BLP 4124

Donald Byrd - A New Perspective

Released - January 1964

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, January 12, 1963
Donald Byrd, trumpet; Hank Mobley, tenor sax; Donald Best, vibes; Herbie Hancock, piano; Kenny Burrell, guitar; Butch Warren, bass; Lex Humphries, drums; unidentified chorus, Coleridge Perkinson, director; Duke Pearson, arranger.

tk.5 | 14283-E Cristo Redentor
tk.8 Chant
tk.11 Elijah
tk.17 The Black Disciples
tk.19 Beast Of Burden

Session Photos

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

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Elijah	Donald Byrd	12 January 1963
Beast of Burden	Donald Byrd	12 January 1963
Side Two
Cristo Redentor	Duke Pearson	12 January 1963
The Black Disciple	Donald Byrd	12 January 1963
Chant	Duke Pearson	12 January 1963

Liner Notes

DONALD BYRD,, when asked about his musical goals a couple of years ago, said: "I'm going to go as far as my emotions, intellect and experience will allow me." Recognizing the corollary need to actively widen and deepen his capacities for musical expression, Donald continually sets himself challenges. His most unique venture so far is this evocative fusion of voices with jazz instrumentalists in a setting which is itself a fresh intertwining of traditional religious feelings with modern, jazz-infused idioms.

Donald has been working toward this album for a number of years. In each of his recent sets, there has been at least one new composition in which Donald has explored his own church background in the context of the way he hears and feels now. There was "Amen" (in Fuego, Blue Note 4026); "Hush" (in Royal Flush, Blue Note 4101); and "Pentecostal Feeling" (in Free Form, Blue Note 4118 4118). Now Donald has felt equipped to undertake an entire album in this vein. It's important to note, however, that this is indeed A New Perspective in terms of a jazz approach to the Afro-American religious heritage. This is not a tongue-in-cheek, oh-how-soulful-l-am session. Nor is it an attempt to somehow mix oldtime religion, rhythm and blues and stomping jazz into a hopeful ride on the best-selling charts.

"I mean this album seriously," Donald emphasizes. "Because of my own background - my father was a Methodist minister - I've always wanted to write an entire album of spiritual-like pieces. The most accurate way I can describe what we were all trying to do is that this is a modern hymnal. In an earlier period, the New Orleans jazzmen would often play religious music for exactly what if was - but with their own jazz textures and techniques added. Now, as modern jazzmen, we're also approaching this tradition with respect and great pleasure."

Donald regards the choral singing in this album as in the tradition - though modernized - of those large spiritual singing groups which used to travel around the country in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Among them were the Fisk Jubilee Singers and the Tuskegee Alabama Choir. 'In other words," Donald explains, "the music in this album is basically akin to the spirituals rather than to the later rocking gospel style. As for the absence of words,' he continued, "I couldn't think of the exactly proper words for each piece. Rather than compromise with inadequate images, I used syllables." Thereby, each listener can attach his own text - from whatever writings, religious or otherwise, seem to him to reflect the marrow of each piece.

Donald chose Coleridge Perkinson to direct the eight-voice chorus because of his admiration for Perkinson's broad musical knowledge and flexibility. They had first met in 1952 at the Manhattan School of Music, where both were students. Perkinson has since acquired a sizable reputation as a choral conductor, here and in Europe, as well as a vocal coach. "Coleridge,' Byrd adds, "not only knows most of the classical repertory - instrumental as well as vocal - but he's also an impressive jazz pianist. He still occasionally plays with Max Roach and other former colleagues. Therefore, he seemed exactly right for the bridging of disciplines that was required in this assignment.'

For the arranger, Donald chose Duke Pearson, whose lyrical individuality as pianist and composer have been demonstrated in his Blue Note albums under his own name (Profile, Blue Note 4022; Tender Feelin's, Blue Note 4035). For Duke, this was the first major writing assignment he'd had since coming to New York in 1 959 from his native Atlanta, Georgia. "I had done," Duke recalls, "a considerable amount of writing for various combinations while I was at Clark College in Atlanta and also during the time I free-lanced at home. I never tried anything quite like this before, and I'm pleased at now naturally it all came out."

The chorus for which Duke wrote consisted of four male (two tenors, two basses) and four female (two sopranos, two altos) singers. Most are graduates of Manhattan School of Music. Donald Byrd wrote out the preliminary sketches for each track, and then instructed Duke as to how he wanted them to evolve from that point. "I asked Duke to do the scoring," Donald underlines, "because we've worked so well together. We've collaborated on many tunes, and it's sometimes hard to tell which of us did what sections. Duke writes much better than even he knows. The one basic guide I had for Duke was that the writing had to be vocal, really vocal. And the way to test your scoring is to sing it yourself. If, in singing it, the line is too long or the intervals are too tricky, you have to change them. I wanted the parts to feel natural for the singers."

"And what happened," adds Herbie Hancock, another close associate of Donald, "is that the music, to a considerable degree, played itself on the date."

"From my point of view," Donald continued, "I think all writing should sing, including writing for instruments. I always try to play in a vocal manner. For me, that's much more vital than showing how fast or high I can play. In this set, it was particularly important that my playing be vocalized because of the function I wanted the trumpet to perform. For three months before we recorded, I got up at six every Sunday morning and listened for three hours to the religious programs on WLIB in New York so that I coula get back into the swing of this music. And what my trumpet occasionally does here is to take on the role of the minister who is sometimes preaching and shouting over the congregation. The congregation in this case consists of the instrumentalists and the chorus.

Elijah is named after Donald Byrd's father. The music itself though does not characterize the usual service at his father's church as Donald was growing up. "We had those Methodist hymnals," Donald recalls, "which were based on English tunes and Lutheran adaptations of drinking songs and that sort of thing. But once in a white, when one of the older visiting ministers came through Detroit, we would abandon the formal hymnal and really go into the traditional, Southern spirituals that were first sung during slavery. It's the latter quality, rather than the sound of the formal Methodist hymnal, that I tried to get into Elijah."

Keeping the spirit buoyant and mellowly joyful is Kenny Burrell, followed by Donald Best, a resourceful vibist whom Donald found at the Manhattan School of Music. After Hank Mobley's own preacher-like solo, Donald takes over the pulpit with assurance and contagious warmth. The emphatic piano witnessing is by the increasingly forceful and personal Herbie Hancock; and in a strikingly exclamatory close, the chorus returns triumphantly.

In the Bible, the beast of burden is the mule. "The title of this one," says Donald, "came, therefore, from the slow, shuffling type of beat that characterizes the piece.' After the undulatingly relaxed choral singing, the band enters playing modern, close harmony under Donald's simple melody; and the effect is refreshingly intriguing. Donald's own solo is one of his most distilled lyrical statements on record. Donald Best is again fluently inventive; and Hank Mobley, like Donald Byrd before him, avoids all excess ornamentation. His message is direct and spontaneous. The same intensity and clarity mark Herbie Hancock's lithe solo.

Duke Pearson wrote "Cristo Redentor" (Portuguese for "Christ The Redeemer") as a result of an experience he had in Brazil in 1961 while he was touring South America with Nancy Wilson. "Coming into Rio," Duke notes, "you see Corcovado peak with its huge white statue of Christ. That sight led me to write this composition right away. I'd never felt that close to religion before." The melody is uncommonly airborne and reflects the awakening of wonder. Donald sustains and deepens the soaring combination of serenity and depth of feeling in the piece. Note here, as throughout the album, the alertness and stimulating taste of Herbie Hancock's accompaniment patterns.

Donald Byrd's "Black Disciple" is one result of the research he's been doing on African rhythms, a project which has led him into correspondence with musicologists in Africa who have sent him recordings and other material. The impetus for this particular composition, however, came from a Folkways recording of a tribe in the Congo. "The rhythms fascinated me," says Donald, "particularly because of their nervous insistency." Within the framework, therefore, of a modern hymnal based on Afro-American traditions, this is an arresting attempt by Donald to adapt African rhythms to his own diversified musical experiences. The rhythm section communicates the appropriately restless turbulence, and there are heated solos by Hank Mobley, Donald Byrd, Kenny Burrell, Herbie Hancock, and Lex Humphries. The title, incidentally, refers to the one black monarch among the three Kings who came to Bethlehem on the night Jesus was born.

Duke Pearson's "Chant" involves imaginative use of choral inversions; and along with shifting colors, the piece has on engaging quality of relaxed fulfillment - a reeling communicated in their distinctive ways by Donald, Hank Mobley, Kenny Burrell, Herbie Hancock, and the supple chorus.

As a result of the satisfaction felt by all the participants in this unusual joining of forces, Donald Byrd is preparing another vocal album. He is also a newly accepted pupil of Nadia Boulanger, with whom he is studying in the summer of 1963. Byrd will then stay a year in Europe for a private instruction in conducting and composition. Already having earned an M.A. from the Manhattan School of Music, Donald is also working on his doctorate in music education from Columbia University. During the 1962-63 academic year, he taught at New York's High School of Music and Art. Simultaneously, he planned this album and other projects and continued his research into American history.

Considering his credo- "I'm going to go as far as my emotions, intellect and experience will allow me" - Donald Byrd is certain to be a formidable figure in American music in the years ahead. And not only in jazz.

-NAT HENTOFF

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

RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes

A NEW LOOK AT A NEW PERSPECTIVE

Donald Byrd is one of the most frequently recorded trumpeters of the LP era, and many of his albums reflect a keen awareness of what other trumpet players were doing. During his early years in New York, he was Clifford Brown’s most ubiquitous disciple, though he had pared down his approach by the time he became an exclusive Blue Note artist in late 1958. The spare, lyrical example of Miles Davis had made a greater impression on Byrd by that point, and would continue to exert a strong influence, particularly when Byrd followed Davis’s lead a decade later and began recording extended blowing pieces with electric rhythm sections.

Byrd also blazed some trails of his own. His pop/funk effort Blackbird from the early ‘70s was the label’s biggest seller to that point, and the harbinger of numerous jazz-lite efforts that followed. The present album, which, in terms of straight-ahead jazz, also enjoyed commercial success, is a far more substantial and artistic work.

Vocal choruses had been used in jazz before A New Perspective, most notably by Dave Lambert behind Charlie Parker and Lambert, Hendricks & Ross in their early efforts with Count Basie. The most direct precedent for this album, though, was Max Roach’s It’s lime, recorded the previous year and also calling upon the services of Coleridge Perkinson. Roach employed lyrics as well as wordless singing, featured Abbey Lincoln as a soloist with choral support and favored a more dissonant pallet that reinforced the protest theme of his compositions. A New Perspective creates a similar aura of African-American pride and dignity, particularly on the African-inspired “The Black Disciple”; but there is a greater stress on lyricism that fits perfectly with Byrd’s style. The trumpeter had developed an especially warm sound, one with almost flugelhorn-like resonance, and a more considered attack tailored to the soulful cast of his improvisations. Byrd is consistently moving throughout these tracks, and does the prettiest playing of his career on “Cristo Redentor.”

As leader, featured soloist, composer of three pieces and the conceptual catalyst behind the entire project, Byrd is clearly the prime mover here. Still, A New Perspective is not a one-man show. Essential supporting roles are played by several others, especially two pianists who — through early associations with Byrd — also became important members of the Blue Note family.

While Duke Pearson’s skill as a composer had been noted since he began recording for the label in 1959 with Byrd and under his own name, this was the first opportunity to show his larger organizational talents. His arrangements deploy the mixed eight-voice choir with great taste and dynamic sensitivity, traits that also can be heard in the way he voices the unusual instrumental septet. His composition “Cristo Redentor” became both a classic modern spiritual and a dramatic blues vehicle in numerous cover versions, and both it and “Chant” are suffused with a poignancy that effectively balances the more declarative Byrd originals. Alfred Lion was suitably impressed, and from this point forward frequently called upon Pearson to provide charts as well as the studio coordination previously handled by the late Ike Quebec.

When it came to piano playing, though, Pearson was no match for his successor in Byrd’s working quintet, the astonishing Herbie Hancock. No one then or now could match Hancock’s knack for balancing buoyant swing, feel-good funk, intellectual daring and angular provocation, often within the same performance. He is captured here at the peak of his pre-Miles Davis concept, when Hancock was making a habit of enlivening the music of other trumpet players: check out Byrd’s earlier Royal Flush and Free Form, Freddie Hubbard’s Hub Tones and Kenny Dorham’s Una Mas for further examples.

The rest of the band also rises to the occasion, including the otherwise-unknown vibist Donald Best. Kenny Burrell and Hank Mobley, like Pearson and Hancock also Blue Note leaders at the time of this date, were ideal choices for the material and sound sensational on the celebratory “Elijah.” Byrd, Mobley and Hancock were a winning combination and would shortly do more memorable work together on Hancock’s My Point Of View and a session originally included on Mobley’s “No Room For Squares” and later released in full on the CD version of the saxophonist‘s Straight, No Filter.

Byrd, together with Pearson, Perkinson, Hancock and others, revisited the New Perspective concept nearly two years later on I’m Tryin’ To Get Home, where the band-and-voices format was augmented to include organ and a full brass section. The results are appealing, though they fall short of this classic, which also sports one of the great Blue Note covers, with both photo and design by Reid Miles.

Bob Blumenthal, 1999

Blue Note Spotlight - January 2013

http://www.bluenote.com/spotlight/a-new-perspective-on-the-road-donald-byrd-as/

As a work of pure music, Donald Byrd‘s A New Perspective is immaculate, one of the 1960s’ most direct expressions of jazz as a connection to the spiritual plane next to John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. Byrd’s intent to take the gospel threads running through Dixieland and New Orleans jazz and wind them through the hard bop movement resulted in one of his most unique, yet career-defining, statements. And yet, there’s something else about it that, while comparatively superficial, gives it an extra sense of scope: that iconic Reid Miles cover, with Byrd looking like he’s a dozen yards in the distance as the bulbous nose of a Jaguar E-Type looms in the foreground.

That Jag isn’t just set dressing; Byrd was something of a gearhead and regularly drove an E-Type belonging to his girlfriend. (He also convinced Herbie Hancock to buy a Shelby Cobra with his first big royalty check in ’63, which makes me wonder whether the two ever staged impromptu drag races between sessions.) The artwork for A New Perspective had almost as much impact on the popular consciousness as the music it contains—rapper Tone-Loc irreverently restaged the shoot 26 years later for the cover of Loc-ed After Dark—and it’s tempting to try and figure out some deeper meaning from Byrd’s and Miles’ choice of imagery.

So is there any real link between the music and the sleeve? Do the performances and arrangements on one of the most beautiful, powerful, innovative jazz albums of the early ’60s take on any additional qualities when you listen to them over the growl of one of the most beautiful, powerful, innovative sports cars of the early ’60s? In my case, answering that question is going to be tricky: I don’t have any access whatsoever to a vintage Jag, and even if I did, the icy, salt-caked Twin Cities streets in the dead of winter don’t offer the most hospitable of circumstances to try it. (Even getting the damned thing started at ten below would be a major obstacle.) So, failing that, I have to turn to a simulation.

The E-Type is one of the featured vehicles in the long-running Forza Motorsport video game franchise, a series that prides itself on how closely it approximates the real-world feel of actual cars, from realistic suspension and weight transfer to the littlest detail in the fully-reproduced cockpits. And while the spinoff game Forza Horizon tweaks the formula a bit to make the driving model a little more accessible, its “open world” format—a sprawling amalgam of rural Colorado’s highways and back roads—means I can simply cruise around without being shoehorned into actual competitive racing. After switching off the game’s trendy festival-techno soundtrack and plugging in my iPod, I select the E-Type from my digital garage, configure it to factory-stock specifications, cue up A New Perspective and set out on the “road.”

It’s dark when I set out to the strains of “Elijah.” Forza Horizon has a 24-hour day/night cycle, sped up so you can go from dead of night to noon in less than 30 minutes’ time. Given the low-light conditions and the presence of other computer-controlled drivers on the road, I figure it makes sense to follow some vague semblance of the speed limit as I drive around aimlessly, and maybe start pushing the throttle down past 70 when the digital sunrise makes it easier to see where I’m going. But the soundtrack doesn’t make it easy to lay off the gas. “Elijah” is a joyous number, lively enough to make a drive in the country—even a computerized facsimile of the country—feel invigorating. Soon I’m thinking more about the music than any pretense of picking a destination, and I wind up wandering into the dirt-road confines of what appears to be a decrepit old steel mill as Donald Best‘s jittery vibraphone solo kicks in. I’m so caught up in this juxtaposition that I almost miss noticing an approaching lime green Lamborghini Miura—the same car Miles Davis crashed back in October ’72, right down to the color. At least this one jets past me unscathed. Soon enough, I head back onto asphalt, and when Byrd hits his piercing, rapturous solo I decide to floor it, just to see what the Jaguar’s capable of. I brush up against 135 MPH in fourth gear before chickening out.

Not that there are any real consequences for smashing into things here—I even switched off the option to give the car dinged-up bodywork if I wreck. It’s just that it wouldn’t feel right to break the spell of this music with an abrupt introduction to an out-of-nowhere guardrail. That said, the E-Type is kind of squirrelly, so it’s wise to take it easy, especially given how many hairpins and blind elevation changes there are to contend with. Thankfully, the sequencing follows up the jump-up of “Elijah” with the blues of “Beast of Burden”: through Hancock’s shivery little piano notes, Hank Mobley‘s sleepy-eyed tenor sax solo, the choir’s weary yet vivid scatting, and the longing cast of Byrd’s trumpet, it practically demands a light touch on the throttle. I set the (completely fictional) Finley Dam as a destination and glide smoothly under the shadows of tall polygonal trees and the bitmapped peaks of the Rockies.

Once I get to the scenic dam site, I feel compelled to get out and stretch my legs, figuratively speaking. The only way to really “exit” the car is to switch to photography mode, where you take out a virtual camera and sort of float around the car’s exterior in order to get a good snapshot of your ride. But I’m dismayed to find out that it’s not possible to recreate the cover shot of A New Perspective: there’s no fisheye lens option to make the hood look like it goes on forever. Still, the strains of “Cristo Redentor”—one of two Duke Pearson compositions on the record, and something of a highlight of the Byrd catalog—lends some reflective, melancholy weight to the few minutes I spend checking out the artificial scenery. Fake prettiness is still pretty, and the very real beauty of the choir’s mournful air and Byrd’s aching echoes of their melody lends some unexpected gravitas to a landscape that only exists thanks to a squad of coders.

Back on the road, the realization sinks in that this E-Type, at least in its stock form, could feasibly be outrun by a mid ’90s Honda Prelude. That doesn’t match the larger-than-life mythos of this car that I’ve spent some thirty years building up in my head, and it seems like high time to give this car some extra kick. Racing game convention practically demands that you’re entrusted with the ability to take a factory-stock car and dump all kinds of outlandish performance parts into it. With some weight reduction, a smoother suspension, and an additional 140 horsepower under the hood, a fast-for-1963 sports car becomes a fire-snorting beast that hits 165 in an eye-blink and takes corners like it’s skidding across a hockey rink. In this context, “The Black Disciple”—a vibrant, charging tour de force that falls somewhere between a stampede and a glide, thanks to the Herbie Hancock/Butch Warren/Lex Humphries rhythm section—is less a celebratory brush with the divine and more the soundtrack to a different kind of call to prayer entirely. Clearly some things aren’t meant to be tampered with, so as the sun sets, I restore the engine to its stock configuration and spend the remainder of my drive decompressing to the cool blues of the deceptively lighthearted yet emotionally resonant closer “Chant.” It’s clear by now that there’s a finely-tuned balance of refined elegance and gutsy soul that resonates through both parties depicted on the cover—though Byrd could’ve been leaning on the front end of a VW Beetle and still come through leading a session as thrilling and enduring as the 24 hours of Le Mans.