BLP 4114

Ike Quebec - Bossa Nova Soul Samba

Released - April 1963

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, October 5, 1962
Ike Quebec, tenor sax; Kenny Burrell, guitar; Wendell Marshall, bass; Willie Bobo, drums; Garvin Masseaux, chekere.

tk.3 Loie
tk.7 Liebestraum
tk.8 Lloro Tu Despedida
tk.13 Shu Shu
tk.19 Favela
tk.24 Linda Flor
tk.27 Me 'N You
tk.35 Goin' Home
tk.38 Blue Samba

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Loie	Kenny Burrell	05 October 1962
Lloro Tu Despedida	Facundo Cabral, Joraci Camargo, Emanuel Lacordaire	05 October 1962
Goin' Home	Antonín Dvořák, William Arms Fisher	05 October 1962
Me 'n You	Ike Quebec	05 October 1962
Side Two
Liebesträume	Franz Liszt	05 October 1962
Shu Shu	Antônio Almeida, Carlos Monteiro DeSouza	05 October 1962
Blue Samba	Ike Quebec	05 October 1962
Favela	Joraci Camargo, Heckel Tavares	05 October 1962
Linda Flor	Henrique Vogeler	05 October 1962

Liner Notes

THE insinuating, infectiously relaxing “bossa nova" has become a pervasive phenomenon within the past year. Essentially, the "new wrinkle" (one way of translating the term) is a more resilient, more elasticized samba with jazz admixtures. Having been developed in Brazil by such native musicians as Joao Gilberto, António Carlos Jobim and Luis Bonfa the “bossa nova” acquired popular momentum in America with astonishing speed. In Ike Quebec’s approach to this inviting idiom, however, the "bossa nova" takes on a somewhat different coloration and mood than has yet appeared on records.

"I had been listening around," says Ike, "and I liked what some of the jazz musicians were doing with this thing. But I decided I wanted to put more grease to it, more of a blues feeling, more sensuality. That’s why this album come out sounding like dancing late at night. We were moanin’ more than most of the others who play ‘bossa nova,’ We mode it soft — and soulful.”

The opening Loie was written by Kenny Burrell for his wife. This is the tune’s first recording. “The song,” says Quebec, is all the more beautiful because it’s so simple. It lays so good. I mean its structure is so right, so naturally put together.” On this track and throughout the album, Kenny Burrell functioned as an exceptionally vital aide to Quebec. Since we had Willie and Garvin and Wendell laying down the rhythms,’ Ike exploins, “Kenny was able to be more free with the beat. He helped a lot to create that floating feeling of the ‘bossa nova’ and he was able to feed me more flexibly and more subtly.”

Loie is indeed an unusually affecting, calmly lyrical song. Ike, always a superior melodist as an improviser, animates the tune with sensitivity and a mellow romanticism. His full, rounded tone is also particularly apt for the kind of glowing serenity which characterizes the “bossa nova”.

Llora Tu Despedida also has a graceful, irresistibly caressing line. Here and in the other numbers, Kenny fits easily into the “bossa nova” bag because of his rhythmic assurance as well as the clarity of his tone and the suppleness of his phrasing.

The evocative Goin’ Home by Dvorak was Ike’s idea as an opposite number for a “bosso nova” set. “I became familiar with sambas a long time ago,” says Ike, “from playing in those dancing schools and halls. I remembered that most of them are in long meter, and I could just hear Goin’ Home on top of a samba rhythm. And it worked out as I thought. It also fused so well into the kind of easeful, reflective mood I wanted for the album as a whole.” Ike’s solo fully communicates the yearning and the compelling nostalgia intended by Dvorak.

Me ‘N You is an original by Ike, and he describes it as “a kind of more personalized Goin’ Home. I mean this is goin’ home to someone.” Here again, Ike plays with his unique combination of tenderness and power. He controls the strength of his tone with consistent skill so that he can shade and shape his textures into a cohesive emotional experience. As in all the tracks, incidentally, the rhythm section is acutely attentive to the kind of mood Ike is building. They’re never in the least obtrusive; and in that respect, it’s instructive to hear the continuously smooth fusion of Marshall, Bobo, and Garvin Masseaux on the gourd-like chekere (an African instrument).

Liebestraum is another illustration of Ike’s transmuting of long-meter standards into the “bossa nova” framework. “The way I feel it,” says Ike, “is to have a line on top that’s quiet, floating and lyrical while the samba cooks underneath.” To this listener, past performances of Liebestroum have connoted the apotheosis of excess schmaltz, but Ike has managed to retain the essence of the tune without overstating the sentiment it conveys.

Shu Shu continues the aura of an early morning on a small dance floor with a very congenial companion who is in no more of a hurry than you are. What Ike has captured in this album is the core of “bossa nova” — carefree, lightly sensuous relaxation.

“I also wanted,” says Ike, “to mix a ‘bossa nova’ with a basic blues, and see what happens.” The result is Ike’s Blue Samba, as basic and deep-rooted a blues as you can get. The “bossa nova” rhythms seem to intertwine with the blues structure until blues and “bossa nova” flow into each other as if it had never been any other way. Listen too to the way Ike builds to a series of climaxes. He handles the blues with on inexorable confidence, a sense of knowing exactly what he can get the blues to say for him. And his tone remains one of the more fulfilling sounds in jazz. Few tenor men sound as if they were playing from so inside the instrument as Ike does.

The final, native-grown Favela and Linda Flor demonstrate again how unaffectedly at ease Ike and his colleagues found themselves in the “bossa nova” context. “You know,” said Ike a few days after the album was recorded, “every time I hear these sides, I hove to start dancing. It's a good feeling.” And it is precisely that feeling of dance-like release from tension that Ike has succeeded in maintaining throughout this Soul Samba celebration. Because the feeling is so right, I expect that this is one "bossa nova" album that will be played just for pleasure long after the “basso nova” fashion has subsided. What makes the album durable, in short, is Ike’s own durability as a lyrical, blues-rooted, directly emotional improviser who neither wastes notes nor wants for passion.

—NAT HENTOFF

Cover Photo and Design by REID MILES

Model: RUTH MASON

Recording by RUDY VAN GELDER

RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes

A NEW LOOK AT BOSSA NOVA SOUL SAMBA

Perhaps the most incredible aspect of Ike Quebec's technically and emotionally faultless playing on this album is how completely it contradicted his deteriorating physical condition. Having fought a protracted battle with heroin that had kept him in professional limbo for over a decade until a series of superb Blue Note sessions that began producing 45s in 1959 and yielded three albums in the final weeks of 1961, Quebec was now in the throes of rapidly spreading cancer. "Ike was in such pain," producer Alfred Lion told Michael Cuscuna in reference to Soul Samba, "and we all knew it ... And yet Ike played just beautifully," to which Rüdy Van Gelder added that "Ike always played beautifully, even at the end, when he was dying ... I mean, literally dying."

This program of sultry, minor-key music with a Brazilian tinge may have provided some inspiration. It is a rare example of both Quebec and producer Lion responding to current musical trends. The Stan Getz-Charlie Byrd album Jazz Samba had been recorded the previous February, and numerous jazz artists wasted no time in creating their own entries in the bossa nova sweepstakes. The new melodies and rhythms from Brazil were ideal for established internationalists such as Herbie Mann and Dizzy Gillespie, and Getz's feeling for the music inspired other cool brethren including Zoot Sims. Mere weeks before the present session. tenor saxophone patriarch and Quebec idol Coleman Hawkins had demonstrated how effectively the music suited the more full-toned wing of the tenor sax family on his own Impulse! session, Desafinado, and on portions of the Kenny Burrell Prestige/Moodsville disc Bluesy Burrell.

With the exception of the last-mentioned date, the albums these artists recorded at the time drew heavily upon the compositions of Antonio Carlos Jobim and the recordings of Joao Gilberto, and in the process helped to define the bossa nova canon. Quebec took a different approach, dividing his program among melodies that the composer credits suggest may have Brazilian origins but remain obscurities ("Favela" is not the Jobim piece of the same name), borrowing from European concert hall music and originals. While the results are not bossa nova for those who demand rigid adherence to compositional and rhythmic sources, the mood and texture of the new Brazilian sounds permeate and elevate all of the material.

Each of the obscurities possesses a melodic substance that Quebec fully inhabits, with "'Shu Shu" being particularly infectious. From the classical realm, a samba version of the Liszt nocturne "Liebestraum" has the aura of shotgun marriage about it, although all hands play well. "Goin' Home" sounds far more organic, a reflection of how effectively Dvoråk had absorbed the African-American music he studied while composing his "New World Symphony." It and Quebec's "Me 'n You" (based on the changes of "You'd Be So Nice to Come Home To") are the longest and most effective tracks, while " Blue Samba" provides a titular and atmospheric nod to "Blue Harlem," the hit from Quebec's initial Blue Note session of 1944 that remains emblematic of "Blue Note jazz" over 60 years later. Burrell's pretty "Loie" was subsequently recorded by the composer with Seldon Powell featured on flute in 1963 (issued on the Japanese Blue Note album Freedom) and with Gil Evans orchestra in 1965 on Guitar Forms (Verve), as well as by organist Freddie Roach with quartet and three-voice chorus on 1964 Blue Note album All That's Good.

The personnel that Quebec and Lion assembled for these performances is exemplary. Burrell takes an understated approach that works as effectively as Grant Green's more declarative conception did on Quebec's other classic album with guitar in place of piano, Blue and Sentimental. The rest of the rhythm section had worked together earlier in '62 on Green's The Latin Bit, and featured the unimpeachable groove of Willie Bobo, who enjoyed a brief period of activity on Blue Note around this time that culminated in his contribution to Herbie Hancock's Inventions and Dimensions. And don't miss the slides that former Ellingtonian Marshall throws in at the start of "Lloro Tu Despendida."

Quebec's illness took its ultimate toll shortly after Soul Samba was recorded. He made one final visit to Van Gelder's in November, recording two tracks with vocalist Dodo Greene that surfaced in 1996 on the CD reissue of her album Hour of Need. A few weeks later Quebec entered the hospital, where he died on January 16, 1963. The original Soul Samba liner notes make no mention of his passing, a sign of how quickly the album was assembled to take advantage of the public's interest in bossa nova. Few might have predicted that either the new Brazilian wrinkle or Ike Quebec's heartfelt take on the genre would have such staying power.

— Bob Blumenthal, 2006