BST 84292

Donald Byrd - Slow Drag

Released - December 1968

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, May 12, 1967
Donald Byrd, trumpet; Sonny Red, alto sax; Cedar Walton, piano; Walter Booker, bass; Billy Higgins, drums, vocals.

1884 tk.3 Book's Bossa
1885 tk.15 The Loner
1886 tk.18 Jelly Roll
1887 tk.22 Slow Drag
1889 tk.29 My Ideal
1890 tk.30 Secret Love

Session Photos

Photos: © Francis Wolff/Mosaic Images 

https://www.mosaicrecordsimages.com/

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Slow Drag	Donald Byrd	May 12 1967
Secret Love	Sammy Fain, Paul Francis Webster	May 12 1967
Book's Bossa	Walter Booker, Cedar Walton	May 12 1967
Side Two
Jelly Roll	Sonny Red Kyner	May 12 1967
The Loner	Ronnie Mathews, Cedar Walton	May 12 1967
My Ideal	Richard A. Whiting, Newell Chase, Leo Robin	May 12 1967

Liner Notes

Donald Byrd has been a protean figure for some years now, but the diversity of his commitments has become so extraordinary that it takes a session like this one to remind us that at the root of the man is a swinging, lyrical trumpet player.

As for that diversity, Donald is now composer-in-residence at the Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, where he is also, as a member of the faculty, drawing up an educational program in jazz. He is a professor of Jazz Studies, a new department, at Howard University — the first jazz department at a black college. There too he has set a regular curriculum, including a band as an organic part of the learning experience.

At Columbia University’s Teachers College, Donald is a lecturer in non-Western music, he is a lecturer and consultant in the same field at North Carolina College in Durham; and he is a consultant in non-Western music for the New York State Board of Education. In that capacity, with African music as his specialty, he has been setting up guidelines for music departments throughout the state as well as directing symposia for music supervisors. And Donald is setting up similar programs for New Jersey and Connecticut. In what time he has left, he’s writing a book that will clearly delineate between Western music and those elements of the African experience in Afro-American music.

And the man still plays and records. This session took place in May 1967, shortly after Donald had been at the Five Spot in New York with a particularly empathic group of musicians. Donald considers Slow Drag the quintessential example of the depth of rapport these men achieved during their association. "We had been well into this song at the Five Spot," Donald recalls, "and at the session, it took on a new dimension as Billy Higgins started having fun singing it. Alfred Lion, who was in charge of the date, asked us if we’d record it that way. And although the melody and bass lines were written out, the rest of what happened was entirely spontaneous. It’s a fun tune, and we had a marvelous time doing it."

Donald, in his current work as an educator, stresses the need to get at and understand the roots of music; and his solo on Slow Drag is an emotional, story-telling illustration of just that process. Just as basic is Sonny Red, who also plays a speaking horn here. Billy brings us back to the very beginning, the human voice, and the rhythms of pleasurable expression.

"Secret Love," Donald notes, “is an arrangement I used to play when Herbie Hancock first worked with me some time ago. He wrote the bridge, and it's a fine example of how he can turn a song around structurally while retaining its essential spirit." The performance by all is crisply relaxed. Book’s Bossa,” according to Donald, “is one of the first tunes Walter Booker ever wrote, and it was the very first bossa nova I ever played. I was attracted to it because, for an American, Walter had an unusually sensitive feeling for the bossa nova vein.” And the pervasive mood of meditative reflection is an intriguing synthesis of American jazz and the bossa nova ambience.

The subject of roots has a great deal to do with Sonny Red’s Jelly Roll.” Sonny,’ Donald Byrd explains, “listens to a lot of the authentic folk singers. Like T-Bone Walker who stayed a lot in Detroit where Sonny comes from. Sonny loves his music. What Sonny is trying to do an his writing, as in this song, involves an attempt to really capture the black feeling in American music. And he certainly succeeds in Jelly Roll.”

The Loner is one of the tunes Donald Byrd and his colleagues had particularly enjoyed developing during their stay at the Five Spot. The rather wistful, searching ensemble statement of the theme gives way to a characteristically thoughtful, judiciously paced solo by Donald; a probing, intense statement by Sonny Red; and a subtly flowing stream of a solo by Cedar Walton.

"My Ideal" was recorded because during the stay of Donald Byrd’s combo at the Five Spot, Barry Harris came by one night, sat in, and played this standard. "He performed it beautifully," Donald remembers, "and reminded me of how attractive a song it is. Interestingly, though it is a standard, a lot of people were rediscovering it that night, some of them even asked what the title was." Donald’s interpretation underlines the affecting, ingrained lyricism that is so fundamental an element in his playing. Also making this a memorable track is the complementary fervor of Sonny Red’s lyrical flight.

I asked Donald’s assessment of Sonny, whom he so clearly likes to work with: "You have to remember," Donald said, "we go back a long way together. When we were both in the eighth grade in Detroit, he was one of the first to introduce me to jazz; he got me listening to Charlie Parker and Dizzy. Through the years he’s always struck me as someone who is really turned on when he plays. I wish I could always be that happy in the act of music. Music and the alto saxophone have been his whole life.”

And what of the others? “Well,” Donald answered, “Cedar is still such an underrated player. He’s a pianist’s pianist. He has such beautiful hands. If you’re in a club when he plays, watch and see how pianists always sit and look at his hands to follow his fingering. As for Walter Booker, he’s one of the sparks in any group he’s with. He gives a band a lot of incentive to play, and he’s growing all the time - in reputation and musical ability." When asked his view of Billy Higgins, Donald laughed in appreciation of Billy’s singular qualities. "He reminds me of Kenny Clarke and Art Blakey. How? Well, the late Clifford Brown once said about Blakey that he could make a dead man swing.”

Finally I asked the pervasively alive Donald Byrd what he was planning for future albums. “Going back to the roots even deeper. In the summer of 1968, I spent a month in Africa—Senegal, Liberia, Ghana, Nigeria. And what I learned there will be reflected in the courses I’m setting up as well as in the music I play.” Donald continues to be a uniquely stimulating force in jazz — in more and more directions.

— NAT HENTOFF

RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes

DONALD BYRD SLOW DRAG

During his active career as a recording artist, Donald Byrd placed his trumpet in partnership with the horns of several talented saxophonists. The most sustained and best-remembered of these pairings involved the baritone sax of Pepper Adams, who gigged and recorded extensively with Byrd between 1958 and ‘61, but the trumpeter also enjoyed two important collaborations with alto players. He and Gigi Gryce were teamed in the Jazz Lab Quintet for much of 1957, with recordings on Columbia, Riverside, Verve, Jubilee and Vik resulting. A decade later, Byrd was working with his longtime friend Sylvester “Sonny Red” Kyner. In slightly more than 15 months during 1966-7, they produced four Blue Note sessions under Byrd’s name, of which Slow Drag is the third.

By 1967, Alfred Lion had sold Blue Note to Liberty Records, though he was still producing sessions (and receiving the producer’s credit in the liner notes that he never awarded himself prior to the sale). The use of an attractive model on a double-fold cover with an internal “unipak” pocket also set Slow Drag apart from standard pre-Liberty procedure. Otherwise, the session was standard post-”Watermelon Man,” post-”Sidewinder” Blue Note, with one or two funky numbers for commercial purposes amidst standards and more challenging originals. The approach was tailor-made for the soulful, edgy horn of Sonny Red, from whom little had been heard since the sessions he led on Blue Note and Jazzland earlier in the decade. This album, the only one of the four Byrd/Kyner sessions on which a third horn was not added, is one of the better showcases for the alto saxophonist’s pleading style. He is also responsible for the funky “Jelly Roll.”

Nat Hentoff’s notes for this album and its predecessors Blackjack and Mustang indicate that Byrd would work an engagement at the Five Spot prior to these recording sessions, then bring his band of the moment to Rudy Van Gelder’s studio and document some of the music they had played on the job. In this case, the approach allowed for the inclusion of two compositions co-authored by pianist Cedar Walton, “Book’s Bossa” (which proved to be the best-remembered original on the date) and “The Loner.” Byrd’s comments regarding Walton’s underrated status were well taken, given that the pianist, who first came to New York in 1955, was still two months shy of his first record as a leader (for Prestige) when the present session took place.

When Walton did finally take charge in the studio, he also called upon the services of drummer Billy Higgins, who would remain the first choice of countless musicians until his death in May 2001. While Higgins can be heard all over the Blue Note catalogue, his speaking voice can only be heard on the title track here, adding saucy commentary that set “Slow Drag” apart from the label’s other pop-directed output of the period. As with many of the more extended jams Lion produced, the Higgins monologue was a spontaneous touch that the producer liked and encouraged the musicians to retain. It did not translate into a hit on the order of “The Sidewinder” or “Song For My Father,” but for many listeners it gave the album a special status as the one on which Billy Higgins “sang.” The drummer’s vocal contribution is subtle and soulful, more felt than clearly heard in spots — like Higgins’s drumming in certain circumstances. As usual, Higgins also turned every rhythm part he played into an affirmative, inspirational terrain.

Byrd is captured on his Sonny Red sessions in his mature straight-ahead style. His beautiful trumpet sound illuminates “Book’s Bossa” and “My Ideal” in particular, and the economy of his lines reveal how far Byrd had travelled from his early days as Clifford Brown’s primary disciple. Soon he would immerse himself ¡n the more atmospheric, switched-on atmosphere of Fancy Free and Electric Byrd, followed by the unapologetic commercialism of Black Byrd. This album thus becomes something of a valedictory statement, in a style that Donald Byrd would not revisit on record for over two decades.

— Bob Blumenthal, 2001