BLP 4238

Donald Byrd - Mustang!

Released - October 1967

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, June 24, 1966
Donald Byrd, trumpet; Sonny Red, alto sax; Hank Mobley, tenor sax; McCoy Tyner, piano; Walter Booker, bass; Freddie Waits, drums.

1746 tk.4 On The Trail
1747 tk.9 I'm So Excited By You
1748 tk.15 Mustang
1750 tk.24 I Got It Bad And That Ain't Good
1751 tk.29 Fly, Little Bird, Fly
1749 tk.31 Dixie Lee

Session Photos

Photos: © Francis Wolff/Mosaic Images 

https://www.mosaicrecordsimages.com/

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Mustang	Sonny Red Kyner	June 24 1966
Fly Little Bird Fly	Donald Byrd	June 24 1966
I Got It Bad (and That Ain't Good)	Duke Ellington, Paul Francis Webster	June 24 1966
Side Two
Dixie Lee	Donald Byrd	June 24 1966
On the Trail	Ferde Grofé	June 24 1966
I'm So Excited by You	Donald Byrd	June 24 1966

Liner Notes

DONALD BYRD sometimes reminds me of a finely disciplined juggler. Always, he has a number of projects going simultaneously; and because he is disciplined as well as musically resourceful, they all get done. And well. For example, when I talked to him about this album, he was taking courses at Columbia University’s Teachers College for his doctorate in music education. (He already has a BA. and an M.A. from Manhattan School of Music.)

In addition, he was planning music for a ballet under commission from the Radio Orchestra of Norway, and was also involved in writing jazz masses for Manhottanville College of the Sacred Heart and for the Advent Lutheran Church. Moreover, Donald was coaching and writing music for a startlingly precocious six-year-old Chicago organist and pianist, Frederick Nelson III.

There were also plans for a big band date for Blue Note, and he had just finished six weeks at the Five Spot in New York with a combo. It is Donald Byrd as combo leader who is at issue here; and predictably, he brings the same qualities of order, ardor and clarity to his work in this context that he applies to other sectors of his highly diversified musical life.

The title song, Mustang, is by Sylvester Kyner, who is more familiarly known as Sonny Red. “Sonny wrote this about three or four years ago,” Donald notes, “but it was never recorded until this session. It’s based on a kind of Bo Diddley beat. Sonny likes people like Bo Diddley and John Lee Hooker. The title? Well, if anything happens with the tune, that’s what Sonny would like to do with the proceeds—buy a new car.”

The rhythm section digs in deeply from the start, the horns set up a dialogue of lines, and then “the” solos soar. Sonny on alto speaks with heat and o tensile beat. Donald is characteristically crisp and logical, re-emphasizing here his capacity to “talk” in the most basic jazz terms. Hank Mobley is also at propulsive ease in his preacher-like solo with antiphonal assent from the congregation of horns. After McCoy Tyner re-emphasizes how strong his roots are, the horns close the circle.

Fly Little Bird Fly by Donald was written, he explains, “because I wanted to see if I could build a structure similar in a sense to what Coltrane is doing. Harmonically, the song is constructed off a whole tone scale. It sounds easy to play, but it’s really quite difficult because of the whole-step, half-step pattern. Most people aren’t used to playing chords in that way. If you get lost on one chord, you usually have to wait eight bars to catch up. McCoy, of course, is especially quick at this because of all the training he had with Coltrane. Listen to him on the track. He tears the song completely apart.” Clearly Donald’s other colleagues also mastered the challenge of this quicksilver piece.

There were a couple of motivations for Donald’s deciding to record I Got It Bad and That Ain’t Good. “I heard Mickey Wayland — she was Miss Tennessee — singing it, and I was drawn to the song. And at the same time, I was thinking of how Miles Davis can get inside certain songs. This seemed a good tune for me to try to get inside and turn around a certain way. It’s a matter of finding the choice notes. Some people ploy a lot of notes on a ballad. That’s easy to do, and the result usually is the desecration of the song. But it’s quite another thing to pick choice notes that also lay within the tune.” I asked if Don was familiar with Ivie Anderson’s recording of I Got It Bod with Duke Ellington. “On the second part of the song,” he answered, “I played it the vocal way, the way she sang it.”

As for choice notes, besides Donald’s solo, listen to the judicious care that went into Hank Mobley’s contribution. And throughout. there is the choice comping of McCoy Tyner.

Dixie Lee is the nickname of the former Miss Tennessee. “In it,” says Donald, “I tried to reflect her personality — Southern and lyrical.” After its infectiously rolling beginning which, as Donald observes, ¡s in the Watermelon Man vein, Sonny Red takes charge, illustrating Donald’s point that “Sonny has made up his mind to really get down to things. His playing has a lot of spirit—and determination.” Donald, whose playing years ago resembled a humming-bird’s flight, reveals again how much earthier and stronger his work ha become. And Hank Mobley, in a brief compass, gets directly t the heart of the matter.

In clubs, Donald has been playing On the Trail from Ferde Grofe’s Grand Canyon Suite for four or five years. “Several people,” he says, “heard me doing it and went off and recorded it — Wynton Kelly and Jimmy Heath, for instance. Finally I got around to it. Oddly, they all used my version of it. And all the time, I’d thought I was playing the regular background to the tune, but it turns out I’d been using Morton Gould’s Pavane underneath. For some reason that’s the way it came to me, and it fits. I suppose the reason I’ve been fascinated by On the Trail is that, being for so long the theme for a cigarette company, it was one of the things I grew up with. And I find it’s also intriguing to audiences. Everybody knows it, but many don’t know the name of it.” In any case, Donald has infused the Grofe theme with a dimension of warmth and expressivity that goes considerably beyond both its original orchestral version and its later commercial application behind the treble of Johnny the bellboy.

I’m So Excited by You is for a friend of Donald in Paris, Eva Lindquist. “I wanted to get,” Donald observed, “the lyricism of her personality into a song.” It is a different degree of lyricism, as you’ll hear, from that of Dixie Lee—lithe, buoyant, but also a bit wistful. Worth noting on this track, as in the others, is the brisk resiliency of the rhythm section. “Freddie Waits,” says Donald, “is a good, all-around, very thorough drummer. I heard him working with Gerald Wilson at East Basin Street and that's what led me to use him here. Walter Booker come up to New York from Washington where he used to be with the JFQ Quintet. He’s ready!”

And so, invariably, is Donald, no matter what the particular focus of his ceaselessly active interest. Here he has shaped a small combo into an energetic unity, giving ample space for the soloists but stamping the overall result with his own distinctive characteristics—disciplined lucidity, economy and a continual freshness of involvement. It’s a quality that marks his conversation too. There’s no time to be bored. There are new books to discuss, new theories of music and of history. And new experiences. And that, of course, is why his music is so alive. He’s persistently absorbed in the processes of growth.

—NAT HENTOFF