On January 27, 1970, Freddie Hubbard walked into Rudy Van Gelder's studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, with a quintet and three days booked. The record they made, Red Clay, came out that May as CTI 6001, the first number in the orange-label 6000 series that carried Creed Taylor's independent label through 1976. Taylor had been making records under the CTI name since 1967, but as a production company working for A&M, where the first CTI album had been Wes Montgomery's A Day in the Life. In 1970 he went out on his own, and he chose a trumpet player with a long Blue Note résumé to open the new catalog.
Hubbard was thirty-one, born in Indianapolis on April 7, 1938. He had signed with Blue Note in 1960 for his first record as a leader, Open Sesame, and replaced Lee Morgan in Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers in 1961, staying until 1966. After Blakey he led his own small group on Atlantic, through Backlash, High Blues Pressure, A Soul Experiment and The Black Angel. JazzTimes, looking back in 2010, described him as "playing at the peak of his powers after a string of seven brilliant Blue Note albums" when he came to Taylor. The music around him was moving. The same piece places the date inside "the tectonic shift beginning with Miles Davis' In a Silent Way, recorded the previous year," and several of the people Hubbard called for this session had been on the inside of that shift.
He called Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Joe Henderson first. Hancock had been in Davis's quintet from May 1963 until the summer of 1968, and by the account in his Wikipedia biography he had started doubling on electric keyboards there at Davis's insistence, despite some reluctance. On Red Clay he plays electric piano and Hammond organ, and Henderson doubles on tenor saxophone and flute. The drum chair had a story of its own. Lenny White told JazzTimes, passing along what Wallace Roney had told him, that "Freddie had originally called Tony to do the record, but Miles was kind of upset" about his rhythm players turning up on other leaders' dates. Tony Williams recommended White instead. White had been born in Queens on December 19, 1949, which made him twenty that week. He had worked his way up through club dates with Jackie McLean, and that connection had put him on Bitches Brew the summer before.
The title track runs a little over twelve minutes, which covers most of my ride, and I never skip it. It opens on a bass figure, and the horns come in over it with the whole band already settled into the groove. Underneath, the tune is simpler than it sounds. JazzTimes calls it "essentially an inventive line set to the chord changes of 'Sunny,' Bobby Hebb's hit song from 1966," which explains why it feels so open. The changes are familiar and the form gives everybody room, so the interest is in how each player uses the space.
The beat came from the drummer. White remembered that Hubbard gave him almost nothing to go on: "He just said, 'Man, I need a beat. Gimme a beat.'" White answered with a syncopated pattern that has a hidden wrinkle in it. "I put a triplet feel in there, and nobody has ever picked up on that," he said. Hubbard, according to the trumpeter David Weiss, who brought him back out of retirement in the late 1990s, always gave White the credit: "He said Lenny came up with the beat and that he himself had nothing to do with it." Later in life, Weiss told JazzTimes, Hubbard would announce the piece as "the tune that's been keeping me alive for the last 30 years."
The session nearly stalled on a piece of hardware. White had brought a bass drum he had made himself, and he described it plainly: "I had this bass drum which was made from a big oil can." Carter thought it rang too much. In Dan Ouellette's biography of Carter, the bassist recalls telling White that "my recommendation to get some real music going here is to stash that drum in your trunk," adding, "We don't want to be doing take 503 with that drum." Van Gelder found a replacement, and White remembered it exactly: "Rudy pulled out this 26- or 28-inch bass drum that had a painting of a moonlit lake on it." White hated the sound, and he told JazzTimes that "for 10 years after that record came out I didn't listen to it because I hated the way I sounded on it."
I hear it differently, and to me this is the loudest, most confident playing Hubbard put on record. He goes high and stays there, and he hits notes most trumpet players would attempt once and then leave alone, and then he goes back and hits them again. Henderson takes the opposite approach. His solo is terse and angular, and he rarely lands where I expect him to. The solo index at allsolos.com lists four solos on the track, in this order: Hubbard, Hancock on electric piano, Henderson, and Carter on electric bass. Hancock uses the sustain of the instrument and lets his chords blur a little, which is a different sound from anything on his own Blue Note records of two years before. Under Hubbard's solo, White pushes the whole band forward without ever getting busy.
All four of the original LP's tunes are Hubbard's. "Delphia" is the quiet one, a waltz of about seven and a half minutes on which allsolos lists Hubbard and Hancock as the soloists. "Suite Sioux" brings the tempo back up, a swinging piece where the index lists solos from Hubbard, Henderson and Hancock and a turn for White. "The Intrepid Fox" closes the record at 10:45, and it is the burner of the set. Wikipedia credits Henderson with flute on the session but does not say where he plays it, so I will not guess. The four tunes add up to 38:57 on the LP. The band also cut John Lennon's "Cold Turkey" at these sessions, but it stayed in the vault until the CD era, and the 2001 and 2010 CD editions add an 18-minute live "Red Clay" recorded at the Southgate Palace in Los Angeles on July 19, 1971, with a different band built around Stanley Turrentine, George Benson, Johnny Hammond Smith, Billy Cobham, Airto Moreira and Carter.
The record sold, too, and it entered Billboard's Top 20 Best Selling Jazz LPs at number 20 in the issue dated June 20, 1970. JazzTimes credits it with "setting the template for all future CTI recordings," and the label did keep coming back to this setup of electric keyboards, long grooves and established soloists, with Van Gelder engineering nearly every session until its later years. Bill Milkowski wrote in JazzTimes that "'Red Clay' would become Hubbard's signature tune throughout his career."
Red Clay often gets filed under fusion, and Wikipedia lists it under jazz fusion and soul jazz both. I think of it as a post bop session with a groove rhythm section, which is a different thing, and the difference is clear within the first minute. Tom Moon put the problem well in 1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die: "Red Clay is one of those records that mucks up the neat evolution narrative of jazz."
If this record works for you, go next to Straight Life. Hubbard recorded it at Van Gelder's on November 16, 1970, with Henderson, Hancock and Carter again, George Benson added on guitar and Jack DeJohnette on drums, and CTI issued it as CTI 6007 in January 1971. The run continued with First Light, which won Hubbard a Grammy in 1972. Lenny White, for all his feelings about the bass drum, came back to play on Hubbard's last CTI album, Polar AC, from 1974.