Nat Adderley

Nat Adderley was twenty-four years old when Savoy put microphones in front of him, and the first thing you notice about this record is that he already sounds like himself. The cornet tone is warm and slightly rounded at the edges in a way that distinguishes it immediately from a trumpet, and the phrasing has an earthiness and directness that never deserts him across the entire arc of his career. This is a debut but it does not sound like a musician searching for an identity.

The rhythm section around him is extraordinary by any measure. Horace Silver had already developed his hard-driving, blues-soaked piano style by 1955 and he brings the same rhythmic authority here that he brought to every session he touched in this period. Paul Chambers was already the first-call bassist in New York, and Roy Haynes on drums plays with a lightness and intelligence that gives the music room to breathe without ever losing propulsion.

Cannonball on alto is already the dominant force in any room he enters, that unbelievable facility and the warm, buttery tone fully present at twenty-six. The chemistry between the two brothers has a looseness and trust that a studio pickup group could never manufacture. You can hear them listening to each other in a specific way, the way people listen when they have been playing together since childhood.

The material leans on blues and hard bop structures, which suits everyone on the date. This is not a record trying to make a sophisticated argument about where jazz should go. It is a group of excellent musicians playing with complete commitment, and Nat Adderley announcing that he belongs in this company. He does.

One year after the debut, Nat was back in front of EmArcy's microphones with a set of sessions that refined and deepened what the Savoy date had established. The title has a wry self-awareness to it: these are not college boys, and the music is not polite. But there is something about the confidence of this record, the sense of a musician who knows his own value and is not looking for anyone's permission, that earns the swagger of the title.

Cannonball is here again, and the dynamic between the brothers is even sharper than on the debut. By 1956 Cannonball had been leading his own groups and developing his own voice with even greater speed, and you can hear both of them operating at a higher level of intensity. Junior Mance on piano is a slightly different proposition from Horace Silver, less percussively aggressive and more harmonically supple, which gives the front line a different kind of cushion to work against.

Nat's cornet playing at this period has a quality of settled certainty that distinguishes him from the more flashy trumpet players of the hard bop era. He does not overplay, does not reach for effects. Every phrase is exactly as long as it needs to be, and the note at the end of each line is always the right note. It is a kind of musical economy that sounds effortless and is anything but.

The arrangements by Ernie Wilkins give some tracks a slightly larger sound than the tight quintet format usually allows, adding texture without overloading the intimate feel that both Adderleys brought to everything they played together. By the end of 1956, Nat was about to join his brother's quintet and the next great chapter was about to begin. This record is a perfect document of the moment just before that.

Everything on this record is good, but the title track is a standard. "Work Song" is one of the great jazz compositions, a melody so perfectly constructed that it sounds like it has always existed, like it was discovered rather than written. The call-and-response between the cornet and the rhythm section in the opening statement has a gravity and a groove that grabs hold of you immediately and does not let go. Within a year of this release, the whole jazz world was playing it.

Wes Montgomery on guitar is the inspired casting choice that makes the session something beyond a typical hard bop date. Montgomery's octave technique and the warmth of his tone create a counterweight to Nat's cornet that a saxophone front line would never have provided. The two instruments have a natural complementarity, a shared roundness of tone, and their conversations across this record are some of the most enjoyable instrumental dialogues in the hard bop era.

Bobby Timmons contributes "Dat Dere" to the session, the same tune he had recorded with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, and it is a reminder that Timmons was writing material that kept pace with the best composers working at the time. His piano playing here has a bluesy density, all those gospel-soaked left-hand voicings, that gives the rhythm section a grounded quality that complements Montgomery's lighter touch beautifully.

Sam Jones playing pizzicato cello on several tracks is the detail that keeps surprising on repeat listens. The cello sits in the texture in a way that thickens the harmony without filling the frequency range that the guitar and bass occupy, and the result is a sonic palette that sounds genuinely different from anything else being recorded in 1960. Nat was doing something original here without making any noise about it.

The idea of Nat Adderley fronting a sax section made up of Cannonball Adderley, Jimmy Heath, Charlie Rouse, Yusef Lateef, and Tate Houston is the kind of casting that looks implausible until you hear it and then seems completely inevitable. This is one of the most densely stacked front lines on any hard bop record of the era, and the music lives up to everything that lineup promises.

Yusef Lateef is the wildcard in the most productive sense. Where Cannonball and Rouse and Heath were all operating within a shared hard bop framework, Lateef was already pulling from different traditions: Eastern scales, the oboe and flute that he used to break up the saxophone texture, a harmonic curiosity that took him places the other players were not going. His presence on "Chordnation" in particular pushes the ensemble into territory that pure hard bop would not have reached.

Wynton Kelly on piano is the ideal anchor for this kind of session. Where a more aggressive comper might have competed with the front line, Kelly plays with a buoyancy and a sense of space that gives all five horn players room to land. Jim Hall on guitar adds texture without crowding anyone, and Jimmy Cobb's drumming has that quality of seemingly effortless momentum that characterized everything he touched in this period.

The title track runs nearly nine minutes and is the showcase that the record has been building toward: Nat out front, the full sax section arranged behind him, and the whole thing swinging harder than it has any right to. "The Old Country" at the top is a perfect opener, warm and immediately memorable. "That's Right!" is the record where Nat stepped fully into his own identity as a leader and left no question about what he was capable of.