BLP 4019

Donald Byrd - Byrd In Hand

Released - December 1959

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Hackensack, NJ, May 31, 1959
Donald Byrd, trumpet; Charlie Rouse, tenor sax; Pepper Adams, baritone sax; Walter Davis Jr., piano; Sam Jones, bass; Art Taylor, drums.

tk.1 Here Am I
tk.2 Witchcraft
tk.3 The Injuns
tk.7 Devil Whip
tk.10 Bronze Dance
tk.16 Clarion Calls

Session Photos

Photos: © Francis Wolff/Mosaic Images 

https://www.mosaicrecordsimages.com/

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Witchcraft	Cy Coleman, Carolyn Leigh	31/05/1959
Here Am I	Donald Byrd	31/05/1959
Devil Whip	Donald Byrd	31/05/1959
Side Two
Bronze Dance	Walter Davis, Jr.	31/05/1959
Clarion Calls	Walter Davis, Jr.	31/05/1959
The Injuns	Donald Byrd	31/05/1959

Liner Notes

JOE GQLDBERG in his notes for Off To The Races, Donald Byrd’s last Blue Note album, spoke of Donald’s coming of jazz age despite the obstacles created by excessive, extravagant praise being poured on him prematurely. Here in Byrd In Hand, Donald affirms his maturity.

Maturity in a jazz musician manifests itself in many ways but one accurate indicator I’ve found is the actual sound produced. It doesn’t necessarily have to be huge in width or depth; Miles Davis and others have proven this. It is rather a firmness, an authority with which a musician speaks on his instrument.

I’ve said it often, although I’m certainly not the first, that playing jazz (especially on the wind instruments) is much like talking and/or singing. Breathing properly has much to do with playing well. When a musician is breathing as one with his horn he is able to convey his shouting, soaring, caressing and crooning moments with equal degree of necessary expression. I’ve always been repulsed by that David Stone Martin cover drawing of Charlie Parker as an actual bird but the idea of the saxophone growing right out of his head, completely a part of him, paralleled a scene I often had in my mind when I heord Bird ploy. (My image had the saxophone welded to his mouth rather than as on extension of his proboscis.) The point is that when a soloist can make the horn do what he is thinking, when he breathes into it and makes music, then he hos reached a point of freedom that bespeaks maturity.

When you are nervous or tense you do not breathe properly and this affects your voice. The singers on amateur shows (the old kind, not the pre-screened TV versions of today) used to prove this in their shaky way. It’s the same in jazz. There are the mumblers, not sure of what they want to say or what they are going to say; their tone is as hesitant as their ideas.

If you listen to the surety with which Donald Byrd plays here, you will have a perfect example of the maturity I’ve been talking about and around. In fact, all the players here speak out boldly and vigorously, but not blatantly, in on assertive, masculine/muscular kind of jazz. Some have tagged it “hard bop.” It is not “hard” the way certain bleached blondes are hard looking but hard driving in the some sense a topflight professional football fullback is when he moves in high gear.

As a further refutation of the implications cast by the “hard bop” tog, there is the lyricism-with-guts of performances like Witchcraft and Byrd’s Here Am I.

Pepper Adams’ deep-throated sound leaves no room for imagination as to what instrument he is playing. His baritone sax pays no debt to either Chaloff or Mulligan, the two main names in the modern development of the instrument once considered as cumbersome to ploy as it is to lift. Pepper is very much his own man; his bittersweet, sometimes tart, always swinging lines are proving to be influential in themselves. He and Byrd have worked together quite a lot in 1958-9; in elongating and deepening a musical friendship that began in Detroit, they hove strengthened their work together.

Charlie Rouse, influenced by Coleman Hawkins, Charlie Parker and Sonny Rollins, but author of a somewhat unorthodox, personal representation of his thoughts, makes it a full, rich-sounding three in the front line.

Pianist Walter Davis Jr., first active on the New York scene when Max Roach brought him over from Newark, New Jersey with Hank Mobley to play with Roach’s quartet at the Down Beat club in the early ‘50s, hos just now really begun to achieve some recognition. In the interim, he played with Dizzy Gillespie but it wasn’t until his appearance with Jackie McLean in New Soil (Blue Note 4013), that his talents as a player and composer were fully exposed. Here he displays a warmth in the Bud Powell idiom and two melodically and harmonically attractive compositions in Bronze Dance and Clarion Coils.

Two of Rouse’s groupmates in the Thelonious Monk Quartet during 1958-9, were Sam Jones and Arthur Taylor. Their experience as o team is evident and indispensibly helpful throughout.

Leader Byrd, with all these excellent supporters and imaginative, well executed scores, shines in his finest, most polished effort to dote. His compositions have substance: Here A I a plaintively beautiful piece which doesn’t need a lyric because it sings by and for itself; Devil Whip crackling with an undertone of impending evil; The Injuns more a fleet scouting expedition which lets everyone ride out on the plains. His playing has that hot sweetness and pungence which characterized the best of the late Clifford Brown. Donald has attained a real stature with this album.

A Byrd in hand is worth two on the record store shelf.

—IRA GITLER

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

RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes

A NEW LOOK AT BYRD IN HAND

As the five-star Down Beat review that this album garnered at the time of its release indicates, Ira Gitler was not alone in feeling that Byrd In Hand represented a new plateau for its trumpet-playing leader. The session’s inspired music represents the conjunction of several critical associations that brought Byrd into his most productive and influential period as a recording artist.

The most sustained and prolific of these relationships was the one Byrd shared with his old friend from Detroit, Pepper Adams. They had started working in New York and recording together a year earlier, and would continue to co-lead bands through late 1961. While Chet Baker and Gerry Mulligan had already displayed how well trumpet and baritone sax could blend in a small group, Byrd and Adams were clearly something else. The saxophonist, an acerbic dervish with a brawny tone who mixed streams of bebop and caustic quotes, was the perfect complement to Byrd’s more thoughtful and tender inventions. This album, their third together and second on Blue Note (after Off To The Races), was the first to fully display the range of moods they were capable of producing. An excellent example is Byrd’s haunting “Here Am I,” with an atmospheric blend of vamp and melody so strong it was reprised almost verbatim two years later in Duke Pearson’s composition “Say You’re Mine,” which was heard on another of Byrd’s best Blue Note sessions, The Cat Walk.

A second important connection represented by Byrd In Hand involves Thelonious Monk, a musician who is not even present. Four months before this session, Monk presented the first orchestral concert of his music at New York’s Town Hall by augmenting his working quartet (which included Charlie Rouse, Sam Jones and Art Taylor) with six additional musicians including Byrd and Adams. The Riverside album that the concert produced features strong playing from the trumpeter (a product perhaps in part of Monk’s threat to replace Byrd with Lee Morgan when the former was late for a rehearsal), and Byrd was clearly satisfied enough with the experience to bring Monk’s sidemen into his next project. Rouse, with his immediately identifiable sound and phraseology, is a delight here, and further complements the leader’s warmth with his flinty inventions. The day after this session, Rouse, Jones and Taylor began work with their regular boss and Thad Jones on 5 By Monk By 5, of which the British critic Jack Cooke astutely observed that “The times were beginning to catch up with Monk...for a generation well versed in the search for fresh harmonic relationships through their experience of hard bop, and stimulated by that style’s rhythmic devices, found themselves with a key to his music.” Here we have more proof that Monk’s aesthetic was spreading, even in the absence of his compositions.

For this reason, pianist Walter Davis, Jr. was an ideal choice for the piano chair, given his friendship with both Monk and Bud Powell. Davis was also in the midst of a period during which he collaborated frequently with Byrd. The two, plus Doug Watkins and Art Taylor, had traveled to and recorded in Europe during 1958. Upon their return, Davis began turning up on Blue Note sessions with Byrd, including Jackie McLean’s New Soil (cut a month before this date) and his own Davis Cup (recorded two months later, with Jones and Taylor also present). While these albums gave the pianist far more solo space than he had enjoyed on his early recordings with Max Roach and Dizzy Gillespie, they were even more important in announcing Davis’s talents as a composer. His writing here is notable in terms of both lyricism and structural originality.

“Bronze Dance” shifts moods and meters seamlessly over a unique 28-bar chorus that allows Rouse to display his strong sense of contrast to particularly good effect, while the 44-bar form of “Clarion Calls” is handled by Adams and Byrd without strain. When Rouse gets confused during his “Clarion” solo and stays on for four extra bars, Davis simply omits four bars of his own chorus and sustains a see-saw figure until he is sure that the structure is secure.

One additional point of comparison this album calls to mind involves Clifford Brown, whose influence on Byrd was receding here as Byrd established a deeper sense of his own personality. In this regard, the brisk yet relaxed trumpet solo on “The Injuns” should be heard next to Brown’s more bravura 1953 reading of the tune on which it is based, “Cherokee,” now available on Clifford Brown Memorial Album in the RVG series, from a sextet date that also finds Rouse in the tenor chair.

— Bob Blumenthal, 2002