Cannonball Adderley Sextet - ‘Jive Samba’

Picking up for a mere song the other day a still-sealed copy of the Cannonball Adderley Quintet recorded live in concert by the Europe1 radio station in 1960 and 1961 reminded me that this was a band built more for the stage than the studio (c.f. its leader, built for comfort rather than speed.) The evidence is there in the plethora of live performances available on YouTube and the number of albums the Adderley band released that were recorded live. Not that the studio recordings were inferior, far from it, but concerts such as In San Francisco seem to capture Cannon’s band at its spontaneous best. Not only did his well-drilled small bands strut their simple soulful stuff with impeccable musicianship, but Julian ‘Cannonball’ Adderley was the most genial of hosts. A complete contrast to his former Kind Of Blue, late ‘50s sextet leader, Miles Davis, the burly alto saxophonist’s announcements are a delight: courteous, witty and informative, a little like Dizzy Gillespie’s but a little less tongue-in-cheek. Is there just a hint of arch amusement, as if poking fun at an outmoded tradition, or can he truly be that polite? I tried to find a video performance that included one such peroration, but the closest I got was a performance of brother Nat Adderley’s best-known number, ‘Work Song’, on Jazz Scene hosted by Oscar Brown jr., who wrote a set of celebrated lyrics that turned the song into a hip chain-gang anthem. Alas, the sound quality is fairly poor and the number itself so well known as to have become almost derivative.

While possibly better known as a quintet, I prefer the Adderleys’ sextet format, largely because of the musicians chosen to make up the number: latterly, the erudite and almost guru-like Charles Lloyd, whose career after a period of self-imposed exile was reborn in the company of Michel Petrucciani; and before that, William Evans, or Yusef Lateef as he found fame, who occupied the sixth seat between 1962-1964. Lateef’s use of flute and oboe lent his music the exotic Eastern quality that probably influenced John Coltrane among others. So… I focused my search on the sextet.

In the end, it was a toss-up between two numbers culled from a 1963 concert in Switzerland. As well as a nice sharp focus and sound quality, the fire and spontaneity of the performance are almost in inverse proportion to the stereotype of the Swiss national character. In the blue corner is a rendition of the lesser-known ‘Jessica’s Birthday’, in which the sextet manages to sound like a little big band, swinging with the gusto of Count Basie’s Orchestra in its pomp, with each soloist in turn urged on intermittently by the other two riffing members of the brass section, and Joe Zawinul comping for all he’s worth on the piano. Individuals in the audience spotted by the camera look curiously contemplative, even bored in a Swiss kind of way.

In the red corner, however, is a version of ‘(The) Jive Samba’, another stomper written by brother Nat and covered by everyone from Quincy Jones to Jack Costanzo and Gerry Woo, whose 1968 version would become a salsa classic. It finds the band positively on fire. Backed by the favoured rock-solid rhythm section of Sam Jones on bass and Louis Hayes on drums, the players peel off one fantastic solo after another: first Cannonball, who shows that the influence of rhythm and blues alto saxophonists such as Louis Jordan and Eddie ‘Cleanhead’ Vinson was as potent as that of Charlie Parker and Benny Carter; then his younger brother, who might have preferred the more mellow cornet but who certainly doesn’t hold back during a spot that suggests the influence of Dizzy Gillespie and Clark Terry; then Yusef Lateef whose flute solo is worthy of Roland Kirk; and finally Joe Zawinul, still fairly fresh from his native Vienna and still at this point with hair, no doubt held in place by some sort of preparation, who shows less than a decade before he went electric and synthesised in Weather Report that he could be as funky a pianist as a predecessor in the outfit, Bobby Timmons. It’s as near to a complete small-group soul-jazz performance as you could wish for.

The big question remains: why Cannonball? Reputedly, it’s a corruption of ‘cannibal’, according to the liner notes of En Concert Avec Europe1, a name given to him by a friend back home in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in recognition of his appetite. Although he died just shy of his 47^th birthday from a stroke, his girth probably didn’t help. Nevertheless, he packed a lot into his abbreviated life. During national service, he hooked up with the pianist Junior Mance and trombonist Curtis Fuller and led his first band, the 36^th Army Band. After leaving Florida to try his luck in New York at the urging of ‘Cleanhead’ Vinson and others, he quickly gained a reputation as the new Charlie Parker, forming his first quintet with Nat, with an alto sax and trumpet/cornet front line modelled on the Parker and Gillespie bebop combo. After serving time with Miles Davis and the blind British pianist George Shearing, his quintet and sextet became long-running fixtures on the scene. Latterly, George Duke took over the pianist’s chair and the outfit leaned more towards the kind of electric funk-jazz (that would evolve into a smoother jazz-funk} sound that Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock and Cannonball’s long-term sideman Joe Zawinul were pioneering.

As befits anyone with such a moniker, Cannonball never appeared to take himself too seriously, either as a musician or a compère. It’s jazz, Jim, but not the deep, serious permutation that tends to turn off the casual listener. He and his brother and their ever-excellent sidemen made the kind of jovial, optimistic music typified by the evergreen ‘Jive Samba’.