BLP 4181

Kenny Dorham - Trompeta Toccata

Released - July 1965

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, September 14, 1964
Kenny Dorham, trumpet; Joe Henderson, tenor sax; Tommy Flanagan, piano; Richard Davis, bass; Albert Heath, drums.

1434 tk.4 The Fox
1435 tk.6 Night Watch
1436 tk.10 Trompeta Toccata
1437 tk.11 Mamacita

Session Photos

Photos: Francis Wolff

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Trompeta Toccata	Kenny Dorham	September 14 1964
Night Watch	Kenny Dorham	September 14 1964
Side Two
Mamacita	Joe Henderson	September 14 1964
The Fox	Kenny Dorham	September 14 1964

Liner Notes

Kenny Dorham has been experiencing a personal renascence. Not so much in terms of added fame or a sudden access of material reward, but rather with regard to a growing realization within jazz that Kenny is still growing and can still surprise his colleagues and himself. As critic-musician Don Heckman has observed in the notes to Joe Henderson’s In ‘n Out (Blue Note 4166), on which Dorham appears, Kenny, “with maturity...seems to be gaining additional articulateness, a surer voice than he had in the days when he was a more publicized player.” To which Andrew Hill, on important figure among the younger jazzmen, adds that Kenny remains open to experiment and is impressively flexible in conception as well as in execution.

After hearing this new Kenny Dorham album, I asked the trumpeter about what seemed to me the growing scope and depth of his recent work. His succinct answer was, “If you keep on living, you have to keep on growing. That is, if you keep your feelings and your ears open.” An additional index, aside from his own playing, of Kenny’s delight in challenge has been his work during 1964 with HARYOU-ACT, a pioneering concentration of activity in Central Harlem to motivate the youngsters there lo find and expand their capacities in everything from the arts to community organization for social change. At HARYOU-ACI, Kenny serves as a special musical consultant, advising the mernbers of the HARYOU-ACT big band, occasionally conducting rehearsals, arranging, and giving brass coaching. His own youthfulness of spirit enables him to establish rapport with these youngsters, and in turn, their particular kind of questing enthusiasm is communicated to him.

It is this persistent freshness of approach that characterizes the music in this album and the musicians whom Kenny chose for the date. Joe Henderson, currently with Horace Silver, and well represented in the Blue Note catalog, is evolving into a formidable tenor saxophonist. “Joe,” says Kenny, “is living up to all the expectations I had of his work: He never fails to excite me, and fortunately, we particularly dig playing together. In many respects we hear in the same way. For instance, after I played him the melody of ‘Trompeta Toccata,’ the first number in the album, he wrote the chords for it. And what he wrote is what I heard in my own ear.”

Because of his consistency and his surface calmness, Tommy Flanagan’s full range of qualities is not always immediately apparent to casual listeners — although musicians have remarkable respect For him. “Tommy,” Dorham emphasizes, “not only has taste, but there is depth in that taste. He’s not flashy, and his feelings are not on the surface. He’s subtle but he’s also deep. And he always matches the mood he’s in and the men with whom he’s playing.”

Richard Davis, who continues to impress this listener more and more with each new recording, hos been accurately described by Dorham as “always reaching.” In technique and in conception, Davis is continually testing his capacities. “Richard,” says Dorham, “gets all over that instrument, but he never loses touch with what he’s feeling and what the rest of us are Feeling.” Albert “Tootie” Heath was chosen by Dorham for this date both because of his ensemble work (“he always keeps the soloists sparked up”), and for the incisive inventiveness of his solos.

Kenny’s approach to “Trompeta Toccata” was spurred by his desire for a free-wheeling piece in which the conventional bar lines could be transcended. “Yet,” he adds, “to give it some kind of pulsation, I put it into meter. Once we go into tempo, it’s in 6/8. And the basic structure is 20 bars long.” As for the spelling of “Trompeta” in the title, Kenny explains that since the term “toccata” comes from a Latin language base and since the sang is in 6/8 with on Afro-Latin feeling, it seemed logical to make the whole title Latin. From Kenny’s proclamation-like opening, he is in authoritative command of the proceedings. Propelled by a swirling but deeply pulsing rhythm section, Kenny plays with both force and concision. Joe Henderson is also authoritative, compellingly personal, and particularly intriguing in the spectrum of colors he extracts from the lower registers of his instrument. After the speech-inflected passion of Dorham and Henderson, Tommy Flanagan’s impressionistic solo — buttressed by the intertwined skill of Davis and Heath — gives the performance a further dimension. Davis follows with an absorbing solo, recorded here with particular fullness of presence and clarity. The unaccompanied final section of Davis’s solo, incidentally, is a measure of the lyrical essence of his playing.

“‘Night Watch,” Kenny says, “speaks of the night, the darkness. It’s very late at night and the mood is what comes when you’re alone at that time. It’s not a blues, but it has a blues feeling.” Kenny’s solo, though outspoken, also has a ruminative quality. To this listener, his trumpet here connotes a man trying to communicate with himself in the void of night. Henderson is bristlingly assertive while Tommy Flanagan tries to bring clarity to his own night thoughts. The theme itself is in part wistful and in part anticipatory of the new day.

“Mamacita” is Joe Henderson’s infectious tune. "Once we got started on it," Kenny recalls, “and Tootie began playing what I would call a gospel bossa nova beat, we all got caught in this groove. I could see Alfred Lion and Frank Wolff of Blue Note also moving around. Everybody caught on fire. As For its form, ‘Mamacita’ is 12-bars. It’s close to the blues, and going into the fifth bar, you do get into the blues.” Joe Henderson’s solo is one of his most relaxed and deeply swinging on records so far. Kenny’s solo especially emphasizes that sureness of voice of which Don Heckman wrote. It also illustrates the judiciousness with which Kenny now uses his technique. There is a spare inevitability in the structure of his playing that can also be heard in Tommy Flanagan’s solo which follows Dorham’s.

Kenny Dorham thought of the title for “The Fox” out of a fusion of present observation and memories of his Texas boyhood. “Richard Davis,” he points out, “was holding this one together for us, and Richard always has a fox-like look about him. And when I was young, in Texas, I used to trap — fox, muskrat — for hides. The memory and the look of Richard gave me the title. The tune is built in the form of 12 bars, a middle 8, and another 12. Basically, the tune is free-wheeling.” Kenny adds, “It goes all over the place. But every time you make one complete chorus, you come up against a major seventh, flatted fifth in the first two bars of the next go ‘round. And when you hit that, you have a tendency to go off. Richard, however, held us in. And since the tune itself was so foxy, that was a third reason for the title.” The performances are also agile and fox-like in their resourcefulness.

Talking about his satisfaction with the date, Kenny remembered what the late “Fats” Navarro had said to him years ago: “Kenny, I’d really like to hear you when you straighten out your style.” That straightening out has been evolving for a long time. “It began,” said Kenny, “when I got out from under Bird’s shadow, as important as Bird was for me. And it’s been going on ever since. There’s more and more I feel I can do. And these days, it strikes me that the sky’s the limit.” In sum, Kenny has as viable a future ahead of him in jazz as he wants it to be; and judging from this album and others of his Blue Note performances in the past couple of years, Kenny wants to go on surprising himself. And us.

— NAT HENTOFF

RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes

A NEW LOOK AT TROMPETA TOCCATA

Nat Hentoff was not the first annotator to predict bigger and better things for Kenny Dorham, but he would be the last. Hentoff had every reason to expect that the trumpeter’s output would increase, and his profile rise, based on his Blue Note output of 1963—64. As it happened, the remainder of Dorham’s recorded career was confined to sideman appearances that can be counted on the fingers of one hand plus the odd air-check that has surfaced over the decades. For a musician who had arrived in New York in 1945 but did not cut his own first date until 1953, the effective conclusion of Dorham’s recording career eight years before his death provided a bitter symmetry.

In addition to the usual reasons that might be given to explain such late-career neglect, Dorham appears to have been victimized by the musical changes that were taking place around him. While he had been heard on occasion with representatives of the new wave (most effectively on Andrew Hill’s Point of Departure, recorded six months prior to the present session and also featuring Joe Henderson and Richard Davis), he was not comfortable with much of the avant-garde, and had made his feelings public in record reviews he wrote for Down Beat during the period. The electric- and rock-oriented notions that became fusion held even less interest for him. Dorham had the misfortune of being a modern jazz diehard at a point when the simultaneous push for more commercial and more exploratory jazz styles forced many bebop and hard-bop veterans out of the spotlight.

Which is not to imply that Dorham was merely recycling old ideas in the final decade of his career. His writing here, representative of the music he and Henderson made on four previous Blue Note albums of the period, maintains clear blowing structures while introducing harmonic wrinkles guaranteed to challenge a soloist. Improvisations on the title track here are played on an elastic chorus structure in which the soloist triggers the harmonic modulations. (The melody also evokes one of the trumpeter’s most intense performances, in the spirit of his reading of Villa-Lobos’s “Prelude” from the United Artists Jazz album, Matador.) “The Fox” is filled with harmonic challenges as well, and “Night Watch” is both extremely lyrical and a quietly distinctive blues variant. Unlike some modernists, Dorham was not simply coasting on a diet that emphasized “rhythm” and blues.

Nor was Dorham one who could easily feign enthusiasm, as the relatively lackluster “Mamacita” illustrates. There are nuggets of musical gold in both the Henderson and Dorham solos to be sure; but a comparison with the title tune from the pair’s first joint effort, Una Mas, illustrates the difference between natural and premeditated grooves. In the intervening months, Lee Morgan had recorded the long-lined blues, “The Sidewinder,” which became one of Blue Note’s biggest hits; “Mamacita” sounds like a concerted effort to duplicate Morgan’s results. Henderson’s melody, which is catchy enough on its own, had been taped for the first time on a Blue Mitchell session the previous year that ultimately appeared on Step Lightly, while the composer finally produced a version under his own name for his 1967 Milestone debut, The Kicker.

The rhythm section adds to the distinction of “Trompeta Toccata,” and is not the typical Blue Note crew. Only Richard Davis was a label regular, and he is as valuable to the proceedings as Hentoff and Dorham indicate, with both his support and solo on “Trompeta Toccata” of particular excellence. Tommy Flanagan made some of his first important New York sessions on the label with Thad Jones and Kenny Burrell, but did the vast majority of his recording elsewhere. Given Barry Harris’s comment that Alfred Lion did not gravitate to pianists whose work was “too beautiful,” it is possible that Flanagan’s lyricism did not suit the producer’s taste. Flanagan’s affinity for Dorham was another matter, as their work on the 1959 New Jazz classic Quiet Kenny makes clear, and as Flanagan’s impressionistic statement on the title track reaffirms. Albert "Tootie" Heath, who also turns in a stellar performance here, was widely heard with several working bands and on several labels at the time, yet this was the first of only two appearances he made for Blue Note, the other being Herbie Hancock’s The Prisoner. Six months after this album was recorded, the drummer left the US for Europe, where he would spend a productive decade before returning home to join brothers Percy and Jimmy in the Heath Brothers. One wonders if a similar act of expatriation might have elevated the career and extended the life of Kenny Dorham.

-Bob Blumenthal, 2006