I first discovered Freddie Hubbard in the mid-70s when he was playing slightly electrified jazz with a bit of soul and fusion and post-bop in the mix. Those recordings on CTI made me a fan, which I remain to this day, but I’ve not listened much to his work from what might be the peak of his long career in the mid to late 60s. This incredible live set from Resonance Records certainly changes that.
Frederick Hubbard was a phenomenon, widely hailed as the best trumpeter of his era. While still in his teens he played with Wes and Monk Montgomery, and in the late ’50s and early ’60s in New York he played with most of the big names including Sonny Rollins, Eric Dolphy, Quincy Jones and more. Beginning in 1960 he made numerous recordings on Blue Note as a leader, and also played on groundbreaking records by Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Oliver Nelson, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter and others, and stepped in to replace Lee Morgan in Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, with whom he played on 10 albums.
Almost from the beginning — and especially by the mid 1960s when he began to develop his own sound distinct from his influences like Clifford Brown — that sound and style was immediately influential and recognizable. This set of three LPs or two CDs captures him at his young lion prime in a live date in April 1967 at the Bronx club known as Blue Morocco. With him on the bandstand is his all-star combo of Benny Maupin on tenor sax, Kenny Barron on piano, bassist Herbie Lewis and drummer Freddie Waits.
If you love to hear a trumpet and tenor sax playing together as much as I do, you’re in for a treat with this one. Hubbard and Maupin are locked in from the opening of the first track “Crisis,” one of four Hubbard originals which along with two standards and one by bassist Bob Cunningham (who played on a Hubbard album that same year). If you’re doing the math, seven tracks over three LPs or two CDs means these are long tracks. This combo really stretches out, with Hubbard, Maupin and Barron taking some long solos on every tune.
After the stratospheric bop of “Crisis” things ease back a bit for Hubbard’s tune that has become something of a standard itself, “Up Jumped Spring,” with Freddie blowing through a Harmon mute for a cool, after-midnight sound; and then the deep blues of Cunningham’s “Echoes of Blue” featuring Herbie Lewis prominently. Hubbard’s zippy bop “True Colors” reads as an homage to Dizzy Gillespie, and drummer Waits must’ve lost at least a pound in perspiration on this one alone, as the whole rhythm section pushes Hubbard and Maupin through the transition to another Hubbard tune “Breaking Point” and back again.
The longest track at 24 minutes is the standard “Bye Bye Blackbird,” which the ensemble takes through a bunch of changes that amounts to a sonic tour of mid-century jazz styles. The Gershwins’ “Summertime” gets a hard bop/bossa treatment, and the set winds up with the deep swinging groove of Hubbard’s “Breaking Point.”
As Maupin says in one of the interviews included in the deluxe set’s booklet, ” …with Freddie, we could play all kinds of music. By that, I mean, in one piece, we would go from straight-ahead to avant-garde and switch on a dime, change on a dime. Freddie was always the instigator. If you listened to him, you could tell where he wanted to go and we would just go there with him. It was a great band.”
The booklet also includes an interview with Kenny Barron, as well as notes by jazz authority John Koenig and Resonance Records’ Zev Feldman, and appreciations and interviews with Charles Tolliver, Eddie Henderson, Steven Bernstein, Jeremy Pelt and others.
(Resonance, 2025)
