Music Monday

Last week was a rough one for music fans. We lost three significant figures whose distinctive visions made our world richer and more interesting.

First, Creed Taylor died. Taylor was a record producer perhaps best know for introducing bossa nova to the United States in the 1960s through Antonio Carlos Jobim and João Gilberto. He founded Impulse! Records, worked for Bethlehem and Verve, and, most importantly for my musical interests, founded CTI Record in the late 1960s first as an imprint of A&M Records and then as a stand alone company in 1970. 

I became interested in Taylor mostly through his contributions to genre of soul jazz in the late 1960s and 1970s through his CTI and Kudu labels. There’s nothing better than listening to Grover Washington Jr. play “Georgia on My Mind” from his album Inner City Blues on an overcast, early fall Saturday.   

That said, I am more consistently drawn to his work with Freddie Hubbard in the 1970s. Red Clay (1970) and Straight Life (1970) which trace the far reaches of hard bop (and the contours of post-bop) rank among my favorite albums and combine Hubbard’s energy and willingness to experiment from his mid-60s Blue Note releases, such as Breaking Point (1964) and Blue Spirits (1965) with an interest in more commercial music that he tested (rather unsuccessfully) with a couple of Atlantic releases in the later 1960s.

Hubbard’s willingness to reckon with the intersection of commercially successful R&B and improvised music (even if he tended more toward the latter than the former) followed a formula familiar to anyone who listened to 1970s mainstream jazz music. In many ways, CTI and artists like Freddie Hubbard (among many others) set the stage for artists like Jaimie Branch who passed away last week as well.

Her one album, Fly or Die, has moved in and out of heavy rotation at my house over the last five years.

She was on my list of people who I might even risk COVID to see in concert. Her trumpet playing set her apart from the recent crop of remarkably talented horn players. She seemed not only to stay true to the spirit of improvised music, but also had a deep sense of the historical and novel sonic possibilities of the trumpet:

And man, could she play:

Finally, the word went out at the end of last week that Joey DeFrancesco died. I hadn’t listened to much of his music lately (although like most jazz and improvised music fans, I knew about his remarkable story of touring with Miles Davis as an 18 year old!). 

That said, I remembered how much I enjoyed Joey DeFrancesco on, Enjoy the View, a 2014 date with Bobby Hutcherson, David Sanborn, and Billy Hart. There’s something about how DeFrancesco’s organ sounds against Hutcherson’s vibes that just feels right. You can listen to this album here.