LT-996

Bobby Hutcherson - Spiral

Released - 1980/1995

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, April 3, 1965
Freddie Hubbard, trumpet; Sam Rivers, tenor, soprano sax, bass clarinet, flute; Bobby Hutcherson, vibes, marimba; Andrew Hill, piano; Richard Davis, bass; Joe Chambers, drums.

1557 tk.11 Jasper

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, November 25, 1968
Harold Land, tenor sax; Bobby Hutcherson, vibes; Stanley Cowell, piano; Reggie Johnson, bass; Joe Chambers, drums.

tk.8 Spiral
tk.14 Visions
tk.18 Poor People's March
tk.28 Ruth
tk.36 The Wedding March

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Ruth	J. Chambers	November 25 1968
The Wedding March	S. Cowell	November 25 1968
Poor People's March	H. Land	November 25 1968
Title	Author	Recording Date
Spiral	J. Chambers	November 25 1968
Visions	B. Hutcherson	November 25 1968
Jasper	A. Hill	March 18 1966

Liner Notes

BOBBY HUTCHERSON

Not long ago, there was an interview in down beat with the vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson. The interviewer, Lee Underwood, noted that his was the first feature on Hutcherson in the magazine since 1974, and asked him - indeed, it was his first question — why he hadn't been talked about more.

"I've been recording maybe an album and a half a year:' Hutcherson said. "plus I was covered up by a lot of new groups and new names and electronics. I've also been out there a long time and not become a big star, which didn't help. And, too, I recorded some tunes on some albums that weren't cool, but I was trying to hold a group together, which is hard to do, and to continue my dedication to bebop, which runs through it all.

"Being ignored isn't easy. Sometimes it's the respect of your peers, or maybe it's just a real small group of dedicated fans and close friends that carry you through."

Well. Hutcherson makes an eloquent case, but he is hardly alone. The years during which he came to prominence were among the most tumultuous in jazz, a form of music whose history has never been exactly placid. The jazz avant-garde, led by John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman, had taken the music to a place where many of its listeners did not wish to follow it. And many people, including some influential critics — this was the Sixties, remember — felt that the center of creativity had shifted to rock. If nothing else, there were fewer jazz clubs and more rock clubs. Some fairly deep political, economic and sociological reasons have been given for this phenomenon, but now that rock, like jazz before it, has become a concert music, and the clubs have largely become discos, it should be fairly obvious that people like to dance — get down and boogie, in the present phrase — and patronize the music that allows them to do it.

It now seems fairly evident, twenty years after Coleman came to New York, that his most lasting innovation will be the influence he had on bassists and drummers, which had, among other things, to do with the removal of the necessity for a regular beat. No dancing.

So there was that going on, and here is Hutcherson, in the remarks quoted above, talking about his "dedication to bebop." Which at that time — though, thank God, and reissue programs like this, not now, when one young reviewer after another discovers Charlie Parker and writes a piece in some rock magazine about how terrific he was, after all — meant that you were old hat.

It's always been that way. There is some kind of a Fastest Gun in the West mentality connected with art in this country, so that what is New is not only, by definition, Good, but renders obsolete what has gone before it. At one time, Hutcherson himself benefitted from this process. The vibraphonist Gary Burton, making what Norman Mailer once called "Quick and Expensive Comments on the Talent in the Room;" once called him, "the only one with a really different musical personality that indicates great evolutionary potential." And A. B. Spellman wrote, "Hutcherson has the most radical, if not the only new appreciation of what the vibes may be actually capable of." In other words, the Next Thing.

Now I don't know if Hutcherson ever thought of himself as the next thing, or wanted to be it, or if he even conceives of playing the vibraphone as being part of a horse race. His interviewer did, writing of "safe-and-secure Milty-baby, who is, of course, beyond the pale of putdown, the King, everybody's darling dozing Deacon of good is to Milt Jackson, who is, despite a for-the-money album here and there, safe and secure from putdown by me, and whose accomplishments include making a record that made him decide he wanted to play that instrument too, so that he could make those sounds. Or sounds like them. Or, in time, his own.

Some of those sounds appear here. And that, in itself, is remarkable. As jazz has regained its prominence among forms of American music in the last few years, a lot of material is surfacing that is, because of the peculiarities of the age of mechanical production, both new and old at the same time. Thus, we have an album that is brand new, composed of music that is largely eleven years old, and, on one track, more than fourteen years old. And it doesn't sound old to me, which is why it deserves to be out now. Not really a reissue, and as new as it can be.

One of these tracks, the last of the album, "Jasper" comes from the same session that produced Hutcherson's first Blue Note album. The drummer Joe Chambers, of whom more later, was present, with one exception, throughout Hutcherson's Blue Note albums recorded in New York. But look at the other names. Freddie Hubbard. Sam Rivers. Andrew Hill. Richard Davis. Time has a way of either casting people into the oubliette of history, or else making stars out of them. Usually, in the case of the producer of this track, the late Alfred Lion, the latter happened. With astonishing regularity, as a matter of fact. Lion and his counterparts, Bob Weinstock and Orrin Keepnews, found session men who would change the course of music. As did Alfred's partner, Francis Wolff, who, with the aid of the pianist Duke Pearson, produced the remaining tracks on this album. Wolff was primarily a brilliant photographer, and Lion was primarily an aficionado of the older jazz. But somehow, they always managed to remain in the forefront. It's amazing how prescient they were.

Drummer Joe Chambers is the only musician beside Hutcherson to appear on the other tracks. Born in Virginia and raised in Philadelphia, he began as a piano student, and eventually shifted to drums. He studied at the Philadelphia conservatory, and later with the composer Hall Overton. Two of the compositions here — "Ruth" and the title track, "Spiral" — are his. His brother, Steve, is an avant-garde composer.

This album, recorded November 11, 1968, except for that one 1965 track, stems from the period, 1968-71, during which Hutcherson co-led a quintet with the tenor saxophonist Harold Land. They recorded under Hutcherson's name for Blue Note, and under Land's for Chess and Mainstream. Based in San Diego for a long time, and later in Hollywood, Land was often lumped with West Coast musicians, for what must be geographical reasons. His style has always been closer to the East Coast boppers of the time. At the time of the trumpet Blue Mitchell's recent death, Land was co-leading a quintet with him. The rhythmically arresting "Poor People's March" on this album is his.

Bassist Reggie Johnson, another Hutcherson regular, has worked with Sonny Rollins (those who think of Land as a West Coast musician might remember that he preceded Rollins in the Clifford Brown-Max Roach (Quintet) and Archie Shepp.

Finally, there is the pianist Stanley Cowell, whose work, somewhat derived from Cecil Taylor, leaps out everywhere from this album. Born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1931, he studied at Oberlin College and Salzburg, has worked with Max Roach and Marion Brown, is the founder of Strata-East Records, and is a founding member and conductor of the Collective Black Artists Ensemble. His composition here is "The Wedding March" and in 1971, he recorded it on his Freedom album, "Blues for the Viet Cong."

Since this album was made, Bobby Hutcherson has kept working at his craft — at his calling — never a superstar, as he says, but one of a number of musicians committed to their "Visions:' to use the name of his composition here, playing excellent music because they can, and probably because they are unable to do anything else. It is a mark of the value of his vision that the music he made eleven years ago sounds so fresh and new today.

—Joe Goldberg

Notes for the 2012 CD Edition

In 1968 and '69, the Bobby Hutcherson-HaroId Land quintet with Stanley Cowell, Reggie Johnson and Joe Chambers was a working band (when work was available). They only made this album on November 25, 1968 and "Medina" on August 11, 1969. Sadly, neither album was released until the LT series.

 

Everyone was playing brilliantly and they gelled as a unit in much the same way the Miles Davis Quintet of 1964-67 did. In Hutcherson, Cowell and Chambers, they had three of the most creative composers in modern jazz at the time.  

The session that comprises most of this album was not enough for a complete LP, so a previously unissued tune from Hutcherson's Blue Note debut "Dialogue" (4198) completes the album. Andrew Hill's "Jasper" was named for his very noisy pet parrot at the time.  
 
- Michael Cuscuna