Cannonball Adderley, Bill Evans and the Folly of Typecasting
Revisiting Cannonball Adderley's best album (in my opinion)
Welcome music lovers!
For this edition of ‘Listening Sessions,’ I'm taking a look at Cannonball Adderley’s 1961 album Know What I Mean? It is a special recording that persuasively argues that Adderley was a multi-faceted jazz musician whose expertise went far beyond soulful hard bop. Joining Adderley on the album were Bill Evans on piano (the last time the two would record together), and Percy Heath and Connie Kay from the Modern Jazz Quartet on bass and drums respectively. In my essay, I argue not only that Know What I Mean? is my favourite Adderley album but that it was his best period.
I hope you enjoy it and will let me know your thoughts.
Just before July closed out, my Tune Tag with
of Front Row & Backstage came out. Click below to read it if you didn’t get a chance to. Needlessly, I had a lot of fun going back and forth with Brad, a fount of musical knowledge, picking tunes.
Coming next time on ‘Listening Sessions’ will another round-up of new and upcoming jazz releases. Until then, may good listening be with you all!
A new book recently hit the shelves entitled 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool. Written by James Kaplan, it’s at least the third book centered on Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, long acknowledged as the best-known as well as simply the best jazz album of all time. It’s also the best introduction that I can think of to the music—worked like a charm for me. I have yet to read Kaplan’s book but expect to get to it at some point (I devoured his two-part biography of Frank Sinatra but also have a to-be-read pile of 50-plus books staring me down) even as reviews have been mixed.
The title implies a hierarchy of the musicians who contributed to Kind of Blue. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, any sort of ranking belies the fact that the group who recorded the album was, by any measure, a supergroup and while Davis and Bill Evans were the only ones who contributed compositions for the recording, the album was a team effort, an expression of the profound enmeshment of seven of the most important jazz musicians of the post-Second World War generation. But, if we must place the seven in some sort of hierarchy—in addition to Davis, John Coltrane and Evans, there were Cannonball Adderley, Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers and Jimmy Cobb—should not Adderley, at the very least, stand alongside his exalted mates in the front line? I think so.
I say this not only as a fan but in recognition of Adderley’s stature within sixties jazz. True, he did not shake things up as much as Ornette Coleman did, for example, or harness a sound as piercing and passionate as Jackie McLean. But, as jazz moved through the sixties and changed, Adderley embraced and, in a way, anticipated these shifts.
He broadened his soulful brand of hard bop when reedman Yusef Lateef joined Adderley’s quintet of brother Nat on cornet, Joe Zawinul on piano, Sam Jones on bass and Louis Hayes on drums, at the beginning of 1962. Lateef added a mystical element, offering a gateway for Adderley’s music to embrace modal jazz as well as the avant-garde. In 1966, with the recording of Zawinul’s ‘Mercy, Mercy, Mercy,’ on which the pianist played electric piano, Adderley became one of the first jazz musicians to seriously investigate a fusion of jazz with rock. Added with such standards in his band’s book like ‘This Here,’ ‘Jive Samba,’ ‘Sac o’ Woe’ and ‘Work Song,’ Adderley’s music was more wide ranging than history leads us to believe.
His work on Kind of Blue provided an ebullient counterpoint to Davis’ aloof cool, Coltrane’s controlled turbulence and Evans’ studied calm. Adderley worked with all three on dates he led or co-led during the late fifties and early sixties—one with both Davis and Coltrane; twice with Evans.
Thank you for reading ‘Listening Sessions.’
The best way to support my work is to take out a free subscription to my Substack. If you are already a subscriber, please consider pledging a paid subscription. Paid subscriptions for ‘Listening Sessions’ will be turned in September.
The iconography of Evans: bespectacled, hunched over the piano, eyes closed, lost in a dense, chordal meditation of such romantic longing as to feel like hearing it was akin to breaking the lock of someone’s diary and reading it cover to cover comes from the recordings he made in the first flush of his career as a sideman and as a leader on Riverside starting in 1956.
Adderley came to Riverside two years later, then also the recording home of Thelonious Monk and Johnny Griffin among others. It is the series of albums Adderley made for the label that form the first substantive chapter of his legend. His debut for the label, Portrait of Cannonball, was his first pairing with Evans outside of the Davis group. It is a good, solid album, particularly notable for the first recording of Davis’ enigmatic ‘Nardis’ which was to become one of Evans’ signature pieces.
Three years later, Adderley would again have Evans in the piano chair. This time, it was for a remarkable quartet recording that, in many ways, subverted what a Cannonball Adderley album sounded like and what his identity as a jazz musician had become. The recording of Know What I Mean? would span three days during the winter of 1961: January 27, February 21 and March 13. The gap in the recording dates was a reflection of the challenge of finding days when Adderley and Evans as well as the two musicians support them on the date: bassist Percy Heath and drummer Connie Kay, both of the Modern Jazz Quartet (MJQ), were all free to record.
Heath was about as sturdy and adaptable a bassist as there was in the music at the time. As for Kay, he had an almost impossibly light touch, a necessity for John Lewis’ often-baroque and impressionistic compositions for the MJQ, that still implied a deep, unstoppable swing, a feel that made him the perfect drummer for Paul Desmond’s series of albums with Jim Hall in the early and mid sixties.
It’s not remarkable that Adderley, Evans, Heath and Kay—an ensemble that existed for only this recording—gelled so well together. Small-group jazz depends on such instant compatibility. What is, however, remarkable here is the impression that this group of musicians could have been a working unit. The collective impression they make on Know What I Mean? is that strong.
Heath and Kay pull things out of Adderley and Evans that seem almost designed to counter the shorthand for each player. A beautiful interpretation of John Lewis’ ‘Venice’ teases out an introversion that Adderley only rarely expressed. He states Lewis’ gorgeous theme with simplicity, shading the romantic cadence of the line with a sweet sense of swing that is also expressed in his short solo. Evans’ equally compact statement is especially notable in how dialogues with Heath’s graceful walking accompaniment, filling in the spaces with his expected lyricism.
Equally, on a bright workout of the Gershwin’s ‘Who Cares?’ the bassist and drummer push the pianist along on his three-chorus solo. The first is full of thoughtful single lines—hear on the first two A sections of the first chorus how Kay’s almost stuttering-cymbal work adds a subtle hint of tension before he evens it out into a straight swing—the final chorus ends with a series of chordal jabs. Heath and Kay never intrude in providing an unshakable bed of sound that spurs Evans on, an approach that was the opposite to the constant three-way communication he engaged with bassist Scott LaFaro and drummer Paul Motian in his working band at the time. The license their approach gives spurs Adderley throughout his five-chorus statement that is a cascade of ideas that skirt along ‘Who Cares?’s framework. In his theme statements, Adderley embodies the tongue-in-cheek optimism of the song’s lyrics.
This approach to interpreting a standard guides a quiet take on Gordon Jenkins’ ‘Goodbye.’ Frank Sinatra’s slow, cinematic rendering of Nelson Riddle’s arrangement of it on his 1958 album Only the Lonely is close at hand here. Evans’ answers to Adderley’s phrases on the opening theme statement echo Riddle’s chart and the slope of the altoist’s line follows Sinatra’s approach even as the peaks and valleys aren’t as extreme while the sound he coaxes out of his instrument shows the strong influence of Benny Carter. A floating version of ‘Nancy (With the Laughing Face)’ underscores Know What I Mean?’s connection to Sinatra.
The album is also often oriented around how a tag can create a mood of sustained wonder before resuming a cycle of harmonic progression. The album opens with one of Evans’ most famous compositions, ‘Waltz for Debby,’ which uses a tag during its final, wistful build. The version here is breezier than how it is usually approached, especially when it shifts from waltz to 4/4 time. Adderley and Evans’ solos are nicely effervescent. When playing the theme, Adderley plays the tag full of childhood joy the keeps the melancholy of the lyrics that Gene Lees would write for the song at bay. It may not be the deepest reading of the song but the pleasure of hearing it obliterates such a reservation.
Clifford Jordan’s ‘Toy’ employs a tag to add a rhapsodic close to the obstacle course of the song’s changes. The theme is lyrically crisp in Adderley’s hands and his solo is full of the warmth and generosity that was at the heart of his artistry. The tag on the final chorus of his solo slows down the momentum for a series of lovely phrases. Evans digs in on his solo, attacking the beat which he eases off of as he reaches the tag of his first chorus for a chordal impression that is truly stunning and profoundly inventive.
Evans recorded Earl Zinders’ waltz ‘Elsa’ for his album Explorations in between the first and second session for Know What I Mean? The version he put on tape with Adderley is a tad brighter by virtue of the altoist’s solo that sandwiches Evans’ thematic statement and short improvisation leading into a repeat of the theme. The use of a tag here allows the soloist to indulge in sumptuous phrases of longing such as when Evans ruminates on a chordal pattern during the tag in his solo.
The album concludes with the title track, co-credited to Adderley and Evans. There is no theme to speak of. Instead, the composition maps out—similar to ‘Flamenco Sketches’ from Kind of Blue—a series of modes on which to solo. The performance is structured like a palindrome. It begins with Evans alone. Adderley enters, along with Heath and Kay, to begin a ballad section in which the altoist and then the pianist carefully move through the series of scales. Once Evans’ completes his turn, Heath plays a funky passage. Kay then starts a pattern that alternates the toms with cross-sticks with Evans comping behind them to begin the up-tempo section of ‘Know What I Mean?’ Adderley structures his solo around a melodic fragment that is the closest thing that the composition has to a melodic motif.
After the first chorus, Kay settles into a more grooving pattern on the ride cymbal and snare. Adderley repeats the cycle one more time and Evans then takes over with a trill that leads into a statement full of staccato phrases that rise and fall. Adderley returns for a second ballad solo. Evans then plays another solo passage to close the tune and the album as well.
‘Know What I Mean?’ is a extraordinary performance not only in that it is one of the few that re-captured the spacious spirit of Kind of Blue but also in that remains a shorthand for the album on which it appears. It is an argument against the folly of typecasting; in this particular case, that Adderley was a soulful hard bopper and Evans was a studious balladeer. On Know What I Mean?, Adderley plays as searchingly as Evans and Evans plays as cheerily as Adderley. Maybe that’s why it’s my favourite recording of Cannonball Adderley. When I first heard it over 20 years ago, I immediately reached up to press play again after the final notes of ‘Know What I Mean?’ to hear the album a second time. I almost never do this.
But, I would go even further. I think it’s Adderley’s best album. It’s the one I’d pull out to argue that he was every bit the equal of Davis, Coltrane and Evans.
KWIM is fantastic. If I had to pick one Cannonball album though, it would be Cannonball and Coltrane in San Francisco.
A great album, and a great piece! When I first heard Kind of Blue, I was much more impressed by Cannonball's playing than Coltrane's. I would come to appreciate Coltrane later, but Cannonball was my way into jazz saxophone.