Liner Notes
Short takes on single records. One album, a few hundred words, no filler. Singles for quick listens, Long Plays for when you can sit with a record.
One session, seven tunes, June 16, 1960. One horn over a piano trio plus congas, cut in the narrow window between two prison terms.
He cut it less than two months after The Sidewinder and Blue Note shelved it for two years while they waited for another hit.
Five musicians at Montreux in 1969, four of them barely knowing each other, and Atlantic bought the tapes afterward for under a hundred dollars.
Silver led bands for fifty years. Asked about the best of them, he named this one: Cook, Mitchell, Hayes and Taylor.
Side one is one song. Cut in a hotel ballroom rather than Van Gelder's studio, with Lee Morgan, Tina Brooks and Art Blakey.
Donaldson says he ran out of material, invented the title riff on the spot, and it became the only thing on the record that sold.
Three tracks on the original LP. Ten minutes, ten minutes, fourteen minutes, and a tenor tone thick enough to fill a car.
Blue Bossa and Recorda Me on the same first record, and one of the great pianists of the century credited on the cover as ETC.
Take the pianist out and the guitar owns all that space. Burrell does not rush to fill it. The gaps are the point.
A quartet date with no second horn and nowhere to hide, plus the quietest Art Blakey anywhere in the catalog.
The first record out of the gate on Creed Taylor's CTI, and the loudest, most confident playing of Hubbard's career.
Timmons plays the riff, the horns answer, and by the second chorus you are awake. Lee Morgan was twenty.
Five tracks about the ocean, and a title tune that started life as music for a Yardley television commercial.
The take ran double because nobody agreed on the length of a chorus. Alfred Lion asked for a retake and never got a better one.
Eight standards, thirty two minutes, the classic quartet holding everything back on purpose. Restraint is the hard part.
One piano riff, laid down in the first few seconds, and the whole tune lives on top of it. It never builds to a climax.
No pick, ever. That is why a record buried in string arrangements still sounds warm at seven in the morning.
Gordon lost most of the fifties. Then Blue Note gave him one day in August 1962 and he walked out with six tunes and no filler.
The jacket says a Chicago club. The tape says Capitol's Hollywood studio, an invited crowd and an open bar. Nobody cared.
The most interesting reissue story in vinyl right now. Three Blind Mice, Midnight Sugar, Blow Up, Funky Stuff, and five records that tell you whether you're in or out.
Ron Carter's two note bass, Tony Williams's shimmering ride, and one suspended Hancock chord. The best opening on any 1960s jazz record, and I'll fight on this.
My commute is 40 minutes and the album is 42, close enough. Shorter, Hubbard, Hancock, Carter, and Elvin Jones, cut in one day on Christmas Eve 1964.
A slow minor blues that meets you where you already are. Cut in 1960 with the early classic quartet, shelved until 1964, and the best first record of a morning.
Miles Davis barely played sideman after 1955. He did it once for Cannonball Adderley, March 9, 1958, in Hackensack. Cannonball's only Blue Note album, and the bridge to Kind of Blue.
Bill Evans cut it on June 25, 1961, with Scott LaFaro and Paul Motian. Eleven days later LaFaro was dead. The record that turned the bass into a front-line voice.
Jimmy Smith on the Hammond B-3, one guy doing three jobs at once. Cut in a day in 1960, held back until 1963, and the best thing in your headphones midweek.
The bass vamp Horace Silver wrote in 1964, the one Steely Dan later borrowed. A loaded quintet with Joe Henderson, and a groove that does the work for you.
Sonny Rollins walked into Van Gelder's studio on June 22, 1956, and cut one of the best jazz records ever made. One day, four players, five tracks.
Lee Morgan, a boogaloo groove, and the song that pulled Blue Note out of a hole in 1964. Ten and a half minutes built to carry a crowded train.