BLP 4118

Donald Byrd - Free Form

Released - November 1962

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, December 11, 1961
Donald Byrd, trumpet; Wayne Shorter, tenor sax; Herbie Hancock, piano; Butch Warren, bass; Billy Higgins, drums.

tk.2 Nai Nai
tk.9 French Spice
tk.15 Night Flower
tk.23 Pentecostal Feeling
tk.24 Free Form

Session Photos

Photos: © Francis Wolff/Mosaic Images 
https://www.mosaicrecordsimages.com/

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Pentecostal Feelin'	Donald Byrd	11 December 1961
Night Flower	Herbie Hancock	11 December 1961
Nai Nai	Donald Byrd	11 December 1961
Side Two
French Spice	Donald Byrd	11 December 1961
Free Form	Donald Byrd	11 December 1961

Liner Notes

“THE best way I can characterize Donald,” says the trumpeter’s friend and colleague, Herbie Hancock, ‘is that he thinks forward all the time. You can notice this in his albums, for one example. On each one, he gets into something new. His mind is too quick and his curiosity too active for him to get caught in any single groove.”

This quality of thoughtfulness — and the clarity of the resultant ideas — is also evident in Byrd’s extramusical behavior. For the past year, Donald has been involved in an intensive course of self-education. Not only in music, but in anthropology and history, particularly Negro history. “I wanted,” he explains, “to get a broader perspective on the way we live. If you concentrate everything into the life of the clubs and the sessions, you’re not getting as much out of being as you can. There’s a very big world out there.”

This album, Free Form, further demonstrates both the lucidity of Donald’s musical explorations and the growing range of its approach to jazz. He has been able to remain in contact with the basic emotions and language of the music while shaping his own writing and playing style. This searching has characteristically been done without haste and without attention-getting labels. By temperament, Donald doesn’t disclose his most recent stage of evolution until he knows exactly where he’s going and how to get there.

For this session, Donald is joined by Wayne Shorter of the Art Blakey Jazz Messengers. Shorter too is a composer as well as a skilful improviser, and he also is a man who finds it impossible to stop the process of self-testing. The rhythm section is one that Byrd was responsible for organizing, and it can be heard as a unit in Donald’s Royal Flush (Blue Note 4101) and in Herbie Hancock’s first album as a leader, Takin’ Off (Blue Note 4109).

‘Billy Higgins,” Donald Byrd observes, ‘has a distinctive imagination. Also he’s one of the two or three drummers in New York who plays with a time and feeling reminiscent of Kenny Clarke. With that as a base, he has a younger man’s conception and daring. Butch is similarly imaginative, knows his instrument thoroughly, and reads well. The same is true of Herbie. They work so well together because of their mutual respect and because they’re all so flexible. In Pentecostal Feeling, for example, Butch formed his own bass line; Herbie worked out his own piano accompaniment; and I gave Billy just a sketch of the drum part. He took care of the rest. That’s why I prefer this rhythm section. I just mention what I want, and there are no further problems.”

Donald’s Pentecostal Feeling is an attempt to distill what he remembers of his Sundays in church when he was growing up. “I’d been searching,” he notes, “for a certain kind of beat. The melody is secondary. Herbie’s piano part has a Ray Charles-like flavor, and underneath is that prototypical Baptist heat. This is one of the veins I’ve been working in. There have been Amen in the Fuego LP (4026) and Hush in the Royal Flush collection (4101). A forthcoming album will be a modern version of that church tradition with polyphonic writing, different harmonic backgrounds, and a chorus.”

Once the irresistible rhythmic undertow has been set, Pentecostal Feeling expands into the individual witnessing of Donald with his customary crisp, clear tone; Wayne Shorter, a testifier of burning urgency; and Herbie Hancock, accenting the ebullient mood that can come out of this kind of yea-saying.

Herbie Hancock’s tender ballad, Night Flower, reflects the pianist’s continuing interest in freshening the jazz ballad form. “In works of Herbie like this one,” says Byrd, “the chord patterns arc unexpected. They’re deceptive in that you can never be sure exactly where the next chord is going to. Therefore, it’s challenging to play.” The probing lyricism of Byrd’s trumpet is matched by Hancock’s luminous solo and by the spare, movingly gentle statement of Wayne Shorter. On this track, as on all the others, I would counsel your listening carefully to what’s happening underneath. Higgins is becoming a master of brushwork and Warren has impressive taste.

Nai Nai is dedicated to someone Donald knows; and the resilient melody is marked by the fact that it builds in a series of sequences. In each succeeding sequence, the accent is displaced at a different point. The tune is played with easeful pleasure by all involved with Wayne Shorter building a particularly intriguing series of variations.

French Spice was originally written by Donald for a group of chorus girls in Chicago who used it as a base for interpretative dancing. Aside from its provocative rhythmic propulsion, the sinewy line makes for stimulating variations — as is demonstrated by Shorter, Byrd and Hancock.

Free Form is an illustration of the “new things” Donald develops in each succeeding album. The theme is based on a tone row. The first statement and the second are symmetrical in that the intervals are the same; but in each, the row begins on a different note. When the two parts are put together, they make a scale. The notes in this row are used throughout the piece in several different forms and patterns. “We move in and out of that basic framework,” Byrd explains. “Another way in which I tried to become more free in this composition was by using the drums differently.

“The tune,” Byrd continues, “has no direct relation to the tempo. I mean that nobody played in the tempo Billy maintains, and we didn’t even use it to bring in the melody. Billy’s work is just there as a percussive factor, but it’s not present as a mark of the time. There is no time in the usual sense, so far as the soloists are concerned.” Within this challenging format, the musicians provide, I think, their most thoughtful and absorbing solos of the date.

At thirty, Donald has already grown remarkably since he first came to New York in 1955. And his future appears even more diversified. He already has an M.A. from the Manhattan School of Music and is working for a doctorate in music education at Columbia Teachers College. As part of the latter course requirements, Donald is also teaching in the New York public school system. He instructs in conducting, band, orchestra, and theory. Meanwhile Donald has been rehearsing a twelve-piece band which will record for Blue Note and which will reveal his increasing preoccupation with composing jazz in extended forms.

In recent months, Byrd has turned down teaching offers from several colleges, preferring to finish his work at Columbia. For the future, however, he does plan a career which will combine teaching, concerts and writing. He knows where he wants to go, and he is proceeding along that route with characteristic thoroughness and intelligence. He hopes too that in his teaching work, he can help younger jazzmen find their ways. “I don’t mean,” Donald says, “that I’m going to set myself up as some kind of young elder statesman and talk a lot. I figure if I can set an example by living what I mean, maybe I can save some guys coming up unnecessary disorganization and unnecessary dues.”

Donald Byrd, in sum, is making it — in his own way and without compromising. as this album also demonstrates. It has been an absorbing odyssey To follow, and the years ahead promise continuing substantial surprises.

— NAT HENTOFF

Cover Photo and Design by REID MILES
Recording by RUDY VAN GELDER

RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes

A NEW LOOK AT FREE FORM

Donald Byrd was not simply one of the most prolific jazz musicians of the period that produced Free Form; as Nat Hentoff's liner notes indicate, he was also among the disciplined and ambitious. In preparing for a career as an educator, Byrd was way ahead of the curve, just as he had been when he became the rare hard bopper to participate in the early Stan Kenton stage band camps. His studies, which included a in Paris under the tutelage of Nadia Boulanger in the mid-Sixties, finally led to the Ph.D. Hentoff mentions, as well as a law degree, and found Byrd ultimately placing more emphasis on teaching at the university level than on performing.

Byrd's interest in different ensemble settings would also lead him to a new phase in his recording career after the completion of this album. While the twelve-piece band cited by Hentoff never did record, the fascination with gospel music represented by "Pentecostal Feeling" was pursued in a series of albums that employed vocal choruses with larger instrumental groups. These efforts — A New Perspective (1963) and I'm Tryin' to Get Home (1964), both on Blue Note, as well as the more commercial Up! (1964) on Verve - interrupted the steady stream of small-group efforts that Byrd had been creating since signing with Blue Note in 1958. Five-and-a-half years would pass between Free Form and Byrd's next pure combo effort for the label, Mustang.

When Free Form was recorded, however, Byrd was still in the thick of the small-group action, often in the company of baritone saxophonist Pepper Adams. From 1961 until the trumpeter's relocation to Paris two years later, Byrd's pianist of choice was the young Herbie Hancock, who Byrd had heard in Chicago and quickly added to the Byrd/Adams quintet. "I really owe Donald Byrd a lot," Hancock has noted. "He's the one who made sure that I formed my own publishing company, Hancock Music, and he's the one who got me my first album as a leader with Alfred Lion." Byrd also gave the pianist his first record date on the Warwick album Out of This World, where Byrd's "French Spice - first under the title "Curro's" the Milwaukee nightclub where Hancock played his first road gig with the Byrd/Adams band), and Byrd was the first to record a Hancock composition ("Requiem," on the Royal Flush session of September '61). The presence of two more Hancock tunes on this date confirms the faith in his protégé's talents that Byrd articulates in the original notes. The waltz "Three Wishes" was omitted from the original LP due to lack of space, but surfaced when Free Form was first reissued on compact disc.

Another feature of this album is the Hancock/Butch Warren/Billy Higgins unit that first appeared on Royal Flush. As Byrd explained in the notes to that album, the musicians came by pure chance when he, Adams and Hancock ran into the bassist and drummer at a New York rehearsal studio. This rhythm section was something special and was reunited for his debut as a leader, Takin' Off. While the three only found their way into the studio on one other occasion, Grant Green's Feelin' the Spirit album, the team of Hancock, Warren and Higgins is remembered as one of Blue Note's most infectious and versatile supporting teams of the period.

Byrd was at his best as both player and composer around the time of Free Form, as the program of diverse originals indicates. He could be lyrical, as on the haunting "Nai Nai" with its mood similar to Dave Brubeck's "In Your Own Sweet Way"; funky, especially on "Pentecostal Feeling"; and even experimental. The title track finds him mining the modal territory that was gaining popularity at the time, with the added wrinkle of a fluid tempo that Higgins and the rest of the group pull off admirably.

Wayne Shorter is a big part of Free Form, which turns out to be his only recorded collaboration with Byrd. More significantly, the album marks Shorter's initial studio encounter with Hancock. The saxophonist and pianist would record together again for Blue Note on sessions under the leadership of Grachan Moncur III and Lee Morgan before joining forces in the summer of 1964 under Miles Davis' leadership. Four decades later, Shorter and Hancock remain close friends and frequent partners who continue to build a shared legacy that began here.

— Bob Blumenthal, 2003