Donald Byrd: Black Byrd

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'.