Any talk of 'jazz' and 'cool' has got to involve vibes in the discussion. I love the gentle tintinnabulation of the vibraphone. It's a beautiful if cumbersome instrument. That lovely resonant metallic ring has little in common with the plink of those toy xylophones that Santa once secreted in Christmas stockings. The vibes go particularly well with the Hammond B-3 organ and serve as an ideal complement to the piano and the electric guitar.
On the third and final occasion that I saw Roy Ayers, master of jazz-funk vibe-rations, he played a portable electronic, bonsai version of his customary Deagan vibraharp. It might have been more portable, but the sound of the former had nothing to do with that of the latter; the difference even more pronounced than that between the acoustic and the electric piano. So it has to be acoustic, but not necessarily metal: the West African balofon and the Colombian marimba are similarly rich and resonant, if generally alien to a jazz context.
Voted 'World's Best Vibist' in 1971, Bobby Hutcherson was one of the few vibraphone masters who also played the marimba. A regular of Blue Note sessions during the 1960s and '70s as both leader and sideman (with, for example, the even-more-regular guitarist, Grant Green, on the marvellous Idle Moments), his career with the label lasted longer than anyone other than Horace Silver. Most of his own sessions included the drummer Joe Chambers, who was a useful vibist himself. Apparently, the two of them were both arrested in New York's Central Park for possession of marijuana in 1967, the year of peace, love, dope and – one would hope – understanding. Despite recording mainly for Blue Note on the east coast, Hutcherson operated mainly on the west, the epicentre of cool jazz. Perhaps that's why he found his way into films like Round Midnight and They Shoot Horses, Don't They? I didn't spot him in either.
There's an abundance of great videos featuring Bobby Hutcherson on YouTube: so many that it renders choice a lottery. There is, for example, a fine rendition of one of his best-known numbers, a waltz written for his son Barry, 'Little B's Poem', that features flautist James Newton along with Miles Davis' rhythm section from his classic quintet of the '60s: Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Tony Williams. Maybe because it's a waltz, it feels just a little academic. Despite the stellar line-up, I felt it failed to spark. A re-union with a regular collaborator, McCoy Tyner, on a splendid version of John Coltrane's 'Moment's Notice' almost swung it for me, despite Eric Harland's (mercifully brief) drum solo.
But then I watched Bobby in the company of organist Joey de Francesco, who thought of him as 'the greatest vibes player of all time.' They serve up a gently swinging, after-hours version of a theme from the TV series, Naked City, Billy May's 'Somewhere In The Night'. Great solos by Hutcherson and de Francesco, by tenor saxophonist Ron Blake and guitarist Ulf Wakenius, along with a fascinating glimpse into the innards of the Hammond B-3 (a truly unwieldy instrument that the great Jimmy Smith used to convey to gigs in a converted hearse). So it has just about everything you could wish for. But this picky individual found Byron Landham's snare drum a little overbearing, sounding a little too like he was beating a dustbin lid. Sometimes you just can't beat a pair of wire brushes.
So I thought: If there's anything better than a vibraphone, it's two vibraphones. Bobby Hutcherson's harmonic sophistication and effortless swing influenced such modern-day masters of the instrument as Stefon Harris and Joe Locke. There's a fabulous bout of duelling mallets with the latter on 'Old Folks', with the vibe-masters old and new trading solos in the way that Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray or Sonny Stitt and Eddie 'Lockjaw' Davis used to do when the tenor sax ruled the Royal Roost and all the other clubs. Bobby wields two mallets, while Joe uses the more pianistic four-mallet technique developed by Gary Burton, the other seminal vibraphonist of the '60s. He it was who introduced me as a teenager to vibes: on BBC2's Jazz Scene at the Ronnie Scott Club. Little did I realise that one day I might be interested to learn that Gary Burton's four-mallet grip would be known as the Burton grip.
There I would have happily left it had I not found that Bobby Hutcherson also played in concert – also at Jazz Baltica, the annual German festival on the Baltic coast, but eight years earlier – with the man whose recording of Monk's 'Bemsha Swing' with Miles Davis inspired him to take up the vibes as a twelve-year old. Milt Jackson was indisputably the leading exponent of the instrument in the '50s, an era when the instrument was bedevilled with technical problems if you wanted to play it in an alternative way to the Lionel Hampton school of bashing the hell out of it as a percussion instrument. 'Bags', as he was nicknamed (for the bags under his eyes), conquered the recalcitrant beast to become probably the most influential vibraphonist of them all. When he wasn't dressed up in a dinner jacket, playing the Modern Jazz Quartet's slightly rarefied brand of jazz in the company of Percy Heath, Connie Kay and the band's musical director, pianist John Lewis, Milt Jackson could swing like the bopper he basically was. Dating back to 1952, 'Bags' Groove' was one of his hardiest perennial favourites. Here, the two senior vibraphonists, both eschewing the supplementary mallets and the Burton grip, go head to head – and tie to tie – in a sophisticated, swinging cutting contest. No doubt, a vibraphonist could spot a winner and wax lyrical on the different styles and techniques on show. Suffice to say that they play as seamlessly in tandem as they segue smoothly from one to the other. It's a close call, but Bobby's ambitious tie just shades it over Milt's more sober number.
Both of these giants of their instruments started their long careers as innovators: Milt Jackson as one of the young bebop revolutionaries who challenged the orthodoxy of swing music; Bobby Hutcherson as one of the generation of freer 'new thing' musicians who put the cat among the pigeons of hard bop, so to speak. To return to organist Joey de Francesco's assessment, 'Milt Jackson was the guy, but Bobby took it to the next level. It's like Milt was Charlie Parker, and Bobby was John Coltrane.' If so, they both appear very happy in their dotage to go back to free-swinging basics.
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