with Moncur, Dolphy, Gordon, Andrew Hill, Tony Williams and Grant Green in 1963 and 1964, later followed by sessions with Joe Henderson, John Patton, Duke Pearson and Lee Morgan.[9] In spite of the numerous post-bop, avant-garde, and free jazz recordings made during this period, Hutcherson's first session for Blue Note as leader, The Kicker (recorded in 1963 but not released until 1999), demonstrated his background in hard bop and the blues, as did Idle Moments with Grant Green.
Hutcherson won the "Talent Deserving of Wider Recognition" award in the 1964 Down Beat readers' poll, and Blue Note released Hutcherson's Dialogue in 1965.[11] The 1966 record Stick-Up!, featuring Joe Henderson, Herbie Lewis, and Billy Higgins, was the first of many recorded sessions Hutcherson made with McCoy Tyner throughout their careers. Stick-Up!
was also the only album out of ten Hutcherson recorded as leader for
Blue Note between 1965 and 1969 which did not feature drummer Joe Chambers or any of Chambers' compositions.[2][9] Spanning the years 1963 to 1977, Hutcherson had one of the longest recording careers with Blue Note, second only to Horace Silver's.[1]
Return to the West Coast
Hutcherson lost his cabaret card and taxi driver's license in 1967 after he and Joe Chambers were arrested for marijuana possession in Central Park,[12] so he moved back to California, but continued to record for Blue Note.[8] This return to the West Coast resulted in an important partnership with Harold Land, with whom Hutcherson recorded seven albums for Blue Note, featuring a rotating lineup of pianists such as Chick Corea, Stanley Cowell, and Joe Sample,
and usually Chambers on drums. The Hutcherson-Land group broke up in
1971, and that same year Hutcherson won the title of "World's Best
Vibist" in the International Jazz Critics Poll.[2][11] After the release of Knucklebean in 1977, Hutcherson recorded three albums for Columbia Records in the late 1970s.
Hutcherson performing at the Berkeley Jazz Festival in 1982. Photo: Brian McMillen
Land and Hutcherson reunited in the early 1980s for several recordings as the "Timeless All Stars," a sextet featuring Curtis Fuller, Cedar Walton, Buster Williams, and Billy Higgins which recorded four albums for the Dutch label Timeless Records.[1] After switching between several labels in the early 1980s for his solo material, Hutcherson recorded eight albums for Landmark Records
from the 1980s into the early 1990s, and continued to work steadily as a
sideman during this time. His recorded output slowed somewhat during
the past few decades, although he did release albums for Atlantic and Verve in the 1990s, three for the Swiss-based label Kind of Blue in the 21st century, and continued to tour.
Hutcherson
has a son, Barry, from his first marriage to Beth Buford. Hutcherson
wrote the waltz "Little B's Poem" for Barry in 1962.[3] Due to the success of "Ummh" from the album San Francisco, one of Hutcherson's few entries in the jazz fusion style, he was able to buy an acre of land on which he built a house in Montara, California, in 1972.[2][8] That same year, he married Rosemary Zuniga, a ticket taker at the Both/And club in San Francisco.[7] The couple had a son, Teddy, who is a production manager for SFJAZZ. Hutcherson attended an African Methodist Episcopal Church as a youth and converted to Catholicism later in life.[3]
Suffering from emphysema since 2007,[16] Hutcherson died from the condition in Montara, California, on August 15, 2016.[17][18][19]
Style and critical reception
Bobby's thorough mastery of harmony and chords combined with his
virtuosity and exploratory intuition enabled him to fulfill the function
that is traditionally allocated to the piano and also remain a voice in
the front line. He did this to perfection in the bands of Dolphy,
McLean, and Archie Shepp.
His approach to the vibes was all encompassing; it was pianistic in the
sense of melody and harmony and percussive in rhythmic attack and
placement. He brought a fire and a passion back into the instrument that
had been lost since the prime of Lionel Hampton. He was firmly rooted in the be bop tradition, but constantly experimenting and expanding upon that tradition.
I love playing with Bobby. He's an exceptionally gifted jazz
improviser... It's always a lot of fun to play with him, always
enlightening, emotional as well as intellectually challenging. Bobby is a
very honest person. He couldn't play the way he does without that
honesty. He has an innocence that's childlike in a way. He's a great
player and a great person, and that helps boost humanity a little bit.
AllMusic
contributor Steve Huey stated that Hutcherson's "free-ringing, open
chords and harmonically advanced solos were an important part of
Dolphy's 1964 masterwork Out to Lunch!", and called Dialogue
a "classic of modernist post-bop", declaring Hutcherson "one of jazz's
greatest vibraphonists". Huey went on to say: "along with Gary Burton,
the other seminal vibraphone talent of the '60s, Hutcherson helped
modernize his instrument by redefining what could be done with it –
sonically, technically, melodically, and emotionally. In the process, he
became one of the defining (if underappreciated) voices in the
so-called "new thing" portion of Blue Note's glorious '60s roster."[2]
In his liner notes to the 1980 release of Medina, record producer Richard Seidel (Verve, Sony Masterworks)
wrote that "of all the vibists to appear on the scene contemporaneous
with Hutcherson, none have been able to combine the rhythmic dexterity,
emotive attack and versatile musical interests that Bobby possesses."
Seidel concurred that Hutcherson was "part of the vanguard of the new
jazz developments in the Sixties. He contributed mightily to several of
the key sessions that document these developments."[20]
Interviewed by Jesse Hamlin for a piece on Hutcherson in the San Francisco Chronicle in 2012, collaborator Joshua Redman
said that "We talk a lot about how music expresses universal values,
experiences and feelings. But you don't often witness that so clearly
and so profoundly as you do with Bobby. His music expresses the joy of
living. He connects to the source of what music is about."[3]
In an April 2013 profile for Down Beat
magazine, Dan Ouellette wrote that "Hutcherson took the vibes to a new
level of jazz sophistication with his harmonic inventions and his
blurring-fast, four-mallet runs... Today, he's the standard bearer of
the instrument and has a plenitude of emulators to prove it." Ouellette
quoted Joey DeFrancesco as saying "Bobby is the greatest vibes player of all time... Milt Jackson was the guy, but Bobby took it to the next level. It's like Milt was Charlie Parker, and Bobby was John Coltrane."[8]
"Pacific Jazz Records Discography: 1959–1960." Jazz Discography Project. Ed. Nobuaki Togashi, Kohji Matsubayashi, and Masayuki Hatta. Web. February 16, 2014
Tatum, Doug. "'99–2000: Off and Running." Jazz Ambassadors Magazine. Kansas City Jazz Ambassadors, Inc., Oct. 1999. Web. February 16, 2014.
Hutcherson, Bobby; Murphy, Molly; Ball, Don (August 13, 2009). "Interview for the NEA". Bobby Hutcherson Jazz Giants. Retrieved August 16, 2016.
Blue
Note Records. BOBBY HUTCHERSON RETURNS TO BLUE NOTE WITH ALL-STAR
COLLECTIVE FOR "ENJOY THE VIEW" ON 6/24. N.p., March 17, 2014. Web.
March 17, 2014.
Kofi Natambu, editor of and contributor to Sound Projections, is a writer, poet, cultural critic, and political journalist whose poetry, essays, criticism, reviews, and journalism have appeared in many literary magazines, journals, newspapers, and anthologies. He has written extensively about music as a critic and historian for many publications, including the Black Scholar, Downbeat, Solid Ground: A New World Journal, Detroit Metro Times, KONCH, the Panopticon Review,Black Renaissance Noire, the Village Voice, the City Sun (NYC), the Poetry Project Newsletter (NYC), and the African American Review. He is the author of a biography Malcolm X: His Life & Work (Alpha Books) and two books of poetry: The Melody Never Stops (Past Tents Press) and Intervals (Post Aesthetic Press). He was the founder and editor of Solid Ground: A New World Journal, a national quarterly magazine of the arts, culture, and politics and the editor of a literary anthology Nostalgia for the Present (Post Aesthetic Press). Natambu has read his work throughout the country and given many lectures and workshops at academic and arts institutions. He has taught American literature, literary theory and criticism, cultural history and criticism, film studies, political science, creative writing, philosophy, critical theory, and music history and criticism (Jazz, Blues, R&B, Hip Hop) at many universities and colleges. He was also a curator in the Education Department of Detroit’s Museum of African American History. Born in Detroit, Michigan, Natambu currently lives in Berkeley, California with his wife Chuleenan.
