BLP 4045

Freddie Redd - Shades Of Redd

Released - March 1961

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, August 13, 1960
Jackie McLean, alto sax; Tina Brooks, tenor sax; Freddie Redd, piano; Paul Chambers, bass; Louis Hayes, drums.

tk.1 Thespian
tk.4 Blues-Blues-Blues
tk.5 Shadows
tk.6 Swift
tk.9 Ole!
tk.11 Just A Ballad For My Baby
tk.16 Melanie

Session Photos

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

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
The Thespian	Freddie Redd	13/08/1960
Blues, Blues, Blues	Freddie Redd	13/08/1960
Shadows	Freddie Redd	13/08/1960
Side Two
Melanie	Freddie Redd	13/08/1960
Swift	Freddie Redd	13/08/1960
Just a Ballad for My Baby	Freddie Redd	13/08/1960
Olé	Freddie Redd	13/08/1960

Liner Notes

SINCE his emergence as composer of the score for Jack Gelber’s harrowingly exact play, The Connection (Blue Note 4027), Freddie Redd has finally been gaining some of the recognition that has eluded him for much of his playing career. Freddie also plays the taciturn pianist in the play with convincing effect. Although he hopes to work again in the theatre, Freddie remains essentially a jazz player-writer, and this album underlines his growth as a composer of vigorously expressive jazz originals.

Freddie has been writing since he started playing. In both disciplines, he is largely self-taught. Born in New York, May 29, 1928. Freddie came of a moderately musical family. His mother sang in church, and still does; and his father, who died when Freddie was not yet a year old, had played piano.

Unlike most professional jazzmen, Freddie didn’t take up an instrument until quite late in his teens. Around 1946, when he was in the Army, Freddie began to pick up the piano on his own. After being discharged, he studied for a month at the Greenwich House Music School in New York, but he become so proficient through his own investigations that he left school to take his first professional job, a jazz gig in Syracuse. With him, by the way, was tenor saxophonist Tina Brooks.

After Syracuse, he free-lanced in Harlem, especially in a sit-in room called Club Harlem where pay was small but the chance to learn before an audience and other musicians was extensive. Meanwhile, he was absorbing a number of influences. The first jazz record he recalls having had a sharp impact on him was the Charlie Parker-Dizzy Gillespie Show ‘Nuff to which he was exposed in the Army. Later, Freddie heard Bud Powell. “Bud really got me started. I’d never heard a pianist play quite like that — the remarkably fluent single lines and the pretty chords. In time, Thelonious Monk got to me too. Actually, however, I’ve been influenced by many things I’ve heard on a lot of instruments. What I do is try to piece together what stimulates me into my own way of feeling things musically.”

By 1953, Freddie had joined Cootie Williams and spent on exacerbating year traveling mostly through the South. Back in New York, Freddie started working with vibist Joe Roland and began to be heard quite often at Birdland’s informal Monday night sessions. In 1954, Freddie was with Art Blakey, and then for a time, he seemed to have disappeared. He turned up in Sweden on a tour with Rolf Ericson, joined Charlie Mingus’ Jazz Workshop in 1956, and when Mingus went to the coast, Freddie left the bond there. He was based in San Francisco for six months, and returned to New York where he did some recording but was inactive on the club scene.

After several years of scuffling, the chance came to write the music for and appear in The Connection. Freddie has been at the Living Theatre on Sixth Avenue ever since. He doesn’t find he long run dull since “something different happens every night”, but he would like to form his own group and go back into the clubs. He was particularly anxious to work out some of his ideas on how jazz writing and playing can be productively inter-related in this album, and the result, he feels, has given him more confidence than any experience since his scoring of The Connection.

Freddie’s long association with the play had led to his being dubbed “The Thespian” by Joe Termini, the owner of The Jazz Gallery and The Five Spot in New York, and Freddie chose the nickname for the title of the Opening tune. On tenor is another thespian Tina Brooks (whose own album True Blue is on Blue Note 4041BLP4041). Brooks is Jackie McLean’s understudy in The Connection. Born in Fayetteville, North Carolina, he’s been based in New York since he was thirteen. After apprenticeship in rhythm and blues bands, he worked with Lionel Hampton, Benny Harris, and several combos. Freddie notes that Tina “creates his lines not only with a lot of lyricism but with real depth.” The third thespian, Jackie McLean, indicated in The Connection that he could successfully explore an acting career were he not so committed to jazz. In any case, we hove here a unique front line of actor-musicians.

This sketch of a Thespian begins with a broodingly lyrical line which has o Monkish touch. It suddenly quickens in tempo and intensity. McLean breaks out in a brisk gallop, followed by Tina. Like Jackie, Tina plays with that unmistakable “cry” that is the emotional insignia of the echt jazzman. Freddie Redd’s style is energetic and assertive, and communicates an urgent authority.

Blues-Blues-Blues is obviously titled because of its undiluted blues spirit. Tina’s tone, incidentally, is particularly penetrating and accordingly, it strikes with concentrated force. McLean is again a compelling soloist. His tone too demands attention because of the strength of emotion it contains. The line of Blues-Blues-Blues has an unforced traditional feeling although it ends, like much in contemporary life, in mid-air.

Shadows has a provocatively twilite mood which accounts for its title. The tune emphasizes Freddie’s predilection for tenderly introspective ballads. Both reedmen are aptly lyrical with Brooks building considerable tension throughout o solo that is well organized and quite deeply felt. Freddie manages to play with his usual force and yet convey the soft loneliness of the tune. Similarly, Paul Chambers has a beautifully shaded statement before the final ensemble and the slowly unwinding theme.

Melanie is named after the new-born baby of a friend of the composer. “It sounded happy to me,” says Freddie, “and that’s why I thought it fitted a child.” Moreover, it has the kind of bouncing beat and line that children, as I can attest from watching mine, like to move freely to ¡n what they regard as dancing. Paul has a warm, rhythmically supple solo and the hornmen speak with unstrained ardor.

Freddie first thought of Swift in two, and when he changed it into four, he realized how really swift it was. At the session, when he beat off the tempo, the hornmen looked at him quizzically, but as it turned out, they met the non-stop challenge, and there is an air of triumph ¡n the final ensemble strut.

Just A Ballad for My Baby is an unabashedly romantic tribute to a young lady. All hands seem to understand the caressing ode. Ole is a composition with a tangy Spanish tinge. Note the steadily tasteful, resourceful drumming of Louis Hayes — formerly with Horace Silver and now with “Cannonball” Adderley — both here and throughout the album.

Shades of Redd, in summary, is part of the continuing self-portrait Freddie Redd is developing as a jazz performer-writer. The colors are all of the jazz language, and the mixer has made them reflect his own unique view of life on and off the stand.

—NAT HENTOFF, Co-Editor, The Jazz Review

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

Paul Chambers and Louis Hayes perform by courtesy of Vee-Jay Records

RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes

A NEW LOOK AT SHADES OF REDD

Freddie Redd is one of jazz's perennial mystery men. His penchant for disappearing, as Nat Hentoff puts it in the original liner notes, has defined his career as much as the quality of his music. When Shades Of Redd was first reissued, on a 1989 Mosaic collection of his Blue Note recordings, the pianist explained to annotator Will Thornbury that "If things aren't going a certain way or I've got the feeling that things might be better someplace else, I just pick up and go." So it was, and so it remains.

Redd already had the reputation of an elusive though notable pianist and composer when he became a Blue Note artist in 1960. At the time, American audiences knew him primarily for two trio sessions, a 1955 Prestige ten-inch LP and the 1957 San Francisco Suite on Riverside. Musicians knew him a bit better, from his many Monday nights at Birdland (where he first met Jackie McLean) and other itinerant jobs in and around Manhattan. The loss of his cabaret card after a conviction for marijuana possession left him unable to work in New York clubs, which was why the opportunity to write music for and perform nightly in Jack Gelber's Off-Broadway play The Connection proved to be a godsend.

The controversial play's success led to Redd's Blue Note contract and the classic Music from The Connection album, recorded in February 1960. Shades of Redd was taped six months later, and includes more of his affirmative, tartly melodic creations. In spots — especially "Blues-Blues-Blues" and "Swift" - the writing recalls pieces from the earlier album, though here there is the added delight of a second saxophone in the front line. "Nobody was using tenor and alto at the time." Redd told Thornbury, "except with a third horn. I thought, 'What's wrong with having two saxophones?' I loved the sound that they got." Keys to that incredible sound are the tonal personalities of McLean and Brooks, two of the period's most distinctive saxophone voices, whose ensemble work is at its best on the beautiful opening melody, delivered slow and then fast in the manner of Thelonious Monk's "Brilliant Corners. " The pair shared a session three weeks later that yielded tracks included on McLean's Jackie's Bag and Brooks's Back to the Tracks, with the complete session surfacing 20 years later on the co-led Street Singer.

"Thespian" also provides a clear view of the saxophonists' contrasting solo styles. Gelber's stage directions for The Connection called for music "in the tradition of Charlie Parker," and McLean honored that request on previous album with his best bebop playing on record. Here, he has moved into a more contemporary space of his own, with an angular linear concept and greater emphasis on the incredible cry in his tone. Brooks, who subbed for McLean in the play and appeared on Howard McGhee's recording of the score (with Redd on piano under the pseudonym l. Ching), was more in the bop mold, albeit with his own sound and phrasing. Redd described the equally elusive though far less resilient Brooks to Thornbury as "a fiery player, very soft-spoken...Music was his whole life. He always played every solo as if it was the last."

As excellent as Shades of Redd was, the original LP (which for some reason was released only in mono) quickly proved as hard to find as Redd himself. A third Redd session for Blue Note followed in January, with Benny Baileys trumpet added to the McLean/Brooks front line; but the pianist and producer Lion argued in the studio over the band's failure to rehearse, and that session remained unissued for over a quarter century. Shortly after that setback, Redd went to Europe with a touring version of The Connection, and was not heard from again on disc until a 1971 trio session cut in Paris. Five more albums would follow in the succeeding two decades, the most interesting of which (Lonely City, Uptown, 1984) contains a septet arrangement of "Thespian," and the most recent of which (Freddie Redd and His International Jazz Connection, Fairplay in Jazz, 1991) was produced during a tour of Scandinavia. Los Angeles has appeared to be Redd's base of operation of late, although New Yorkers saw him again in February 2007. when he reprised Music from The Connection in concert with special guest Lou Donaldson.

— Bob Blumenthal. 2007