Bobby Hutcherson - Dialogue
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Free Music Notes for Dialogue
Free Music Review: Excellent
Hit: 4 Stars
Bobby Hutcherson is one of those musician's musicians you just can't pin down, He starts his career doing hard bop. Turn around, he is as edgey as firebrand Archie Shepp when Shepp drafted the vibes player for his band. This avant garud.......wait a minute, he is cooking a soul jazz record, San Francisco. A few months pass, and he is exploring race politics on Now with Gene McDaniels.
Dialouge is classified as an avant-jazz record, and this does have its merits. There is some fantastic open jamming here. Listen to the fourth track. But this label also sells this album short. There are blues jams, a wonderfully errie march, and a hard bop cooker that opens Dialouge.
Blue Note in 1965, when this was recorded, was an interesting record company. It did not have the firebrand reputation of Impulse!, where the heaviest of the heavies developed the "new thing." But Blue Note allowed its hard bop roster to experiment with the avant gaurde as it became more and more dominent. By 1965, Coltrane had made Ascention, and the new thing was king. Cecil Taylor took this to the limit on Blue Note, but for most on the label, avant gaurde was only another spice for the stew.
Dialouge is one of the best products of this brief window in jazz, where the floodgates opened and anything could musically happen, and usually did.
Listen to this Dialouge happen.
Free Music Review: Hutcherson's first
Hit: 3 Stars
I've always been a little puzzled by the reputation of this album, which is regarded with something like awe by Blue Note aficionados. It's of course a landmark in the label's experiment in the 1960s with avantgarde jazz, & is also notable as being Hutcherson's first disc as a leader, & as fielding what's basically the house "avantgarde" team: Hutcherson, Hill, Hubbard, Rivers, Davis, Chambers. Between them these musicians appeared in various combinations on classics of the period such as Dolphy's _Out to Lunch_, Hill's _Point of Departure_ & Moncur's _Evolution_.& yet I find this an album easier to admire than love (unlike those last three discs I named). Part of the problem is that often the musicians are on instruments I don't especially enjoy hearing them on. Sam Rivers is on flute for two tracks, bass clarinet for one (the long title-track); & Hutcherson is using marimba for half the album. "Catta" is the strongest, most distinctive composition here, the creation of Andrew Hill: it's in 8/8 time, with a grinding repetitive piano accompaniment which is actually often rather more absorbing than the solos over top of it (Rivers is in rather middling form here; Hubbard & Hutcherson much better). The dissonantly harmonized waltz "Idle While", the soulful "Ghetto Lights" & the quite straightforward blues "Jasper" (an outtake from the session, for some reason--it could easily have fit on the original LP) are likeable; but I find the two "free" tracks, "Les Noirs Marchant" & "Dialogue", rather tough going. They are interesting for being quite unlike what anyone else what doing in free jazz at that moment, their spacious interplay anticipating European free-improv rather than being at all like the work of Ayler, Coleman & Coltrane. Still, almost 17 solid minutes of this rather fugitive interplay bogs the album down somewhat.
A "classic" I suppose, but it's one that seems to me ultimately almost time-locked. Still, with most of Hutcherson's Blue Notes enjoying only brief lives in the catalogue before they disappear, it's certainly worth acquiring. Curious how the careers of these players were so soon to diverge, with Hutcherson & Hubbard never sounding this adventurous again after the 1960s, while Rivers & Hill continued on their stubbornly independent musical paths.