The Rambunctious CTI of 1970: Freddie Hubbard, Joe Farrell & Stanley Turrentine
Highlighting three albums from 1970 when CTI's jazz was red hot
Welcome music lovers once again!
Today, my essay is on three of the albums that CTI, the record label arguably most associated with the smoother jazz that emerged in the seventies, put out in 1970, the first year when it was an independent label. Freddie Hubbard’s Red Clay, Joe Farrell Quartet and Stanley Turrentine’s Sugar could be described as rambunctious to one extent or another. That spirit would gradually disappear from CTI recordings as the ensembles got larger and the sound became more and more consciously commercial. All three remain exciting documents of a fertile era in jazz.
I hope you enjoy the essay and will share your thoughts as well.
Coming up at the end of this month will be my second primarily paid post. Free to all will be a fairly quick hit on three archival releases that came out last fall with an update behind the paywall on what I’ve been listening to in January in my record room and how my Substack is doing. If you’d like to get the full post, I hope you may consider taking out a paid subscription to my Substack to support my work.
Until next time, may good listening be with you all!
There’s a certain reputation that sticks to Creed Taylor Incorporated Records, CTI for short. Music that is slick. Jazz adjacent rather than purely jazz played by a group of musicians that would number in the dozens. It often had deep crossover appeal. Eumir Deodato’s first for the label, Prelude, with its extremely funky adaptation of the opening of Richard Strauss’ Also sprach Zarathustra that was the theme to 2001: A Space Odyssey, was a massive hit and became the prototype for the CTI LP whether on the label itself or its subsidiary Kudu. Label stalwarts like Bob James, Grover Washington, Jr., Patti Austin and Hubert Laws all made music for CTI that floated outside of genre. That was by design.
Whether Creed Taylor was always successful in doing so is a matter of debate. Going back to Deodato, the follow-up to Prelude, called just Deodato 2, was such a bald rehash of its predecessor that I’m not sure I’ll ever spin it again (for the record, I think Prelude is just about a perfect album).
Taylor began CTI in 1967 as a subsidiary of A&M. Antonio Carlos Jobim’s Wave was CTI’s second release (the first being Wes Montgomery’s A Day in the Life). It managed to be both bossa nova at its classiest and sophisticated, literate easy listening. When CTI went independent three years later, Jobim’s Stone Flower was among the first half-dozen albums Taylor put out. It’s almost as exquisite as Wave but a little more advanced and a little less calculated. Laws’ Crying Song was the first of CTI’s indie era, a re-release from a brief moment when Taylor shifted gears and focused on folk and pop music and was in line with Montgomery’s very mainstream releases in 1967 and 1968 before he passed away.
Three other of CTI’s early indie releases point to something very different, the beginning of a brief, brash era for the label during a very fertile, if unheralded, moment in jazz.
Recently, pianist and critic Ethan Iverson has gained a lot of well-deserved notice for a long-form piece in The Nation (after reading it here, be sure to check out his fabulous Substack, Transitional Technology) about a branch of jazz prevalent from the mid sixties to the early seventies. He defines it as a jazz rooted in bebop, blues and hardbop with an often static harmony that retained a sense of swing. Think of albums like Herbie Hancock’s Maiden Voyage, Wayne Shorter’s Speak No Evil and McCoy Tyner’s The Real McCoy and you’ll quickly get what Iverson is writing about. Iverson convincingly argues that its roots are found in the music of Miles Davis and John Coltrane.
It was Creed Taylor, during the brief time he steered Impulse! Records, that brought Coltrane over to the label from Atlantic. It was Taylor as well who set the aesthetic direction for Impulse!. Glossy gatefold covers with photography and typography that popped. A distinctive orange-and-black spine that looked great on one’s record shelf and denoted a sign of musical taste.
That visual flair carried over as Taylor left Impulse! for Verve and then founded CTI. While Iverson would not include Taylor’s early productions for the latter as examples of the jazz on which he has shone a welcome spotlight, I see them, at the very least, as part of the deep inspiration that was in the air.
In a wide-ranging interview Marc Myers of JazzWax and the Wall Street Journal conducted with Taylor, he expressed ambivalence with how Blue Note was documenting this type of jazz. Taylor liked it but, “it wasn’t the direction in which I was interested in going. I thought the label was restricting its reach by having long improvised solos on albums.”
It’s an interesting comment and Myers, to his credit, calls him out on it. After the reissue of Crying Song, the next album out in the indie era of CTI was Red Clay by Freddie Hubbard, an album constructed as a conventional jazz album; four tracks totaling 38 minutes of music full of improvisation.
Taylor rationalized how Red Clay was different this way to Myers: “It was electrifying all the way through. It had an explosive quality. So if it took five or ten minutes for more explosions, I was all for it.” A little later, he provided a more persuasive answer. “Great music required room to stretch, Freddie needed the space for all the improvising he wanted. He was absolutely free to do as he pleased.”
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Hubbard was the brashest of the trumpeters to emerge in the wake of Clifford Brown. His phrases landed hard and his playing seemed fueled by urgency. He also was a versatile stylist. Hard bop was his home base but he could also venture out into the daring territory of the avant-garde. His work in the first half of the sixties on a series of albums on Blue Note chart a remarkable course from precocious upstart to bracing modernist. It was deepened by his work as a sideman on a large number of the decade’s most important albums with the aforementioned Maiden Voyage and Speak No Evil just the tip of the iceberg.
Red Clay took him to the frontier of jazz-rock at the start of the seventies. On the album, the rock is mostly muted, primarily expressed in the title track.
After a rubato opening in which Hubbard and tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson weave fanfare-like lines around each other while drummer Lenny White pounds away, Ron Carter, playing electric here, begins ‘Red Clay’’s distinctive bassline punctuated by Herbie Hancock on electric piano. Hubbard’s line, played in unison with Henderson, is a variation on Bobby Hebb’s ‘Sunny,’ similar to how Charles Earland’s ‘Black Talk’ used Lennon and McCartney’s ‘Eleanor Rigby’ as a jumping-off point.
Hubbard and Henderson had recorded together a few times prior to Red Clay but only twice when they solely comprised the frontline with neither instance: an Andrew Hill date from 1965 and an aborted session led by Hubbard a year later, being released until years later. Their dynamic, like any good frontline, is based on contrast. Hubbard’s swagger runs up against Henderson’s discursive asides. It is illustrated well through their solos on ‘Red Clay.’ In between, Hancock improvises a statement in his more earthy guise. All three follow an arc, starting lightly and then gradually escalating the heat until cooling down again.
A lot of what they are playing may be characterized as riffing but it far from noodling (by contrast, an outtake of John Lennon’s ‘Cold Turkey’ from the session finds Hubbard, Henderson and Hancock struggling to find something interesting to say). ‘Red Clay’ is a formidable performance. It gives off the feeling of the dial being moved. The remainder of the album charts a gradual return to the cutting-edge jazz of the time.
‘Delphia’ has Henderson on flute and Hancock on organ, and alternates between a ballad in rubato with a waltz. The latter section feels similar to Chicago’s ‘Fancy Colors’ from their second album, released the day before the first of three straight days of recording for Red Clay at the Van Gelder Studios. Hubbard, more than his contemporaries, seemed to shy away from ballad playing but when he did play one, he often did with a sense of melancholy which comes to the fore on ‘Delphia.’ It’s the slightest composition on Red Clay but offers a nice respite.
Each chorus on ‘Suite Sioux,’ which follows, balances two worlds. The first has White playing a straight metre against a very attractive call-and-response line between Hancock, and Hubbard and Henderson. The second is balls-to-the-wall and modal with White playing a steeple-chase rhythm at a rapid clip. The solos here taken no prisoners.
Hubbard goes first and about two minutes in, plays a bitonal line, one of his trademark licks, reminding of how much his playing was influenced by Coltrane. Henderson follows and plays a series of glissandos that choke off as he ascends to the top of his register and then it’s Hancock’s turn and he showcases his churchy side, a part of his playing that he had largely discarded by this time.
Red Clay ends with ‘The Intrepid Fox.’ There are no concessions made beyond Hancock being plugged in. This is the kind of fiery jazz that was being eclipsed, including through the music recorded on CTI. Of special note are the several moments during Henderson’s cooking statement where the rhythm section strays into the margins of the composition’s harmonic structure. It was in that netherworld where another CTI release from 1970 was firmly planted.
Joe Farrell was seemingly everywhere in the late sixties. He was part of the founding edition of the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra and also played in a trio setting with Elvin Jones. He was a member of the quintet of young lions on Chick Corea’s debut as a leader, Tone for Joan’s Bones and played on Hancock’s Fat Albert Rotunda as well as on Laura Nyro’s Eli and the Thirteenth Confession. His primary instrument was the tenor saxophone but he could play the soprano saxophone and flute just as well, and the oboe too.
His debut as a leader was for CTI and was recorded in July 1970, and released later that year. With Farrell were Miles’ rhythm section at the time: Chick Corea, Dave Holland and Jack DeJohnette. Another Davis regular at the time, John McLaughlin, guests on two tracks. It’s his thundering guitar chords that start the album—a thick blanket of sound that is deepened by DeJohnette’s slow-motion beat, every snare hit seemingly leaving an imprint in the ground. Farrell on tenor then comes in, playing the theme of McLaughin’s ‘Follow Your Heart.’ His lines are elongated, proclaiming like the guitarist and DeJohnette of a jazz-rock fusion just about as badass as Davis’ Jack Johnson sessions.
Farrell’s tone on tenor was bright and muscular with just the right amount of polish that would make him an in-demand studio player well beyond the jazz world. ‘Follow Your Heart’ is a ringer—good to note here that it’s the only track on the album on which Corea sits out—in that the rest of Joe Farrell Quartet is dedicated to balancing on a scale with structure on one end and freedom on the other.
‘Molten Glass’ is an impressionistic piece with Farrell on flute and Holland up close anchoring the theme. Corea’s comping is aggressive and DeJohnette keeps the contour of the time intact. ‘Circle in the Square’ is similar—it’s another composition that takes the next step in the legacy of the classic Coltrane quartet—but adds the twist of the scale constantly shifting. On the moments where there is a semblance of structure, it is a hardly a rigid one as DeJohnette constantly traipses around the best. He may be the best inside/outside drummer there has ever been in jazz. An example of the great unsettledness he can bring was recorded a week and a half after the Farrell session when he sat in with the Lee Morgan group at the Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach, California for a supersonic version of the trumpeter’s ‘Speedball.’ DeJohnette’s presence changes the sound of the Morgan band instantly (I say this not to demean the music of the group when Mickey Roker was behind the kit. Morgan’s Lighthouse’s recordings are extraordinary examples of long-form improvisation).
There are quieter moments on Joe Farrell Quartet, including two ambient interludes, ‘Collage for Polly’ and ‘Alter Ego.’ Farrell (on flute) and Corea have a spirited duet on the pianist’s ‘Song of the Wind’ that foreshadows their hypnotic read of ‘Crystal Silence’ on the first Return to Forever album from 1972 on ECM.
The album ends with the most un-CTI-like performance to ever appear on CTI. ‘Motion,’ written by Corea, is five minutes of energy music, wild and free, far away from the chill of Washington, Jr’s ‘Mister Magic’ just four years later.
An album that bridged the rambunctious CTI and the sedate CTI is Sugar, the first album that Stanley Turrentine made for the label and recorded in November 1970. Like Farrell, Turrentine’s sound was broad. His bluesy wail with a slight vibrato was tempered by a creamy articulation. He could preach a blues sermon but what he played couldn’t exactly be called soul jazz. He also had a stint in Max Roach’s group and had deep simpatico with both Horace Parlan and McCoy Tyner but he also couldn’t exactly be said to have been on the cutting edge.
Sugar points where Taylor would ultimately go with CTI. Playing with Turrentine is a mid-size ensemble with Hubbard, George Benson and organist Butch Cornel the principal soloists with the tenor saxophonist. Carter and drummer Billy Kyle rounded out the rhythm section. Lonnie Liston Smith Jr. on electric piano and Richard Landrum on percussion sweetened the group’s sound.
The album grooves primarily. The title track, written by Turrentine, struts like a spy-movie theme and has a largely static harmony. Turrentine’s solo is full of his trademark cries and the exuberant exclamations he often made at the end of a chorus. He meshes well with Hubbard—they had only recorded together once before for a Duke Pearson date in 1967—who tempers his playing just a bit to fit the mood of Sugar. Benson demonstrates well why he was the most exciting player on guitar since the emergence of Grant Green.
Cornell’s ‘Sunshine Alley’ had an inventive line with a nice switch on the bridge that gives the solos that follow a real thrust that sometimes lacked in the soul jazz of the late sixties and early seventies. The album closes with Coltrane’s ‘Impressions.’ Turrentine dials back the intensity usually associated with Coltrane’s take off on Miles’ So What.’ Still, his interpretation stretches for just over 14 minutes—no track on Sugar is less then ten—and generates some heat especially during Hubbard’s improvisation.
Sugar, to be sure, doesn’t push the boundaries like Red Clay or Joe Farrell Quartet did but through its emphasis on extended improvisations, it still pulses with those album’s rambunctious spirit. There would more daring albums to come on CTI like Hubbard’s Straight Life, Benson’s Beyond the Blue Horizon and Farrell’s Moon Germs, a gradually fading counterpoint to the mild-mannered label CTI became.
Ah, you're speaking my language! (See my post from yesterday about a fine album from CTI's A&M days.) I remember being warned away from CTI by jazz aficionado friends back when I was first dipping my toes in the genre, precisely because of the label's reputation for smoothness, but I've loved just about everything I've heard from the label — at least the late sixties to early seventies stuff. And I actually love Deodato 2; sure, it's a pretty blatant rehash of what made Prelude great, but it's such a fun listen that I don't mind.
Thank you for this revelatory essay. I got into CTI/Kudu because I became a fan of Grover Washington, Jr. and was fascinated by the sound on his albums. I have certainly heard of Hubbard, Farrell and Turrentine but have yet to hear their records. I think I know where to start now.