BLP 4040

Freddie Hubbard - Open Sesame

Released - September 1960

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, June 19, 1960
Freddie Hubbard, trumpet; Tina Brooks, tenor sax; McCoy Tyner, piano; Sam Jones, bass; Clifford Jarvis, drums.

tk.3 Hub's Nub
tk.6 Gypsy Blue
tk.9 Open Sesame
tk.11 One Mint Julep
tk.17 But Beautiful
tk.22 All Or Nothing At All

Session Photos

Photos: Francis Wolff/Mosaic Images / 
https://www.mosaicrecordsimages.com/

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Open Sesame	Tina Brooks	19/06/1960
But Beautiful	Johnny Burke, Jimmy Van Heusen	19/06/1960
Gypsy Blue	Tina Brooks	19/06/1960
Side Two
All or Nothing at All	Arthur Altman, Jack Lawrence	19/06/1960
One Mint Julep	Rudy Toombs	19/06/1960
Hub's Nub	Freddie Hubbard	19/06/1960

Liner Notes

TO THOSE of you familiar with the tales of The Arabian Nights, more specifically the story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, the words “open sesame!” represent the magic password which opened the doors to the robbers’ cave. As with many phrases from literature, the expression has found its way into our language and contemporary usage. It still has the same basic connotation—door-opener.

This album is an “open sesame” for two doors. One is being opened by Blue Note on an extremely talented young trumpet player named Freddie Hubbard by giving him his first date as a leader; the other by Hubbard himself through his playing in this set.

If you travel around the United States you will encounter many fine musicians who have never been heard outside of their particular area. There is much undiscovered talent that may never be brought to the light of public scrutiny. On the other hand, much important talent is being discovered and re-discovered by the necessities brought about by the current economic set-up of jazz with its emphasis on heavy recording schedules.

Certainly Blue Note has been an “Ali Baba” before mass production (Monk, Blakey, Silver, Clifford Brown, etc.) and is equally judicious in its choice of talent today. Although Hubbard is only 22 and his future lies glowingly ahead, with promise of greater things to come, there is no doubt that he is ready to be heard at length right now.

Freddie is from Indianapolis, the same city which gave Jay Jay Johnson and the Montgomery brothers to jazz. Born in the Indiana capital on April 7, 1938 into a musical family, Frederick Dewayne Hubbard started playing mellophone in the band at John Hope Junior High School and migrated to trumpet after a year. At Arsenal Tech High, he continued on trumpet and also took up French horn. It was on the latter instrument that he received a scholarship to Indiana Central College. He declined this, however, and remained in Indianapolis to attend the Jordan Conservatory of Music for a year. Freddie also studied with Max Woodbury of the Indianapolis Symphony. During this period he worked around the area with a group called The Contemporaries and with the Montgomery brothers (Wes, Buddy and Monk).

In 1958, Freddie came to New York and played at Turbo Village, first with baritone saxophonist Jay Cameron and then with his own group. It was there I first heard him. At Cameron’s urging, I journeyed to Brooklyn and was properly impressed. There were two sitters-in that Saturday night who were also taken with what they heard—Horace Silver and Philly Joe Jones. Philly thereupon hired Hubbard for a gig he was playing at Birdland. In April of 1959 he went to San Francisco with Sonny Rollins. All told he was with Sonny for two months. In 1960 he did Monday nights at Birdland and played with Charlie Persip’s group and Slide Hampton’s Octet before joining Jay Jay Johnson’s sextet.

Freddie admires the playing of Miles Davis (his first influence), Clifford Brown and Kenny Dorham. He also likes the tenor playing of John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins and admits that they have had their effect on him too. “I was heavily influenced by Newk for two months after I stopped working with him”, says Freddie.

Another tenor man that Hubbard digs is Tina Brooks. Tina is from the Bronx by way of Fayetteville, North Carolina. He gained playing experience with the r&b bands of Sonny Thompson, Charles Brown, Amos Milburn, Joe Morris and Lionel Hampton but a lot of important jazz knowledge was made available to him by trumpeter Benny Harris. Since the opening of The Connection, Tina has been Jackie McLean’s understudy and has subbed for him on several occasions.

Hubbard and Brooks met at a session at Count Basie’s club and immediately found that their styles were compatible. In addition to making this date with Freddie, Tina has also recorded one of his own, using Freddie as his helpmate on Blue Note 4041. Actually, he is no stranger to this label, having done all his previous recording for Blue Note with Jimmy Smith and Kenny Burrell, respectively.

Tina’s early influences were Lester Young, Dexter Gordon and Charlie Parker. He is very much in favor of Sonny Rollins and there is more than a hint of Hank Mobley in his playing. In this album, his composing is represented by the title number and Gypsy Blue; his arranging by But Beautiful.

The rhythm section consists of two youngsters and a veteran. McCoy Tyner, the young Philadelphian who made his debut in the big time with the Jazztet and has recently been a member of John Coltrane’s quartet, is one of the most facile new pianists to come on the scene in the past year. Facility is not his only attribute; he knows what he wants to say and his dexterity helps him to be articulate but not verbose.

Clifford Jarvis is a drummer from Boston who has been working with Randy Weston. Although not yet 20, Clifford handles himself very professionally, knows where the beat is and lays it down with the exuberance of his years.

The veteran is Sam Jones (a young 35), the Jacksonville, Florida product who has played with Tiny Bradshaw, Kenny Dorham, Thelonious Monk and is currently with Cannonball Adderley. His presence is a steadying factor at any record date. In July of 1960, he won a new star award in the Down Beat International Critics’ Poll.

Open Sesame really opens things in a swinging minor groove right out of the old Messengers or the Horace Silver quintet. All the soloists are directly communicative. Freddie has some fun with a phrase from Illinois Jacquet’s solo on Flyin’ Home.

The two ballads in the set are treated differently. But Beautiful is treated very sensitively with Freddie’s tone and ability to sustain a slow performance outstanding. All Or Nothing At All is hit full tilt with Jarvis slashing away, straight ahead. Later, Cliff comes in for some exciting “fours”.

Brooks’ Gypsy Blue is a touching theme that almost takes you to a Jewish wedding. When the soloists play, they are working on a minor, 12-bar blues. Jones has his only solo of the set.

One Mint Julep, first done by The Clovers, is out of the r&b bag. Freddie used to do it at Turbo Village and revived it here. Both hornmen are “down” and powerful but never hokey.

Freddie’s original, Hub’s Nub, which serves as the closer, shows his thoughtful control of the horn in front of the solidly driving rhythm section. Tina again generates o great deal of genuine excitement in his solo without resorting to any contrived devices.

One night when Slide Hampton was appearing at the Jazz Gallery, I looked at Freddie, up on the stand, and suddenly a certain picture of a young Louis Armstrong that I had once seen, popped into my mind’s eye and drew its resemblance to Hubbard. Whether Freddie is ever going to reach the stature of Louis Armstrong is not important. What is, is that here is a brilliant young jazzman on the threshold of a potentially great career. His trumpet is his “open sesame”. The door is open.

— IRA GITLER

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

Sam Jones performs by courtesy of Riverside Records

RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes

FREDDIE HUBBARD OPEN SESAME

As prognostications go, Ira Gitler's thoughts on Freddie Hubbard's future proved quite accurate. Hubbard did not equal Louis Armstrong in personal achievement or all-encompassing influence (who has?), but he did become one of the central figures in the jazz trumpet continuum. His achievement here and his subsequent triumphs were grounded in an early apprenticeship that seems even more imposing in retrospect.

While still an Indianapolis teenager, Hubbard's band the Jazz Contemporaries included fellow students and future partners James Spaulding and Larry Ridley, while his friends the Montgomerys were responsible for the trumpeter's recording debut on a Pacific Jazz session in late 1957 (reissued on the Wes Montgomery CD Finger Pickin'). After moving to New York, Hubbard next participated in John Coltrane's final Prestige recordings, then was summoned to Chicago to join Paul Chambers and other members of the Miles Davis sextet on Chambers's first Vee Jay album. Hubbard's tenure with Slide Hampton often found Booker Little as the other half of the Hampton Octet's trumpet section, and the pair can be heard together on the first of two Hampton sessions that feature Hubbard. Several weeks before the present album was made, Hubbard was featured on Eric Dolphy's memorable debut as a leader, Outward Bound.

These experiences helped produced a confident, inventive and already distinctive trumpet soloist, well grounded in jazz's modern mainstream and also comfortable with the harmonic and structural challenges associates such as Rollins, Coltrane and Dolphy were investigating. Hubbard's style would continue to expand, a process well documented on his own albums of the next several years as well as in several subsequent sideman appearances with Dolphy and Coltrane again, and with Ornette Coleman, Oliver Nelson and Herbie Hancock, among others. Part of the change was a greater technical daring, as Hubbard reached for the expressive peaks of his saxophone colleagues. On the present performances he risks less but still sounds like himself, particularly on the title track (the master is more clarion in both general ambience and the trumpet solo than the alternate) and "All Or Nothing At All." The unusual 44-bar form of "Hub's Nub" also hints at a compositional gift that would reveal itself more fully with time.

Hubbard wasn't the only newcomer among the members of this uniformly impressive but at the time mostly unknown quintet. Only Sam Jones had to that point established himself within the jazz community and among the public as a premier player on his instrument, a position he would solidify over the remaining two decades of his career. Of the others, McCoy Tyner attained a status at least comparable to Hubbard's as a major stylist on his instrument and a primary figure in jazz's immediately subsequent evolution. At this point in his career, Tyner had yet to record with his new boss John Coltrane, and had only received minimal recorded exposure with Curtis Fuller and The Jazztet. Tyner's fluency, touch and personal harmonic language are already beginning to emerge in these performances, and would be unmistakable when he finally recorded with Coltrane in October. Clifford Jarvis, a student of the great Alan Dawson in his native Boston, worked with a wide range of artists, from Chet Baker and Barry Harris to Sun Ra and Archie Shepp, during the two decades in New York that preceded his expatriation to London. Jarvis reunited with Hubbard on Blue Note in 1962 for Hub-tones, and again in 1965 when he was paired with conga drummer Big Black on the trumpeter's Blue Spirits and The Night Of The Cookers.

Tenor saxophonist Tina Brooks (1932-74) was a familiar voice in 1960. at least within Blue Note's inner circle. He had been recorded in both live and studio settings with Jimmy Smith and Kenny Burrell, and Alfred Lion had already given Brooks his own date as a leader in 1958, though the results were not released at the time. His memorable contributions here inspired Lion to bring Brooks back to Rudy Van Gelder's six days after these tracks were cut with Hubbard, Jones. Duke Jordan and Art Taylor completing the group. The resulting album, True Blue, proved to be the only one of four Brooks sessions for the label that appeared during the saxophonist's lifetime. Open Sesame confirmed his exceptional promise as both a full-throated mainstream/modern player and a writer with a gift for memorable themes in the Horace Silver tradition. His two compositions are the highlights of this album, and each fortunately exists in an alternate take. The folkloric tinge of his "Gypsy Blue" is a particularly Silverish touch that makes the tune's theme most memorable.

Hearing Tina Brooks with Hubbard, here and on True Blue. one might have also speculated on the saxophonist's bright future; yet Brooks never attracted the attention of the other major jazz labels of the time, and he ultimately found few additional opportunities at Blue Note, where tenormen Hank Mobley and Stanley Turrentine were already on board and were soon to be joined by Dexter Gordon and Wayne Shorter. The unjustly overlooked Brooks is now considered among the period's most intriguing "lost" figures, one who never sounded better than in his two encounters with the young Freddie Hubbard.

— Bob Blumenthal. 2001