Donald Byrd

The gospel-choir masterpiece. Byrd, Hank Mobley, and Herbie Hancock build a hard-bop session around a wordless eight-voice choir, and the opener Cristo Redentor became the most enduring thing he ever recorded. A church record made by jazz musicians.

The record that changed everything. Larry and Fonce Mizell produced Byrd into the best-selling album in Blue Note history, drew the purists' fury, and laid down a groove that hip-hop has been sampling ever since. The pivot point of his whole catalog.

The session that introduced a twenty-one-year-old Herbie Hancock on a Blue Note date. Byrd and Pepper Adams running their tight quintet, Billy Higgins on drums, and a young pianist who already sounds like the future. Hard bop at full strength.

A three-horn front line with Charlie Rouse and Pepper Adams, Walter Davis Jr. at the piano, and the Sam Jones and Art Taylor rhythm section. One of the cleanest examples of Byrd's late-fifties Blue Note hard bop, written and blown with no wasted motion.

Byrd reaching toward the new music with a young Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock in the band. Not free jazz exactly, but looser and more searching than the hard-bop dates around it. Shorter's writing pulls the whole session somewhere strange and good.

The Black Byrd follow-up, deeper into the Mizell sound: clavinet, synthesizer, layered vocals, and string-section gloss over a fat rhythm bed. Another crate-digger goldmine that producers have been pulling breaks from for fifty years.

The Mizell run hitting its stride, with Gary Bartz adding alto and soprano to the mix and Larry Mizell stacking Fender Rhodes and ARP synth. Warm, optimistic, deeply melodic funk-jazz that has aged into one of the era's quiet favorites.