Bobby Hutcherson - Components

[bertrand]

Just scored the Denon Chambers LP Punjab from da bastards for $7 (it started at $25 but I guess no one wanted it at the price).

Solo piano all the way - I love his sparse piano playing. He never plays too many notes. No flash here, just beauty.

Bertrand.

[mjazzg]

The Almoravid was issued on CD by 32jazz.

I've never seen nor heard Double Exposure. One day...

copies of Double Exposure are currently on Discogs if you want to bring the day closer

[JSngry]

The Almoravid was issued on CD by 32jazz.

I've never seen nor heard Double Exposure. One day...

copies of Double Exposure are currently on Discogs if you want to bring the day closer

New reissue copies now on sale for $9.99 at Chicagos, dustiest grooviest: http://www.dustygroove.com/item.php?id=xbgk89dwh4&ref=browse.php&refQ=kwfilter%3Djoe%2Bchambers%26amp%3Bincl_oos%3D1%26amp%3Bincl_cs%3D1

Carpe Diem!

[ep1str0phy]

The Almoravid was issued on CD by 32jazz.

I've never seen nor heard Double Exposure. One day...

copies of Double Exposure are currently on Discogs if you want to bring the day closer

New reissue copies now on sale for $9.99 at Chicagos, dustiest grooviest: http://www.dustygroove.com/item.php?id=xbgk89dwh4&ref=browse.php&refQ=kwfilter%3Djoe%2Bchambers%26amp%3Bincl_oos%3D1%26amp%3Bincl_cs%3D1

Carpe Diem!

My Andrew Hill, Richard Davis, and Larry Young fixations led me to both of those albums... the Almoravid always struck me as shockingly maximalist, but I guess that's part Joe and part something to do with the times--it has some interesting overlap with the Milestone albums of the era in that it is very, very rhythm (and rhythm section) heavy... in other words, I think it's very true that it "rounds out" the picture to an extent.

Double Exposure, on the other hand, is much more ruminative in a way I would have expected from Joe "the composer"'s previous efforts--I guess I was expecting a full album of duets that sounded like the Elvin/Larry Young "Monk's Dream," but the colors on Double Exposure are a lot subtler. Something about the way Joe writes indicates to me that he really, really did his homework in the tradition of contemporary "legitimate" composition--I hear a ton of Stravinsky in there, and I don't think it's just an artifact of extended harmony + primal rhythms... and there are serious post-minimalist strains on Double Exposure. Joe's brother was a new music composer (I don't really know more about this), and there may have been some osmosis in there.

[.:.impossible]

Don't forget his connection to M'BOOM. The Almoravid has that.

[JSngry]

Don't forget his connection to M'BOOM. The Almoravid has that.

DUDE! I was just logging in to say that exact thing!

[Teasing the Korean]

Juba Dance is a great example of Twilight Zone jazz.

[.:.impossible]

[CJ Shearn]

I'm of the mind that Bobby's "prime" period as a frontman on Blue Note ('65-'70) marks one of the greatest single leader-single label runs in jazz. Bobby was, of course, an adventurous and flexible contributor to many of the most important and realized sessions of the 60's--Out to Lunch, One Step Beyond, Destination Out!, Life Time, Evolution, and Judgment, among others--but he was also an extremely versatile leader, catholic in taste and remarkably affecting in a variety of idioms. I can think of few musicians of the era who conveyed as well-developed an understanding of the full spectrum of 60's jazz as Hutcherson, which is why, despite his subsequent shift to (by and large) conservatism, he'll always have my respect and admiration as an "explorer."

I was going to post something on the "Blue Note School" of inside-out before I found this thread, but it's doubly interesting to trace a specific artist (Bobby in this case) through the ebb and flow of the 60's. There's definitely a straight line from the early McLean sides to '69 (when he did Now--already somewhat of a commercial recording--and Stanley Cowell's Brilliant Circles, which is like a "late to the party," slightly more ominous Blue Note album), but Bobby kept really busy with session work from all corners--soul jazzy post-bop on "Street of Dreams" and "Feeling Free," straightforward, Impulse-y free jazz with Shepp, big band music with Gerald Wilson, mellow swing/bop with Dexter Gordon... it's almost hard to pinpoint a specific thing he did "best," although it's clear he did all of these things well.

We tend to celebrate a number of classic BN runs--Shorter's and Hill's maybe being the apotheoses of their respective discographies, with Herbie's, Hank Mobley's, Joe Henderon's, and a handful of others' also justly canonized--but I very rarely hear talk about just how remarkable Hutch's arc was. These happened in order, for perspective: Dialogue, Components, Happenings, Stick-Up!, Oblique, Patterns, Total Eclipse, Spiral, Medina... for my money, they're all absolute classics right up to Patterns, and even though I'm not 100% convinced of the relative merits of post-Coltrane Harold Land, that band (as a band) was a helluva band. Check this out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-4NTZSkzAE&feature=related

As for Components--it's easy to read Bobby's BN discography as a gradual descent into the mainstream, but (as many mention above) the story is nowhere near as simple as that. Joe Chambers was clearly the X factor here, and a big part of Hutch's more experimental efforts came out of a synergy with Chambers as a composer--paired with Hill on Dialogue, essaying the crazy half of Components, offering up the "weird" tracks on Oblique. I sort of read it less as Bobby "becoming" more conservative and more that the meeting with Chambers was timely and very much a part of what was "in the air"--it's all a testament to Hutcheron's remarkable flexibility (essaying both hardcore abstraction and modal exercises to perfection) and Chambers's vastly underrated and visionary talents as a composer that we got this music at all.

On that note, why Chambers--whose experiments on Hutch's earlier Blue Notes presage the European improv scene of the 60's and rival Cecil Taylor in their systematized approach to improvised abstraction--is not more well regarded is a total mystery to me. He's up there with Wayne, Hill, and Moncur as one of the most idiosyncratic, intelligent, and formidable composers of that scene. Moreover, I used to have the impression that Chambers was sort of a makeweight Tony Williams (he seems to show up everywhere Tony Williams was or would have been), but I've come to the conclusion that despite his leaning toward more straightforward conceits than his more celebrated peers (Tony and Elvin in particular), Joe was maybe the most reliable session drummer in the Blue Note fold... he never played a truly crappy album, and he did so many of them. I rediscovered Oblique this past weekend, and though it's clearly a confluence of many wonderful, weird things (Herbie in the last "real" year of the 2nd Miles Quintet, recording within days of Trane's death, Albert Stinson showing up, etc.), Chambers f'ing makes that session. In terms of reliability, propulsion, and making everything groove, Joe Chambers is a hall of famer.

The passage about why Chambers isn't more well regarded, is exactly my thinking. Those tunes on the second half of the album, plus portions of "Dialogue", Moncur's "Some Other Stuff" ("Gnostic" especially), the free tunes on "Happenings" and "Oblique" all seem to me to be a precursor to the European improv scene, the ECM sound, etc......

[ep1str0phy]

I purchased a copy of Head On earlier today and... wow. Components does not lie in that it paints a picture of a complex, multifaceted musician with a very broad palette of tastes and inclinations. Even though it's not as if any of Bobby's other albums are that clearly divided between an "in" side and an "out" side (so to speak), Components was not a fluke. My mind reels at the fact that Bobby recorded Now (a pseudo-abstract psychedelic groover), then San Francisco (a moody funk album), then Head On (which shifts from free jazz to light instrumental music to modal blowouts with remarkable cohesion), then Natural Illusions (which borders on irredeemable muzak at times).

I honestly can't think of another mainstream jazz musician of the era who was both this all over the place in terms of setting and so proficient at everything he or she handled. There's Rahsaan, but his bag is more explicitly postmodern; the genre play in that case is jarring and purposefully so, and many of his attempts at engaging with subgenres are almost aggressively facile, if musically interesting (I'm thinking specifically of The Case of the 3 Sided Dream in Audio Color, which is alternately awesome and a little bit too absurd). Freddie Hubbard did a lot of work in multiple settings, but his crassness was much more wholesale than Bobby's, and his descent into recorded commercialism is a little more extreme. The clearest comparison is with Herbie, although Herbie was the more visionary composer and conceptualist--the arc of his development seems clearer and more overtly purposeful (however much you value that purpose... after Thrust, at least).

Head On does reinforce my thoughts about the Hutcherson/Chambers collaboration--that is, that Bobby's "secret" talent was that he had an excellent ear for other folks' innovations and, moreover, that he knew how to both champion those innovations and operate convincingly within their premises. The transition from "At the Source" to "Many Thousands Gone" is mind-boggling in its scope, and it's sort of a microcosm of how Hutch's preternatural ability to collaborate made, in almost every case up until the 80's, for this sort of gestalt music--a sound informed by, but "better" than, what, say, Cochran and Hutcherson might create independently.

As for what you said, CJ--were you the guy who mentioned this on a Components thread a while back? Because if so, that was dead on, and it's crazy to me that no one (including myself) followed up on your sentiments. The similarities between Components and the more free jazzy EFI (like, for example, the SME's Karyobin) are very, very apparent. It may (or may not) have been a matter of one thing influencing the other, but it was certainly a case of people coming to similar conclusions from similar external pressures. The reductionist free jazz aesthetic of the Spontaneous Music Ensemble was a response, in ways, to the maximalist American ethos (e.g., Coltrane), and Chambers's contributions to Components strike me as attempts to both rationalize (via intellectual and physical introversion) the liberties of free jazz that were elsewhere exercised fast and loose.

[CJ Shearn]

Yes, that was me Epistrophy but I don't remember that thread in particular. I'm not well versed in EFI like others here but I certainly know the sound. I think players like Bobby must have been listening to more out 20th century classical and avant garde, Stockhausen, Varese, etc and the influence was synthesized out of that.

[king ubu]

Great discussion here!

There's an earlier thread on "Head On":

[Bluesnik]

i listened to this album recently after a long, long time and liked it a lot. and now, thanks to this thread yesterday i picked it up again from among the piles of recently listened albums and found it very good. it's a great album! i love that period blue note.

[Guy Berger]

I'm of the mind that Bobby's "prime" period as a frontman on Blue Note ('65-'70) marks one of the greatest single leader-single label runs in jazz.

I'm glad you ended up getting Head On, which is outside of this period and absolutely brilliant. I like it as much as (almost?) all of the more acclaimed 60s titles.