SOUND PROJECTIONS
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
SUMMER, 2019
VOLUME SEVEN NUMBER TWO
HOLLAND DOZIER HOLLAND
(L-R: LAMONT DOZIER EDDIE HOLLAND BRIAN HOLLAND)
Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:
SHIRLEY SCOTT
(June 15-21)
FREDDIE HUBBARD
(June 22-28)
BILL WITHERS
(June 29- July 5)
OUTKAST
(July 6-12)
J. J. JOHNSON
(July 13-19)
JIMMY SMITH
(July 20-26)
JACKIE WILSON
(July 27-August 2)
LITTLE RICHARD
(August 3-9)
KENNY BARRON
(August 10-16)
BLIND LEMON JEFFERSON
(August 17-23)
MOS DEF
(August 24-30)
BLIND BOY FULLER
(August 31-September 6)
Freddie Hubbard
(1938-2008)
Artist Biography by Scott Yanow
One of the great jazz trumpeters of all time, Freddie Hubbard formed his sound out of the Clifford Brown/Lee Morgan
tradition, and by the early '70s was immediately distinctive and the
pacesetter in jazz. However, a string of blatantly commercial albums
later in the decade damaged his reputation and, just when Hubbard, in the early '90s (with the deaths of Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis), seemed perfectly suited for the role of veteran master, his chops started causing him serious troubles.
Born and raised in Indianapolis, Hubbard played early on with Wes and Monk Montgomery. He moved to New York in 1958, roomed with Eric Dolphy (with whom he recorded in 1960), and was in the groups of Philly Joe Jones (1958-1959), Sonny Rollins, Slide Hampton, and J.J. Johnson, before touring Europe with Quincy Jones (1960-1961). He recorded with John Coltrane, participated in Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz (1960), was on Oliver Nelson's classic Blues and the Abstract Truth album (highlighted by "Stolen Moments"), and started recording as a leader for Blue Note that same year. Hubbard gained fame playing with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers (1961-1964) next to Wayne Shorter and Curtis Fuller. He recorded Ascension with Coltrane (1965), Out to Lunch (1964) with Eric Dolphy, and Maiden Voyage with Herbie Hancock, and, after a period with Max Roach (1965-1966), he led his own quintet, which at the time usually featured altoist James Spaulding. A blazing trumpeter with a beautiful tone on flügelhorn, Hubbard fared well in freer settings but was always essentially a hard bop stylist.
In 1970, Freddie Hubbard recorded two of his finest albums (Red Clay and Straight Life) for CTI. The follow-up, First Light (1971), was actually his most popular date, featuring Don Sebesky arrangements. But after the glory of the CTI years (during which producer Creed Taylor did an expert job of balancing the artistic with the accessible), Hubbard made the mistake of signing with Columbia and recording one dud after another; Windjammer (1976) and Splash (a slightly later effort for Fantasy) are low points. However, in 1977, he toured with Herbie Hancock's acoustic V.S.O.P. Quintet
and, in the 1980s, on recordings for Pablo, Blue Note, and Atlantic, he
showed that he could reach his former heights (even if much of the jazz
world had given up on him). But by the late '80s, Hubbard's
"personal problems" and increasing unreliability (not showing up for
gigs) started to really hurt him, and a few years later his once mighty
technique started to seriously falter. In late 2008, Hubbard suffered a heart attack that left him hospitalized until his death at age 70 on December 29 of that year.Freddie Hubbard's
fans can still certainly enjoy his many recordings for Blue Note,
Impulse, Atlantic, CTI, Pablo, and his first Music Masters sets.
Freddie Hubbard
Frederick Dewayne Hubbard (born April 7, 1938 in Indianapolis, Indiana) is an American jazz trumpeter.In his youth, Hubbard associated with various musicians in Indianapolis, including Wes Montgomery and Montgomery's brothers. Chet Baker was an early influence, although Hubbard soon aligned himself with the approach of Clifford Brown (and his forebears: Fats Navarro and Dizzy Gillespie).
Hubbard's jazz career began in earnest after moving to New York City in 1958. While there, he worked with Sonny Rollins, Slide Hampton, J. J. Johnson, Philly Joe Jones, Oliver Nelson, and Quincy Jones, among others. He gained attention while playing with the seminal hard bop ensemble Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, appearing on such albums as Mosaic, Buhaina's Delight, and Free For All. He left the Messengers in 1964 to lead his own groups and since that time has maintained a high profile as a bandleader or featured as a special guest, but never merely a sideman.
Along with two other trumpeters also born in 1938, Lee Morgan (d. 1971) and Booker Little (d. 1961), Hubbard exerted a strong force on the direction of 1960s jazz. He recorded extensively for Blue Note Records: eight albums as a bandleader, and twenty-eight as a sideman. [1] Most of these recordings are regarded as classics. Hubbard appeared on a few early avant-garde landmarks (Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz, Eric Dolphy's Out to Lunch and John Coltrane's Ascension), but Hubbard never fully embraced free jazz, though it has influenced his playing.
After leaving Blue Note, Hubbard recorded for the Atlantic label and moved toward a more commercial style. His next label was CTI Records where he recorded his best-known works, Red Clay, First Light, and Sky Dive. By 1970, his fiery, melodic improvisation and phenomenal technique established him as perhaps the leading trumpeter of his day, but a series of commercially oriented smooth jazz albums spawned some negative criticism. After signing with Columbia Records, Hubbard's albums were almost exclusively in a commercial vein. However, in 1976, Hubbard toured and recorded with V.S.O.P., led by Herbie Hancock which presented unadulterated jazz in the style of the 1960s Miles Davis Quintet (with Hubbard taking the place of Davis).
1980s projects moved between straight-ahead and commercial styles, and Hubbard recorded for several different labels including Atlantic, Pablo, Fantasy, Elektra/Musician, and the revived Blue Note label. The slightly younger Woody Shaw was Hubbard's main jazz competitor during the 1970s and 1980s, and the two eventually recorded together on three occasions. Hubbard participated in the short-lived Griffith Park Collective, which also included Joe Henderson, Chick Corea, Stanley Clarke, and Lenny White.
Following a long setback of health problems and a serious lip injury in 1992, Hubbard is again playing and recording occasionally, but not at the high level that he set for himself during his earlier career.
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1127264
Freddie Hubbard: A Jazz Icon Remembered
AUDIO: <iframe src="https://www.npr.org/player/embed/1127264/98787455" width="100%" height="290" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" title="NPR embedded audio player"></iframe>
After personal setbacks left him unable to play, Freddie Hubbard is now making a comeback with a new album. Tom Copi/ Michael Ochs Archives/ Getty Images
Freddie Hubbard is a legendary name in jazz. In the 1960s, he was a popular and critically acclaimed trumpeter and bandleader. But by the 1980s, he had all but disappeared from the jazz scene. Now, he's attempting a comeback.
Hubbard says that the low point in his career came in the early 1990s. After he split his lip and lost the ability to play, he started drinking, suffered an ulcer and almost died.
"I started drinking Jack Daniel's to feel good, you know? Jack Daniel's and Coca-Cola," Hubbard says. "And I had an ulcer. I went over in London and I fell out. I've never passed out, but I lost four pints of blood. And the doctor said, 'You're going to clean up your body, because otherwise you're looking to go.' So I said, 'Well, I'm not ready to go, so let me cool out.'"
Hubbard's decline is more startling when you consider the heights from which he fell. In the early 1970s, Hubbard supplanted Miles Davis as the top jazz trumpeter in polls of fans and critics. Then he won a Grammy for his album First Light.
Critic Stanley Crouch calls Hubbard one of the most important and original jazz trumpeters of the last 40 years.
"From the moment he played one note," Crouch says, "you knew that was Freddie Hubbard. So he had a sound that was distinctive as Miles Davis, as Louis Armstrong, as Clifford Brown. I mean, he's one of those trumpet players.
"He's also an extraordinary powerful player — great stamina, great range," Crouch says. "He swung very hard, was a beautiful ballad player and seemed to have very few limitations in terms of getting through material, whether the material was very simple material or very complex material. He was quite a musician."
Trumpeter Wynton Marsalis says that Hubbard was one of his main influences.
"All the trumpet players in the '70s, you can hear Freddie Hubbard's sound and everything worth playing," Marsalis says. "He's such a phenomenal trumpet player — just the largeness of his sound, the velocity and the swing."
Hubbard was a little-known bebop player imitating Miles Davis solos when he dropped out of college in Indianapolis and moved to New York. In the late 1950s, the 20-year-old trumpeter shared an apartment with saxophonist and flutist Eric Dolphy, and he quickly established himself at jam sessions across the city. Hubbard says he was playing with John Coltrane at Birdland one night when Davis dropped by.
"Miles was sitting in the front of the stage," Hubbard says, "so I was copying his solo off of one of his records. And so when I saw him, I said, 'Oh my God. I've got to make up something else very quick.' So I came up with something pretty good. So when I got off the stage, he said, 'Come here, man. I want to talk to you.' So I talked to him, and then he introduced me to Alfred Lion. And he told Alfred, 'Sign him up.'"
And that's just what Alfred Lion did, signing Hubbard to a four-record deal with his legendary Blue Note label. Hubbard's reputation burned even brighter as the horn player of choice among leaders of more adventurous jazz.
In addition to turning up on Eric Dolphy's Out to Lunch, Hubbard appeared as a side man on John Coltrane's Ascension, East Broadway Rundown by Sonny Rollins, Herbie Hancock's Maiden Voyage and Oliver Nelson's Blues and the Abstract Truth.
"I don't know how I met all these people," Hubbard says, "but a lot of them came to get me, too. They sought me out because they saw I wanted to experiment, and during that period, I was changing the style of the trumpet. I was trying to play the trumpet like a saxophone. Instead of saying, 'Dah, dah, du, du, di, di, di, do,' I was saying, 'Diddly, do, du, do, dah, do, wham, bam, be,' playing more intervals. And I was trying to make those as long glissando runs, like 'trun, da, dun, dun, da, lun, da, da, da, da, da,' and trumpet players don't do that."
Hubbard says that, in all, he played on more than 300 records. Then, in the 1970s, he moved to Hollywood.
"You know, lifestyle out there is different from mine than in New York," Hubbard says. "I mean, I was in the Hollywood Hills, above the Bowl. I could look at the ocean on this side. I can hear the concerts free at the Bowl. And I had a big swimming pool. I had parties all the time, and the trumpet just was in the corner a lot of the time, when it should have been on my lips."
When he did pick up his trumpet, Hubbard played pop and R&B.
Ten years ago, Hubbard split his lip in Philadelphia by playing without warming up. He continued to perform until the lip got infected and he had to stop. In the 1990s, he says he managed to make a living on royalties when rap musicians sampled his music. Sometimes, he was even asked to play a few notes.
"I guess they'd call me up," Hubbard says, "and like I said, do 16 bars and the money was good, so I didn't feel the need to go out on the road and hustle and bustle."
After some soul searching, Hubbard says he decided to try to play real jazz again. This spring, he released his first record in six years. But the 63-year-old trumpeter says that he'll never have the chops he once had.
"It's mind-boggling to me," Hubbard says, "but I come to the conclusion that I'm not going to play that way again. And as far as giving up all the 30 choruses I used to play — and I used to play with such intensity, trying to play like Coltrane and play, you know, hard and long. I think now I have to dig down and play from my soul."
Hubbard says that he plans to continue working with his current band, The New Jazz Composers Octet, and he wants to visit schools, in part to encourage a new generation of composers.
"We've got to wind this music back to the real deal," Hubbard says. "If you've noticed, nobody's written any good songs lately. What song can you name me that's famous that they've written in the last 10 years? Like a 'Sidewinder.' You remember that? You remember 'Red Clay'? You remember Herbie [Hancock]'s 'Maiden Voyage'? You remember Miles' 'All Blues'? You see what I'm saying? But when we came along behind Coltrane and Miles, then you had to come up with some songs."
Freddie Hubbard revisits some of his best-known songs with new arrangements on his latest CD, New Colors.
https://www.arts.gov/honors/jazz/freddie-hubbard
NEA Jazz Masters
"I feel very blessed and honored to have received this award. I feel as though I owe all the great jazz trumpeters before me gratitude. I sincerely hope that I have contributed something to [the] art of playing the trumpet, writing, and composing."
One of the greatest trumpet virtuosos ever to play in the jazz idiom, and arguably one of the most influential, Freddie Hubbard played mellophone and then trumpet in his school band and studied at the Jordan Conservatory with the principal trumpeter of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra. As a teenager, he worked with Wes and Monk Montgomery and eventually founded his own band, the Jazz Contemporaries, with bassist Larry Ridley and saxophonist James Spaulding. After moving to New York in 1958, he quickly astonished fans and critics alike with his depth and maturity, playing with veteran artists Philly Joe Jones, Sonny Rollins, Slide Hampton, J.J. Johnson, Eric Dolphy, and Quincy Jones, with whom he toured Europe.
In June 1960, on the recommendation of Miles Davis, he recorded his first solo album, Open Sesame, for Blue Note Records, just weeks after his 22nd birthday. Within the next 10 months, he recorded two more albums, Goin' Up and Hub Cap, and then in August 1961 made what many consider to be his masterpiece, Ready for Freddie, which was also his first Blue Note collaboration with Wayne Shorter. That same year, Hubbard joined Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, replacing Lee Morgan. By now, he had indisputably developed his own sound and had won the DownBeat "New Star" award on trumpet.
Hubbard remained with the Jazz Messengers until 1964, when he left to form his own small group, which over the next years featured Kenny Barron and Louis Hayes. Throughout the 1960s, Hubbard also played in bands led by other legends, including Max Roach, and was a significant presence on the Blue Note recordings of Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter and Hank Mobley. Hubbard was also featured on four classic, groundbreaking 1960s sessions: Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz, Oliver Nelson's Blues and the Abstract Truth, Eric Dolphy's Out to Lunch, and John Coltrane's Ascension.
In the 1970s, Hubbard achieved his greatest popular success with a series of crossover albums on Atlantic and CTI Records, including the Grammy Award-winning First Light. He returned to acoustic hard bop in 1977 when he toured with the V.S.O.P. quintet, which teamed him with the members of Miles Davis' 1960s ensemble: Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams. In the 1980s, Hubbard again led his own groups, often in the company of Joe Henderson, and he collaborated with fellow trumpet legend Woody Shaw on a series of albums for the Blue Note and Timeless labels.
Selected Discography
Ready for Freddie, Blue Note, 1961
Hub-Tones, Blue Note, 1962
Straight Life, Columbia, 1970
Live, CLP, 1983
New Colors, Hip Bop Essence, 20
https://jazztimes.com/features/profiles/freddie-hubbard-red-clay/
Freddie Hubbard: Red Clay
The legacy of the trumpeter’s 1970 album for CTI
It was a transitional period in jazz; the tectonic shift beginning with Miles Davis’ In a Silent Way, recorded the previous year. Hubbard’s entry into this crossover territory on Red Clay was characterized by the slyly syncopated beats of drummer Lenny White on the funky 12-minute title track, an infectious groover that was soon covered by budding crossover groups all over America. Essentially an inventive line set to the chord changes of “Sunny,” Bobby Hebb’s hit song from 1966, “Red Clay” would become Hubbard’s signature tune throughout his career. As trumpeter, friend and benefactor David Weiss, who is credited with bringing Hubbard out of self-imposed retirement in the late ’90s, explains, “Later in life Freddie would always announce it as ‘the tune that’s been keeping me alive for the last 30 years.’ We played ‘Red Clay’ every night and he would quote ‘Sunny’ over it every night.”
That looseness can be attributed in large part to drummer White, whose wide beat and interactive instincts characterize the track. “Freddie always credited Lenny with that,” says Weiss. “He said Lenny came up with the beat and that he himself had nothing to do with it. He was always happy to give Lenny credit on that track.”
White, who had just turned 20 a month before the Red Clay sessions, was in the midst of an extremely productive period as a young drummer coming up on the scene. Two months earlier (Nov. 7-14, 1969) he had played on Andrew Hill’s Passing Ships for Blue Note. Before that (Aug. 19-21, 1969) he had participated in Miles Davis’ landmark Bitches Brew sessions. Later in 1970, he would play on two other cutting-edge albums: Joe Henderson’s If You’re Not Part of the Solution, You’re Part of the Problem for Milestone (Sept. 24-26) and Woody Shaw’s Blackstone Legacy for Contemporary (Dec. 8-9). “I had gotten a call from Freddie asking me if I wanted to do a record date,” recalls White. “Freddie Hubbard’s a hero to me, so naturally I said, ‘Sure, I’d love to.’ But then I asked him a stupid question. I said, ‘Who’s on it?’ And he said, ‘Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Joe Henderson.’ When he said that, inside I was screaming but outside I tried to stay cool: ‘Oh, right. No problem.'”
Hubbard directed White to show up at Van Gelder’s studio on the morning of Jan. 27. But as he was setting up his drums and trying them out, he encountered a problem. “I had this bass drum which was made from a big oil can. This guy who made it for me had fashioned it into an actual drum. He shaved off the edges and made hoops and everything. It’s the same drum I used on Bitches Brew. But as soon as I hit it, Ron Carter said, ‘No, man. That’s not gonna work. That drum is too resonant.’ So we went in the back where Rudy had a whole bunch of equipment stored. And Rudy pulled out this 26- or 28-inch bass drum that had a painting of a moonlit lake on it. I thought it sounded horrible. But that’s the bass drum that I played on the session, and for 10 years after that record came out I didn’t listen to it because I hated the way I sounded on it. It was a traumatic thing for me, because here I got an opportunity to play with all my heroes and I had to play this horrible drum. I thought I didn’t sound good so I didn’t listen to it for so long.”
Carter’s memory of this scenario is detailed in his ArtistShare biography, Finding the Right Notes, by noted jazz writer Dan Ouellette:
“I told Lenny, ‘Listen, Rudy is ready to walk up the stairs and leave and then we’d be done,'” said Ron. “We’d been there for two hours, and it was obvious the steel drums weren’t working. The song wasn’t going anywhere. Freddie was getting more and more anxious, Joe Henderson was just waiting for something to happen. The energy was dissipating, attitudes were starting to show up and the vibe was turning strange.”
Outside Ron tried to talk sense to Lenny, who still wanted to use the pans. “I can appreciate you want to get your sound,” said Ron. “But playing in the studio isn’t like playing in a club. Certain things don’t apply. In this case, your drums don’t apply. My recommendation to get some real music going here is to stash that drum in your trunk. We can’t keep doing this. I won’t keep doing this. We don’t want to be doing take 503 with that drum.”
Forty years later, trumpeter Randy Brecker is amused to learn about the whole drum controversy surrounding Red Clay. “My first thought after hearing that album back then was, ‘It sure doesn’t sound like the drums that Lenny would normally play … especially the bass drum. Something was really weird with that. The bass drum sounded real dull and kind of separated from the rest of the kit, like it was out in the middle of nowhere somehow.”
Brecker’s second impression of Red Clay concerned the presence of the young drummer amidst all those celebrated jazz veterans. “Lenny was in our small inner circle of younger guys who were jamming all the time at Dave Liebman’s place or at Mike Garson’s place. Lenny is a few years younger than me. The first time I played with him he was 17. And, to me, to see him playing on a record with Ron, Herbie, Joe and Freddie was like, ‘Wow!’ Because these were the higher-echelon cats. It was a big break for Lenny to actually be playing with them, so I was really happy about the fact that he was on that record. I didn’t know he had done this session until I had bought Red Clay, so it was a thrill to see that he had made it, so to speak.”
In the studio, Hubbard had no specific direction for the young drummer on the Red Clay session. As White recalls, “He just said, ‘Man, I need a beat. Gimme a beat.’ And that was it. So I came up with a beat and I put a triplet feel in there, and nobody has ever picked up on that. Everybody who played that tune after me didn’t actually get that beat right because they didn’t put that triplet feel in.”
White’s loosely syncopated, interactive approach to the kit-a kind of marriage between Clyde Stubblefield’s locked-down, funky-drummer signature with James Brown and Roy Haynes’ unpredictable yet bop-rooted approach-ultimately went against the grain of Creed Taylor’s slicker tendencies that came to define the CTI sound throughout the ’70s. As White recalls, “I did another CTI date with Freddie after that [1974’s Polar AC, Hubbard’s last recording for the label]. But Creed didn’t call me for a lot of record dates, because I think he really wanted a more structured and tight beat.”
White also reveals that he was not the first choice for the Red Clay sessions. “The inside story on this-and this is what I had gotten from Wallace Roney, who had talked with Tony Williams about it-[was that] apparently Freddie had originally called Tony to do the record, but Miles was kind of upset with that rhythm section playing on other people’s albums and making everybody else sound good. So Tony decided that he wasn’t going to do it, and he recommended me for the session. And it turned out to be a really nice opportunity for me, even though I did hate my bass drum sound on that record.”
The rest of this article appears in the September 2010 issue of JazzTimes.
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/30/arts/music/30hubbard.html
Music
Freddie Hubbard, Jazz Trumpeter, Dies at 70
Freddie
Hubbard, a jazz trumpeter who dazzled audiences and critics alike with
his virtuosity, his melodicism and his infectious energy, died on Monday
in Sherman Oaks, Calif. He was 70 and lived in Sherman Oaks.
The cause was complications of a heart attack he had on November 26, said his spokesman, Don Lucoff of DL Media.
Over
a career that began in the late 1950s, Mr. Hubbard earned both critical
praise and commercial success — although rarely for the same projects.
He
attracted attention in the 1960s for his bravura work as a member of
the Jazz Messengers, the valuable training ground for young musicians
led by the veteran drummer Art Blakey, and on albums by Herbie Hancock,
Wayne Shorter and many others. He also recorded several well-regarded
albums as a leader. And although he was not an avant-gardist by
temperament, he participated in three of the seminal recordings of the
1960s jazz avant-garde: Ornette Coleman’s “Free Jazz” (1960), Eric
Dolphy’s “Out to Lunch” (1964) and John Coltrane’s “Ascension” (1965).
In
the 1970s Mr. Hubbard, like many other jazz musicians of his
generation, began courting a larger audience, with albums that featured
electric instruments, rock and funk rhythms, string arrangements and
repertory sprinkled with pop and R&B songs like Paul McCartney’s
“Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey” and the Stylistics’ “Betcha by Golly,
Wow.” His audience did indeed grow, but his standing in the jazz world
diminished.
By
the start of the next decade he had largely abandoned his more
commercial approach and returned to his jazz roots. But his career came
to a virtual halt in 1992 when he damaged his lip, and although he
resumed performing and recording after an extended hiatus, he was never
again as powerful a player as he had been in his prime.
Frederick
Dewayne Hubbard was born on April 7, 1938, in Indianapolis. His first
instrument was the alto-brass mellophone, and in high school he studied
French horn and tuba as well as trumpet. After taking lessons with Max
Woodbury, the first trumpeter of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, at
the Arthur Jordan Conservatory of Music, he performed locally with,
among others, the guitarist Wes Montgomery and his brothers.
Mr.
Hubbard moved to New York in 1958 and almost immediately began working
with groups led by the saxophonist Sonny Rollins, the drummer Philly Joe
Jones and others. His profile rose in 1960 when he joined the roster of
Blue Note, a leading jazz label; it rose further the next year when
he was hired by Blakey, widely regarded as the music’s premier talent
scout.
Adding
his own spin to a style informed by Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis and
Clifford Brown, Mr. Hubbard played trumpet with an unusual mix of
melodic inventiveness and technical razzle-dazzle. The critics took
notice. Leonard Feather called him “one of the most skilled, original
and forceful trumpeters of the ’60s.”
After
leaving Blakey’s band in 1964, Mr. Hubbard worked for a while with
another drummer-bandleader, Max Roach, before forming his own group in
1966. Four years later he began recording for CTI, a record company that
would soon become known for its aggressive efforts to market jazz
musicians beyond the confines of the jazz audience.
His
first albums for the label, notably “Red Clay,” contained some of the
best playing of his career and, except for slicker production and the
presence of some electric instruments, were not significantly different
from his work for Blue Note. But his later albums on CTI, and the ones
he made after leaving the label for Columbia in 1974, put less and less
emphasis on improvisation and relied more and more on glossy
arrangements and pop appeal. They sold well, for the most part, but were
attacked, or in some cases simply ignored, by jazz critics. Within a
few years Mr. Hubbard was expressing regrets about his career path.
Most
of his recordings as a leader from the early 1980s on, for Pablo,
Musicmasters and other labels, were small-group sessions emphasizing his
gifts as an improviser that helped restore his critical reputation. But
in 1992 he suffered a setback from which he never fully recovered.
By
Mr. Hubbard’s own account, he seriously injured his upper lip that year
by playing too hard, without warming up, once too often. The lip became
infected, and for the rest of his life it was a struggle for him to
play with his trademark strength and fire. As Howard Mandel explained
in a 2008 Down Beat article, “His ability to project and hold a clear
tone was damaged, so his fast finger flurries often result in blurts and
blurs rather than explosive phrases.”
Mr.
Hubbard nonetheless continued to perform and record sporadically,
primarily on fluegelhorn rather than on the more demanding trumpet. In
his last years he worked mostly with the trumpeter David Weiss, who
featured Mr. Hubbard as a guest artist with his group, the New Jazz
Composers Octet, on albums released under Mr. Hubbard’s name in 2001 and
2008, and at occasional nightclub engagements.
Mr.
Hubbard won a Grammy Award for the album “First Light” in 1972 and was
named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 2006.
He is survived by his wife of 35 years, Briggie Hubbard, and his son, Duane.
Mr.
Hubbard was once known as the brashest of jazzmen, but his personality
as well as his music mellowed in the wake of his lip problems. In a 1995
interview with Fred Shuster of Down Beat, he offered some sober advice
to younger musicians: “Don’t make the mistake I made of not taking care
of myself. Please, keep your chops cool and don’t overblow.”
A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A18 of the New York edition with the headline: Freddie Hubbard, Jazz Trumpeter, Is Dead at 70.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/goings-on/freddie-hubbard-r-i-p
http://www.suzannepittson.com/hubreviews.html
The New York City Jazz Record (October 2010)
Although he’s considered one of jazz’s greatest trumpeters, Freddie Hubbard is not generally viewed as a composer or as one whose songs are often sung. He had success with “Up Jumped Spring,” and “Little Sunflower,” but, otherwise, his originals have tended to remain challenging instrumentals.
Vocalist Suzanne Pittson, who considers Hubbard one of her most important influences, met the trumpeter in 2008 (a few months before he died) and gained permission to record several of his songs with new lyrics written by her and/or her husband, pianist Jeff Pittson. Out of the Hub features the singer, Jeff Pittson and an all-star group: bassist John Patitucci, drummer Willie Jones III, and on five of the 11 songs, trumpeter Jeremy Pelt and saxophonist Steve Wilson.
Three of the performances are jazz or pop standards that Hubbard recorded (“You’re My Everything.” “Moment to Moment,” and Betcha By Golly, Wow!”). Of the eight originals by the trumpeter, six have lyrics by Suzanne, Jeff and/or son Evan Pittson. While “Up Jumped Spring,” which utilizes Abbey Lincoln’s lyrics, is both joyful and conventional, many of the other songs — “Our Own (Gibraltar), “Out of the Hub (One of Another Kind)” and “We’re Having a Crisis (Crisis)” — are not easy to sing. Yet Pittson makes her interpretations sound fairly effortless, both in her often up-tempo melody statements and her scat-filled improvisations.
Sprinkled throughout are notable solos by Pelt, whose playing hints at both the sound and ideas of Hubbard; by the ever-inventive Wilson, who alternates between alto and soprano saxes; and by Patitucci and Jeff Pittson. But the star of the session is Suzanne Pittson. Her voice is particularly lovely on the ballads, even while navigating the complex and haunting vocals of “Bright Sun (Lament for Booker).”
During an era when jazz singers struggle to find fresh repertoire, Suzanne Pittson offers an appealing option with these “new” Freddie Hubbard songs.
http://www.freddiehubbardmusic.com/landing.php
B I O G R A P H Y
Geoffrey Himes has written about jazz and other genres of music on a regular basis for the Washington Post since 1977 and has also written for JazzTimes, Paste, Rolling Stone, New York Times, Smithsonian Magazine, National Public Radio, and others. His book on Bruce Springsteen, Born in the U.S.A.,
was published by Continuum Books in 2005 and he’s currently working on a
major book for the Country Music Hall of Fame. He has been honored for
Music Feature Writing by the Deems Taylor/ASCAP Awards (2003, 2005, 2014
and 2015), the New Orleans Press Awards, the Abell Foundation Awards
and the Music Journalism Awards.
https://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Trumpeter-Freddie-Hubbard-celebrates-70th-3221250.php
For a guy who's considered to be one of the four or five greatest trumpet players in jazz history, Freddie Hubbard sure has taken some lumps.
Back in the '70s, when adopting electric instruments and rock stylings earned jazz artists the scarlet "sellout" S - unlike today, when it's a badge of innovation - it seemed Hubbard took the most flak, even though many of his peers were doing it. It was as if a collective "Freddie, say it ain't so!" went up. It's why Hubbard's producer and arranger, trumpeter David Weiss, calls Hubbard the Barry Bonds
"He's the one guy who seems to be taking the brunt of the s- for everybody's whatever," Weiss says, "whether it's fusion, irresponsibility, drug use."
Hubbard doesn't get too exercised over it, though.
"They've got to jump on somebody," he says.
Fact is, he's got bigger things to worry about. For
example, his own trumpet turned on him. This occurred in 1992, when
Hubbard was on a pressure-cooker tour that brought him to New York,
Finland and Japan in a single week. At the Blue Note in New York, "I was
playing so hard, my lip popped," he says. A blister formed, but instead
of taking some time off, Hubbard flew straight to Finland for another
gig, and the blister popped onstage.
"Blood was everywhere, man," Hubbard says.
Then the lip became infected. When it failed to heal, a doctor ordered a biopsy. It came back negative, but Hubbard kept trying to play, which wasn't good for his lip or his reputation. Eventually, he slowed down so much it looked as if he was going to cash in his career, at which point, in the late '90s, Weiss rode to the rescue.
"I call him my baby," Hubbard says, chortling heartily. "He brought me back to work. He called me out of the blue and said, 'C'mon, Freddie, you've got to play some more.' "
On April 7, Hubbard turns 70, and he's celebrating with a series of shows Thursday through Saturday at the San Francisco Yoshi's. Four of his band members - vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson, alto saxophonist James Spaulding, drummer Lenny White and pianist George Cables - have been playing with Hubbard since the '60s, and Spaulding grew up with him in Indianapolis. The other players for the birthday shows are tenor saxophonist Craig Handy, bassist Dwayne Burno and Weiss.
"It'll be good to be back at Yoshi's. I used to play there all the time, But what with my lip, they've been scared to book me," he says, laughing.
Hubbard is speaking by phone from his Sherman Oaks home
in Southern California's San Fernando Valley. He's lived in the area
since the early '70s, the period of his brightest stardom, when he was
putting out big-selling records such as "Sky Dive," "Red Clay" and "First Light," which won a Grammy for the title song.
By then he had already made dozens of records as a leader and played on hundreds of others. He wasn't only the hardest-working trumpeter in show business, he was also the best, with a gleaming, quicksilver sound that combined the brass of Louis Armstrong with the bebop power of Clifford Brown and the melodic grace of Miles Davis.
"Nobody's played longer, higher, harder or faster than Freddie Hubbard, for more years," Weiss says by phone from New York. "Nobody. Not even close. There's nobody you can compare him to."
Hubbard was lucky, of course, to come up in an era where jazz giants not only roamed the Earth, but a lot of them also lived around the corner. That was the '60s, when the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn was something of a mecca for jazz artists.
"I lived with (saxophonist) Eric Dolphy for a year and a half," Hubbard says. "(Pianist) McCoy Tyner lived down the block." He ticks off the name of his neighbors: "(Bassist) Paul Chambers, (pianists) Cedar Walton, Bobby Timmons, Kenny Barron, Wynton Kelly."
The critical mass of these artists and the camaraderie among them are what distinguishes that era from today's, according to Hubbard.
"We would play with each other and study," he says. "I used to go over to somebody's house every day. Sonny Rollins. I would go over to his house and ask him questions, practice with him. Coltrane, too."
Not that it was easy for Hubbard to get accepted by this crowd when he first arrived in New York from Indianapolis in 1958.
"It took about a month before I had a chance to sit in" at the jam sessions, he says "They wouldn't let me. Finally, I just took my horn and walked up on the bandstand."
He made his mark, but paid gigs came slowly at first because, he says, everyone wanted trumpet players to sound like Dizzy Gillespie or Davis.
"I was playing like Clifford, and I met Miles, and he said (Hubbard imitates Davis' raspy growl), 'You like Clifford?' And I said, 'Yeah, I think he's the baddest around.' And Miles said, 'Nah, he plays too much. He's too staccato. He plays too many notes.'
"Then he said to me, 'Freddie, you play too many notes. Ain't nobody can hear all that s-.' But he got me my first gig with Blue Note records."
Hubbard cut about a dozen records for Blue Note, including "Hub Cap" and "Ready for Freddie," and he played on countless classics for the label: Wayne Shorter's "Speak No Evil," Dolphy's "Out to Lunch," Herbie Hancock's "Takin' Off." It wasn't just Blue Note, of course. Hubbard played on John Coltrane's "Ascension," Ornette Coleman's "Free Jazz," Oliver Nelson's "The Blues and the Abstract Truth" and far too many more albums to name.
"As a trumpet player, nobody's been able to do what he can do on the instrument," Weiss says. "It's just ridiculous."
Musicians who hired Hubbard "could expand how they wrote things because they knew Freddie would be able to play them," Weiss adds. "And that makes great records possible."
Now, of course, the spiel on Hubbard is that he's lost his chops. But, Weiss says, "he's still capable of doing things weakened that nobody else can do." For proof, listen to Hubbard's comeback album, "New Colors," released in 2001 on Hip Bop. Backed by Weiss' New Jazz Composers Octet, Hubbard's genius comes through on flugelhorn played on several of his classic tunes. Some of the pyrotechnics are missing from his arsenal, but his sense of melody and rhythm are 100 percent.
Hubbard has another CD with the octet in the can and an all-star date with drummer Louis Hayes, pianist Roland Hanna and bassist Ron Carter due for Blue Note.
"The trumpet is rough, man, especially the way I play," Hubbard says. "I used to play all over the horn, like a saxophone. It takes a little more stamina. I used to play so long ... 30 choruses. People don't do that s- no more."
So, yes, his trumpet struck back at him. Not that he holds it against the instrument.
"I was lucky. I got to play with everybody I wanted to play with. And that trumpet took me all over the world, man. I really appreciate it."
FREDDIE HUBBARD & FRIENDS 70TH BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION: 8 and 10 p.m. Thurs.-Sat. $24-$32. Yoshi's, 1330 Fillmore St., San Francisco. (415) 655-5600, sf.yoshis.com.
https://www.nuvo.net/music/album-reviews-five-forward-thinking-freddie-hubbard-albums/article_a8ddc60c-ae65-5e34-85b7-7e8651df5cf8.html
https://cageian.wordpress.com/2013/02/15/ilhan-mimaroglu-freddie-hubbards-sing-me-a-song-of-songmy/
Ilhan Mimaroglu
In July last year, the strange story of İlhan Mimaroğlu came to a close due to complications from pneumonia.
The son of a famed Turkish architect, Mimaroğlu moved to New York in the 1950s and eventually became an integral, and relatively undersung inventor and pioneer in the John Cage-championed realm of electronic and avant garde composition exploding behind the scenes in the city at the time. Mimaroğlu thrived as both a composer in his own right, and as a producer and owner of Finnadar Records; working with, recording and releasing works by a wide range of musical titans – including Charles Mingus, John Cage, Edgar Varese and, to somewhat bizarre effect, Freddie Hubbard.
One of Mimaroğlu’s defining characteristics – and arguably his
greatest contribution to 20th century American music – was in his
marriage of jazz with classical avant garde & musique concréte. As
an executive and producer at Atlantic Music, Mimaroğlu worked mostly in
the late-60s and early-70s, recording the likes of Charles Mingus, John
Lee Hooker, and Ornette Coleman, and he kept his expertise and intrigue
with tape music and minimalism somewhat sidelined. Mingus’ Mingus Moves
from 1973 (produced by Mimaroğlu), for example, plays like a relatively
straight-forward post-bop record from the period, albeit with a
slightly more “searching and unpredictable” style. Whereas the unusual Sing Me a Song of Songmy,
made in collaboration with the normally less adventurous Freddie
Hubbard, was an occasion where Mimaroğlu utilised his stature and the
tools at his disposal to create a high-budget piece of avant garde music
– a fusion of post-bop with musique concréte, united by a generally
“anti-war” message, that still doesn’t quite sound like anything that’s
come before or since.
Freddie Hubbard was arguably the only rival to Miles Davis’ crown as jazz’s greatest trumpeter (& flugelhornist) at the close of the 1960s, and while Davis explored modality and the influence of psychedelia and expanding timbral colour on his music with In A Silent Way & Bitches Brew, Hubbard introduced soul and funk in a much more subtle way on his Herbie Hancock-informed 1970s opuses, Red Clay & Straight Life, expanding the pallet of his music, yet still remaining firmly on Earth while Davis explored outer space. Furthermore, Hubbard’s First Light, recorded after Sing Me a Song of Songmy in 1971 saw Hubbard become even less musically adventurous (although still brilliant), injecting string arrangements into the mix in an uncharacteristically high-budget affair, creating an album of soul & big-band influenced fusion. All of which make his involvement in Mimaroğlu’s strange Songmy project all the stranger.
The “Songmy” in Sing Me a Song of Songmy, undoubtedly must refer to “Son My”, a village in South Vietnam and the location of the mass murder, rape and mutilation of some 400 unarmed civilians by the US Army during the tumultuous events of the US’ Vietnam campaign in 1968. The event caused outrage in the States, and was one of the driving factors in the burgeoning anti-war sentiment in the nation that arguably cost the US the war later in the 70s.
As afroementioned, Mimaroğlu’s album can take rank with the multitude of similar anti-war compositions coming out of both popular and jazz music at the time, and furthermore sit comfortably alongside the “Afro” focused music culture of the day, when the likes of Archie Shepp, Melvin van Peebles and Gil Scott-Heron really put the African back into African-American. The record takes the form of a montage, patch-working its pieces together in an almost Dark Side of the Moon fashion.
Album opener, Threnody for Sharon Tate, sees synthesizer
tones, dissonant string arrangements and other processed sounds bed a
rising crescendo of strange recitations about death, music and love –
voices in the heads of the young soldiers sent to murder innocent
Vietnamese. “I feel I can hold a guitar, I know I can hold a know, I think I can kill…” This quickly segues into This Combat I Know,
a track that starts as a relatively straight-forward post-bop,
piano-led romp by Hubbard & his Quintet, before gradually
introducing Mimaroğlu’s own spacey synthesizer work, and ultimately
losing its romp atmosphere and drifting along sparsely morphing from
soulful to jazz to dissonant avant-garde, reintroducing recitations by
Turkish poet, Fazıl Hüsnü Dağlarca (“This is combat, do whatever you want, burn my sky…but don’t burn my prize cows”). This atmosphere of horro-movie dissonance with poetic anti-war recitation continues into The Crowd,
a musique conréte montage littered with moments courtesy of Hubbard’s
quintet as well as the aforementioned string orchestra and the
Barnard-Columbia Chorus, becoming increasingly unhinged like Jazz’s own Lumpy Gravy.
The album’s highlight is arguably the couplet of two shorter pieces – Monodrama and Black Soldier –
that open the LP’s second side. Mimaroğlu creates a processed
atmosphere of reversed horn and synthesizers, while Hubbard improvises a
reverbed bugle call over the madness. This segues nicely into
Stravinsky-esque string arrangements, twisted by Mimaroğlu’s production,
harkening Hubbard himself to recite another Dağlarca passage,
translated into an African-American context.
1 Threnody For Sharon Tate 2:04
2 This Is Combat, I Know 8:57
3 The Crowd 7:03
4 What A Good Time For A Kent State 1:27
Info
Download
Footnotes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freddie_Hubbard
Frederick Dewayne Hubbard (April 7, 1938 – December 29, 2008) was an American jazz trumpeter.[1] He was known primarily for playing in the bebop, hard bop, and post-bop styles from the early 1960s onwards. His unmistakable and influential tone contributed to new perspectives for modern jazz and bebop.[2]
Then in May 1961, Hubbard played on Olé Coltrane, John Coltrane's final recording session for Atlantic Records. Together with Eric Dolphy and Art Davis, Hubbard was the only sideman who appeared on both Olé and Africa/Brass, Coltrane's first album with Impulse!. Later, in August 1961, Hubbard recorded Ready for Freddie (Blue Note), which was also his first collaboration with saxophonist Wayne Shorter. Hubbard joined Shorter later in 1961 when he replaced Lee Morgan in Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. He played on several Blakey recordings, including Caravan, Ugetsu, Mosaic, and Free for All. In all, during the 1960s, he recorded eight studio albums as a bandleader for Blue Note, and more than two dozen as a sideman.[4] Hubbard remained with Blakey until 1966, leaving to form the first of several small groups of his own, which featured, among others, his Blue note associate James Spaulding, pianist Kenny Barron and drummer Louis Hayes. This group recorded for Atlantic.
It was during this time that he began to develop his own sound, distancing himself from the early influences of Clifford Brown and Morgan, and won the DownBeat jazz magazine "New Star" award on trumpet.[5]
Throughout the 1960s Hubbard played as a sideman on some of the most important albums from that era, including Oliver Nelson's The Blues and the Abstract Truth, Eric Dolphy's Out to Lunch!, Herbie Hancock's Maiden Voyage, and Wayne Shorter's Speak No Evil.[6] Hubbard was described as "the most brilliant trumpeter of a generation of musicians who stand with one foot in 'tonal' jazz and the other in the atonal camp".[7] Though he never fully embraced the free jazz of the 1960s, he appeared on two of its landmark albums: Coleman's Free Jazz and Coltrane's Ascension, as well as on Sonny Rollins' 1966 "New Thing" track "East Broadway Run Down" with Elvin Jones and Jimmy Garrison.
Hubbard achieved his greatest popular success in the 1970s with a series of albums for Creed Taylor and his record label CTI Records, overshadowing Stanley Turrentine, Hubert Laws, and George Benson.[8] Although his early 1970s jazz albums Red Clay, First Light, Straight Life, and Sky Dive were particularly well received and considered among his best work, the albums he recorded later in the decade were attacked by critics for their commercialism. First Light won a 1972 Grammy Award and included pianists Herbie Hancock and Richard Wyands, guitarists Eric Gale and George Benson, bassist Ron Carter, drummer Jack DeJohnette, and percussionist Airto Moreira.[9] In 1994, Hubbard, collaborating with Chicago jazz vocalist/co-writer Catherine Whitney, had lyrics set to the music of First Light.[10]
In 1977 Hubbard joined with Herbie Hancock, Tony Williams, Ron Carter and Wayne Shorter, members of the mid-sixties Miles Davis Quintet, for a series of performances. Several live recordings of this group were released as V.S.O.P, V.S.O.P. The Quintet, V.S.O.P. Tempest in the Colosseum (all 1977) and V.S.O.P. Live Under the Sky (1979).[2]
Hubbard's trumpet playing was featured on the track "Zanzibar", on the 1978 Billy Joel album 52nd Street (the 1979 Grammy Award Winner for Best Album). The track ends with a fade during Hubbard's performance. An "unfaded" version was released on the 2004 Billy Joel box set My Lives.
Following a long setback of health problems and a serious lip injury in 1992 where he ruptured his upper lip and subsequently developed an infection, Hubbard was again playing and recording occasionally, even if not at the high level that he set for himself during his earlier career.[11] His best records ranked with the finest in his field.[12]
On December 29, 2008, Hubbard died in Sherman Oaks, California from complications caused by a heart attack he suffered on November 26.[13]
Freddie Hubbard had close ties to the Jazz Foundation of America in his later years. He is quoted as saying, "When I had congestive heart failure and couldn't work, The Jazz Foundation paid my mortgage for several months and saved my home! Thank God for those people."[14] The Jazz Foundation of America's Musicians' Emergency Fund took care of him during times of illness. After his death, Hubbard's estate requested that tax-deductible donations be made in his name to the Jazz Foundation of America.[14]
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/goings-on/freddie-hubbard-r-i-p
Freddie
Hubbard, who was perhaps the most skillful, fluent, and versatile jazz
trumpeter of the nineteen-sixties, died yesterday, at age seventy. Old
enough to be raised on bebop and young enough to assimilate heady
avant-garde stylings, he was a high-flying sideman for Art Blakey and
also the answer to a fascinating trivia question: who was the only
musician to appear on both Ornette Coleman’s “Free Jazz” and John
Coltrane’s “Ascension,” the era’s two most celebrated large-group
settings for collective improvisation? Hubbard’s own dates as a leader,
most of them for Blue Note, stuck close to the hard-bop tradition of
harmonically intricate reframings of the blues. His debut as a leader,
“Open Sesame,” from 1960, finds him ideally paired with the great,
short-lived tenor saxophonist Tina Brooks, who returned the favor six
days later and had Hubbard alongside him for the album “True Blue.”
Perhaps his single greatest recorded performance was as a sideman on Herbie Hancock’s “Maiden Voyage,” which features, in effect, Miles Davis’s quintet with Hubbard in Davis’s stead. After a decade in the haze of fusion, Hubbard returned to a changed jazz world; his lip injury in 1992 curtailed his playing in recent years. This clip, from 1963, of the twenty-five-year-old Hubbard with Blakey (and the powerful bassist Reggie Workman), displays his clarion-bright tone, amazingly rapid articulation, adventuresome chromaticism, and sure sense of drama.
Perhaps his single greatest recorded performance was as a sideman on Herbie Hancock’s “Maiden Voyage,” which features, in effect, Miles Davis’s quintet with Hubbard in Davis’s stead. After a decade in the haze of fusion, Hubbard returned to a changed jazz world; his lip injury in 1992 curtailed his playing in recent years. This clip, from 1963, of the twenty-five-year-old Hubbard with Blakey (and the powerful bassist Reggie Workman), displays his clarion-bright tone, amazingly rapid articulation, adventuresome chromaticism, and sure sense of drama.
http://www.suzannepittson.com/hubreviews.html
REVIEWS / OUT OF THE HUB: THE MUSIC OF FREDDIE HUBBARD
The New York City Jazz Record / Andrew Vélez / October 2010
L.A. Jazz Scene / Scott Yanow / March 2011
All About Jazz / Wilbert Sostre / March 2011
Jazz Inside New York / Bob Gish
JazzTimes (March 2011)
Pasatiempo / Paul Weideman / March 2011
Jazz Weekly / George W. Harris / September 2011
JAZZIZ / Mark Holston / Spring 2011
L.A. Jazz Scene / Scott Yanow / March 2011
All About Jazz / Wilbert Sostre / March 2011
Jazz Inside New York / Bob Gish
JazzTimes (March 2011)
Pasatiempo / Paul Weideman / March 2011
Jazz Weekly / George W. Harris / September 2011
JAZZIZ / Mark Holston / Spring 2011
The New York City Jazz Record (October 2010)
Andrew Vélez
Her voice is a high and sweet soprano. She can
scat like nobody’s business. There’s some kinship with the sound of
Diane Schuur but warmer. She credits John Coltrane, Carmen McRae and
Sarah Vaughan as her influences, but like all genuinely innovative
musicians, Suzanne Pittson’s creativity, musicianship and
improvisational skills are off and away on their own, ably demonstrated
in the company of her fine band. Out of the Hub: The Music of Freddie
Hubbard, Pittson’s third recording, salutes one of her musical heroes
and mentors. One cannot speak of Hubbard and his technically virtuosic
trumpeting and composing without mentioning his participation in two
seminal 1960 classics, Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz and, shortly
thereafter, Oliver Nelson’s Blues and the Abstract Truth. The latter was
saluted by and the title of Pittson’s first recording.
The opener, “Our Own” (based on “Gibraltar”), a
Hubbard tune with Catherine Whitney lyrics, gets things off at a
swinging pace. Sounding a bit like a vocalese cousin to the Annie Ross
of the Lambert, Hendricks and Ross days, Pittson is light and fun as
trumpeter Jeremy Pelt swings behind her husband Jeff Pittson’s sharp
company on piano, solid have-a-goodtime music. Another Hubbard tune is
the meditative “Up Jumped Spring”, with characteristically beautiful
lyrics by the late Abbey Lincoln. The swinging is at a gentler pace,
with Pittson’s piano and Willie Jones III’s brushes making for
empathetic company. Pittson sings her own lyrics to Hubbard’s “Like A
Byrd” (“Byrd Like”) and “We’re Having a Crisis” (“Crisis”), appealingly
scatting, floating, soaring and speeding along. Her fun with the music
is clear, irresistible and still further evidence that we have a fresh
new jazzbird to celebrate.
L.A. Jazz Scene (March 2011)
by Scott Yanow
Suzanne Pittson, a fine vocalist who is a
superior scat singer, is based in New York. On Out Of The Hub, she
performs eight Freddie Hubbard compositions and three other songs that
the late great trumpeter had recorded. For five of the numbers she (and
often her husband keyboardist Jeff Pittson) wrote new lyrics, two of
which include vocalese based on Hubbard's recorded solos. Using an
all-star group (Jeff Pittson, bassist John Patitucci, drummer Willie
Jones III. and, on five of the songs, trumpeter Jeremy Pelt and Steve
Wilson on alto and soprano), Suzanne Pittson holds her own with her
illustrious sidemen and does Hubbard's music justice. To sing such tunes
as “Gibraltar,” “One Of Another Kind” and “Crisis” is not an easy task,
but she makes it sound natural, swinging all the way and improvising
within Hubbard's style. Highly recommended and available from
www.suzannepittson.com.
All About Jazz (March 2011)
By Wilbert Sostre
The vocalese and scatting tradition is alive and
well in singer Suzanne Pittson. With “Out of the Hub: The Music of
Freddie Hubbard,” Pittson continues to establish herself as one of the
best singers on today’s jazz scene.
Out of the Hub includes tunes written by or
associated with trumpet legend Freddie Hubbard, with Pittson writing or
co-writing five lyrics, which Hubbard approved just three months before
his passing in 2008.
To honor Hubbard, Pittson recruited a group of
extraordinaire musicians, including trumpeter Jeremy Pelt and bassist
John Patitucci, who add – along with saxophonist Steve Wilson and the
rest of Pittson’s quintet – dazzling improvisations throughout.
More than just a singer, Suzanne Pittson is a
jazz musician. With a fluid phrasing and stunning tone, Pittson uses
her voice as another instrument, improvising and playing with the
melodies. Pittson’s striking sense of melody and amazing vocal range
allow her to express a vast palette of colors and txtures on swinging
tracks like “True Vision,” “You’re My Everything” and “We’re Having a
Crisis,” and on ballads including “Bright Sun,” “Moment to Moment” and
“Betcha by Golly, Wow!” Following in the steps of the great Ella
Fitzgerald, Pittson is also a master of the scatting technique, as shown
on “Our Own” and “Out of the Hub.”
All the arrangements are by pianist/husband Jeff
Pittson, and the cover design is a creation of their son Evan, who also
wrote the lyrics to “Out of the Hub.”
Jazz Inside New York
By Bob Gish
Some controversy exists over just what makes a
jazz vocalist. Listen to Suzanne Pittson and you’ll know. So it’s a
perfect match for her to make a recording devoted exclusively to the
compositions of the inimitable jazz composer and musician Freddie
Hubbard. Pittson does his songs up royally and the musicians on the
project are up to the task too, delivering first rate performances on
every track.
Jeremy Pelt’s trumpet points the way with great
unison lines with Pittson. The other Pittson, husband Jeff on piano,
lives up to the standards of their shared names—and their mutual love of
jazz.
Suzanne Pittson more or less fell in love with
jazz as a teenager when she first heard Freddie Hubbard play with Wayne
Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams. That was an
imprint to last a lifetime, taking Ms. Pittson through classical
training and a graduate degree in music but always leading her back to
jazz and the yearning to perform as a jazz vocalist. Her homage here to
Hubbard is an extension of years of transcribing and singing Hubbard’s
songs and harmonies.
All eleven tracks live up to the genius and
expected quality associated with Hubbard and his legacy. You can’t just
spontaneously sing the songs heard on this recording, and still get the
lyrics out of your mouth in an intelligible way. Improvisation is
another matter and its here in grand order – Pittson’s scatting growing
out of her understanding of theory and the piano.
“Out of the Hub,” the title track is a tour de
force, full of all the runs and riffs of a joyful jazz ride. The same
goes for “Up Jumped Spring,” a personal favorite of this writer’s. But
then who’s to choose, all of the songs here, as conceived and arranged,
sung and played are the stuff to blow you away—much in the same way
Pittson was blown away when she first heard Hubbard when she was a
teenager.
Every musician, of whatever persuasion, can point
to that special time when they knew music would be a large if not the
controlling part of their life. Maybe it’s listening to Johnny Smith at
Eddie’s Lounge in Colorado Springs those many years back which seem as
fresh and recent as yesterday, if not this morning. Each person
provides their own lyrics and memory of of melody.
So there’s an extra benefit to this CD, and
that’s empathizing with Pittson’s inspiration and motivation for Hubbard
as a hero. One could do no better than the result, only a partial
culmination, heard in Pittson’s beautiful vocals. Check out “Bright
Sun” a poignant account of every artist’s, especially jazz artists’
compulsion for epic quest.
JazzTimes (March 2011)
Two albums ago, for her recording debut, vocalist
Suzanne Pittson shaped an appropriately abstract tribut to Oliver
nelson’s essential The Blues and the Abstract Truth. By association,
she also honored one of her foremost jazz heroes, Freddie Hubbard. Now
Pittson, whose intervening project was a penetrating Coltrane
exploration, is back with a full-length salute to Hubbard.
In June 2008, Pittson and her husband
pianist-arranger Jeff Pittson, visited Hubbard and asked permission to
record five of his compositions, refitted with their lyrics. That
September, Hubbard approved their request. Three months later he dies,
making this initiative all the more significant. To paint vocal
canvases that match the power and glory of Hubbard’s work is a tall –
some would say insurmountable order. Pittson’s ability to rise
fearlessly to the challenge goes beyond mere vocal legerdemain,
revealing soul-deep creative empathy. While it takes a true Hubbard
connoisseur to fully grasp the profundity of Pittson’s homage, it only
requires a working pair of ears to appreciate her effervescent
transformation of “Gibraltar” into “Our Own,” or the cunning way in
which she narrows the spectrum of “Crisis” to focus specifically on
romantic tumult or the unimpeded gaiety of her “Up Jumped Spring.”
Of course, none of this magic is achieved
single-handedly. In addition to her husband, Pittson is surrounded with
equally sapient disciples, including trumpeter/flugelhornist Jeremy
Pelt, saxophonist Steve Wilson, bassist John Patitucci and drummer
Willie Jones III.
Pasatiempo (March 2011)
By Paul Weideman
Suzanne Pittson grew up listening to jazz and
loved singing Freddie Hubbard’s solos. Her tribute CD opens with his
composition “Our Own (Gibraltar)” and a bright intro courtesy of soprano
saxophonist Steve Wilson, bassist John Patitucci and drummer Willie
Jones III. Pittson is just reckless enough with her intonation and
rhythmic attack (shades of Flora Purim), works satisfyingly with and
without vibrato, and is a killer scat artist. The song also offers
swell solos by trumpeter Jeremy Pelt and pianist Jeff Pittson, the
singer’s husband. On “Out of the Hub (One of Another Kind),” Jeff
Pittson creates a romantic wash of piano strings, Patitucci sets up a
bouncier beat, Wilson burns, and the singer paints with lyrics penned by
her son, Evan Pittson. She and her husband sought out Hubbard at a New
York jazz club in June 2008 (six months before the jazz veteran died at
age 70) to get his blessing on this and four other songs on which the
Pittsons innovated lyrics. She remembers trumpeter Booker Little on
“Bright Sun,” performing the Hubbard song – “He played with scalar
exhilaration/pushing past the last generation” – with her beautifully
jazz voice and phrasing and a vocalese segment based on Hubbard’s solo
from 1962’s Hub-Tones. Her voice is a virtual horn on “True Visions
(True Colors).” All in all, it’s really cool vocal and instrumental
jazz.
Jazz Weekly (September, 2011)
By George W. Harris
This is the kind of record I like: take a
songbook (in this case, trumpeter Freddie Hubbard’s) and do it with a
completely different instrument, in this case with the soothing voice of
Suzanne Pittson. Oh, sure, she allows some room for Jeremy Pelt’s
trumpet (good call!), as well as Steve Wilson’s saxes, but for the most
part she just lets it ride with the rhythm team of Jeff Pittson/p, John
Patitucci/b and Willi Jones III/dr for literally lyrical takes of “Byrd
Like,” “Lament For Booker” (done in vocalese) and “Up Jumped Spring.”
The two horns provide excellent framework on an exciting “Gibraltar” and
assertive “Crisis” with Pittson executing the tricky course with grace
and clarity. A fitting tribute to not only the great late trumpeter, but
to the art of singing.
JAZZIZ — Sing a Song of Freddie: Suzanne Pittson pays
vocal tribute to an integral influence. (Spring 2011)
Mark Holston
As a graduate student at San Francisco State
University in the 1970s, vocalist Suzanne Pittson set aside her dreams
of becoming a classical pianist when she developed hand problems. But
the classical world’s loss was the jazz world’s gain, as she refocused
on the improvisor’s art.
Not that she was a stranger to the genre. Her
family had listened to jazz while she was growing up. And when Pittson
chose to devote herself to jazz, she thought back to an artist whose
music she had fallen in love with years before: Freddie Hubbard. The
trumpeter and composer, whose songs she vocally interprets on her album
Out of the Hub: The Music of Freddie Hubbard (Vineland), provided the
perfect point of entry.
“I just wanted to learn the jazz language,”
recalls Pittson of her initial foray into the world of improvisational
music. “I couldn’t seem to make the switch as a pianist, so it made
sense to start singing. I started writing out solos, and Freddie’s
recordings were among the first that I was interested in. HIs harmonic
concept and his language as a soloist have always intrigued me. He was
so strong as a soloist, you could almost say he had no peers. I’d go to
hear him and was always blown away.”
“Byrdlike” was one of the first Hubbard
originals she tackled , its degree of difficulty establishing a high
standard for what would follow. “That set my goal, which was to learn
how to sing the jazz language like a horn,” she reflects. “I was
studying how approached different chords, and what he did was very
complex.”
Now teaching jazz-vocal studies at the City
College of New York, Pittson never forgot her crucial, early influence.
Her fascination with Hubbard, who died in late 2008, is reflected in the
lovingly rendered and stylistically expansive survey of his music on
Out of the Hub. The CD features husband Jeff Pittson’s arrangements and
keyboards, along with an A-list band, comprising trumpeter and
flugelhorn player Jeremy Pelt, alto saxophonist Steve Wilson, bassist
John Patitucci and drummer Willie Jones III.
Out of the Hub comes more than a decade after
Pittson first experimented with singing the works of another jazz giant
on Resolution: A Remembrance of John Coltrane. With the Hubbard project,
however, the singer was able to meet the source of her inspiration.
Visiting the trumpeter at the Iridium Jazz Club in New York City,
Pittson obtained his blessing to add lyrics to tunes such as “Crisis,”
“The Melting Pot” and the aforementioned “Byrdlike.” Contributions by
Jeff and their 18-year-old son, Evan, made it truly a family effort.
With no prompting, violist and bassist Evan simply presented his mother
with lyrics to the title tune, based on Hubbard’s “One of Another
Kind.”
Organizing the recording session before she had
to return to classroom in the fall of 2008—and before her dream
bandmates scattered—created some last-minute drama. Although Hubbard had
been flattered by the singer’s attention, he still harbored some
doubts.
“Jeremy Pelt told me that Freddie had actually
called him to find out more about me.” Pittson say “And he said, “I
don’t see how a singer is going to be able to do my music!” Pittson had
previously sent several sets of her lyrics, but he hadn’t responded.
Then, a week before the scheduled recording date, he asked to hear a
demo of her singing the tunes. That prompted a mad scramble to lay down
barebones, home-studio versions of several pieces and get them in the
trumpeter’s hands.
“Two weeks later, Freddie approved our lyrics,”
she remembers with a tinge of remorse. “He said that he looked forward
to hearing it, but he passed away on December 29th, before that was
possible. He was a mentor, and it was a great honor to me that he
approved of and was enthusiastic about what I was doing.”
JAZZIZ (Spring 2011)
Scott Yanow
Although he’s considered one of jazz’s greatest trumpeters, Freddie Hubbard is not generally viewed as a composer or as one whose songs are often sung. He had success with “Up Jumped Spring,” and “Little Sunflower,” but, otherwise, his originals have tended to remain challenging instrumentals.
Vocalist Suzanne Pittson, who considers Hubbard one of her most important influences, met the trumpeter in 2008 (a few months before he died) and gained permission to record several of his songs with new lyrics written by her and/or her husband, pianist Jeff Pittson. Out of the Hub features the singer, Jeff Pittson and an all-star group: bassist John Patitucci, drummer Willie Jones III, and on five of the 11 songs, trumpeter Jeremy Pelt and saxophonist Steve Wilson.
Three of the performances are jazz or pop standards that Hubbard recorded (“You’re My Everything.” “Moment to Moment,” and Betcha By Golly, Wow!”). Of the eight originals by the trumpeter, six have lyrics by Suzanne, Jeff and/or son Evan Pittson. While “Up Jumped Spring,” which utilizes Abbey Lincoln’s lyrics, is both joyful and conventional, many of the other songs — “Our Own (Gibraltar), “Out of the Hub (One of Another Kind)” and “We’re Having a Crisis (Crisis)” — are not easy to sing. Yet Pittson makes her interpretations sound fairly effortless, both in her often up-tempo melody statements and her scat-filled improvisations.
Sprinkled throughout are notable solos by Pelt, whose playing hints at both the sound and ideas of Hubbard; by the ever-inventive Wilson, who alternates between alto and soprano saxes; and by Patitucci and Jeff Pittson. But the star of the session is Suzanne Pittson. Her voice is particularly lovely on the ballads, even while navigating the complex and haunting vocals of “Bright Sun (Lament for Booker).”
During an era when jazz singers struggle to find fresh repertoire, Suzanne Pittson offers an appealing option with these “new” Freddie Hubbard songs.
http://www.freddiehubbardmusic.com/landing.php
Freddie Hubbard
B I O G R A P H Y
In
the pantheon of jazz trumpeters, Freddie Hubbard stands as one of the
boldest and most inventive artists of the bop, hard-bop and post-bop
eras. Although influenced by titans like Miles Davis and Clifford Brown,
Hubbard ultimately forged his own unique sound – a careful balance of
bravado and subtlety that fueled more than fifty solo recordings and
countless collaborations with some of the most prominent jazz artists of
his era. Shortly after his death at the end of 2008, Down Beat
called him “the most powerful and prolific trumpeter in jazz.” Embedded
in his massive body of recorded work is a legacy that will continue to
influence trumpeters and other jazz artists for generations to come.
Hubbard
was born on April 7, 1938, In Indianapolis, Indiana. As a student and
band member at Arsenal Technical High School, he demonstrated early
talents on the tuba, French horn, and mellophone before eventually
settling on the trumpet and flugelhorn. He was first introduced to jazz
by his brother, Earmon, Jr., a piano player and a devotee of Bud Powell.
Hubbard’s
budding musical talents caught the attention of Lee Katzman, a former
sideman of Stan Kenton. Katzman convinced the young trumpeter to study
at the Arthur Jordan Conservatory of Music with Max Woodbury, the
principal trumpeter of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra.
As
a teenager, Hubbard worked and recorded with the Montgomery Brothers –
Wes, Monk and Buddy. His first recording session was for an album called
The Montgomery Brothers and Five Others. Around that same time,
he also assembled his first band, the Jazz Contemporaries, with bassist
(and manager) Larry Ridley, saxophonist/flutist James Spaulding, pianist
Walt Miller and drummer Paul Parker. The quintet became recurring
players at George’s Bar, the well known club on Indiana Avenue.
In
1958, Hubbard moved to New York at age 20 and quickly established
himself as one of the bright young trumpeters on the scene, astonishing
critics and fans alike with the depth and maturity of his playing.
Within the first two years of his arrival in the Big Apple, he landed
gigs with veteran jazz artists Philly Joe Jones, Sonny Rollins, Slide
Hampton and Eric Dolphy. He joined Quincy Jones in a tour of Europe that
stretched from 1960 to 1961.
https://secretsociety.typepad.com/darcy_james_argues_secret/2008/12/rip-freddie-hubbard.html
https://secretsociety.typepad.com/darcy_james_argues_secret/2008/12/rip-freddie-hubbard.html
30 December 2008
RIP Freddie Hubbard
Freddie Hubbard's story has the elements of a mawkish Hollywood
melodrama -- the wide-eyed 20-year old kid from heartland America
(Indianapolis, Indiana) moves to the Big City and immediately starts
showing up all those sophisticated New York trumpet players with his
uncanny speed, range, endurance, and huge, rich sound. A brash,
swaggering, relentlessly swinging hard bop trumpeter in the mould of his
hero Clifford Brown and his peer Lee Morgan, he ended up replacing
Morgan in Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers and his elemental
fire ignited what many consider the greatest edition of that band. As a
first-call sideman, he made indelible contributions to some of the greatest albums ever recorded
-- if you are a young jazz musician learning to play, there is no
question that Freddie Hubbard is tearing it up on some of your formative
recordings. His albums as a leader during this time are all very fine,
but I think (somewhat controversially) that his first truly classic
record under his own name -- the first time he played as well as he did
on everyone else's records -- is 1970's electrified Red Clay.
Freddie's playing had become too blisteringly intense to be adequately
supported by a purely acoustic rhythm section, and this early jazz-rock
record feels like the most natural setting for his unbound virtuosity.
It's tempting to trace the origin of Freddie's downward spiral to his move to Los Angeles in the 70's -- as he says in this NPR profile:
Freddie's style was fully bound up in his superhuman virtuosity -- he played longer, louder, higher, and faster than just about anyone. With Freddie, it was always full-throttle, balls-to-the-wall all the way. He seemed practically invincible, still playing like a brash and restless 20-year old well into his 50's. But then in 1992, during a hit in Philly, he split his lip, badly. True to form, he kept on playing, trying to fight his way through his injury. It didn't work. The lip became badly infected and doctors, fearing cancer, recommended a biopsy. No cancer was found, but Freddie's embouchure was ruined.
Here's where that Hollywood melodrama would show a sentimental montage of Freddie's struggle to regain his ability to play. Along the way, he would learn Important Life Lessons about what was truly precious to him as a musician and as a human being. The sequence would end with a triumphant return to the bandstand, perhaps with Freddie playing a simple, beautiful, heartfelt melody ("Up Jumped Spring" would be perfect here) -- and we would see that his injuries might have cost him his blazing technique, but they couldn't take away his indomitable spirit.
Sadly, Freddie never had that Hollywood ending. Despite his best efforts and the encouragement of trumpeter David Weiss, Freddie never really found a way to be Freddie Hubbard again. His post-injury output is heartbreaking. You can hear the ideas percolating in there, clamoring to be released, but he just couldn't find a way to execute them.
I never had the chance to hear Freddie play live. But I did see him receive his NEA Jazz Masters award at the 2006 IAJE Convention, which was deeply moving. You could tell it was deeply moving for Freddie as well. The presentation began with a nicely produced biographical video, including a roll call of all of the classic records he played on. The ballroom was packed to the rafters, mostly with young jazz students, who gave him a roaring standing ovation. He didn't need to play. He could just be Freddie Hubbard.
-----
Favorite Freddie solo: impossible to choose, but I'll go with "One Finger Snap," from Herbie's Empyrean Isles. See also Randy Brecker's Top 12.
-----
In his own words -- Freddie talks about his lip injury, his work with David Weiss and the New Jazz Composers Octet, and Louis Armstrong, Clifford Brown, Lee Morgan, Maynard Ferguson, Wynton Marsalis, Richard Davis, and others.
-----
Must-read remembrances from around the blogosphere:
Taylor Ho Bynum (SpiderMonkey Stories)
Dave Douglas (Greenleaf Music Blog)
Kris Tiner (All At Once)
Ethan Iverson (Do The Math)
Doug Ramsey (Rifftides)
David Adler (Lerterland)
Marc Myers (JazzWax)
James Hale (Jazz Chronicles)
Mainstream media obits:
Peter Keepnews, New York Times
Howard Mandel, NPR's Morning Edition -- as mentioned above. Be sure to check out the audio to hear Freddie talking about the style of articulation he pioneered:
Tom Vitale, NPR's All Things Considered
Don Heckman, Los Angeles Times
John Rogers, Associated Press
It's tempting to trace the origin of Freddie's downward spiral to his move to Los Angeles in the 70's -- as he says in this NPR profile:
You know, lifestyle out there is different from mine than in New York. I mean, I was in the Hollywood Hills, above the Bowl. I could look at the ocean on this side. I can hear the concerts free at the Bowl. And I had a big swimming pool. I had parties all the time, and the trumpet just was in the corner a lot of the time, when it should have been on my lips.Under the influence of record mogul Creed Taylor, Freddie made a series of increasingly overproduced records featuring somewhat dubious studio arrangements by Don Sebesky. (That version of the theme from The Godfather off of Sky Dive is a camp classic.) But despite the Hollywood lifestyle, Freddie's power as a trumpet player remained undiminished, and he did some of the most impressive playing of his career in the late 70s, "standing in" for Miles in the reunited supergroup VSOP, and in the 80s, going head-to-head with his greatest disciple, Woody Shaw.
Freddie's style was fully bound up in his superhuman virtuosity -- he played longer, louder, higher, and faster than just about anyone. With Freddie, it was always full-throttle, balls-to-the-wall all the way. He seemed practically invincible, still playing like a brash and restless 20-year old well into his 50's. But then in 1992, during a hit in Philly, he split his lip, badly. True to form, he kept on playing, trying to fight his way through his injury. It didn't work. The lip became badly infected and doctors, fearing cancer, recommended a biopsy. No cancer was found, but Freddie's embouchure was ruined.
Here's where that Hollywood melodrama would show a sentimental montage of Freddie's struggle to regain his ability to play. Along the way, he would learn Important Life Lessons about what was truly precious to him as a musician and as a human being. The sequence would end with a triumphant return to the bandstand, perhaps with Freddie playing a simple, beautiful, heartfelt melody ("Up Jumped Spring" would be perfect here) -- and we would see that his injuries might have cost him his blazing technique, but they couldn't take away his indomitable spirit.
Sadly, Freddie never had that Hollywood ending. Despite his best efforts and the encouragement of trumpeter David Weiss, Freddie never really found a way to be Freddie Hubbard again. His post-injury output is heartbreaking. You can hear the ideas percolating in there, clamoring to be released, but he just couldn't find a way to execute them.
I never had the chance to hear Freddie play live. But I did see him receive his NEA Jazz Masters award at the 2006 IAJE Convention, which was deeply moving. You could tell it was deeply moving for Freddie as well. The presentation began with a nicely produced biographical video, including a roll call of all of the classic records he played on. The ballroom was packed to the rafters, mostly with young jazz students, who gave him a roaring standing ovation. He didn't need to play. He could just be Freddie Hubbard.
-----
Favorite Freddie solo: impossible to choose, but I'll go with "One Finger Snap," from Herbie's Empyrean Isles. See also Randy Brecker's Top 12.
-----
In his own words -- Freddie talks about his lip injury, his work with David Weiss and the New Jazz Composers Octet, and Louis Armstrong, Clifford Brown, Lee Morgan, Maynard Ferguson, Wynton Marsalis, Richard Davis, and others.
-----
Must-read remembrances from around the blogosphere:
Taylor Ho Bynum (SpiderMonkey Stories)
It’s funny to think that though he’s the quintessential hard bop trumpeter, he was a key participant on three of the most important documents of the 60s avant-garde: Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz, John Coltrane’s Ascension, and Eric Dolphy’s Out to Lunch. And though he might have sounded a little out of place in the ensemble “freedom” of Ornette or Trane, he absolutely tears it up in the angular world of Dolphy. Out to Lunch features some of the most otherworldly trumpet playing on record, a combination of virtuosic post-bop technique and new music risk taking that still sounds thrilling.
Dave Douglas (Greenleaf Music Blog)
Freddie Hubbard was one of the most skilled practitioners of this art. The joy and freedom in his playing came in part from this complete mastery of the instrument. It always sounded effortless. In the high range his control of air was so sublime that his lines sometimes defied the laws of physics and harmony, resolving in odd ways just by dint of his total domination of the instrument. Freddie grabbed the opportunity of those alternate fingerings to pop in and out of chromatic chord and scale ideas. His attack was always precise and his dodging and darting lines flowed like water through a sluiceway.
A lot of people can play the trumpet well. Technical mastery is far from the reason Freddie Hubbard is the most imitated player of the last half-century. It was what he did with that mastery -- the inventiveness of his harmonies and the ingenuity of his rhythmic propulsion. Freddie's impact is so profound that you often don't have to mention him when noting a young player's influences. Freddie is always there. He had a lot to say, and we all soaked it up.
Kris Tiner (All At Once)
Freddie had that rare combination of tremendous chops + tremendous spirit. I think I can speak for many trumpet players here: Freddie Hubbard is our Coltrane. Like Coltrane, much of Freddie's music represents the highest possible creative manifestation of instrumental virtuosity. When he was at his best, his technical mastery was entirely servile to his supreme artistic sensibility, demonstrating by example that true freedom didn't happen by simply breaking rules, but by developing a strong command of one's instrument coupled with a firm sense of tradition and an ability to fully translate personality to sound, breaking through the tradition rather than breaking from it.
Ethan Iverson (Do The Math)
“Without A Song” from the same album [The Hub of Hubbard] shows how how Hubbard’s time is so good that he can swing he band (which constantly verges on falling apart) from the trumpet on down.
Doug Ramsey (Rifftides)
The compulsion to power his way through good times and bad resulted in glorious music and monumental frustration. I last spoke with Freddie in 2006 at a reception for National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters. He was in good spirits, if rather subdued, and seemed to have accepted that his chops weren't coming back. We sat around remembering good times together in New Orleans and he favored me with a few unprintable Art Blakey stories. Later at a post-function concert that evolved into a sort of jam session, he was asked to sit in. He declined.Howard Mandel (Jazz Beyond Jazz) - see also Howard's June 2008 Down Beat cover story and his obit for NPR's Morning Edition.
He was not ideologically an avant-gardist; his compositions such as "Up Jumped Spring" had a lyrical playfulness. But he also excelled at expressing urgency with tunes such as "Crisis" and "Breaking Point."
David Adler (Lerterland)
In the late '80s I got caught trying to walk out of the Blue Note without paying. I had hoped the $18 in my pocket was enough, but it wasn't. But that's how badly I needed to see Freddie Hubbard.
It wasn't just Hubbard's ferocity on the trumpet that got me. It was his bands. And at that time I was discovering just what it is that jazz bands do. Hearing Hubbard with Benny Green or Billy Childs on piano, Javon Jackson or Don Braden on tenor, Ronnie Burrage on drums — this was just too hot to handle. I must have heard him at the Blue Note four or five times.
Marc Myers (JazzWax)
Among his classic dates were Open Sesame, Hub-Tones, Goin' Up and Ready for Freddie, which in my opinion is an underappreciated game-changing jazz album. On this 1961 album, we hear three Hubbard originals, one by Shorter and a standard, "Weaver of Dreams." The importance of Ready for Freddie rests in its tension. Unlike previous hard bop albums, the tracks here break new melodic ground and set the stage for Shorter's Speak No Evil recorded three years later. We hear Hubbard and Shorter feed off each other creatively, with Bernard McKinney on euphonium, Art Davis on bass and Elvin Jones on drums. We also hear a brilliant McCoy Tyner, who had just finished recording six powerful albums with John Coltrane. On Ready for Freddie, Hubbard's hot metal sound is countered by Shorter's velvet sledgehammer, and there's a clean articulation throughout.
James Hale (Jazz Chronicles)
Overlooked in that timeline are Hubbard's years with Atlantic Records in the second half of the '60s – a period that I was introduced to on a terrific two-LP set called The Art Of Freddie Hubbard. Like his closest peer, Lee Morgan, Hubbard found himself with one foot in hard bop and another in freer music that was heavily influenced by the Black Consciousness movement. For Hubbard, that played out on tracks like "Black Soldier" from the album Sing Me A Song of Songmy, which featured him reciting words by Turkish poet Fazil Husnu Daglarca accompanied by a string orchestra and some processed electronics. More predictably, he also worked with genre-spanning sidemen like Bennie Maupin, Carlos Garnett and Freddie Waits, as well as a tight quintet sparked by Kenny Barron and Louis Hayes.
To fully appreciate Hubbard's range, consider for a moment the stylistic ground he covered in just 10 years – 1963-73 – and try to think of another artist who stretched so far without sacrificing his own signature voice. A giant to be sure, which makes the last 25 years of his life all the sadder.----
Mainstream media obits:
Peter Keepnews, New York Times
Mr. Hubbard was once known as the brashest of jazzmen, but his personality as well as his music mellowed in the wake of his lip problems. In a 1995 interview with Fred Shuster of Down Beat, he offered some sober advice to younger musicians: “Don’t make the mistake I made of not taking care of myself. Please, keep your chops cool and don’t overblow.”
Howard Mandel, NPR's Morning Edition -- as mentioned above. Be sure to check out the audio to hear Freddie talking about the style of articulation he pioneered:
"[D]uring that period, I was changing the style of the trumpet. I was trying to play the trumpet like a saxophone. Instead of saying, 'Dah, dah, du, du, di, di, di, do,' I was saying, 'Diddly, do, du, do, dah, do, wham, bam, be,' playing more intervals. And I was trying to make those as long glissando runs, like 'trun, da, dun, dun, da, lun, da, da, da, da, da,' and trumpet players don't do that."
Tom Vitale, NPR's All Things Considered
Hubbard says that the low point in his career came in the early 1990s. After he split his lip and lost the ability to play, he started drinking, suffered an ulcer and almost died.
"I started drinking Jack Daniel's to feel good, you know? Jack Daniel's and Coca-Cola," Hubbard says. "And I had an ulcer. I went over in London and I fell out. I've never passed out, but I lost four pints of blood. And the doctor said, 'You're going to clean up your body, because otherwise you're looking to go.' So I said, 'Well, I'm not ready to go, so let me cool out.'"
Don Heckman, Los Angeles Times
Hubbard was born Frederick DeWayne Hubbard in Indianapolis on April 7, 1938. He was the youngest of six children in a musical household and first played the tonette and then the mellophone.
"I had a sister who played classical piano and sang spirituals," he told Coryell and Friedman. "My mother played the piano by ear and I had a brother who played the bass and tenor. So the music was hot and heavy. You'd hear somebody singing, somebody playing the piano, and always a record playing."
John Rogers, Associated Press
"I met Trane at a jam session at Count Basie's in Harlem in 1958," he told the jazz magazine Down Beat in 1995. "He said, `Why don't you come over and let's try and practice a little bit together.' I almost went crazy. I mean, here is a 20-year-old kid practicing with John Coltrane. He helped me out a lot, and we worked several jobs together."
Freddie Hubbard: The Show Must Go On
The blue-neon sign of the Iridium Jazz Club glowed softly
behind Freddie Hubbard. The legendary trumpeter wore a yellow-straw
fedora, a gold tie and a tailored dark suit with a handkerchief peeking
out of the jacket pocket. He was celebrating his 70th birthday in New
York two-and-a-half months late by leading an all-star octet that
included some of his longest-standing collaborators, among them Curtis
Fuller, Louis Hayes and James Spaulding.
On “Jodo,” the first tune of the second set on June 28, the bandleader picked up his silver flugelhorn, which had been resting on Larry Willis’ piano. Hubbard played a short passage that had the slashing phrasing of the original 1965 Blue Note recording.
But the notes that filled that phrasing came out cracked, strangled and far from their intended pitch. Hubbard held the horn horizontally at waist level and stared at it quizzically, as if there were something wrong with it. He didn’t see anything, so he tried the solo again. Again the notes sputtered off-pitch. Obviously frustrated, Hubbard cut his solo short and motioned for his old friend Spaulding to take over.
The evening was meant to showcase the hard-bop great’s return to active duty. He had a new album with the New Jazz Composers Octet, On the Real Side (Times Square), and a spate of newspaper and magazine articles suggesting that he had largely recovered from the health problems that had marred his playing since 1992. But Hubbard himself knew better. You could tell from the way he winced that the notes coming out of his horn were far different from the notes he heard in his head. There was nothing wrong with his ears; his embouchure was the problem.
His sharp ears were obvious as his bandmates soloed on “Jodo.” Hubbard moved gingerly, the result of severe back problems, but he punched the air with the rhythmic accents of his composition. During the head of the next tune, “Little Sunflower,” he barked out that the chord was A, not E. Music director David Weiss looked puzzled, but saxophonist Javon Jackson pointed at the score on the music stand. Hubbard was right. The bandleader cheered on the adventurous solos by Jackson and Willis, beaming with pleasure at hearing his music played as he heard it in his head. But when he picked up the flugelhorn again, there were more winces.
What kind of special agony is it to be mentally sharp, as Hubbard obviously is, and unable to physically execute the sounds you can so clearly imagine? What must it be like to still harbor the fire for making music and yet be constantly dissatisfied with the results?
“What I play is not too bad,” Hubbard said defensively a few days later. “It was all right. It wasn’t like I was 100 percent; I was tired.” Then he grew combative, asserting, “The young cats can’t play what I play. My stuff is way ahead; they don’t play with the chordal sense that I do; they don’t know nothing about that. I’ve got more maturity than they’ve got, even though my chops are down.”
Those chops are what once made his reputation. Between 1958, when he first arrived in New York from Indianapolis, and 1992, when he suffered a devastating lip injury, Hubbard could play the trumpet as fast and as hard, as agilely and as accurately, as anyone on the planet. Just listen to the records he made as a leader for Blue Note and Impulse in the ’60s, the solos he played on records by Art Blakey, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy and Wayne Shorter in the same decade, the hits he had with CTI in the ’70s.
On his 1961 album, Ready for Freddie, Hubbard unveiled “Birdlike,” his tribute to Charlie Parker, with a bravura trumpet solo that machine-gunned notes across several octaves at a dizzying, Parker-like tempo pushed along by Elvin Jones. Each note, whether a piercing 16th or a bluesy quarter, was precisely pitched and crisply articulated. When Hubbard played the same song at Iridium this year, he attempted the same solo on flugelhorn, but the pitch was hit-and-miss and the articulation uncertain.
“I don’t have the embouchure and strength I had when I was 25,” Hubbard admitted before the gig. “You realize you’re getting older and can’t do the same thing you once did. Miles once told me, ‘You can’t play like that forever; you have to find something you’re comfortable with.’ That’s what I’m looking for.
“The most difficult thing for me is to say to myself, ‘You can’t do what you used to do,’ and to find a way to play, so I’m still happy with it and the audience is still happy with it. People know what I used to sound like, but they appreciate that I’m still trying. Maybe they’re just coming out to see if I’m still alive. Maybe they’re saying, ‘He’s still alive; let’s see how far he can go.'”
I arrived at the Buckingham Hotel in midtown Manhattan at 5 p.m. and a barefoot Hubbard opened his door wearing nothing but a white Los Angeles Marathon T-shirt and a pair of blue-and-white plaid shorts. He immediately crawled back into bed and did the interview with his head tilted sideways atop two pillows. He catalogued all his physical ailments.
“I’ve been through so much,” he lamented, “in addition to my lip problems. I had congestive heart failure a few years ago, and I also had something cut out of my lung. Last year, all of a sudden, my neck got stiff, and my doctor said I have a pinched nerve between my second and third vertebrae. That’s probably the most serious of all, because it affects the way I walk and move.”
He sounded like nothing so much as an aging athlete, bewildered that the same body that brought him so many triumphs had now betrayed him. It echoed those moments when an aging Cal Ripken Jr. would flail in vain at a grounder to his left, or when an aging Sammy Sosa would swing at a fast ball just after it had passed him.
We don’t usually compare trumpeters to athletes. After all, horn players stand in one place onstage for a few hours a day-what can be so physically demanding about that? Hubbard insists, however, that the bodily toll is similar, especially for trumpeters. And he has the injuries to prove it.
“Just like an athlete,” he argues, “your bones get tired unless you move just right. Like an athlete, you’re trying to be a little bit better than the next guy, so you push yourself a bit harder. A trumpeter pushes that metal mouthpiece against his lip, squeezing it against his teeth; the more he presses the louder and harder he can play.
“I always played with too much pressure because I felt I needed it to get that feel I wanted. You want to stay in the pocket, but the drums are usually so loud that you have to play really hard to be heard over them. That leads to injuries, but like an athlete, a musician can’t wait to get back out there and start playing again. You feel good so you take the jobs, but then it hurts again because it didn’t have time to heal.”
Young musicians, like young athletes, feel indestructible. Both are encouraged by their teammates and managers to shake off aches and pains and to keep playing as hard as they can. For years Hubbard would get blisters on his lips, but he’d keep playing and they’d go away. As he got older, however, he noticed that all the older trumpeters had scar tissue.
“I once asked Miles, ‘What are those spots on your lips?'” Hubbard recalled. “He said, ‘That’s from blowing the horn.’ Then I noticed that Harry James had spots on his lips. I did this ‘Satchmo Tour’ in Russia, and they had this big photo of Louis [Armstrong] behind the stage. I’d look up at that picture and the scar on his lip was in the same place as mine. It drilled me every time I saw it.
“I heard stories about Louis. The crowd would be cheering and hollering, so he would overexert himself. Instead of playing two choruses, he’d play four or five or 10. The same thing happened to me. You get caught up in the moment; you want to play with the same intensity as the drummer, so you play too loud and too long. But lips are very delicate, I’ve learned-there are a lot of different muscles in there. I didn’t realize how hard I was blowing. I thought I was the strongest trumpet player in the world, but that shit caught up with me.”
So what should Hubbard have done earlier in his career? It’s hard to say. If he had played it safe, he’d be healthier and have better chops today. But if he had played it safe, he might never have become the extraordinary player he did. Even as a teenager in the mid-’50s, he wowed his elders.
“I was in the Army in 1954,” recalled Spaulding. “I was stationed at Fort Harris in Indiana, and I met Freddie at a Saturday afternoon jam session at the Cotton Club in Indianapolis when he was 16 and I was a year older. He was one of the most talented musicians I’d ever heard. Even then he was fiery and had a flair about him, that outgoing personality. He had perfect pitch; he’d hear someone’s car blowing in the street and tell you what note it was.”
When Hubbard first arrived in New York from Indianapolis as a 20-year-old in 1958, his prodigious ability quickly landed him jobs with Sonny Rollins, Philly Joe Jones, Slide Hampton and J.J. Johnson.
“Imagine me, a kid, with those giants,” he exclaimed, the astonishment still in his voice 50 years later. “I could hardly play for listening. They’d start and-whoosh-they’d be gone. I’d say, ‘How’d you do that? How’d you come up with that?’ Then I figured out that they did it by listening to the guys before them. A lot of what Sonny and Trane were playing was no different than what Lester Young played; they just played with more intensity.
“Prez would sit there in his chair with his horn out to the side and it was so lovely. That’s what I need to figure out how to do now. Ben Webster was the same way. I played with him once at a jazz festival in Norway in the ’80s, and he’d sit there playing so lightly, but he had tears in his eyes because it was so beautiful. I had tears in my eyes too.”
Like every other young trumpeter in the late ’50s, Hubbard was an imitator of Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis and Clifford Brown. To distinguish himself from his contemporaries (most notably Lee Morgan, Booker Little and Donald Byrd), Hubbard needed a different sound.
“I started practicing with tenor players,” he revealed. “I’d hear what Rollins and Trane would do, and their passages were so involved, so hip, that I figured it’d make me sound different. But passages that come naturally to a saxophonist don’t come easy to a trumpeter. You need a lot of elasticity, because your embouchure is so different than a tenor player’s.
“You can’t play a trumpet as long as you can a tenor, because the mouthpiece is against your lips while the tenor’s mouthpiece is inside your lips. If you’re going to play lots of choruses like Trane and Sonny, you have to be really strong. When I practiced with Sonny, he’d have me lift weights to build up my strength.”
When he mastered the challenge of playing those long, slipping and sliding tenor passages with the brassy attack of the trumpet, Hubbard had a sound like no one else. He further refined it by eschewing the dominant trumpet tone of the time.
“Most trumpeters back then had a pinched sound, like tee-tee-tee,” he pointed out, “but Clifford Brown had an open sound, more like doo-doo-doo. It’s harder to control an open sound than a pinched sound, so most trumpeters avoid it, but I had played tuba, French horn and E-flat mellophone in school, and I was used to a larger mouthpiece. You have to blow a certain way to get that sound, but I figured it out. It’s difficult to control when you open up that wide, but if you can, you sound like no one else.”
“He always had the confidence to experiment and try things,” Spaulding added. “He was able to funnel all these different trumpet players, all the way from Louis Armstrong down to Dizzy and Miles, until he found his own voice. That’s what I think this music is all about, finding your own voice. When you heard Trane, you knew it was Trane. When you heard Dizzy, you knew it was Dizzy. When you heard Freddie, you knew it was Freddie.”
The combination of the Rollins-like phrasing and the Brown-like openness gave Hubbard a one-of-a-kind voice on the horn. That voice attracted Art Blakey, who made the trumpeter a Jazz Messenger from 1961 through 1966. That voice dominated Hubbard’s own recordings as a leader, most memorably Ready for Freddie, Breaking Point and The Artistry of Freddie Hubbard. That voice earned Hubbard a key role on such landmark recordings as Herbie Hancock’s Maiden Voyage, Wayne Shorter’s Speak No Evil, John Coltrane’s Ascension and Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz.
“I got into that free jazz for a while,” he admitted, “but it didn’t really fit me. Some of it was good, but I prefer playing with changes. I like that element of surprise, of not knowing what you’re going to hear next, but I didn’t like that it shut so many people out. A lot of people didn’t dig free jazz, because you have to really get into that music to get something out of it. You have to really use your imagination. I wanted to connect with as many people as I could, because the people who did that seemed to make the most money.”
When Hubbard, like many of his peers, began experimenting with R&B-flavored fusion in the early ’70s, it was his distinctive trumpet sound, with its lingering links to Rollins and Brown, that redeemed the simple vamps and pop melodies of the material. Hubbard made a quartet of albums for producer Creed Taylor at CTI Records-1970’s Red Clay, 1970’s Straight Life, 1971’s First Light and 1973’s Sky Dive-that managed to combine artistic and commercial success and even won a Grammy.
But not even his remarkable chops could save records that resorted more and more to formula. Albums such as 1976’s Windjammer, 1979’s The Love Connection, 1980’s Mistral and 1981’s Splash were embarrassments. Hubbard realized he was getting more praise and gigs out of his acoustic projects such as the V.S.O.P. tours where he took over Miles Davis’ trumpet chair to perform and record with Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter and Tony Williams. So he shifted gears and cut some excellent acoustic recordings under his own name: 1982’s Keystone Bop, 1983’s Sweet Return, 1987’s Outpost and 1988’s Eternal Triangle. He had seemingly rebounded.
But this renaissance was cut short by a blister. In 1992 Hubbard was playing New York’s Blue Note club when he developed a sore on his lip as he had so many times before. He ignored it, because he was due in Helsinki to play as a guest soloist with a Finnish big band.
“My lip popped during the TV show,” he remembered, shaking his head, “and got blood all over my white shirt. They said, ‘You have to make the second set,’ and like a dummy I tried to do it. But that just made it worse. I laid off for a month, but then I came back too soon, before it was really healed.”
A growth developed on his lip. It wasn’t cancerous, as first feared, but it had to be removed, and the cutting affected his embouchure as much as the growth had. Soon a pattern developed: Hubbard would rest for a while in an effort to heal, then he’d get restless and try to play again, only to be dissatisfied with the results. So he’d rest some more and the cycle would restart. He was only 54 in 1992, but he had lived a hard life and as he passed 60, his health was complicated by problems unrelated to his lips.
“Trumpet players seem to die young,” he mused. “Is it the playing or the lifestyle? It’s probably both.”
He owed MusicMasters another album in 1993, but everyone was unsure how it could be done under the circumstances. So the label turned to Big Apple Productions, the three-man team of Vincent Herring, Carl Allen and David Weiss, who had been organizing records for Japanese labels. The producers decided to record Hubbard as part of an octet in a tribute to Monk, Miles, Trane and Cannon (hence the title MMTC). The combination of many instruments and familiar material, they figured, would take the pressure off the bandleader.
Weiss, a trumpeter himself, was the least well known of the three producers, but he had a knack for conducting sessions and writing arrangements (he wrote three of the eight charts on MMTC). His success with the Hubbard date impressed some record companies, who asked Weiss to produce demos on some potential “young lions” (this was the early ’90s, remember) before the labels committed to full-scale sessions. Out of those demo projects, Weiss bonded with such young musicians as pianist Xavier Davis, bassist Dwayne Burno and saxophonists Greg Tardy and Myron Walden. They all wrote music, so in 1996 the five friends formed the core of the New Jazz Composers Octet.
“I thought it would be good for the band to hook up with Freddie,” Weiss said, “and good for him too. It would give us some exposure and would give him a band that had rehearsed his material. So in 1999 I went out to California and spent a week with him, picking out older tunes that we could arrange for the octet. We toured together in the summer of 2000, recorded later that year and released our first album together, New Colors, in 2003.”
In the process Weiss became Hubbard’s music director and de facto manager. During the interview at the Buckingham Hotel, Weiss lurked in the background, making phone calls and answering e-mails about the evening’s gig, letting Hubbard know when he had to end the interview and get dressed for the show. At Iridium, the 43-year-old Weiss wore a black shirt with a black suit, his short, sandy hair highlighting his angular face as he directed traffic onstage. He stood between Spaulding and Jackson, handling the ensemble trumpet parts so Hubbard could concentrate on his solos.
But the solos weren’t going too well. So Hubbard announced, “Now we’re going to do the song that has kept me alive all these years. I’m going to show you how I first wrote it.” He sat down at the club’s Steinway grand piano and banged out the opening chords to “Red Clay.” Hubbard’s not much of a pianist, but his low expectations on the instrument allowed him to relax. As he got a primitive blues groove going at the keys, he looked happier than he had all night. He picked out the song’s melody, an obvious borrowing of Bobby Hebb’s 1966 pop hit “Sunny,” and turned it over to Spaulding’s alto sax with a delighted chuckle.
Because Hubbard had so much trouble playing, the evening’s focus inevitably shifted to his compositions, just as it does on the new album, On the Real Side, which is, after all, a collaboration with the New Jazz Composers Octet. For a long time, his virtuosic performances had obscured his writing, but now that the virtuosity was gone, maybe it was time to appreciate his compositions.
“What’s most interesting to me as a musician,” noted Weiss, “are not the popular tunes like ‘Red Clay’ or ‘Up Jumped Spring,’ but rather the more complex pieces like ‘True Colors,’ ‘For B.P.’ and ‘Outer Forces.’ His pieces can be dark and complicated, but they always have real melodies. And Freddie has a unique rhythm to the way he plays, even the way he walks-a swaggering kind of strut.
“‘Lifeflight’ is my favorite on the new record. It’s got a strong melody with an interesting rhythmic counterpoint. When you expand his pieces from a quartet to an octet, all the hip tendencies in the tune, all the unusual grooves and harmonies, get more weight and have more of an impact.”
“When I was younger,” Hubbard admitted, “I was more into proving I could play. I wrote a lot of things, but they got overshadowed by the playing. But I can’t play that way anymore.”
But he can’t seem to stop himself from trying. Again and again at Iridium, he would pick up the more forgiving flugelhorn, his main instrument these days, and try to blast out his diamond-sharp and diamond-hard phrases of yore. Some musicians onstage turned their heads as if uncomfortable with the awkward results. Others, like Curtis Fuller, were so glad to see Hubbard onstage at all that they smiled as they watched him give it everything he had.
“The years have taken a toll,” Spaulding acknowledged, “so I don’t know if he’ll be able to continue or not. We gave him all the support we possibly could at the Iridium. He seemed like he was enjoying it. It’s been a struggle these past few years, but his spirit is still there. I have to admire him for that. I would have shut down myself, gotten a teaching job or something.”
Hubbard remained horizontal on his hotel bed for the entire interview, but he perked up when asked if he ever considered quitting. He propped himself up on one elbow and stared straight at the interviewer in the bedside chair.
“After I had the lip operation, I couldn’t get that sound I wanted,” he confessed. “That was discouraging. I was worried more about how I sounded than in getting healthy. I would get set to get the sound I wanted-I could hear it in my head-but I couldn’t get it to come out. I thought about stopping, but I made up my mind I was going to continue to play. A lot of guys quit, but that’s a mistake unless you’ve got a lot of money stashed somewhere.”
He sank back on his pillow. “Most people in the entertainment business won’t admit they’re getting old. Miles used to wear those young people’s clothes, and people would come for what he was wearing more than for what he was playing. I’m naïve in the same way. I put color in my hair because I don’t want gray hair on my head. I ask myself, ‘Why not?’ I don’t know.”
On “Jodo,” the first tune of the second set on June 28, the bandleader picked up his silver flugelhorn, which had been resting on Larry Willis’ piano. Hubbard played a short passage that had the slashing phrasing of the original 1965 Blue Note recording.
But the notes that filled that phrasing came out cracked, strangled and far from their intended pitch. Hubbard held the horn horizontally at waist level and stared at it quizzically, as if there were something wrong with it. He didn’t see anything, so he tried the solo again. Again the notes sputtered off-pitch. Obviously frustrated, Hubbard cut his solo short and motioned for his old friend Spaulding to take over.
The evening was meant to showcase the hard-bop great’s return to active duty. He had a new album with the New Jazz Composers Octet, On the Real Side (Times Square), and a spate of newspaper and magazine articles suggesting that he had largely recovered from the health problems that had marred his playing since 1992. But Hubbard himself knew better. You could tell from the way he winced that the notes coming out of his horn were far different from the notes he heard in his head. There was nothing wrong with his ears; his embouchure was the problem.
His sharp ears were obvious as his bandmates soloed on “Jodo.” Hubbard moved gingerly, the result of severe back problems, but he punched the air with the rhythmic accents of his composition. During the head of the next tune, “Little Sunflower,” he barked out that the chord was A, not E. Music director David Weiss looked puzzled, but saxophonist Javon Jackson pointed at the score on the music stand. Hubbard was right. The bandleader cheered on the adventurous solos by Jackson and Willis, beaming with pleasure at hearing his music played as he heard it in his head. But when he picked up the flugelhorn again, there were more winces.
What kind of special agony is it to be mentally sharp, as Hubbard obviously is, and unable to physically execute the sounds you can so clearly imagine? What must it be like to still harbor the fire for making music and yet be constantly dissatisfied with the results?
“What I play is not too bad,” Hubbard said defensively a few days later. “It was all right. It wasn’t like I was 100 percent; I was tired.” Then he grew combative, asserting, “The young cats can’t play what I play. My stuff is way ahead; they don’t play with the chordal sense that I do; they don’t know nothing about that. I’ve got more maturity than they’ve got, even though my chops are down.”
Those chops are what once made his reputation. Between 1958, when he first arrived in New York from Indianapolis, and 1992, when he suffered a devastating lip injury, Hubbard could play the trumpet as fast and as hard, as agilely and as accurately, as anyone on the planet. Just listen to the records he made as a leader for Blue Note and Impulse in the ’60s, the solos he played on records by Art Blakey, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy and Wayne Shorter in the same decade, the hits he had with CTI in the ’70s.
On his 1961 album, Ready for Freddie, Hubbard unveiled “Birdlike,” his tribute to Charlie Parker, with a bravura trumpet solo that machine-gunned notes across several octaves at a dizzying, Parker-like tempo pushed along by Elvin Jones. Each note, whether a piercing 16th or a bluesy quarter, was precisely pitched and crisply articulated. When Hubbard played the same song at Iridium this year, he attempted the same solo on flugelhorn, but the pitch was hit-and-miss and the articulation uncertain.
“I don’t have the embouchure and strength I had when I was 25,” Hubbard admitted before the gig. “You realize you’re getting older and can’t do the same thing you once did. Miles once told me, ‘You can’t play like that forever; you have to find something you’re comfortable with.’ That’s what I’m looking for.
“The most difficult thing for me is to say to myself, ‘You can’t do what you used to do,’ and to find a way to play, so I’m still happy with it and the audience is still happy with it. People know what I used to sound like, but they appreciate that I’m still trying. Maybe they’re just coming out to see if I’m still alive. Maybe they’re saying, ‘He’s still alive; let’s see how far he can go.'”
I arrived at the Buckingham Hotel in midtown Manhattan at 5 p.m. and a barefoot Hubbard opened his door wearing nothing but a white Los Angeles Marathon T-shirt and a pair of blue-and-white plaid shorts. He immediately crawled back into bed and did the interview with his head tilted sideways atop two pillows. He catalogued all his physical ailments.
“I’ve been through so much,” he lamented, “in addition to my lip problems. I had congestive heart failure a few years ago, and I also had something cut out of my lung. Last year, all of a sudden, my neck got stiff, and my doctor said I have a pinched nerve between my second and third vertebrae. That’s probably the most serious of all, because it affects the way I walk and move.”
He sounded like nothing so much as an aging athlete, bewildered that the same body that brought him so many triumphs had now betrayed him. It echoed those moments when an aging Cal Ripken Jr. would flail in vain at a grounder to his left, or when an aging Sammy Sosa would swing at a fast ball just after it had passed him.
We don’t usually compare trumpeters to athletes. After all, horn players stand in one place onstage for a few hours a day-what can be so physically demanding about that? Hubbard insists, however, that the bodily toll is similar, especially for trumpeters. And he has the injuries to prove it.
“Just like an athlete,” he argues, “your bones get tired unless you move just right. Like an athlete, you’re trying to be a little bit better than the next guy, so you push yourself a bit harder. A trumpeter pushes that metal mouthpiece against his lip, squeezing it against his teeth; the more he presses the louder and harder he can play.
“I always played with too much pressure because I felt I needed it to get that feel I wanted. You want to stay in the pocket, but the drums are usually so loud that you have to play really hard to be heard over them. That leads to injuries, but like an athlete, a musician can’t wait to get back out there and start playing again. You feel good so you take the jobs, but then it hurts again because it didn’t have time to heal.”
Young musicians, like young athletes, feel indestructible. Both are encouraged by their teammates and managers to shake off aches and pains and to keep playing as hard as they can. For years Hubbard would get blisters on his lips, but he’d keep playing and they’d go away. As he got older, however, he noticed that all the older trumpeters had scar tissue.
“I once asked Miles, ‘What are those spots on your lips?'” Hubbard recalled. “He said, ‘That’s from blowing the horn.’ Then I noticed that Harry James had spots on his lips. I did this ‘Satchmo Tour’ in Russia, and they had this big photo of Louis [Armstrong] behind the stage. I’d look up at that picture and the scar on his lip was in the same place as mine. It drilled me every time I saw it.
“I heard stories about Louis. The crowd would be cheering and hollering, so he would overexert himself. Instead of playing two choruses, he’d play four or five or 10. The same thing happened to me. You get caught up in the moment; you want to play with the same intensity as the drummer, so you play too loud and too long. But lips are very delicate, I’ve learned-there are a lot of different muscles in there. I didn’t realize how hard I was blowing. I thought I was the strongest trumpet player in the world, but that shit caught up with me.”
So what should Hubbard have done earlier in his career? It’s hard to say. If he had played it safe, he’d be healthier and have better chops today. But if he had played it safe, he might never have become the extraordinary player he did. Even as a teenager in the mid-’50s, he wowed his elders.
“I was in the Army in 1954,” recalled Spaulding. “I was stationed at Fort Harris in Indiana, and I met Freddie at a Saturday afternoon jam session at the Cotton Club in Indianapolis when he was 16 and I was a year older. He was one of the most talented musicians I’d ever heard. Even then he was fiery and had a flair about him, that outgoing personality. He had perfect pitch; he’d hear someone’s car blowing in the street and tell you what note it was.”
When Hubbard first arrived in New York from Indianapolis as a 20-year-old in 1958, his prodigious ability quickly landed him jobs with Sonny Rollins, Philly Joe Jones, Slide Hampton and J.J. Johnson.
“Imagine me, a kid, with those giants,” he exclaimed, the astonishment still in his voice 50 years later. “I could hardly play for listening. They’d start and-whoosh-they’d be gone. I’d say, ‘How’d you do that? How’d you come up with that?’ Then I figured out that they did it by listening to the guys before them. A lot of what Sonny and Trane were playing was no different than what Lester Young played; they just played with more intensity.
“Prez would sit there in his chair with his horn out to the side and it was so lovely. That’s what I need to figure out how to do now. Ben Webster was the same way. I played with him once at a jazz festival in Norway in the ’80s, and he’d sit there playing so lightly, but he had tears in his eyes because it was so beautiful. I had tears in my eyes too.”
Like every other young trumpeter in the late ’50s, Hubbard was an imitator of Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis and Clifford Brown. To distinguish himself from his contemporaries (most notably Lee Morgan, Booker Little and Donald Byrd), Hubbard needed a different sound.
“I started practicing with tenor players,” he revealed. “I’d hear what Rollins and Trane would do, and their passages were so involved, so hip, that I figured it’d make me sound different. But passages that come naturally to a saxophonist don’t come easy to a trumpeter. You need a lot of elasticity, because your embouchure is so different than a tenor player’s.
“You can’t play a trumpet as long as you can a tenor, because the mouthpiece is against your lips while the tenor’s mouthpiece is inside your lips. If you’re going to play lots of choruses like Trane and Sonny, you have to be really strong. When I practiced with Sonny, he’d have me lift weights to build up my strength.”
When he mastered the challenge of playing those long, slipping and sliding tenor passages with the brassy attack of the trumpet, Hubbard had a sound like no one else. He further refined it by eschewing the dominant trumpet tone of the time.
“Most trumpeters back then had a pinched sound, like tee-tee-tee,” he pointed out, “but Clifford Brown had an open sound, more like doo-doo-doo. It’s harder to control an open sound than a pinched sound, so most trumpeters avoid it, but I had played tuba, French horn and E-flat mellophone in school, and I was used to a larger mouthpiece. You have to blow a certain way to get that sound, but I figured it out. It’s difficult to control when you open up that wide, but if you can, you sound like no one else.”
“He always had the confidence to experiment and try things,” Spaulding added. “He was able to funnel all these different trumpet players, all the way from Louis Armstrong down to Dizzy and Miles, until he found his own voice. That’s what I think this music is all about, finding your own voice. When you heard Trane, you knew it was Trane. When you heard Dizzy, you knew it was Dizzy. When you heard Freddie, you knew it was Freddie.”
The combination of the Rollins-like phrasing and the Brown-like openness gave Hubbard a one-of-a-kind voice on the horn. That voice attracted Art Blakey, who made the trumpeter a Jazz Messenger from 1961 through 1966. That voice dominated Hubbard’s own recordings as a leader, most memorably Ready for Freddie, Breaking Point and The Artistry of Freddie Hubbard. That voice earned Hubbard a key role on such landmark recordings as Herbie Hancock’s Maiden Voyage, Wayne Shorter’s Speak No Evil, John Coltrane’s Ascension and Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz.
“I got into that free jazz for a while,” he admitted, “but it didn’t really fit me. Some of it was good, but I prefer playing with changes. I like that element of surprise, of not knowing what you’re going to hear next, but I didn’t like that it shut so many people out. A lot of people didn’t dig free jazz, because you have to really get into that music to get something out of it. You have to really use your imagination. I wanted to connect with as many people as I could, because the people who did that seemed to make the most money.”
When Hubbard, like many of his peers, began experimenting with R&B-flavored fusion in the early ’70s, it was his distinctive trumpet sound, with its lingering links to Rollins and Brown, that redeemed the simple vamps and pop melodies of the material. Hubbard made a quartet of albums for producer Creed Taylor at CTI Records-1970’s Red Clay, 1970’s Straight Life, 1971’s First Light and 1973’s Sky Dive-that managed to combine artistic and commercial success and even won a Grammy.
But not even his remarkable chops could save records that resorted more and more to formula. Albums such as 1976’s Windjammer, 1979’s The Love Connection, 1980’s Mistral and 1981’s Splash were embarrassments. Hubbard realized he was getting more praise and gigs out of his acoustic projects such as the V.S.O.P. tours where he took over Miles Davis’ trumpet chair to perform and record with Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter and Tony Williams. So he shifted gears and cut some excellent acoustic recordings under his own name: 1982’s Keystone Bop, 1983’s Sweet Return, 1987’s Outpost and 1988’s Eternal Triangle. He had seemingly rebounded.
But this renaissance was cut short by a blister. In 1992 Hubbard was playing New York’s Blue Note club when he developed a sore on his lip as he had so many times before. He ignored it, because he was due in Helsinki to play as a guest soloist with a Finnish big band.
“My lip popped during the TV show,” he remembered, shaking his head, “and got blood all over my white shirt. They said, ‘You have to make the second set,’ and like a dummy I tried to do it. But that just made it worse. I laid off for a month, but then I came back too soon, before it was really healed.”
A growth developed on his lip. It wasn’t cancerous, as first feared, but it had to be removed, and the cutting affected his embouchure as much as the growth had. Soon a pattern developed: Hubbard would rest for a while in an effort to heal, then he’d get restless and try to play again, only to be dissatisfied with the results. So he’d rest some more and the cycle would restart. He was only 54 in 1992, but he had lived a hard life and as he passed 60, his health was complicated by problems unrelated to his lips.
“Trumpet players seem to die young,” he mused. “Is it the playing or the lifestyle? It’s probably both.”
He owed MusicMasters another album in 1993, but everyone was unsure how it could be done under the circumstances. So the label turned to Big Apple Productions, the three-man team of Vincent Herring, Carl Allen and David Weiss, who had been organizing records for Japanese labels. The producers decided to record Hubbard as part of an octet in a tribute to Monk, Miles, Trane and Cannon (hence the title MMTC). The combination of many instruments and familiar material, they figured, would take the pressure off the bandleader.
Weiss, a trumpeter himself, was the least well known of the three producers, but he had a knack for conducting sessions and writing arrangements (he wrote three of the eight charts on MMTC). His success with the Hubbard date impressed some record companies, who asked Weiss to produce demos on some potential “young lions” (this was the early ’90s, remember) before the labels committed to full-scale sessions. Out of those demo projects, Weiss bonded with such young musicians as pianist Xavier Davis, bassist Dwayne Burno and saxophonists Greg Tardy and Myron Walden. They all wrote music, so in 1996 the five friends formed the core of the New Jazz Composers Octet.
“I thought it would be good for the band to hook up with Freddie,” Weiss said, “and good for him too. It would give us some exposure and would give him a band that had rehearsed his material. So in 1999 I went out to California and spent a week with him, picking out older tunes that we could arrange for the octet. We toured together in the summer of 2000, recorded later that year and released our first album together, New Colors, in 2003.”
In the process Weiss became Hubbard’s music director and de facto manager. During the interview at the Buckingham Hotel, Weiss lurked in the background, making phone calls and answering e-mails about the evening’s gig, letting Hubbard know when he had to end the interview and get dressed for the show. At Iridium, the 43-year-old Weiss wore a black shirt with a black suit, his short, sandy hair highlighting his angular face as he directed traffic onstage. He stood between Spaulding and Jackson, handling the ensemble trumpet parts so Hubbard could concentrate on his solos.
But the solos weren’t going too well. So Hubbard announced, “Now we’re going to do the song that has kept me alive all these years. I’m going to show you how I first wrote it.” He sat down at the club’s Steinway grand piano and banged out the opening chords to “Red Clay.” Hubbard’s not much of a pianist, but his low expectations on the instrument allowed him to relax. As he got a primitive blues groove going at the keys, he looked happier than he had all night. He picked out the song’s melody, an obvious borrowing of Bobby Hebb’s 1966 pop hit “Sunny,” and turned it over to Spaulding’s alto sax with a delighted chuckle.
Because Hubbard had so much trouble playing, the evening’s focus inevitably shifted to his compositions, just as it does on the new album, On the Real Side, which is, after all, a collaboration with the New Jazz Composers Octet. For a long time, his virtuosic performances had obscured his writing, but now that the virtuosity was gone, maybe it was time to appreciate his compositions.
“What’s most interesting to me as a musician,” noted Weiss, “are not the popular tunes like ‘Red Clay’ or ‘Up Jumped Spring,’ but rather the more complex pieces like ‘True Colors,’ ‘For B.P.’ and ‘Outer Forces.’ His pieces can be dark and complicated, but they always have real melodies. And Freddie has a unique rhythm to the way he plays, even the way he walks-a swaggering kind of strut.
“‘Lifeflight’ is my favorite on the new record. It’s got a strong melody with an interesting rhythmic counterpoint. When you expand his pieces from a quartet to an octet, all the hip tendencies in the tune, all the unusual grooves and harmonies, get more weight and have more of an impact.”
“When I was younger,” Hubbard admitted, “I was more into proving I could play. I wrote a lot of things, but they got overshadowed by the playing. But I can’t play that way anymore.”
But he can’t seem to stop himself from trying. Again and again at Iridium, he would pick up the more forgiving flugelhorn, his main instrument these days, and try to blast out his diamond-sharp and diamond-hard phrases of yore. Some musicians onstage turned their heads as if uncomfortable with the awkward results. Others, like Curtis Fuller, were so glad to see Hubbard onstage at all that they smiled as they watched him give it everything he had.
“The years have taken a toll,” Spaulding acknowledged, “so I don’t know if he’ll be able to continue or not. We gave him all the support we possibly could at the Iridium. He seemed like he was enjoying it. It’s been a struggle these past few years, but his spirit is still there. I have to admire him for that. I would have shut down myself, gotten a teaching job or something.”
Hubbard remained horizontal on his hotel bed for the entire interview, but he perked up when asked if he ever considered quitting. He propped himself up on one elbow and stared straight at the interviewer in the bedside chair.
“After I had the lip operation, I couldn’t get that sound I wanted,” he confessed. “That was discouraging. I was worried more about how I sounded than in getting healthy. I would get set to get the sound I wanted-I could hear it in my head-but I couldn’t get it to come out. I thought about stopping, but I made up my mind I was going to continue to play. A lot of guys quit, but that’s a mistake unless you’ve got a lot of money stashed somewhere.”
He sank back on his pillow. “Most people in the entertainment business won’t admit they’re getting old. Miles used to wear those young people’s clothes, and people would come for what he was wearing more than for what he was playing. I’m naïve in the same way. I put color in my hair because I don’t want gray hair on my head. I ask myself, ‘Why not?’ I don’t know.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
https://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Trumpeter-Freddie-Hubbard-celebrates-70th-3221250.php
Trumpeter Freddie Hubbard celebrates 70th
-
Photo: Courtesy Yoshis
Back in the '70s, when adopting electric instruments and rock stylings earned jazz artists the scarlet "sellout" S - unlike today, when it's a badge of innovation - it seemed Hubbard took the most flak, even though many of his peers were doing it. It was as if a collective "Freddie, say it ain't so!" went up. It's why Hubbard's producer and arranger, trumpeter David Weiss, calls Hubbard the Barry Bonds
"He's the one guy who seems to be taking the brunt of the s- for everybody's whatever," Weiss says, "whether it's fusion, irresponsibility, drug use."
Hubbard doesn't get too exercised over it, though.
"They've got to jump on somebody," he says.
"Blood was everywhere, man," Hubbard says.
Then the lip became infected. When it failed to heal, a doctor ordered a biopsy. It came back negative, but Hubbard kept trying to play, which wasn't good for his lip or his reputation. Eventually, he slowed down so much it looked as if he was going to cash in his career, at which point, in the late '90s, Weiss rode to the rescue.
"I call him my baby," Hubbard says, chortling heartily. "He brought me back to work. He called me out of the blue and said, 'C'mon, Freddie, you've got to play some more.' "
On April 7, Hubbard turns 70, and he's celebrating with a series of shows Thursday through Saturday at the San Francisco Yoshi's. Four of his band members - vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson, alto saxophonist James Spaulding, drummer Lenny White and pianist George Cables - have been playing with Hubbard since the '60s, and Spaulding grew up with him in Indianapolis. The other players for the birthday shows are tenor saxophonist Craig Handy, bassist Dwayne Burno and Weiss.
"It'll be good to be back at Yoshi's. I used to play there all the time, But what with my lip, they've been scared to book me," he says, laughing.
By then he had already made dozens of records as a leader and played on hundreds of others. He wasn't only the hardest-working trumpeter in show business, he was also the best, with a gleaming, quicksilver sound that combined the brass of Louis Armstrong with the bebop power of Clifford Brown and the melodic grace of Miles Davis.
"Nobody's played longer, higher, harder or faster than Freddie Hubbard, for more years," Weiss says by phone from New York. "Nobody. Not even close. There's nobody you can compare him to."
Hubbard was lucky, of course, to come up in an era where jazz giants not only roamed the Earth, but a lot of them also lived around the corner. That was the '60s, when the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn was something of a mecca for jazz artists.
"I lived with (saxophonist) Eric Dolphy for a year and a half," Hubbard says. "(Pianist) McCoy Tyner lived down the block." He ticks off the name of his neighbors: "(Bassist) Paul Chambers, (pianists) Cedar Walton, Bobby Timmons, Kenny Barron, Wynton Kelly."
The critical mass of these artists and the camaraderie among them are what distinguishes that era from today's, according to Hubbard.
"We would play with each other and study," he says. "I used to go over to somebody's house every day. Sonny Rollins. I would go over to his house and ask him questions, practice with him. Coltrane, too."
Not that it was easy for Hubbard to get accepted by this crowd when he first arrived in New York from Indianapolis in 1958.
"It took about a month before I had a chance to sit in" at the jam sessions, he says "They wouldn't let me. Finally, I just took my horn and walked up on the bandstand."
He made his mark, but paid gigs came slowly at first because, he says, everyone wanted trumpet players to sound like Dizzy Gillespie or Davis.
"I was playing like Clifford, and I met Miles, and he said (Hubbard imitates Davis' raspy growl), 'You like Clifford?' And I said, 'Yeah, I think he's the baddest around.' And Miles said, 'Nah, he plays too much. He's too staccato. He plays too many notes.'
"Then he said to me, 'Freddie, you play too many notes. Ain't nobody can hear all that s-.' But he got me my first gig with Blue Note records."
Hubbard cut about a dozen records for Blue Note, including "Hub Cap" and "Ready for Freddie," and he played on countless classics for the label: Wayne Shorter's "Speak No Evil," Dolphy's "Out to Lunch," Herbie Hancock's "Takin' Off." It wasn't just Blue Note, of course. Hubbard played on John Coltrane's "Ascension," Ornette Coleman's "Free Jazz," Oliver Nelson's "The Blues and the Abstract Truth" and far too many more albums to name.
"As a trumpet player, nobody's been able to do what he can do on the instrument," Weiss says. "It's just ridiculous."
Musicians who hired Hubbard "could expand how they wrote things because they knew Freddie would be able to play them," Weiss adds. "And that makes great records possible."
Now, of course, the spiel on Hubbard is that he's lost his chops. But, Weiss says, "he's still capable of doing things weakened that nobody else can do." For proof, listen to Hubbard's comeback album, "New Colors," released in 2001 on Hip Bop. Backed by Weiss' New Jazz Composers Octet, Hubbard's genius comes through on flugelhorn played on several of his classic tunes. Some of the pyrotechnics are missing from his arsenal, but his sense of melody and rhythm are 100 percent.
Hubbard has another CD with the octet in the can and an all-star date with drummer Louis Hayes, pianist Roland Hanna and bassist Ron Carter due for Blue Note.
"The trumpet is rough, man, especially the way I play," Hubbard says. "I used to play all over the horn, like a saxophone. It takes a little more stamina. I used to play so long ... 30 choruses. People don't do that s- no more."
So, yes, his trumpet struck back at him. Not that he holds it against the instrument.
"I was lucky. I got to play with everybody I wanted to play with. And that trumpet took me all over the world, man. I really appreciate it."
FREDDIE HUBBARD & FRIENDS 70TH BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION: 8 and 10 p.m. Thurs.-Sat. $24-$32. Yoshi's, 1330 Fillmore St., San Francisco. (415) 655-5600, sf.yoshis.com.
https://www.nuvo.net/music/album-reviews-five-forward-thinking-freddie-hubbard-albums/article_a8ddc60c-ae65-5e34-85b7-7e8651df5cf8.html
Album reviews: Five forward-thinking Freddie Hubbard albums
David Baker's tribute to Freddie
Hubbard at September's Indy Jazz Fest will add to a year-long
celebration of the work of the Indianapolis-born trumpeter, who died
last December. Here's a brief look at Hubbard's discography, followed by
an in-depth consideration five albums on which Hubbard strayed from the
jazz world to incorporate funk, R&B and musics beyond.
Freddie Hubbard left Indianapolis for New York in 1958, and before the age of 30, he played on some of the most important, genre-expanding recordings in jazz history. Even a brief survey is staggering: John Coltrane's Ascension, Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz, Herbie Hancock's Maiden Voyage, Wayne Shorter's Speak No Evil, Eric Dolphy's Out to Lunch. Hubbard also toured and recorded as one of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers and worked with a slew of other greats: Roland Kirk, Max Roach, Sam Rivers and more.
As a leader, Hubbard cultivated an equally distinguished career, adroitly balancing the popular and progressive ends of the jazz spectrum while penning some compositions that would become standards. After a string of classic hard bop albums for Blue Note, Hubbard signed to Atlantic and began to carve out his own niche, bringing soul, funk and rock into his sound. This new sound of Hubbard's came into full bloom in the '70s after he signed to CTI records. Written off at the time as "too commercial" by jazz purists, Hubbard's recordings from this period struck a chord with the record buying public, making his CTI catalog both a commercial and artistic success, a rare combination in jazz.
The '80s saw Freddie returning to his hard bop roots and he would continue to work in that style for the remainder of his career.
All of Hubbard's early recordings for Blue Note and Impulse are essential listening for jazz fans, but the list below spotlights albums from the middle period of Hubbard's career, a time when his music was integrating influences outside of the jazz world.
Backlash (Atlantic Records, 1966)
Hubbard's first effort for Atlantic, Backlash sees the influence of R&B and soul moving into Hubbard's sound while remaining rooted in the hard bop style of his Blue Note days. Includes the first recording of Hubbard's classic composition "Little Sunflower."
Sing Me a Song of Songmy (Atlantic Records, 1971)
A collaboration between Hubbard and Turkish composer Ilhan Mimaroglu. Both the most experimental album of Hubbard's career, and one of the most experimental jazz albums ever made. Conceived as an anti-war statement, the album shifts subtly between performances by Hubbard's quintet, chanting voices and Mimaroglu's experiments in "musique concrete," a mix of early synthesizer noise and electronic tape effects. File this next to Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music as one of the most un-commercial records ever released by a major label.
Red Clay (CTI, 1970)
His first for CTI, and a classic. Red Clay finds Hubbard leading his all-star band through a maze of funky, bop-influenced soul-jazz grooves. Pick up the CD reissue for the previously unreleased bonus track, a scorching version of John Lennon's "Cold Turkey."
First Light (CTI, 1971)
The apotheosis of Hubbard's work on CTI, First Light represents the summation of the CTI recording aesthetic: great musicians, big arrangements, pristine production and soulful grooves. Don Sebesky's string arrangements provide a lush and mysterious background for some of the most inspired soloing of Hubbard's career. Check out the brilliant reading of Paul McCartney's "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey" for evidence.
A Soul Experiment (Atlantic Records, 1969)
Hated by jazz critics and purists, A Soul Experiment provides a treasure trove of grooves for fans of late '60s soul and funk. The presence of funky drummer Bernard Purdie is unmistakable and the bluesy ballads contain some of Hubbard's most direct and expressive playing.
Freddie Hubbard left Indianapolis for New York in 1958, and before the age of 30, he played on some of the most important, genre-expanding recordings in jazz history. Even a brief survey is staggering: John Coltrane's Ascension, Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz, Herbie Hancock's Maiden Voyage, Wayne Shorter's Speak No Evil, Eric Dolphy's Out to Lunch. Hubbard also toured and recorded as one of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers and worked with a slew of other greats: Roland Kirk, Max Roach, Sam Rivers and more.
As a leader, Hubbard cultivated an equally distinguished career, adroitly balancing the popular and progressive ends of the jazz spectrum while penning some compositions that would become standards. After a string of classic hard bop albums for Blue Note, Hubbard signed to Atlantic and began to carve out his own niche, bringing soul, funk and rock into his sound. This new sound of Hubbard's came into full bloom in the '70s after he signed to CTI records. Written off at the time as "too commercial" by jazz purists, Hubbard's recordings from this period struck a chord with the record buying public, making his CTI catalog both a commercial and artistic success, a rare combination in jazz.
The '80s saw Freddie returning to his hard bop roots and he would continue to work in that style for the remainder of his career.
All of Hubbard's early recordings for Blue Note and Impulse are essential listening for jazz fans, but the list below spotlights albums from the middle period of Hubbard's career, a time when his music was integrating influences outside of the jazz world.
Backlash (Atlantic Records, 1966)
Hubbard's first effort for Atlantic, Backlash sees the influence of R&B and soul moving into Hubbard's sound while remaining rooted in the hard bop style of his Blue Note days. Includes the first recording of Hubbard's classic composition "Little Sunflower."
Sing Me a Song of Songmy (Atlantic Records, 1971)
A collaboration between Hubbard and Turkish composer Ilhan Mimaroglu. Both the most experimental album of Hubbard's career, and one of the most experimental jazz albums ever made. Conceived as an anti-war statement, the album shifts subtly between performances by Hubbard's quintet, chanting voices and Mimaroglu's experiments in "musique concrete," a mix of early synthesizer noise and electronic tape effects. File this next to Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music as one of the most un-commercial records ever released by a major label.
Red Clay (CTI, 1970)
His first for CTI, and a classic. Red Clay finds Hubbard leading his all-star band through a maze of funky, bop-influenced soul-jazz grooves. Pick up the CD reissue for the previously unreleased bonus track, a scorching version of John Lennon's "Cold Turkey."
First Light (CTI, 1971)
The apotheosis of Hubbard's work on CTI, First Light represents the summation of the CTI recording aesthetic: great musicians, big arrangements, pristine production and soulful grooves. Don Sebesky's string arrangements provide a lush and mysterious background for some of the most inspired soloing of Hubbard's career. Check out the brilliant reading of Paul McCartney's "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey" for evidence.
A Soul Experiment (Atlantic Records, 1969)
Hated by jazz critics and purists, A Soul Experiment provides a treasure trove of grooves for fans of late '60s soul and funk. The presence of funky drummer Bernard Purdie is unmistakable and the bluesy ballads contain some of Hubbard's most direct and expressive playing.
https://cageian.wordpress.com/2013/02/15/ilhan-mimaroglu-freddie-hubbards-sing-me-a-song-of-songmy/
Ilhan Mimaroglu & Freddie Hubbard’s “Sing Me a Song of Songmy”
Ilhan Mimaroglu
In July last year, the strange story of İlhan Mimaroğlu came to a close due to complications from pneumonia.
The son of a famed Turkish architect, Mimaroğlu moved to New York in the 1950s and eventually became an integral, and relatively undersung inventor and pioneer in the John Cage-championed realm of electronic and avant garde composition exploding behind the scenes in the city at the time. Mimaroğlu thrived as both a composer in his own right, and as a producer and owner of Finnadar Records; working with, recording and releasing works by a wide range of musical titans – including Charles Mingus, John Cage, Edgar Varese and, to somewhat bizarre effect, Freddie Hubbard.
Freddie Hubbard was arguably the only rival to Miles Davis’ crown as jazz’s greatest trumpeter (& flugelhornist) at the close of the 1960s, and while Davis explored modality and the influence of psychedelia and expanding timbral colour on his music with In A Silent Way & Bitches Brew, Hubbard introduced soul and funk in a much more subtle way on his Herbie Hancock-informed 1970s opuses, Red Clay & Straight Life, expanding the pallet of his music, yet still remaining firmly on Earth while Davis explored outer space. Furthermore, Hubbard’s First Light, recorded after Sing Me a Song of Songmy in 1971 saw Hubbard become even less musically adventurous (although still brilliant), injecting string arrangements into the mix in an uncharacteristically high-budget affair, creating an album of soul & big-band influenced fusion. All of which make his involvement in Mimaroğlu’s strange Songmy project all the stranger.
The “Songmy” in Sing Me a Song of Songmy, undoubtedly must refer to “Son My”, a village in South Vietnam and the location of the mass murder, rape and mutilation of some 400 unarmed civilians by the US Army during the tumultuous events of the US’ Vietnam campaign in 1968. The event caused outrage in the States, and was one of the driving factors in the burgeoning anti-war sentiment in the nation that arguably cost the US the war later in the 70s.
As afroementioned, Mimaroğlu’s album can take rank with the multitude of similar anti-war compositions coming out of both popular and jazz music at the time, and furthermore sit comfortably alongside the “Afro” focused music culture of the day, when the likes of Archie Shepp, Melvin van Peebles and Gil Scott-Heron really put the African back into African-American. The record takes the form of a montage, patch-working its pieces together in an almost Dark Side of the Moon fashion.
“You, black man. US Army, private first class. For freedom you shoot down your own freedom. Your body lies crucified on a steel cross.”This album it seems, was somewhat falsely marketed as a collaboration, with Hubbard first and Mimaroğlu second, but it’s quite the opposite. As was in vogue at the time, it’s an album by a producer, with Hubbard & his quintet merely as star guests. The album, it seems, was a flop, and is seen as a minor footnote in Hubbard’s beloved career as a great voice in 20th century jazz, and one of the many big label oddities from the era. At times it may seem flat-out weird, and at others it may sound utterly breathtaking, either way the album truly deserves a second hearing, and is in many ways a lost classic and a relic from a time when “big-budget major label avant-garde” was still possible, and inventive musicians were, on occasion, given carte blanche to be just that.
Part I
1 Threnody For Sharon Tate 2:04
2 This Is Combat, I Know 8:57
3 The Crowd 7:03
4 What A Good Time For A Kent State 1:27
Part II
5 Monodrama 2:54
6 Black Soldier 2:19
7 Interlude I 5:48
8 Interlude II 4:30
9 And Yet, There Could Be Love 4:28
10 Postlude 1:05
5 Monodrama 2:54
6 Black Soldier 2:19
7 Interlude I 5:48
8 Interlude II 4:30
9 And Yet, There Could Be Love 4:28
10 Postlude 1:05
Download
Footnotes:
- Visit John Zorn’s Tzadik: probably the best example of this sort of high-prouction value experimental music happening today.
- Listen to Amalgamation – a similar and parallel fusion of jazz with musique concréte by Masahiko Satoh (being recorded at almost exactly the same time in 1971, only in Japan).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freddie_Hubbard
Freddie Hubbard
Frederick Dewayne Hubbard (April 7, 1938 – December 29, 2008) was an American jazz trumpeter.[1] He was known primarily for playing in the bebop, hard bop, and post-bop styles from the early 1960s onwards. His unmistakable and influential tone contributed to new perspectives for modern jazz and bebop.[2]
Career beginnings
Hubbard started playing the mellophone and trumpet in his school band at Arsenal Technical High School in Indianapolis, Indiana. Trumpeter Lee Katzman, former sideman with Stan Kenton, recommended that he begin studying at the Arthur Jordan Conservatory of Music (now the Jordan College of the Arts at Butler University) with Max Woodbury, the principal trumpeter of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra. In his teens, Hubbard worked locally with brothers Wes and Monk Montgomery and worked with bassist Larry Ridley and saxophonist James Spaulding. In 1958, at the age of 20, he moved to New York and began playing with some of the best jazz players of the era, including Philly Joe Jones, Sonny Rollins, Slide Hampton, Eric Dolphy, J. J. Johnson, and Quincy Jones. On 19 June 1960 Hubbard made his first record as a leader, Open Sesame at the beginning of his contract with Blue Note Records, with saxophonist Tina Brooks, pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Sam Jones, and drummer Clifford Jarvis. Six days later he returned the favor to Brooks and recorded with him on True Blue.
1960s
In December 1960, Hubbard was invited to play on Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz after Coleman had heard him performing with Don Cherry.[3]
Then in May 1961, Hubbard played on Olé Coltrane, John Coltrane's final recording session for Atlantic Records. Together with Eric Dolphy and Art Davis, Hubbard was the only sideman who appeared on both Olé and Africa/Brass, Coltrane's first album with Impulse!. Later, in August 1961, Hubbard recorded Ready for Freddie (Blue Note), which was also his first collaboration with saxophonist Wayne Shorter. Hubbard joined Shorter later in 1961 when he replaced Lee Morgan in Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. He played on several Blakey recordings, including Caravan, Ugetsu, Mosaic, and Free for All. In all, during the 1960s, he recorded eight studio albums as a bandleader for Blue Note, and more than two dozen as a sideman.[4] Hubbard remained with Blakey until 1966, leaving to form the first of several small groups of his own, which featured, among others, his Blue note associate James Spaulding, pianist Kenny Barron and drummer Louis Hayes. This group recorded for Atlantic.
It was during this time that he began to develop his own sound, distancing himself from the early influences of Clifford Brown and Morgan, and won the DownBeat jazz magazine "New Star" award on trumpet.[5]
Throughout the 1960s Hubbard played as a sideman on some of the most important albums from that era, including Oliver Nelson's The Blues and the Abstract Truth, Eric Dolphy's Out to Lunch!, Herbie Hancock's Maiden Voyage, and Wayne Shorter's Speak No Evil.[6] Hubbard was described as "the most brilliant trumpeter of a generation of musicians who stand with one foot in 'tonal' jazz and the other in the atonal camp".[7] Though he never fully embraced the free jazz of the 1960s, he appeared on two of its landmark albums: Coleman's Free Jazz and Coltrane's Ascension, as well as on Sonny Rollins' 1966 "New Thing" track "East Broadway Run Down" with Elvin Jones and Jimmy Garrison.
1970s
Hubbard with HarryAbraham
Hubbard achieved his greatest popular success in the 1970s with a series of albums for Creed Taylor and his record label CTI Records, overshadowing Stanley Turrentine, Hubert Laws, and George Benson.[8] Although his early 1970s jazz albums Red Clay, First Light, Straight Life, and Sky Dive were particularly well received and considered among his best work, the albums he recorded later in the decade were attacked by critics for their commercialism. First Light won a 1972 Grammy Award and included pianists Herbie Hancock and Richard Wyands, guitarists Eric Gale and George Benson, bassist Ron Carter, drummer Jack DeJohnette, and percussionist Airto Moreira.[9] In 1994, Hubbard, collaborating with Chicago jazz vocalist/co-writer Catherine Whitney, had lyrics set to the music of First Light.[10]
In 1977 Hubbard joined with Herbie Hancock, Tony Williams, Ron Carter and Wayne Shorter, members of the mid-sixties Miles Davis Quintet, for a series of performances. Several live recordings of this group were released as V.S.O.P, V.S.O.P. The Quintet, V.S.O.P. Tempest in the Colosseum (all 1977) and V.S.O.P. Live Under the Sky (1979).[2]
Hubbard's trumpet playing was featured on the track "Zanzibar", on the 1978 Billy Joel album 52nd Street (the 1979 Grammy Award Winner for Best Album). The track ends with a fade during Hubbard's performance. An "unfaded" version was released on the 2004 Billy Joel box set My Lives.
Later life
In the 1980s Hubbard was again leading his own jazz group – this time with Billy Childs and Larry Klein, among others, as members – attracting favorable reviews, playing at concerts and festivals in the US and Europe, often in the company of Joe Henderson, playing a repertory of hard bop and modal jazz pieces. Hubbard played at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1980 and in 1989 (with Bobby Hutcherson). He played with Woody Shaw, recording with him in 1985, and two years later recorded Stardust with Benny Golson. In 1988 he teamed up once more with Blakey at an engagement in the Netherlands, from which came Feel the Wind. In 1988, Hubbard played with Elton John, contributing trumpet and flugelhorn and trumpet solos on the track "Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters (Part Two)" for John's Reg Strikes Back album. In 1990 he appeared in Japan headlining an American-Japanese concert package which also featured Elvin Jones, Sonny Fortune, pianists George Duke and Benny Green, bass players Ron Carter, and Rufus Reid, with jazz and vocalist Salena Jones. He also performed at the Warsaw Jazz Festival, at which Live at the Warsaw Jazz Festival (Jazzmen 1992) was recorded.[2]
Following a long setback of health problems and a serious lip injury in 1992 where he ruptured his upper lip and subsequently developed an infection, Hubbard was again playing and recording occasionally, even if not at the high level that he set for himself during his earlier career.[11] His best records ranked with the finest in his field.[12]
Legacy and honors
In 2006, the National Endowment for the Arts accorded Hubbard its highest honor in jazz, the NEA Jazz Masters Award.[5]
On December 29, 2008, Hubbard died in Sherman Oaks, California from complications caused by a heart attack he suffered on November 26.[13]
Freddie Hubbard had close ties to the Jazz Foundation of America in his later years. He is quoted as saying, "When I had congestive heart failure and couldn't work, The Jazz Foundation paid my mortgage for several months and saved my home! Thank God for those people."[14] The Jazz Foundation of America's Musicians' Emergency Fund took care of him during times of illness. After his death, Hubbard's estate requested that tax-deductible donations be made in his name to the Jazz Foundation of America.[14]
Discography
As leader/co-leader
Sortable table with last recording session for each release as primal order.
Title
|
Year
|
Label
|
1960
| ||
1960
| ||
1961
| ||
Groovy!/Minor Mishap
|
1961
|
Fontana/Black Lion
|
1961
| ||
1962
| ||
1962
| ||
1962
| ||
1963
| ||
1964
| ||
1965
| ||
1965
|
Label M
| |
1966
| ||
1966
| ||
Fastball: Live at the Left Bank
|
1967
|
Hyena
|
1968
| ||
1969
| ||
1970
| ||
1970
| ||
1970
| ||
1970
| ||
1971
| ||
1971
| ||
1973
| ||
1973
| ||
1973
| ||
1974
| ||
1975
| ||
1974
| ||
1975
|
Sony (Japan)
| |
1975
| ||
1976
| ||
1977
| ||
1978
| ||
1979
| ||
1979
| ||
1980
| ||
Mistral with Art Pepper
|
1981
|
East World (Japan)/Liberty
|
1981
| ||
1981
| ||
1981
| ||
1981
| ||
1981
| ||
1981
| ||
1982
| ||
1982
|
Metropolitan
| |
1982
|
Real Time
| |
1983
| ||
1983
|
Baystate (Japan)
| |
Double Take with Woody Shaw
|
1985
| |
1987
| ||
The Eternal Triangle with Woody Shaw
|
1987
| |
Stardust with Benny Golson
|
1987
| |
Feel the Wind with Art Blakey
|
1988
| |
1989
|
Blue Note
| |
1989
|
Alpha/Compose
| |
1991
| ||
1991
|
Starburst
| |
1991
|
MusicMasters
| |
1992
|
Evidence
| |
1995
|
MusicMasters
| |
2000
|
Hip Bop
| |
2007
|
Times Square
|
As sideman
Sortable table with main artist alphabetically as primal order.
Main artist
|
Title
|
Label
|
Year
|
1966
| |||
Roberto Ávila & Sarava
|
Come to Brazil
|
1989
| |
A&M/CTI
|
1969
| ||
1960
| |||
1961
| |||
Art Blakey
|
1961
| ||
Art Blakey
|
Jazz Hour
|
1961 [1992]
| |
Art Blakey
|
1962
| ||
Art Blakey
|
1962
| ||
Art Blakey
|
1963
| ||
Art Blakey
|
1964
| ||
Art Blakey
|
1964
| ||
Art Blakey
|
1964
| ||
Art Blakey
|
1965
| ||
1960
| |||
1971
| |||
1979
| |||
1990
| |||
Go
|
1959
| ||
1960
| |||
1961
| |||
John Coltrane
|
1961
| ||
John Coltrane
|
1965
| ||
1969
| |||
1960
| |||
Eric Dolphy
|
1964
| ||
1960
| |||
1973
| |||
1967
| |||
1962
| |||
1980
| |||
1960
| |||
Curtis Fuller
|
1961
| ||
Curtis Fuller
|
1962
| ||
1980
| |||
Dizzy Gillespie, Clark Terry and Oscar Peterson
|
1980
| ||
1961
| |||
Benny Golson
|
Pop + Jazz = Swing — jazz part also released as Just Jazz!
|
1962
| |
Benny Golson
|
1982
| ||
1961
| |||
Dexter Gordon
|
1964
| ||
Dexter Gordon
|
1972
| ||
Dexter Gordon
|
1986
| ||
Strand
|
1959
| ||
Slide Hampton
|
1960
| ||
Slide Hampton
|
Epic
|
1962
| |
1962
| |||
Herbie Hancock
|
1964
| ||
Herbie Hancock
|
1965
| ||
Herbie Hancock
|
1966
| ||
Herbie Hancock
|
1977
| ||
Herbie Hancock
|
1977
| ||
Herbie Hancock
|
1977
| ||
Herbie Hancock
|
1979
| ||
Herbie Hancock
|
1986
| ||
1961
| |||
Jimmy Heath
|
1962
| ||
1996
| |||
1965 [1975]
| |||
Andrew Hill
|
1965
| ||
1965
| |||
Bobby Hutcherson
|
1965
| ||
Bobby Hutcherson
|
1977
| ||
Bobby Hutcherson
|
1978
| ||
1973
| |||
Goodbye— trumpet on "S.K.J." only
|
1974
| ||
52nd Street — trumpet on "Zanzibar" only
|
1978
| ||
1988
| |||
1961
| |||
Mercury
|
1960
| ||
Quincy Jones
|
Impulse!
|
1962
| |
Quincy Jones
|
Mercury
|
1964
| |
Quincy Jones
|
1965
| ||
Quincy Jones
|
1969
| ||
Quincy Jones
|
1970
| ||
1982
| |||
1962
| |||
Temptation
|
1991
| ||
1979
| |||
1963
| |||
1961
| |||
1994
| |||
1958
| |||
Road Song
|
1968
| ||
1960
| |||
By All Means
|
1980
| ||
1961
| |||
Cerupa
|
1993
| ||
Dedication!/Minor Mishap (Hubbard)
|
Prestige/Black Lion
|
1961
| |
Duke Pearson
|
1966
| ||
Duke Pearson
|
1967
| ||
1982
| |||
1965
| |||
1965
| |||
1966
| |||
1979
| |||
Cambios
|
Concord Picante
|
1991
| |
1965
| |||
1973
| |||
1962
| |||
Wayne Shorter
|
1964
| ||
Wayne Shorter
|
1965
| ||
Wayne Shorter
|
1965
| ||
A Piece of Cake
| |||
1970
| |||
Stanley Turrentine
|
1992
| ||
1978
| |||
McCoy Tyner
|
Quartets 4 X 4 — on three tracks as part of one quartet
|
1980
| |
1980
| |||
1960
| |||
Randy Weston
|
1972
|
Filmography
- 1981 Studiolive (Sony)[15]
- 1985 One Night with Blue Note
- 2004 Live at the Village Vanguard (Immortal)[16]
- 2005 All Blues (FS World Jazz)[17]
- 2009 Freddie Hubbard: One of a Kind
References
- Freddie Hubbard Dies". Downbeat. December 29, 2008. Archived from the original on June 16, 2013. Retrieved August 12, 2013.
- Scott Yanow. "Freddie Hubbard | Biography". AllMusic. Retrieved August 12, 2013.
- Martin Williams, sleeve notes to Free Jazz (1960)
- "Freddie Hubbard The Blue Note Years 1960–1965". Dan Miller Jazz. Retrieved August 12, 2013.
- "Freddie Hubbard", NEA Jazz Masters, 2006.
- Larkin, Colin. The Guinness Encyclopedia of Popular Music, Guinness (1995), pp. 2018–2019 – ISBN 1-56159-176-9
- Berendt, Joachim E (1976). The Jazz Book. Paladin. p. 191.
- Scott Yanow, Jazz on Record: The First Sixty Years, Backbeat Books, 2003, p. 821 – ISBN 0-87930-755-2
- Thom Jurek. "First Light – Freddie Hubbard | Songs, Reviews, Credits, Awards". AllMusic. Retrieved August 12, 2013.
- "LoroMusic.com and Gopam Enterprises". Gopammusic.com. Retrieved August 12, 2013.
- "Freddie Hubbard @ All About Jazz". Allaboutjazz.com. Archived from the original on May 11, 2012. Retrieved August 12, 2013.
- Yanow, Scott. Jazz: A Regional Exploration, Greenwood Press, 2005, p. 184 – ISBN 0-313-32871-4
- Heckman, Don (December 30, 2008). "Freddie Hubbard, jazz trumpeter, dies at 70". Los Angeles Times.
- "Freddie Hubbard" Archived April 7, 2014, at the Wayback Machine, Jazz Foundation of America.
- "Studiolive – Freddie Hubbard | Songs, Reviews, Credits, Awards". AllMusic. Retrieved August 12, 2013.
- "Live at the Village Vanguard – Freddie Hubbard | Songs, Reviews, Credits, Awards". AllMusic. June 29, 2004. Retrieved August 12, 2013.
- "All Blues [DVD] – Freddie Hubbard | Songs, Reviews, Credits, Awards". AllMusic. July 19, 2005. Retrieved August 12, 2013.
- Official website
- Freddie Hubbard at Find a Grave
- Freddie Hubbard on IMDb
- Howard Mandel, "Jazz Trumpeter Freddie Hubbard Dies", NPR Music, December 30, 2008.
External links
THE
MUSIC OF FREDDIE HUBBARD: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF
RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS
WITH FREDDIE HUBBARD:
