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Trumpeters. Friends. Rivals. 60 Years Ago, the Pair Made Jazz History. - The New York Times
Trumpeters. Friends. Rivals. 60 Years Ago, the Pair Made Jazz History.
"Over two nights in Brooklyn, two musicians at a crossroads — Freddie Hubbard and Lee Morgan — went head-to-head in a pair of sizzling gigs.
“There was a bar right there,” a Crown Heights, Brooklyn, resident named James said in early March, pointing to the deli at 835 Nostrand Avenue, at the intersection with President Street. “Long time ago, though.”
Sixty years ago, the Black social club that once occupied that corner hosted a jazz concert that is so storied, it has a title: the Night of the Cookers. Of the dozens of performances that the trumpet star Freddie Hubbard led in the mid-1960s, his two nights at La Marchal on April 9 and 10 featuring his friend and chief rival, Lee Morgan, are heralded as arguably the most celebrated jazz gig in the borough’s history.
“That was one of the records that made me say, ‘You gotta go find your own thing,’” the trumpeter and composer Terence Blanchard said in a phone interview, referring to the recordings from the gig that were first released on LP in 1966. “They both had great sounds on their instruments, but they were very different.”
The Night of the Cookers was a night of tension. Hubbard and Morgan, both born in 1938, were the hottest trumpet players in the business as they turned 27, though each was at his own crossroads. Hubbard, always ambitious, was securing his future as a bandleader; Morgan was struggling with addiction while watching the improbable rise of his hit record, “The Sidewinder,” on the pop charts.
An engineer named Orville O’Brien was rolling tape as the bandstand filled with heavyweights including James Spaulding on alto saxophone and flute, the pianist Harold Mabern Jr., the bassist Larry Ridley, the drummer Pete LaRoca and another special guest, Big Black, on congas. Well-dressed Brooklynites, including musicians like the trumpeter Kenny Dorham, filled the spot to capacity. A crowd of standees hovered near the bar.
“When anybody mentions Night of the Cookers, I can see it as if I was there again,” said the trumpeter Eddie Henderson, who sat in the front row both nights. “I was at their feet, looking up at Freddie and Lee, and I was screaming and yelling. When I hear that record, I can hear my voice.”
Henderson, who now plays with the Cookers, a supergroup named after the gig, grew up idolizing Hubbard and Morgan. “When I discovered what great trumpet players they were, I began following them around like a little puppy dog,” he said in a phone interview. While in medical school, Henderson spent his weekends driving up to New York from Washington, D.C. to hang out with his heroes. “I drove Freddie to that first night of Night of the Cookers. Man, he was flexing his muscles like Arnold Schwarzenegger!” he recalled with obvious glee.
On the way home, the typically brash Hubbard was reflective. “I stopped in front of Freddie’s house, and we talked for about a half-hour, just sitting in my car,” Henderson said. “Before he got out, Freddie asked me, ‘How did you like Lee?’ I said he was great. Freddie says, ‘I hate that [expletive]’.”
Hubbard and Morgan were, in fact, close friends. (Hubbard died from complications of a heart attack in 2008; Morgan was shot by his girlfriend and killed in 1972.) Hubbard was three months older. Morgan was the first to break out. At 18, he was touring with Dizzy Gillespie’s big band and making records under his own name for Blue Note. By 1958, he had joined Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers and was winning jazz polls.
Hubbard arrived in New York that year and went straight to Birdland to witness the club’s famous jam sessions. There, he encountered Morgan for the first time. “When I looked up on that stage and saw him playing, I was ready to go back to Indianapolis,” Hubbard told Jazz Improv in 2006. “He was so strong and cocky. He thought he was the Wiz, which he was at that time.”
When Morgan’s momentum was hampered by addiction, Hubbard replaced him in the Jazz Messengers and started building his own legend. Hubbard’s technical command, as heard on his composition “Thermo” with the Messengers and on his own recordings for Blue Note and Impulse!, threw down a gauntlet for other trumpeters.
While club hopping in the mid-1960s, Henderson witnessed a camaraderie between the two. “I would be driving Freddie around and he would say, ‘Let’s go hear Lee,’” Henderson recalled. “We would be in the audience and Lee would see us and invite Freddie to come on up and he would say, ‘Naw, I came to hear you.’ And vice versa. It was really something to see those two guys at the top of their game and with so much love for each other.”
By the time of the Night of the Cookers, Hubbard and Morgan had both matured into respected figures in jazz. After his blockbuster hit “The Sidewinder,” with its signature boogaloo beat, Morgan recorded “Search for the New Land” as artistic statement and social commentary. Hubbard capped his Blue Note stint with “Blue Spirits,” a classic that he told Nat Hentoff in the album notes was “all the things that are happening today — the civil rights movement and the thrust for dignity beyond civil rights.”
The concerts were instigated by Jest Us, a group of young women whose mandate was to secure gigs for their musician husbands. “A lot of what people of color have done has no value in this country unless we find a way to cover ourselves, record ourselves, promote ourselves,” said Patricia Hayes, who was married to the drummer Louis Hayes at the time. “That’s why we put on Night of the Cookers at La Marchal. We had these geniuses, talented virtuosos on all instruments, and they were not getting what they should based on the talents they were bringing to the table.”
La Marchal opened in June 1961 as a space for luncheons and other social occasions, with a capacity of 200. The venue presented local combos and hosted African dance lessons but, strictly speaking, it was not a jazz club.
“The Blue Coronet was the place in Brooklyn that presented jazz musicians, but the money was funny, if you know what I mean,” Hayes said with a giggle during a recent phone conversation.
The Cookers event didn’t just sell tickets — it moved “a whole lot of tickets,” Hayes emphasized.
“La Marchal never had such a night of business as those two nights,” she added. “And it went so late, I think they had to throw us out! It was so much fun. We didn’t know how tired we all were until both nights were over.”
Spaulding remembered La Marchal had a downstairs dressing room for the musicians. “When I came up from the basement after I unpacked my instrument, I couldn’t even get up on the bandstand, there were so many people,” the 87-year-old saxophonist said in an interview. “The bar was packed!”
O’Brien, a peripatetic sound engineer and jack-of-all-trades who also flew airplanes, was one of the few Black engineers of the 1960s recording modern jazz. He captured the evenings on reel-to-reel tape and sold four of the performances to Blue Note for release. “The Night of the Cookers, Vol. 1,”featuring “Pensativa” and “Walkin’,” hit the shelves in 1965. A year later, Blue Note’s remaining material, Hubbard’s “Jodo” and “Breaking Point,” was released as a second volume. O’Brien’s other tapes from the four sets played each night have not surfaced.
“We all know that there is some other stuff out there,” Blanchard said optimistically, speculating that the lost tapes might have ballad features for each trumpeter.
The recording is a meaningful one for Don Was, who’s served as president of Blue Note since 2011. “James Spaulding! Man, I don’t know if he was ever captured playing better than those nights,” he said in a video interview. “And the rhythm section, they’re swinging relentlessly. People sometimes complain about the recording quality of that album. I happen to love it because it is the 1965 equivalent of immersive audio. It puts you in that room, man. And it’s such a glamorous, romantic image. I don’t know what that club was like but I can picture it — subterranean, smoky and filled with groovy people.”
The trumpeter and producer David Weiss, who leads the Cookers, said, “With studio recordings you hear the polished versions of the tunes and that is why those records become classics. But with live, you’re hoping for that special moment where the band gels, and you reach that peak. For me, that’s Freddie Hubbard on ‘Jodo’ and Lee Morgan on ‘Walkin’’ from ‘The Night of the Cookers’.”
“Breaking Point” featured both trumpeters, but they really challenged each other on the Clare Fischer bossa nova tune “Pensativa.” Morgan, using a Harmon mute, was first to solo, followed by Hubbard on open horn. The two then exchanged 8-bar, 4-bar and 2-bar statements culminating in an overlapping interplay — or perhaps melee — until the ecstatic La Marchal audience just couldn’t take it anymore. It’s 22 minutes of fierce music.
“Compositionally, ‘Pensativa’ is one of the hardest songs for anyone to play,” the trumpeter Keyon Harrold said by phone, “but these guys make it sound so easy and so beautiful.” The trumpeter, educator and podcaster Nabaté Isles concurred: “That tune is so difficult. It goes through a lot of keys as it flows and you have to nail each change.”
The way the two trumpeters inspired and elevated each other during the extended battle remains an inspiration for Harrold. “That session was one of the reasons why I moved to New York City,” he said. “I wanted to feel what that energy could possibly be like. The best jazz musicians, you know, late night and just going at it.”
“The Night of the Cookers” was one of the last Blue Note albums with artwork designed by Reid Miles, who was responsible for the label’s memorable early visual aesthetic. The following year, Blue Note’s founder Alfred Lion sold the company and retired. The famous Brooklyn cutting session with Hubbard and Morgan marks the end of an era.
“The music is really burning, the artwork is great, and it’s on Blue Note,” the producer Zev Feldman said. “What can I say? It’s folklore!”
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Ornette Coleman - The Jazz Musician Interview
Ornette Coleman - The Jazz Musician Interview
© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.
In looking for a way to represent Ornette’s approach on these pages, I searched for a piece that contained his conceptualization of Jazz as explained in his own words. I think the following comes as close as any that I’ve researched in doing just that.
The interview was conducted by Quincy Troupe and appeared in the November 1981 edition of The Jazz Musician. Ornette died on June 11, 2015.
Ornette Coleman is one of the most influential musicians to emerge in the post-bebop period. The possibilities he opened up for improvised music in the late fifties and early sixties, when he scrapped the conventions of Western harmony and pitch for a conception that was both a leap into the future and a recovery of the blues past, show no signs of being exhausted, and the implications of his more recent work, involving symphonic composition, free-funk, and the "harmolodic" system, are now being worked on by a new generation of musicians, many of whom are alumni of his bands.
Born in Fort Worth, Texas, on March 9,1930, Coleman has been an enigma for many years inside and outside the music world. Loved and respected by many, he has nonetheless been maligned for his ideas and innovations, particularly in his first decade of public life. Even more than John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, and Eric Dolphy, Coleman served as a magnet for the charges of charlatanism that raged in the free-jazz wars of the Sixties, but his formidable talents as both instrumentalist and composer have made his place in the history of instrumental music secure. Only Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and Coltrane have had a more dramatic effect on the practice of jazz.
His conversation resembles his music in its disregard for linguistic convention and for the liberating effect it can have. A certain amount of editing has been done on the transcript, but the greatest number of conceptual knots have been left untied. Coleman understands how things harden and ultimately die of the sense people make of them (see his discussion of method below). His inventions have always tended to subvert the usual dead verities. His first classic band, a quartet with Don Cherry on trumpet, Charlie Haden on bass, and either Billy Higgins or Ed Blackwell on drums, simultaneously developed and obliterated the parameters of bop.”
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Legendary Indian tabla player Zakir Hussain dies at 73
Legendary Indian tabla player Zakir Hussain dies at 73
Getty Images“Zakir Hussain, one of the world's greatest tabla players, has died at the age of 73.
The Indian classical music icon died of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a lung disease, at a hospital in San Francisco, his family said in a statement.
Hussain was a four-time Grammy award winner and has received the Padma Vibhushan, India's second-highest civilian award.
Through his performances, he transformed the tabla into a globally loved solo instrument that was the star of the show.
The tabla - a pair of drums used in north Indian classical music - was historically viewed as an accompaniment to the main performance.
As news of Hussain's death broke, tributes have begun pouring in.
Nayan Ghosh, who plays the sitar and tabla, called the news "devastating" and said that his association with Hussain went back 60 years to their childhood.
"He was a pathbreaker, a game-changer, an icon who put tabla and Indian music on the world map by transcending the boundaries of genre and inspiring generations of artistes," he told the BBC.
Born in Mumbai in 1951, Hussain began training under his father Ustad Allarakha Khan, a tabla maestro himself.
Hussain performed his first concert when he was just seven years old.
"In later years, his masterful dexterity and creative genius led to his becoming one of the most sought-after accompanists to the very best of Hindustani classical musicians and dancers," wrote Nasreen Munni Kabir in a biography of him published in 2018.
Reviewing his 2009 performance at New York's Carnegie Hall, the New York Times described him as "a fearsome technician but also a whimsical inventor".
"So he rarely seems overbearing, even when the blur of his fingers rival the beat of a hummingbird's wings," it said.“