LT-1096

Donald Byrd - The Creeper

Released - 1981

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, October 5, 1967
Donald Byrd, trumpet; Sonny Red, alto sax #1,2,4-7; Pepper Adams, baritone sax #1,2,4-7; Chick Corea, piano; Miroslav Vitous, bass; Mickey Roker, drums.

1959 tk.4 Blues Well Done
1960 tk.6 Early Sunday Morning
1961 tk.8 I Will Wait For You
1962 tk.15 Chico-San
1957 tk.18 The Creeper
1963 tk.21 Samba Yantra
1964 tk.25 Blues Medium Rare

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Samba Yantra	Chick Corea	October 5 1967
I Will Wait For You	Michel Legrand-Norman Gimbel	October 5 1967
Blues Medium Rare	Donald Byrd	October 5 1967
Side Two
The Creeper	Sylvester Kyner	October 5 1967
Chico-San	Chick Corea	October 5 1967
Early Sunday Morning	Donald Byrd	October 5 1967
Blues Well Done	Donald Byrd	October 5 1967

Liner Notes

DONALD BYRD

A handsome, black 22-year-old with an authoritative, confident, yet gentle and unthreatening manner comes to New York with a trumpet sound as strong as Brownie's and yet a lyricism as sensitive as Mlles'. Right away, he's standing alongside Jackie McLean in George Wallington's quintet. A few months and a few record dates later, he replaces Kenny Dorham in the Jazz Messengers. Now he's making music nightly with Hank Mobley, Horace Silver, Doug Watkins and Art Blakey. And it that's the music you want to play, you can't do it with anyone better.

It's the mid fifties, The major cities have thriving jazz clubs. The record companies are recording the music almost daily. Jazz is the hip thing to like tor whites and blacks, for males and females.

In the Hollywood 'anguished man with a horn' formula or even in real life, this kind of 'too much too soon' can turn a lot of people around. A fast ascent liberally sprinkled with new experiences, new money. new fame and bad habits has taken many creative artists down, sometimes for good.

Donald Byrd's story is, as time has revealed, quite the opposite. What is remarkable is how immediately immune he was to the temptations of coasting on recognition, getting high, and self indulgent behavior From the start, booking agents and club owners would look to him as the strawboss to get the guys on the bandstand on time and in some sort of shape. There were even a couple of very famous bands for which he was on call in case the leader pulled a no-show or nodded out.

Byrd is a man of many interests who believes in making things happen instead of waiting, who knows that the affairs of the world around him have an impact on his existence and who has never stopped learning. In a 1966 Down Beat interview with Burt Korall, he said, "Thinking and planning are a big part of it. You have to be a human being and deal with other human beings. A lot of musicians take liberties because they are musicians. They act up in clubs, are late for appointments and record dates. Some are antisocial. Others think getting high is part of an artist's life. All they're doing is feeding a stereotype that we don't need...You have to keep moving. No one is going to take you by the hand. You have to take the future in your hands.

"Quincy Jones, Lalo Schifrin, Oliver Nelson — they've gotten into other areas like films, television without losing face or sight of the tradition from which they spring...They learned in school and on the job and kept their eyes and ears open. They have the equipment the education and, of course, the know-how with people."

Beyond this very active performing career, Donald was always studying somewhere. First Wayne University, the Manhattan School of Music, Columbia University and on and on. He holds degrees in music education and law, has been a student of composition with Nadia Boulanger in Paris and a student of history in more ways than one.

He has also gotten more and more into teaching with the years, at times maintaining positions at three or four colleges at once. And he is genuinely inspired by the enthusiasm and flexibility of the young talent that he encounters. His fascination with black history and music history has led him to amass an archive of documents, books, sheet music, manuscripts, photographs, tape recordings of music and interviews and video tapes that is so large that it must be warehoused. It still hasn't been completely catalogued.

All of this might seem at odds with the man who retreated from a steady diet of performing and moved into the direction of a strictly commercial recording career. Although he did discover producer-arranger Larry Mizell and influence a wave of jazz-tinged R&B that many of us would like to forget, his commercial success was impressive for its entrepreneurial foresight. For Byrd, it was a means that enabled him to pursue his many other endeavors.

He has written full orchestral works that have gone unrecorded, and he has been working on several books and a play. He always has eighteen projects going at the same time. And most of them are eventually completed. If one avenue of creativity has suffered from his multi-level existence, it is his trumpet playing. The trumpet is more demanding than most instruments. And the passage of just one day without a serious workout shows on the best of players.

This album, recorded on October 5, 1967, is a sort of swansonq to the tradition out of which Donald came as a performing artist. A year later, he would begin a series of recordings a special, R&B-textured style of fusion (although there was no such word applied to jazz at the time). He was still playing, but that would decrease drastically with his next move a couple of years later into a stone, commercial R&B format that he and Larry Mizell concocted and introduced with "Black Byrd," an album that went gold. Donald then began producing The Blackbyrds, former students and his backup band at the time, and other acts. The trumpet moved further into the background. So this session is a clear demarkation point for Donald. It is issued here for the first time. That might have been because Byrd changed direction or because there are loose edges around some of the ensembles or because the departure of Alfred Lion and the subsequent sale of Liberty (which had owned Blue Note for about 2 years) to United Artists Records created enough upheaval to let this session, among others, get lost in the confusion.

Whatever. Here Byrd brought together the two hornmen with whom he was most closely associated at different times in his life. Both are, like Donald, from Detroit. The quintet that Donald and Pepper Adams led intermittently from 1958 to 1961 was documented by a series of recordings, many for Blue Note such as The Cat Walk, Fuego, Chant and a live date from the Half Note. They both did some of their finest playing standing next to each other.

As Donald told Nat Hentoff, "Sonny and I met in the eighth grade in Detroit. He was one of the people instrumental in my starting to play jazz." Sonny Red (Sylvester Kyner) made his recording debut almost ten years before this session. For a second horn, he used Pepper Adams.

Although Red had been in and around New York since 1959, writing tunes and playing with a variety of people and making his own albums, it was not until 1966 that he began working frequently with Byrd. He appeared on the three Byrd albums leading up to this one. He possesses a rare ability to craft a tune that is attractive, but still unpredictable. That is a contradiction in the music 'industry' code of serving music to the masses via mental enemas. Two cases in point are the title tune of this album and "Bluesville" on Blue Mitchell's "Step Lightly" (Blue Note LT-1082).

Mickey Roker was one of the active, all-purpose jazz drummers on the New York scene during the mid sixties. He was a member of the Duke Pearson Big Band and was always present when Duke recorded his own music, whatever the context. In 1969, he joined Lee Morgan's band and then spent the better part of the seventies with Dizzy Gillespie's quintet.

Miroslav Vitous had arrived in the United States from his native Czechoslovakia to attend the Berklee School of Music just one year before this recording. In the summer of '67, he moved to New York and began freelancing quickly, thanks in part to the help of Walter Booker, who in fact was the bassist in the band that Donald had been leading for the past year.

Chick Corea, as much a composer as a pianist, spent the early and mid sixties in a variety of Latin jazz bands and with the Blue Mitchell quintet. In 1966, he recorded an impressive debut album for Atlantic with Woody Shaw and Joe Chambers among the players. His compositions were starting to be recorded by a variety of artists and his playing, always completely professional, was finding its own identity. In 1968, he made his first thoroughly individual statement as a pianist on a trio date with Vitous and Roy Haynes. Incidentally, they recorded a very different version of "Samba Yanta" (on "Circlin' In" Blue Note LWB 472), Also in that year, he would Join Miles Davis. In 1970, he formed the experimental band Circle with Anthony Braxton, Dave Holland and Barry Altschul. And in 1972, while Byrd was recording "Black Byrd" and Miroslav was helping to create another type of fusion with Weather Report, Chick formed Return to Forever, a band that went through many stylistic changes, all of which had a commercial bent.

Times change, and so do people. But there is music that knows no temporal barriers. The tradition in which the music on this album is conceived is just such a genre.

—Michael Cuscuna

Notes for the 2012 CD Edition

This October 1967 session, Donald Byrd's last real pure jazz date before he started experimenting with more spacial music on "Fancy Free" (4319), seems to be a look backward and a look forward at the same time.  

Byrd co-led a quintet with Pepper Adams from 1958 to 61. Sonny Red, a friend from childhood was his saxophonist of choice throughout the mid '60s. And Mickey Roker was often his drummer of choice during that same period.  

Chick Corea and Miroslav Vitous were new blood for Donald. Chick was no stranger to Blue Note thanks to his years with Blue Mitchell and, already an established jazz composer, contributes "Samba Yantra" and "Chico San" to this date. It is interesting to note that in a few short years, Donald Byrd (with "Black Byrd"), Miroslav Vitous (with Weather Report) and Chick Corea (with Return To Forever) Would all drastically alter the course of jazz.  
 
- Michael Cuscuna