Music Monday: Vibing Out

I’m buried in work these days which is both unpleasant and compromises my ability to enjoy the full range of music in my collection. I dislike the idea of background music, but I also recognize that I work better with some music on even if that music can’t necessarily be the center of my attention.

Over the weekend, when I had a delightful blend of repetitive, tedious, and mundane work to get through, I found myself listening to the brilliant vibraphone player Bobby Hutcherson and engaging in an impromptu career retrospective starting with his hard bop and mildly avant-garde days and continuing through his fusion and soul jazz phases. 

Hutcherson’s album Stick-Up! from 1966 is a nice example of his late hard bop phase (which also includes Components from the same year). It is fun to contrast it with his work on the brilliant album Dialogue where he performs alongside Andrew Hill, Freddie Hubbard, Sam Rivers, Richard Davis, and Joe Chambers. You can listen to that album here.  

By the late 1960s, Hutcherson’s style had changed markedly. He had teamed up with saxophone player Harold Land in what would be a long-standing and immensely creative partnership. In 1969, they released the album Now! which opened with the remarkable track “Slow Change.” 

By 1971, Hutcherson demonstrated his willingness to explore the emerging sounds of jazz fusion on the album San Francisco with the addition of both the electric bass and electric piano. For the latter, he brings pianist Joe Sample on board whose playing brought an ample dose of soul to Hutcherson’s and Land’s collaboration. 

By the mid-1970s, Hutcherson’s willingness to explore fusion and soul jazz was in full flight with a series of thoroughly entertaining albums that celebrate the capacity of his distinctive style on the vibes and Land’s compelling tone to bring new life to popular and R&B songs.

Cirrus starts with the Woody Shaw penned, R&B tinged track “Rosewood” arranged by trumpet player Woody Shaw and the rest of the album proceeds from there. It finds a deeper and perhaps even more accessible groove in some ways compared to San Francisco and sets the stage for things to come the next year. 

1975 saw the release of two fantastic Hutcherson albums: Linger Lane and Montara. These albums marked the end of Hutcherson’s collaboration with Land and the embrace of a larger band and a larger more soul inflected sound. 

Linger Lane opens with a deeply funky version of The Stylistic’s “People Make the World Go Round”:

And the Theme from MASH which had started to emerge as a pop-jazz standard by the mid-1970s.

Montara is an altogether tighter album that announces its intention with the first track, George Cables’ “Camel Rise”:

And brings it home with a mildly funkified version of Tito Puente’s “Oyo Como Va”:

If you’re still worried about your work at this point, I really don’t have a cure for what ails you.