On Thursday, September 21, 1961, Detroit trumpeter Donald Byrd took a quintet into Rudy Van Gelder’s famed New Jersey recording studio to put down the tracks for what turned Royal Flush, his eighth album for Blue Word Data. Although nonetheless solely three months shy of his twenty ninth birthday, Byrd might virtually be thought of a veteran at this level, such was his expertise each on stage and within the recording studio. Certainly, his CV was mightily spectacular, together with a stint as a member of Artwork Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, alongside work as a sideman on albums by John Coltrane, Hank Mobley, Horace Silver, Jackie McLean, Crimson Garland, Lou Donaldson, and quite a few others.
Regardless of his relative musical maturity, Byrd’s quintet revealed that he was keen to take an opportunity on youth and inexperience. In his band was a largely untested 21-year-old pianist known as Herbie Hancock, whom the trumpeter had found in Chicago. He was struck by Hancock’s distinctive model – “He sounds almost like a combination of Bill Evans, Ahmad Jamal, and Hank Jones,” Byrd remarked to author Leonard Feather in Royal Flush’s authentic liner notes – and likewise recruited a younger rhythm part that had caught his ear, bassist Butch Warren and drummer Billy Higgins, each of whom had reduce their enamel with free jazz maven Ornette Coleman. All three younger males – Hancock, Warren, and Higgins – would shortly turn out to be stalwarts of Blue Word periods within the subsequent few years. However whereas Byrd was giving youth an opportunity, he additionally continued his lengthy affiliation with a fellow veteran, Michigan musician Pepper Adams, whose husky baritone saxophone imbued the trumpeter’s band with earthy sonorities.
“Hush” is the primary of 4 authentic Byrd tunes on Royal Flush, and by way of construction, in addition to the synthesis of blues and gospel inflections, it’s an archetypal piece of early 60s exhausting bop. Higgins and Warren set up a swinging groove and, after the “head” theme, every member of the band proceeds to solo, with Byrd on the entrance of the queue.
Byrd shows his prowess as a balladeer on the forlorn “I’m A Fool To Want You,” a music co-written by Frank Sinatra, who recorded it first in 1951 after which waxed a definitive model six years later. Behind Byrd’s luminous trumpet strains – he’s the one soloist on the reduce – Hancock performs masterful delicate chords whereas the rhythm part grooves alongside slowly and softly.
The Byrd-written “Jorgie’s,” named after a St Louis nightclub, begins as a extra progressive slice of jazz with a spacey intro earlier than morphing right into a medium-paced piece of swinging exhausting bop. The intriguing “Shangri-La,” in the meantime, is one other Byrd composition that gives one thing completely different, particularly in relation to Billy Higgins’ drums, which, as a substitute of taking part in a set, common, swing-type sample all through, have extra of a freer, particular person position. This offers the observe a jagged, stop-start really feel.
Herbie Hancock’s languid piano begins the loping “6 M’s,” performed in 6/4 time, and on which Byrd and Adams enunciate the theme in an authentically basic exhausting bop vogue. It gives a chance for all of the gamers to indicate their affinity for blues music, with Hancock impressing by way of a funkified piano solo.
It’s Herbie Hancock who reveals his hand on Royal Flush’s closing observe, “Requiem.” The primary of the pianist’s compositions to be recorded, regardless of its title the music is way from solemn or morose. After an intro outlined by the call-and-response cadences of gospel music, it evolves right into a swinging groove with deft solos from Byrd, Adams, Hancock, and even Warren, who provides us a short style of bowed double bass.
Royal Flush stays a big album in Donald Byrd’s canon. Whereas it waved goodbye to a five-year affiliation with Pepper Adams – it might be his and Byrd’s closing collaboration collectively – it additionally launched the world to his protégé Herbert Jeffrey Hancock, who, shortly afterward, would go on to make his mark as each a solo artist and as a member of the groundbreaking Miles Davis Quintet.
Although Hancock left Blue Word in 1969 to start out new adventures elsewhere, Byrd stayed with the label till 1976, by which era he was within the vanguard of the fusion and jazz-funk actions. Even so, Royal Flush stays a go-to album from the trumpeter’s golden exhausting bop interval, regardless that it finds him stretching the boundaries of the style. However that wouldn’t have been potential with out the presence of Herbie Hancock, Butch Warren, and Billy Higgins. They have been the aces up Byrd’s sleeve, and their youth opened up new vistas of sonic expression, serving to to take the trumpeter – and jazz – in an thrilling new course.
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