Red Clay [Bonus Track] [Remaster]

Performer: Freddie Hubbard
Artist: George Benson; Herbie Hancock; Stanley Turrentine; Ron Carter; Billy Cobham; Lenny White; Joe Henderson
Engineer: Rudy Van Gelder
Distributor: Sony Music Distribution (

Notes: Personnel: Freddie Hubbard (trumpet); Joe Henderson, Stanley Turrentine (alto saxophone); Herbie Hancock (piano); Johnny Hammond (electric piano, organ); George Benson (guitar); Ron Carter (bass); Lenny White, Billy Cobham (drums); Airto Moreira (percussion). Producer: Creed Taylor. Reissue producer: Didier C. Deutsch. Recorded at Van Gelder Studios, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey; Southgate Palace, Los Angeles, California between January 27, 1970 and July 19, 1971. Includes liner notes by James Isaacs. All tracks have been digitally remastered. This may be Freddie Hubbard's finest moment as a leader, in that it embodies and utilizes all of his strengths as a composer, soloist, and frontman. On Red Clay, Hubbard combines hard bop's glorious blues-out past with the soulful innovations of mainstream jazz in the 1960s, and reads them through the chunky groove innovations of 1970s jazz fusion. This session places the trumpeter in the company of giants such as tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson, pianist Herbie Hancock, bassist Ron Carter, and drummer Lenny White. Hubbard's five compositions all come from deep inside blues territory; these shaded notions are grafted onto funky hard bop melodies worthy of Horace Silver's finest tunes, and are layered inside the smoothed-over cadences of shimmering, steaming soul. The 12-minute-plus title track features a 4/4 modal opening and a spare electric piano solo woven through the twin horns of Hubbard and Henderson. It is a fine example of snaky groove music. Henderson even takes his solo outside a bit without ever moving out of the rhythmnatist's pocket. "Delightful" begins as a ballad with slow, clipped trumpet lines against a major key background, and opens onto a mid-tempo groover, then winds back into the dark, steamy heart of bluesy melodicism. The hands-down favorite here, though, is "The Intrepid Fox," with its Miles-like opening of knotty changes and shifting modes, that are all rooted in bop's muscular architecture. It's White and Hancock who shift the track from underneath with large sevenths and triple-timed drums that land deeply inside the clamoring, ever-present riff. Where Hubbard and Henderson are playing against, as well as with one another, the rhythm section, lifted buoyantly by Carter's bridge-building bassline, carries the melody over until Hancock plays an uncharacteristically angular solo before splitting the groove in two and doubling back with a series of striking arpeggiatics. This is a classic, hands down. ~Thom Jurek RED CLAY is easily one of trumpeter Freddie Hubbard's finest albums. Falling cleanly between the straight-ahead hard bop of his mid-1960s releases and his more accessible '70s ventures, this is an irresistible mix of electric and acoustic jazz, elevated by dazzling technical proficiency and funk-infused rhythms. Hubbard displays his trademark compositional skill here, with memorable melodies, open and often shifting tempos, and attention to tonal color and atmosphere. RED CLAY also boasts spectacular personnel: Joe Henderson on tenor sax, Herbie Hancock on electric piano, Ron Carter on bass, and Lenny White on drums. Every musician here is marvelously adept at playing both inside and outside, and each proves his mettle as a sensitive group player and a soloist (particularly Henderson and Hancock). White and Carter's rapport pushes the group toward quicksilver bop tempos ("The Intrepid Fox") and in-the-cut grooves (the title track). The reissue contains an incendiary version of "Red Clay" with a different lineup, including guitarist George Benson and percussionist Airto Moreira.

Mojo (Publisher) (6/02, p.125) - "...A rigorous purveying of muscular 2-chord, hard-bop-to-light-fusion improvisations over frantic boogaloo beats..."

Freddie Hubbard has always been a trumpet player of great facility, suppleness, and polish. Following his breakthrough with the Jazz Messengers in the late '50s, his burnished tone became a focal point of innumerable Blue Note albums of the '60s, both as leader and sideman. After a foray into fusion in the '70s, he returned to the hard bop of his early career.

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