The inner sleeve boasts, 'Blue Note hits a new note'.
Pictured are artists new to the great jazz label's catalogue – like the Texan
saxophonist, Ronnie Laws, and the borderline muzak-al guitarist, Earl Klugh –
and artists old, like singer Carmen McRae, vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson,
pianist Gene Harris and trumpeter Donald Byrd, all trying to re-invent
themselves for a new era of 'mini-skirts, maxi-skirts and Afro hair-dos'.
Gone now is the label's trademark blue and white motif at
the centre of the record – to be replaced by an uninspired solid dark blue with
black lettering – and gone, too, are all those marvellous, strikingly simple
but graphically bold covers by Reid Miles and others (even Andy Warhol
contributed some distinctive etchings, if that's what they were). By contrast,
this photograph of what looks like an old-style church meeting framed in a clunky
green and red design seems heavy-handed and inelegant. What's more, there are no
personnel details to be found, the sine qua non of jazz albums. Francis Wolff
and Alfred Lion, the label's founding fathers, would have turned in their
retirement homes – and not in a euphoric way.
But let not that
take anything away from the music. Throughout a long and varied career, Donald
Toussaint L'Ouverture Byrd II was, as his name suggests, a class act. The year
was 1973 and it was his first album of a few more with the Mizell brothers' production
team, who were at one point everywhere in the Blue Note stable buildings. It's
Larry and not brother Fonce who wrote each of the seven tracks on the album.
The tunes and the hooks stay in your head, but the lyrics are not complicated.
'Get in the groove and move,' is a representative sample.
Coming two years
after Ethiopian Knights, which did the rounds while I was at Exeter
University, it's a more obviously funky affair than its serpentine, exploratory
predecessor and the influence of Sly Stone, James Brown, Curtis Mayfield et al
is there for all to spot. It gave me, for one, the more instant kind of gratification
that I needed at that time. Unsurprisingly, it was at one point – maybe still
is – the biggest selling album in Blue Note's distinguished history.
As a trumpeter,
Byrd was less of an individual stylist than the likes of Fats Navarro, Clifford
Brown and Lee Morgan, but unlike them he wasn't cut off in his prime. Less
individual perhaps, but longer lived and more ubiquitous. There was a time
in the mid 1950s when he seemed to be on just every record released. If you're
looking for some great straight-up-and-down small-group hard bop, the sides he
made with alto saxophonist Gigi Gryce and a little later with baritone
saxophonist Pepper Adams are as good as it gets.
For all his
ubiquity, he was often somewhere near the cutting edge of what was happening in
the wonderful world of jazz. Not as close as, say, Miles Davis or Herbie
Hancock, but always thereabouts and always ready to try things. A New
Perspective in 1963 was one of the first jazz albums to use a gospel choir
and the point when Byrd's trumpet cuts through the voices on 'Christo Redentor'
has to be one of the most spine-tingling moments in modern music of any
denomination.
The use of
voices on Black Byrd (the Mizells again) makes the record even closer to the
mainstream and helps to account for its commercial success. 'Flight Time', the
opening track, starts with the sound of a 707 jet (courtesy of Elektra Records,
apparently) before segueing into an insistent single note picked out on a
keyboard and the kind of pulsing rhythmical refrain that lodges somewhere deep
in your nether regions. Byrd's trumpet states the hook on the title track that
follows and feeds it through a wah-wah when 'we listen to the horn, carrying
on'. This was the age of the wah-wah pedal and Byrd vies with the guitarist to
get the most mileage out of the device. It probably dates it as much as
anything on the album, but the funk is pure and irresistible.
'Love's So Far
Away' is taken at a lick that prefigures the Places and Spaces album a
few years later. It was the album when jazz-funk tipped into disco and I still
play the compelling 'Change (Makes You Want To Hustle)' at parties. It's also
very reminiscent of flautist Bobbi Humphrey's Harlem River Drive, another
artist in the stable who was 'steered' down the same path by the Mizell
Brothers.
There's more
hard-driving motorway funk on the second side. As someone on YouTube commented,
Donald Byrd's 'always giving eargasms' and he's at his most eargasmic on the
opener, 'Mr. Thomas'. His trumpet is crisp, bright and clean. He plays in
unison with whoever's on flute for 'Sky High', which is as pretty a melody as
the final 'Where Are We Going?' – which was covered, seductively and gorgeously
of course, by Marvin Gaye. In between is another funkin'-for-fun track, 'Slop
Jar Blues', which has always alarmed me a little. 'Sitting on a slop jar...'
What is a slop jar? Does it
have anything to do with water closets? As Marvin might say, 'What's going on?'
Donald Byrd not
only appeared as a leader or a sideman on too many albums to list, but he also
taught at Howard University and around the time of Black Byrd, he would
nurture the brief but successful career of his student protégés, The
Blackbyrds. I picked up three of their albums at the time, including City
Life with its classic 'Rock Creek Park' ('Doin' it in the park/Doin' it
after dark/In Rock Creek Park...'), but abandoned them around the same time as
I abandoned Donald Byrd, after Places And Spaces.
But in The
Donald's case, abandonment was only ever going to be temporary. I went back in time
and discovered those wonderful small-group recordings with Gigi Gryce and with
Pepper Adams. And every now and then, I spin Black Byrd and its
successors to remind myself of just what a funky dude Donald Toussaint
L'Ouverture Byrd could be. As someone else on YouTube commented, 'Byrd just
knew how to make great music'.
