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Jazz Icons: Cannonball Adderley boasts two beautifully filmed concerts from one of the most celebrated sextets in jazz history, captured at the top of their game. Cannonball Adderley (alto sax), Nat Adderley (cornet) and the masterful Yusef Lateef (tenor sax, flute, oboe), provide a massive three-horn frontline attack, while the stellar rhythm section featuring a pre-Weather Report Joe Zawinul (piano), Sam Jones (bass) and Louis Hayes (drums) fuel the songs with a deep infectious swing. Quincy Jones’ “Jessica’s Day” leaps from the gate with a huge “big band” sound that is extraordinary for only six musicians. This DVD is a reminder that Cannonball Adderley was one of the most outstanding and highly respected alto saxophonists in the history of jazz, a blues-based jazzman who could play anything in superb fashion. |
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Sample of Afterword: A Look Back by Ira Gitler It’s a special kick to see and hear these two performances of the 1963 Cannonball Adderley sextet. The energy and joie de vivre that all Adderley-led combos had is multiplied by Yusef’s versatile mastery, the nonpareil rhythm section and a chance to witness again the talent of the young Joe Zawinul. When Cannonball Adderley and his brother Nat arrived from Florida in late June of 1955, sat in with Oscar Pettiford’s band at the Cafe Bohemia and knocked everyone out, word spread quickly within the jazz community. It must have been the next night that I went down to hear him and he certainly lived up to his newly-hatched reputation. After the first set he was holding court on the curb in front of the club on Barrow Street. I joined the knot of people around him. He was naturally gregarious, effusive and witty. Some of the conversation touched on Bird, but not about Cannon being the new Bird. I knew him casually when he and Nat were touring with their quintet. After he joined Miles there were more opportunities in New York and Newport to get better acquainted.
Sample Liner Notes by John Szwed: The mythology of jazz tells us that some of the greatest musicians first appear in New York (or Los Angeles or Chicago) seemingly from out of nowhere, or at least from someplace that city folks would never dream had jazz musicians. These jazz gods are often said to be naturals who arrive fully prepared to assume their roles in spite of no real musical training. Thus it is said that Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Ornette Coleman and Charlie Parker came with a destiny of greatness already bestowed upon them. And so it might have seemed for saxophonist Julian “Cannonball” Adderley when he turned up in New York with his trumpet playing brother, Nat, in the summer of 1955. Yet, the Adderleys were hardly musical naïfs. Cannonball was on vacation from his job as band director at Dillard High School in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., a city then known more for its naval base than as a seasonal playground for college students, and Nat had the summer off from studying at Florida A&M University. The brothers were raised in Tampa and Tallahassee, and both had spent some time in bands in the military. Cannonball went to college to become a music educator, and Nat joined Lionel Hampton’s band before returning to finish college. But since most of their playing experience had been in local clubs in Fort Lauderdale and occasionally in Miami, as far as New Yorkers were concerned, they still came from nowhere. ... The Cannonball Adderley Sextet in Lugano, Switzerland, March 24, 1963 The band opens with Quincy Jones’ “Jessica’s Day,” (or as Cannonball calls it: “Jessica’s Birthday”) a hard bop composition that with tight horn work and a bit of arrangement takes on a 1940s big band feel, especially with its spirited riffing behind the soloists. Cannonball’s solo has an uncharacteristic gruffness, as if Lateef’s previous solo has rubbed off on him. Joe Zawinul’s accompaniment is especially fine here, showing a belief in funk that would largely disappear from his playing once he left the Adderleys. “Angel Eyes” is a feature for Lateef’s flute, not the most improvised of Lateef’s solos on this outing, but one in which he demonstrates his beautiful tone on the instrument along with his range of effects—a low, pulsing, soulful sound, set off by occasional vocalizations through the horn. Zawinul also offers a brief, but finely crafted solo line. The fact that Cannonball would program a slow ballad this early in the set shows his trust in Lateef to bring something special to the performance. He called it the ability to “project,” to play “through the horn and not just in the horn,” to reach an audience as one of a series of strong individuals in a group. “Jive Samba” appeared at that moment in the early 1960s when the Brazilian bossa nova and black soul music were both reaching the hit charts. (Cannonball had, just the year before, recorded a bossa nova album with Brazilian musicians in New York.) Nat’s composition caught the spirit of that moment in pop music, but also managed to evoke the same kind of modal simplicity that is heard in Miles Davis’ Kind Of Blue album, by working two chords against each other. Rhythmically, it is not a true samba (thus the “jive” appellation), and is instead grounded somewhere between Brazil, Cuba, and the land of rhythm and blues. Simple as it is harmonically and rhythmically, “Jive Samba” manages to provide a constant source of new ideas among the musicians. By spacing the recurrent hammering of the same chords between instrumental breaks, it moves without an apparent end in sight, until it fades, making it the sort of piece the Italians once labeled perpetuun mobile. This band never seemed to tire of playing it night after night, and Zawinul seems especially inspired by this minimalist harmonic material. “Bohemia After Dark,” an Oscar Pettiford composition that memorialized his nights at the Café Bohemia, takes the Adderley brothers back to one of their first recorded pieces. Here it’s given the Davis treatment of speeding up older songs to give them new life and reaches an almost inhuman tempo. Cannonball seems to be able to handle it most comfortably among the horn players, and even he sputters a bit and leaves some spaces in what for him is a short solo. Only Louis Hayes, bless him, can manage to create fresh ideas for a stretch of time at that speed, suggesting that the group sacrificed something for his feature spot. ...
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