The Musical Box

jazz trumpeter freddie hubbard

The news yesterday afternoon on NPR was more of the dreary same. But after updates on the airstrikes in Gaza and the newest winter storm set to slam the Northwest, a bit of bop came over the airwaves. Of all the times you hope to hear jazz on the radio, this was not one of them.

The music was a lead-in to the announcement of Freddie Hubbard’s death at age 70. The acclaimed trumpet player had suffered a heart attack.

Hubbard was a giant in his day - equaled in terms of tone and temperament, perhaps, only by the great Lee Morgan. A veteran of the golden age of Blue Note Records during the ‘60s, Hubbard, like so many of contemporaries, collaborated with legends (specifically, John Coltrane on 1961’s The Africa/Brass Sessions and 1965’s groundbreaking Ascension), flirted with fusion (on a series of underrated CTI albums) and, for a time, gave in completely to pop.

For much of the past decade-and-a-half, he has been out of the spotlight fighting various illnesses and a career-threatening lip infection. However, Hubbard returned last summer with a well-received studio outing aided by the New Jazz Composers Octet called On the Real Side. The flourishes and flash that peppered his early playing were gone. Hubbard had also switched from trumpet exclusively to flugelhorn. Still, his tone remained vibrant.

Hubbard’s Blue Note recordings exemplify the label’s boppish command, especially Here to Stay (recorded 46 years ago this week) and Ready for Freddie (cut a month earlier, in November 1962). While 1965’s The Night of the Cookers was a seering live set that placed him alongside Morgan, the ‘62 albums presented the tenor sax giant Wayne Shorter as Hubbard’s primary foil.

That relationship reached a zenith in the late ‘70s. Hubbard was recording slick, orchestrated and largely forgettable pop albums at the time. But he moonlighted in an all-star band called VSOP that featured all of Miles Davis’ classic mid ‘60s quintet: Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Tony Williams. Everyone that is, except Davis himself. The trumpet seat now belonged to Hubbard.

VSOP, though, tackled an entirely different repertoire than what Davis designed for the group. Comparisons were unavoidable. But for the record, figuratively and literally, Hubbard was as volatile a trumpeter as Davis was cool.

The best surviving recorded statement from VSOP is a two-disc set of 1979 concert performances issued in 2004 under the title Live Under the Sky.

For all the boppish glory of the Blue Note recordings, which far and away remain Hubbard’s best work, and the celebrity summits of VSOP, the Hubbard albums that hit me the hardest came in the early ‘70s - a time when artists like Hancock, Shorter and Williams were experimenting with primitive fusion.

Of those records, all cut for the CTI label, 1970’s Red Clay was the most heralded. It’s beaut, to be sure, with Hancock on electric piano, a 20 year old Lenny White on drums and sax great Joe Henderson. It’s also the only jazz record I know of that dared take an instrumental stab at John Lennon’s karmic nightmare, Cold Turkey.

But my favorite remains Straight Life. Cut 10 months after Red Clay, it sports two extended jams that echo funk, fusion and urban urgency. Yet the album concludes with a lovely take of Here Comes That Rainy Day, a subdued but brief serenade with a young George Benson providing the merest sketch of a backdrop on guitar.

Admittedly, it took the news of Hubbard’s passing to bring those recordings back to mind. But a listen again last night to Straight Life for the first time in many years only brought smiles. Sure, the groove was wicked. But this was the music of a titan with an intuitive edge that deserves to he heard for generations to come.