With their radically completely different sounds, two Blue Word LPs launched within the mid-60s – Eric Dolphy’s avant-garde manifesto Out To Lunch! and Dexter Gordon’s hard-bop providing Gettin’ Round – appeared worlds aside. However each data had a typical denominator in that includes Bobby Hutcherson, a younger musician who introduced a contemporary, cliche-free strategy to the vibraphone. Signed by Blue Word’s co-founder Alfred Lion in 1963, Los Angeles-born Hutcherson proved a catalytic determine within the label’s historical past, galvanizing its hard-bop roots whereas pushing musical frontiers with a cutting-edge fearlessness. Hutcherson proved to be one of many iconic jazz label’s longest-serving and most prolific recording artists, recording 22 solo albums between 1963 and 1977. His groundbreaking 60s work – which produced masterpieces like Parts, that includes the jazz customary “Little B’s Poem” – has typically overshadowed his 70s recordings. Amongst them, 1974’s Cirrus deserves a lot wider recognition.
By 1974, Blue Word drastically differed from the impartial New York-based firm Hutcherson had joined eleven years earlier. In 1966, Alfred Lion retired, promoting his firm to Liberty, a serious label which merged with United Artists in 1969. Consequently, Blue Word’s head workplace moved to California, the place Hutcherson had returned within the late 60s. Primarily based within the San Francisco Bay Space, the 33-year-old fashioned a brand new touring band and was desirous to characteristic them on his subsequent studio enterprise. He reunited with tenor saxophonist Harold Land – with whom he had co-led a band and made recordings through the late 60s and early 70s – and introduced in one other good good friend, the virtuosic trumpeter Woody Shaw. “Woody was a lot of fun,” he informed Richard Seidel in 2006. “He doesn’t play connecting lines; he plays these unusual intervals within the diatonic scale.”
Take heed to Bobby Hutcherson’s Cirrus now.
Finishing the line-up within the studio was saxophonist/flutist Emmanuel Boyd, pianist Invoice Henderson, bassist Ray Drummond, drummer Larry Hancock, and percussionist extraordinaire, Kenneth Nash, whose myriad credit included Herbie Hancock and Alice Coltrane.
Produced by Dr. George Butler, Cirrus got here collectively throughout two days in April 1974. The primary observe, “Rosewood,” is a vigorous and complicated fusion-esque observe, which is considered one of a number of different cuts on Cirrus highlighting Hutcherson on the marimba, a tuned wood percussion instrument. Penned by Woody Shaw, “Rosewood’s” title, in response to Hutcherson, was “a combination of his mother’s name and his father’s.”
Hutcherson’s band sizzles on two additional uptempo tunes – the driving “Wrong Or Right” and the hard-swinging title observe, each that includes dazzling Shaw solos – however probably the most spectacular music comes within the form of two slower numbers. Hutcherson’s marimba is spotlighted once more within the serene soundscape “Even Later.” “This was influenced by some wedding music that Stanley Cowell had written when we were together (“The Wedding March,” from Hutcherson’s 1968 recording Spiral), and that type of stayed with me,” defined the vibraphonist, who re-recorded the piece as “Later, Even,” on his 1976 album The View From The Inside.
Immersive, too, is the marimba-led “Zuri Dance,” the album’s centerpiece, which Hutcherson said in 2006 “was influenced by (drummer/composer) Joe Chambers and some of the things we did on the Components album.” With its hypnotic rhythms and mournfully blended horns, the piece additionally highlights Kenneth Nash’s coloristic but refined percussion touches.
Providing an impressionistic kaleidoscope of coloration, texture, and environment, Cirrus discovered Bobby Hutcherson hitting a stratospheric post-bop excessive. With its ingenious compositions – particularly the ballads – it’s the undoubted choose of the vibraphone grasp’s 70s Blue Word albums, capturing Hutcherson at a major however typically neglected juncture in his storied profession.
Take heed to Bobby Hutcherson’s Cirrus now.
