Freddie Hubbard, CTI, 1970. The title track runs about twelve minutes. That covers most of my ride, and I never skip it.
Here is what I will say up front. This is not background music. It is a groove record with real teeth.
Hubbard cut it at Van Gelder's studio in Englewood Cliffs, January 27 through 29, 1970. It was his first album for Creed Taylor's new CTI label, catalog number 6001. First record out of the gate. He came in with a band that could do anything.
Joe Henderson on tenor, Herbie Hancock on electric piano and organ, Ron Carter on bass, Lenny White on drums. Five guys and nobody wasted.
The title track opens with that bass figure and the horns come in over it and you are already locked in. It is a blues at heart. Nothing complicated about the structure. What makes it work is how much room everybody gets and how nobody wastes any of it.
Hubbard's trumpet on this is the loudest, most confident playing of his career. He goes high and stays there. He hits notes most trumpet players would only try once. Then he does it again.
Henderson follows him and plays the opposite way, terse and angular, never landing where you think he is going to land.
Hancock is on electric keyboards here, not acoustic. In 1970 a lot of pianists were still figuring out what to do with those instruments, but Hancock already knew. He uses the sustain. He lets the chords blur a little. It is a different sound than anything he was doing on Blue Note two years earlier.
Lenny White was 20 years old on this session, just twenty, and he plays it somewhere between hard bop and rock and commits fully to that middle ground. Listen to what he does under Hubbard's solo. He is pushing the whole thing forward without ever getting busy about it.
The rest of the album earns its side. Delphia is the quiet one, about seven and a half minutes, with Henderson doubling on flute somewhere across the date. Suite Sioux picks the tempo back up. The Intrepid Fox closes it at just under 11 minutes and it is the burner of the set.
Four tracks, under 40 minutes on the LP, and every one of them earns its length.
The record sold: it entered Billboard's Top 20 Best Selling Jazz LPs at number 20 in the June 20, 1970 issue. That mattered, because it set the template for what CTI would do for the rest of the decade. Big open sound, electric instruments, serious players not dumbing anything down.
People sometimes file Red Clay under fusion and move on, and that is lazy. It is a post bop session with a groove rhythm section. There is a difference and you can hear it in about 30 seconds.
If you like this one, go straight to Straight Life. Hubbard recorded it that November and CTI put it out in January 1971, with George Benson on guitar and Jack DeJohnette on drums.
Twelve minutes is a long time to hold one groove. Hubbard makes it feel short.