In 1953 the alto saxophonist and bandleader Earl Bostic needed a tenor player to replace John Coltrane, and he hired Stanley Turrentine, a young man from the Hill District of Pittsburgh whose father, Thomas Turrentine Sr., played saxophone and whose older brother Tommy played trumpet. Seventeen years later, in November 1970, Turrentine was in Rudy Van Gelder's studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, recording fourteen minutes of Coltrane's "Impressions" for a label that had only just gone out on its own. The album that came out of that date was Sugar, CTI 6005, and it became the record most people reach for when they hear his name.
The road to that session ran through most of the working circuits open to a Black saxophonist of his generation. He toured with Lowell Fulson's blues band in 1951, worked for Bostic, served in the military, and came out in 1959 to join Max Roach's band. In 1960 he began recording for Blue Note, and that same year he married the organist Shirley Scott, with whom he recorded often over the following decade. The Blue Note records made him a soul jazz name, built on the blues and on a tenor sound that a listener could pick out in a bar or two.
By the end of the sixties the company he had signed with was no longer the same company. Liberty Records bought Blue Note in 1965, and Alfred Lion, who had trouble working inside a larger organization, retired in 1967. From late 1967 the sessions were produced by Francis Wolff or the pianist Duke Pearson. Turrentine's last Blue Note studio album of that run, Another Story, dates from 1969. In 1970 he signed with Creed Taylor.
Taylor had already built one important jazz label for someone else. He started Impulse! for ABC-Paramount in 1960 and left the next summer to run Verve, and in 1967 he founded CTI as a jazz imprint of A&M Records. Three years later he took CTI independent. The first five independent releases went out as a 1000 series, and then the 6000 series began, running from 1970 to 1976, with Van Gelder engineering nearly all of the sessions. Sugar carries the number 6005, so it sits near the front of that new numbering, and it was Turrentine's first album for the label. In the same month and the same studio, on November 16, 1970, Freddie Hubbard recorded his own CTI album, Straight Life. Taylor was building a roster, and the same players moved through one another's dates.
The band on Sugar shows how that worked. Hubbard is on trumpet, George Benson on guitar, Ron Carter on bass and Billy Kaye on drums. The keyboard chair changes from track to track, and that matters to how each piece feels. Lonnie Liston Smith, listed on jazzdisco.org as Lonnie L. Smith Jr., plays electric piano on the title track. Butch Cornell plays organ on "Sunshine Alley" and "Impressions." Richard "Pablo" Landrum adds congas on those two, but not on "Sugar." The discographies give the date only as November 1970, with no day.
The original LP holds three tracks: Turrentine's "Sugar" at 10:03, Cornell's "Sunshine Alley" at 10:48, and "Impressions" at 14:14. Most jazz records of the period would have used that much space for six or seven tunes. This one uses it for three grooves and lets each of them run.
The title track is the one everybody knows. Benson and Carter lock into a slow figure and hold it, and Turrentine comes in over the top with the tone that made his name, big and round and a little rough at the edges. He is not in a hurry about anything. Hubbard answers him, Smith fills the middle on electric piano, and for ten minutes nobody rushes. CTI thought enough of the tune to split it across both sides of a single, issued in 1971 as "Sugar Parts 1 & 2," and it came back again on the 1974 compilation The Baddest Turrentine.
I mostly hear this record in the car, and the length is a big part of why it works there. One morning Sugar came on about four minutes into the drive, and I did not touch my phone again until I parked. Short tracks make you aware of time, because every three or four minutes something ends and something else starts, and you notice it. Long tracks do the opposite. Turrentine's sound helps too, because it is thick enough to fill car speakers without much volume, and you do not have to turn it up to hear what he is doing, which matters at seven in the morning.
"Sunshine Alley" is Cornell's tune, and it is the track people tend to skip, which is a mistake. It is a shuffle with the organ sitting under everything, and it is the most relaxed ten minutes on the record. With Cornell's organ and Landrum's congas in place of the electric piano, the second track has a different feel from the first, even though it is the same band on the same date.
Then comes "Impressions," and Coltrane's modal tune gets fourteen minutes from what is, on paper, a soul jazz band, and it works because they put a groove underneath the modal frame instead of trying to play it the way Coltrane's quartet did. Hubbard is excellent on this one. This is the track that reminds you these were serious players and not a group of studio musicians knocking out a payday. For Turrentine the tune carried some history of its own, since Bostic had once hired him as Coltrane's replacement.
The session produced a fourth tune, Hubbard's "Gibraltar," with Smith on electric piano and Landrum on congas. It stayed in the vault for years. Jazzdisco.org traces its first issue to a 1987 compact disc on CBS Associated, ZK 40811, and it has been part of the CD editions since. The 2001 and 2010 CDs also add a live "Sugar" from July 1971, with Hubert Laws on flute, Johnny Hammond on organ and electric piano, Billy Cobham on drums and Airto Moreira on percussion, alongside Turrentine, Hubbard, Benson and Carter. Jazzdisco.org places that performance at the CTI All-Stars concert at the Hollywood Palladium on July 18, 1971, while the credits on Wikipedia name a different venue and a July 19 date. Both bonus tracks are good. The original three-track sequence is still the way I would hear the album first.
The release date is a small puzzle of its own. Wikipedia gives November 22, 1970, only days after the session, while jazzdisco.org lists the LP as a 1971 issue. What nobody disputes is where it landed. Turrentine's own Wikipedia entry calls Sugar "one of his biggest successes and a seminal recording for the label," and David Rickert, writing for All About Jazz, said that "Turrentine was one of the lucky few who made his crowning achievement during this time." Thom Jurek's AllMusic review, as quoted on Wikipedia, calls the album "a heck of a place to listen for satisfaction."
CTI catches a lot of grief for the Creed Taylor production, the glossy jackets and the crossover ambitions, and some of that criticism lands fine on other records in the catalog. It does not land on this one. Sugar is a blues band playing long and playing well, with a tenor player who had been on the road since 1951, and the polish is not hiding anything. Start with the title track and give it the full ten minutes.