BLP 4198

Bobby Hutcherson - Dialogue

Released - September 1965

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, April 3, 1965
Freddie Hubbard, trumpet; Sam Rivers, tenor, soprano sax, bass clarinet, flute; Bobby Hutcherson, vibes, marimba; Andrew Hill, piano; Richard Davis, bass; Joe Chambers, drums.

1556 tk.3 Catta
1558 tk.18 Idle While
1559 tk.24 Ghetto Lights
1560 tk.29 Les Noirs Merchant
1561 tk.30 Dialogue

Session Photos

rehearsal

Photos: Francis Wolff

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Catta	Andrew Hill	April 3 1965
Idle While	Joe Chambers	April 3 1965
Les Noirs Marchant	Andrew Hill	April 3 1965
Side Two
Dialogue	Joe Chambers	April 3 1965
Ghetto Lights	Andrew Hill	April 3 1965

Liner Notes

DIALOGUE is a good title for this record. implying as it does a versant music in which the voices retain their individual integrity while focusing upon areas of mutual concern. One expects, in a dialogue, more than one point of view to be stated in the clearest possible manner, with all parties giving up whatever insistence might impede the exchange of ideas; one expects thought stated by the one to touch the response in the other. And that is exactly what Bobby Hutcherson’s first date as a leader is about.

There is no fighting here, no effort by any of the principals at out-blasting the other. Nor is there any campy groove set so that popular harmonic and metric cliches can settle all differences and get everyone to sound alike. There is neither negotiation nor argument, but a sincere and moving conversation among strong men with fertile minds. There is Dialogue.

By all of which I mean to say, by all means, listen to this record. There is a feeling of relaxed adventure here, a kind of grooved out search for the truly happening. Here are musicians from as far apart as California (Hutcherson) (Haiti) (Hill) and Boston (Rivers), all rooted in tradition and hungry for the future; all with immediately recognizable, highly personal approaches to their instruments but all so much at home with their instruments and with all the contemporary concepts of group playing that they could meet on a corner at 7:00 am. and come up with a sound both moving and challenging.

Bobby Hutcherson, the young vibist from California who leads this date, is probably the most sought after vibist since Dizzy Gillespie brought Milt Jackson east in 1945 and, with the possible exception of the once recorded Earl Griffith, the most original. He has been impressive in several recordings with Blue Note: with Grachan Moncur, Jackie McLean, Eric Dolphy and Andrew Hill. He is in the vanguard of those musicians who have brought some of the recent innovations (or what I am glad to see is no longer called the ‘New Thing’), particularly those innovations in the concepts of group playing and group time, at least as far as the suburbs of mainstream. As a soloist he is able to utilize the vibraharp’s resonant but percussive nature to make sudden, jagged incursions into the soloist’s line. As a soloist he is open pedaled, dissonant but lyrical, methodical but unpredictable, swinging but at all time lyrical. As a leader he gives his group a clear direction without overwhelming it — it is to his credit that each man has so much responsibility that this date sounds as if any one of them could be the leader.

Most of these men have, in fact, recorded as leaders. Sam Rivers has made one excellent record for Blue Note and Andrew Hill, three. Freddie Hubbard has led several record dates and Joe Chambers hopes to make his own soon.

There is no need to say who Freddie Hubbard is, except that he has been a poll winner and one of the very top men on his instrument since he was eighteen years old.

Rivers is from Boston. He is the kind of living legend that does not need to be legend. For years we’ve been hearing news of a tenorman with unsurpassed technical gift, and the kind of peculiar car jazzmen swear by, whose style was set long before Coltrane became the power that he is today. Upon arrival in New York, Rivers worked briefly with Miles Davis and recorded with some of the new emerging forces in jazz, such as the brilliant young drummer from Boston, Tony Williams. On this record, he plays tenor, soprano. bass clarinet and flute, all with power and conviction. But it’s the tenor that’s the axe of this age, and Sam Rivers wields it mightily.

Andrew Hill is a pianist-composer from Port-au-Prince, Haiti and Chicago. Joe Chambers says of his playing that ‘it’s like psychoanalysis — you’ve got to check it out.” Meaning that there’s no possible casual approach to playing with Hill. You have to rope with him, he does not equivocate. Those heavy handed black chords he’s constantly throwing out provide both a direction and a point of departure for the group. But he is never overwhelming, and he's even modest as a soloist. Above all, Andrew sounds exactly like himself, and that’s rare enough.

Joe Chambers is an unusual drummer. He is familiar with every kind of drum that has come along in the last 20 years. Like every other musician on the date he is strong without being overpowering, but you hear him blasting when he has to. 3/4 mambo or free time, Chambers is with it without doubt or hesitation. He learned his drums in the course of study in the high school band at dances, etc. His approach is almost pragmatic: he shapes the tune the way it’s supposed to be, but is never cliche.

Richard Davis, the bassist here, is perhaps the most consistent, most well-rounded new bassist on the scene today. Hutcherson says of him, “I can think of some cats who can walk better than Richard, and some who can strum the bass better, hut I honestly can’t think of any thatcan do everything as well as Richard. He knows the bass thoroughly, and he can read. I'm sure he could play with most symphony orchestras.”

That’s the band. And the performances on this record match the promise. Joe Chambers thought that Hill’s Catta was the best conventional (conventional?) tune on the record. Catta is in a mambo 8/8 and it holds together very well. Bobby says that its “the kind of tune I can get lost in.” There’s one phrase Andrew uses to introduce every solo, and when you hear it, watch out. Notice Andrew’s pedal-like backdrop.

Idle While is a Joe Chambers composition in 3/4. One of the things you can look for in this tune is Richard Davis’ strong and provocative accompaniment. There are excellent solos by Hubbard and Hutcherson, as well as by Davis himself, but his hand is in all their lines.

Les Noirs Marchent (The Blacks March) is an Andrew Hill composition played in march time. Here we see the group start out along a given path which opens up into something very much like freedom. From there it is an essay in free group improvisation in which no one plays an apparently set role, in which there are no extended solos but in which there is a mass evolution around some felt key. This is one of the clearer examples of how Hutcherson feels about group playing unfettered by out-sized solo wailing. This is also an example of what Chambers describes as the “pulse of the group.” The beat is in the group somewhere, it is not the overt insistence of the rhythm section plus a soloist. If you’re about to audition the record. try this one.

Or try Dialogue. the nostalgic, erie Joe Chambers composition. Here is Hutcherson hearing thru a field of conversant voices. A concept of free rhythm like this tune allows bass, drum and piano to sort of rotate around the beat and the changes which in turn provides a release for the other players. I love this idea of “no solo” that Hutcherson has developed here. Both Bobby and Joe would like to forge different combinations in instrumentation than we are accustomed to. They would like to heat say, vibes and bass clarinet playing duet, or unaccompanied trumpet. They get very deep into this idea of free orchestration in Dialogue, hut you can believe that they will get more into it during the future.

The last tune on this record is Andrew Hill’s Ghetto Lights. Andrew, who served as musical coordinator on this date, had an image in mind of the lights from the shacks of those unimaginably horrible shanty towns one reads about which expand up and up the sides of the hills in Sao Paulo, Brazil: but which Andrew knew only too well in his native Port-Au-Prince, Haiti. (Catta, the name of the first tune on this record, is a kind of Haitian patois spoken in the slums of Port-au-Prince.) The melody has a kind of perambulating quality because of its 6/4 tempo. Here there are solos: a lovely, relaxed soprano sax by Sam Rivers, a lyric muted solo by Hubbard and a gentle blues from Hutcherson. Notice that Andrew comes in only for the tag at the end, and that Bobby does the chord accompaniment.

So that's Dialogue. A thoroughly integrated band with direction but no dominating figure, emphasizing group-playing rather than solo-playing; where the climaxes are in the group rather than in the hero; with at least three compositions that could easily become standards. It’s something you’d want to listen to. Or write about.

— A. B. SPELLMAN

RVG CD Reissue Notes

BOBBY HUTCHERSON DIALOGUE

Nearly two years passed between Bobby Hutcherson's first appearance on Blue Note as a sideman — on Jackie McLean's One Step Beyond — and this session, his first as a leader to be released. We now know that producer Alfred Lion had put Hutcherson at the helm of a recording in December 1963, and that the results were quite successful; yet that date, now known as The Kicker, was not released at the time. Why did the usually prescient Lion wait so long to feature a musician who was obviously among the most exciting new talents in a decade loaded with promising newcomers?

My guess is that Hutcherson was a victim of his own versatility. He excelled in mainstream post-bop situations such as Grant Green's Idle Moments, which The Kicker had in fact hoped to re-create through the use of identical personnel; but Hutcherson was also exploring new sounds and structures, and had quickly become a key player in such groundbreaking recordings for the label as Eric Dolphy's Out To Lunch, Andrew Hill's Judgment and Tony Williams's Life Time. These last albums were defining a new Blue Note sound, one that sustained a foothold in the swinging, blues-based tradition that the label had always championed while also demonstrating that this tradition could evolve quite naturally into what by 1965 was beginning to be referred to as free jazz.

Hutcherson recalled the period in a 1998 conversation. "Everyone was exploring," he said, "and a huge influx of musicians had arrived in New York. People who didn't have the cabaret cards you needed to work in clubs then went to lofts to play. You could always find an after-hours session, and everyone was writing. I remember taking a bus from the Bronx into Manhattan, and seeing Malcolm X speaking as we crossed 125th Street. You just had to get out and listen. Sun Ra did something in Central Park one day with 100 musicians; all of the saxophonists played flutes at one point, and it sounded like every , bird in the world was there. You'd just go home after those experiences and find yourself writing something, becoming part of it. It was just wonderful to be alive."

This is the feeling that The Kicker lacked, and that Lion finally captured under Hutcherson's name in the present album. Dialogue illustrates just how well the players of Hutcherson's generation (plus older mavericks like Sam Rivers and Richard Davis) were absorbing and applying new musical ideas, and how the diversity of their concepts did not undermine the creation of a unified musical statement. This is even more impressive when one considers that Hutcherson, who would soon prove to be a notable composer, did none of the writing. Pianist Andrew Hill, credited in A.B. Spellman's liner notes as the date's "musical coordinator," wrote the majority of the material. His "Catta" and "Ghetto Lights" are inspired combinations of the familiar (mambo and slow blues, respectively) and more open concepts, while "Les Noirs Marchant" provides an example of collective improvisation made coherent by its focus on rhythmic variation. The fourth Hill piece, "Jasper," is a blowing blues, excellent in its way but, given its more traditional conception, understandably omitted from the original LP where time constraints dictated that something had to be dropped. (Spellman, like several writers of the time, was under the misperception that Hill was born in Haiti. The pianist was born in Chicago to Haitian immigrant parents.)

Hill and Hutcherson shared an incredible ability to play together that is best heard here on Joe Chambers's challenging title track, one of the period's most spellbinding explorations. Chambers also wrote "Idle While," a delicate waltz With a pun in the title that contemporary listeners might miss. (New York's JFK Airport was previously named Idylwild.) While he did not play on Hutcherson's earlier unreleased session, Chambers did contribute the tune "Mirrors," which Freddie Hubbard recorded on his Breaking Point album with the drummer present. It was Dialogue, however, that really established Chambers as a drummer/composer, a dual role he also played on the next Hutcherson album, Components. Chambers had to wait until 1998, however, to get his own Blue Note session.

The other sidemen were equally critical to the success of Dialogue. Freddie Hubbard is particularly attuned to the sounds his trumpet can generate with and without mutes, and responds to the freer pieces by tempering rather than unleashing his trademark fire. Sam Rivers extends the timbral variety through his command of several instruments, including a rare appearance of his bass clarinet. Richard Davis, the definitive inside/outside bassist of the period, bends the pulse yet never allows it to snap. Every one of these artists remains active, and (Hubbard's recent embouchure problems notwithstanding) it would be fascinating to hear them reunited.

There is an aura surrounding Dialogue that one detects only in the most memorable albums. Fluid yet emotionally consistent, it creates its own distinct sound world from beginning to end, and captures a key transitional moment in jazz evolution as well as any recording of the period.

— Bob Blumenthal, 2001