BLP 4007

Donald Byrd - Off To The Races

Released - January 1959

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Hackensack, NJ, December 21, 1958
Donald Byrd, trumpet; Jackie McLean, alto sax #1,2,4-6; Pepper Adams, baritone sax #1,2,4-6; Wynton Kelly, piano; Sam Jones, bass; Art Taylor, drums.

tk.3 Sudwest Funk
tk.4 Lover Come Back To Me
tk.6 When Your Lover Has Gone
tk.8 Off To The Races (aka The Long Two/Four)
tk.10 Paul's Pal
tk.12 Down Tempo

Session Photos

Photos: Francis Wolff

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Lover, Come Back to Me	Oscar Hammerstein II, Sigmund Romberg	21/12/1958
When Your Love Has Gone	Donald Byrd	21/12/1958
Sudwest Funk	Donald Byrd	21/12/1958
Side Two
Paul's Pal	Sonny Rollins	21/12/1958
Off to the Races	Donald Byrd	21/12/1958
Down Tempo	Donald Byrd	21/12/1958

Liner Notes

Inevitably, and perhaps unfortunately, jazz in this country is part of show business. As such, it treads the tightrope of all entertainment, trying to be an art form and a going business proposition at the same time, often succeeding at neither. But since it is a part of show business, existing at its best as a means of expression and at its worst as a means of inducing people to buy expensive drinks, it falls prey to the show business rules.

One of the most pernicious of these rules has to do with publicity. It stands to reason that heroes are not born every minute, or every ten years, but publicity must have heroes, and if none are available, must manufacture them where none exist. Often a man is built up to be a hero long before he is really due for such acclaim; then, when it turns out that he is not flawless, he is cast aside in favor of this week's new giant. If he really has the stuff of talent, he can outlast both types of treatment (and who can say which is more dangerous?), and quietly, without fanfare, work his way honestly into a position of importance. Once this is done, his status is secure. The most obvious example of talent weathering such storms of popular fancy in recent years is, of course, Frank Sinatra, who came back "bigger and better than ever," as the publicists say, and today has little to worry about, artistically or financially.

It seems to me that in the realm of jazz, and in not quite so noisy a fashion, Donald Byrd has recently suffered the same fate. Coming out of Detroit a few years ago with some other extremely talented young musicians, he was hailed everywhere as the new great trumpet player, even winning the Down Beat Critic's New Star Poll in 1957. Now, "great" is a word that should be carefully reserved and brought out only at very special times. If Donald Byrd was not truly great at twenty-one or twenty-two, that is not very important. And if the fans who think they own jazz, that it is their own special province, dismissed him when he became too widely known to be their secret, that is not very important, either. What is important, and what can be judged from this record, is that Donald Byrd is a very good musician, and an honest one.

He has matured since all the fuss was made about him; that much is apparent. At one time, he sounded much like Clifford Brown; he no longer does. He is developing his own voice, and it is a strong one. Nor is he a slavish imitator of fashion. Many young trumpet players, influenced by the obvious stature of Miles Davis, play soft, whispery trumpet - one technique among many, one that is superbly suited to the statements Miles makes, but that might not fare so well for others. Donald Byrd, on this record, plays a wonderfully open horn, more reminiscent of the true trumpet sound than the work of any young musician I have heard in several years. It is, as it should be, a sound that is in keeping with his music rather than with fashion. His is not a slanted, oblique music like Miles's, it is an open, forceful, direct music. In keeping with his sound is the energy that is apparent throughout the record. Donald obviously wants to play and enjoys it - a warm feeling, somewhat rare in these diffident days, that communicates itself instantly to the listener and carries him along.

After several appearances as a sideman for Blue Note, this is Donald's first date as a leader, and he has chosen men well suited to his musical thought. They possess the same energy and drive that are characteristic of his playing, and make this, through their combined efforts, an essentially cheerful record in an era of angry, slashing music.

Jackie McLean, an alto player, has been around much longer than his years would indicate, and at various times, in such groups as George Wellington's, could almost be considered to be in partnership with Donald. Pepper Adams shares with Donald the distinctions of being a New Star poll winner and being from Detroit. Wynton Kelly and Art Taylor have been present on several Blue Note LPs, and Sam Jones, an extremely talented young bass player, was one of the reasons for the success of the Cannon ball Adder ley-Miles Davis Somethin' Else LP on Blue Note.

The one standard, "Lover Come Back to Me," is taken at the rapid tempo common to jazz performances. Someday, it may be remembered that this was once a ballad. But there is every reason for it to be swung in this way, as this performance proves.

"Paul's Pal" is by Sonny Rollins, and has the easy, slightly sardonic charm of his best compositions. Sonny is worthy of being placed among the finest jazz composers, and Donald deserves credit for both his choice of the tune and his playing of it.

The remaining four tunes are Donald's own compositions. One of them, "When Your Love Has Gone," is in many ways the best example of his abilities on the LP. In these angry days, it is almost as rare to find a young musician who can play a ballad as to find one who can write one. Without ever resorting to the evasive device of double-timing (which only keeps a ballad from being a ballad), Donald, for the only time on the record without the benefit of the other two horns, gives an extended, emotional, open-horn performance.

Two of the other pieces are "Sudwest Funk" and "Down Tempo." The first takes its name from the name of a Southwest German radio network where, no doubt, the concept of funk has also penetrated by now, and is a well-rooted example of today's idiom. The second is a blues of a quite different nature; a return to the happy, hollering blues of the forties. Both are open, easy performances.

The remaining Donald Byrd composition, the one that gives this album its name, is "Off to the Races." It is a rather fascinating, well-ordered tune taken at a slower tempo than one might expect from the title. Built around a march-tempo motif, it is brilliantly introduced and concluded by Art Taylor. If it is meant that everyone goes off to the races between the arranged portions, that much is certainly true.

As the cover indicates, Donald Byrd, after having suffered in a very short time the ins and outs of popular favor (and it is typical of jazz that happenings which take a great amount of time anywhere else happen quickly within its limits), is finally off to the races himself. This record is enough to make that, rather than a wish or an opinion, a fact.

-JOE GOLDBERG

Photos by FRANCIS WOLFF
Cover Design by REID MILES
Recording by RUDY VAN GELDER

RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes

A NEW LOOK AT OFF TO THE RACES

The Blue Note label is known, among other things, for its many impressive discoveries. Donald Byrd was not one of them. The young trumpeter seemed to find opportunities to lead or co-lead record dates at just about every label except Blue Note during his first three years in New York. There were Byrd albums on Transition, Savoy, and Brunswick's French arm; co-leader sessions with Art Farmer, Phil Woods, and others on Prestige; and the Jazz Lab sessions credited to Byrd, Gigi Gryce, or both on Riverside, Columbia, Verve, and Jubilee. A second Riverside LP, Pepper Adam's 10 to 4 at the Five Spot, indicated by the typeface on the cover that Byrd was in fact co-leader of the date. And there were two more unreleased albums, by the Jazz Lab RCA and Byrd with strings arranged by Clare Fischer on Warner Bros. The trumpeter did get around.

Byrd made many trips to Rudy Van studios under Blue Note auspices, as Joe Goldberg's wonderfully mordant original liner notes point out. Beginning in September 1956, Byrd was heard with Paul Chambers, Horace Silver, Hank Mobley, Sonny Rollins, Lou Donaldson, Jimmy Smith, Sonny Clark, Dizzy Reece, and Art Blakey — a veritable who of the label's roster in the period. Yet the label refrained from giving Byrd his own session until this December 1958 sextet date, preferring to enter the 12-inch-LP era with its attention focused on fellow trumpeters Thad Jones, Kenny Dorham, Lee Morgan, and (after purchasing his first sessions from Transition) Louis Smith. The early hype that Goldberg describes, and the overexposure that the above list of recordings suggest, may account in part for the delay. There was also the matter of crowning someone as the next Clifford Brown, an exercise that commenced after Brown's tragic death in 1956, and evoked as much fervor from the jazz scribes as the search for the next Bird had in the wake of Charlie Parker's passing a year earlier. Blue Note had clearly put its money on Lee Morgan, and Byrd may have simply been too strong a competitor for what, as in Parker's case, proved to be a nonexistent mantle.

In any event, the wait proved worthwhile. Off to the Races marked the start of an affiliation between artist and label that, with one interruption for a Verve date in 1964, would last until 1976. It also provided the lone occasion on which Byrd partnered with both of the saxophonists who became identified as his most reliable running buddies in the early and middle phases of his career. Byrd's ties to Jackie McLean ran back to some of the trumpeter's earliest experiences in New York, including the George Wallington Quintet and McLean's first three albums as a leader. The association would be sustained at Blue Note well into the '60s, with particularly notable work by the Byrd/McLean team on such projects in the immediate future as McLean's Jackie's Bag and New Soil, Byrd's Fuego and Byrd in Flight, and Walter Davis, Jr.'s Davis Cup. Art Taylor, McLean's playing-mate since childhood, had also worked with Byrd in Wallington's band and the Jazz Lab Quintet, on numerous studio dates, and during a tour of Europe earlier in 1958 that found both men featured on Dizzy Reece's Blue Note debut Blues in Trinity, as well as the concert performance that French Brunswick released under Byrd's name.

Byrd's partnership with Pepper Adams stretched back to the days when both were coming up in Detroit, and had emerged as a working relationship earlier in '58 on the Riverside Five Spot album. This would turn out to be Byrd's defining affiliation over the next three years, as indicated by five released and one unreleased Blue Note album under Byrd's name, plus sessions on Bethlehem and Warwick where the saxophonist received top billing. Adams's work here is exemplary, with the energy and harmonic/rhythmic momentum he generates on "Lover Come Back to Me" marking him as a hard-bop baritone paragon.

As for the rest of the program, Byrd and Taylor had included "Paul's Pal" in their Paris concert recording of two months earlier. "Off to the Races" had appeared on Adams's Riverside album under the title "The Long Two/Four," in an arrangement where the march feeling was retained for the bridge of each solo chorus. Applying march rhythms in a modern jazz context was a popular ploy of the time, and it is worth noting that this tune precedes (at least in terms of taped documentation) Benny Golson's "Blues March," but had itself been preceded by Sonny Rollins's "Wail March." "Sudwest Funk" is in the soulful walk manner of Sonny Clark's "Cool Struttin'," which was also enlivened by a stunning McLean alto solo.

— Bob Blumenthal, 2006