Wayne Shorter - Adam's Apple (1966)

No slight on the four musicians who directly contribute to making Adam's Apple such a memorable experience, but hearing this intriguing program of music in light of subsequent history brings to mind three additional associates of Wayne Shorter who were not present at the February 1966 session.

First and foremost is Miles Davis, whose then-current band featuring Shorter, pianist Herbie Hancock, bassist Ron Carter, and drummer Tony Williams was in its second year together and well on its way to being recognized as the second classic Miles Davis quintet. The legendary fivesome recorded "Footprints" eight months later on Miles's Columbia album Miles Smiles, and the success of that version (which actually saw release before the present take) helped to make the blues easily Shorter's most popular composition. Here, in its original arrangement, "Footprints" is in 6/8 meter throughout, and the heavy, pendular piano vamp suggests the feeling of the John Coltrane quartet. Davis recast the rhythmic terrain with Williams imposing an 8/8 meter against the original 6/8 as the band drifted between the three and four feelings for a more fluid and mysterious groove. Hancock's composition "The Collector" (a bonus track which first appeared in Japan) was also recorded under the name "Teo's Bag" by the Davis quintet two years after this performance, but in this instance the open form 4/4 swing feels conventional next to the version's unpredictable energy. Joe Chambers's contribution plays a critical role in generating that energy, and in the overall cohesion of all the present performances. While Chambers's name does not spring to mind as quickly as those of Art Blakey, Elvin Jones, and Tony Williams when considering Shorter's music in the 1960s, he did participate on four of the saxophonist's Blue Note albums of the period, where he proved equally sympathetic to Shorter's vision.

Jimmy Rowles, the second absent presence, wrote the haunting "502 Blues (Drinkin' and Drivin')" which could be described as a very Shorteresque ballad. The tune was originally recorded by the Bill Holman-Mel Lewis Quintet on the 1958 Andex album Jive For Five with the composer on piano and haunting muted trumpet by Lee Katzman. Here, it provides the first recorded sign of the mutual admiration in which Shorter and Rowles held each other. In the subsequent decade, Rowles returned the compliment on several of his own recordings by covering "Lester Left Town" (with Stan Getz), "The Chess Players" (in two versions), and three other Shorter compositions on a duo album with bassist George Mraz. It's a shame that Shorter and Rowles never found the opportunity to record together.

Finally, the spirit of Shorter's former frontline partner in Blakey's Jazz Messengers, Lee Morgan, hovers over the title track. "Adam's Apple" the tune proves that even an artist as singular as Shorter to bend to the soulful vamp formulations that made Morgan's hit "The Sidewinder" a template for so many subsequent Blue Note recordings. This is not one of the genre's notable successes, and one wonders if Shorter and company really had their hearts in the effort. That said, the saxophonist's use of the same riff as both entrance point to his solo and coda is a notable touch, and Hancock's ability to extend funk into outward-bound territory with his comping and improvisations is once again on display. When it comes to writing a catchy soul anthem, however, Shorter's magnum opus is "Tom Thumb" which he recorded with Bobby Timmons for Prestige a month before this session and reprised on his own 1967 Schizophrenia date - and which happens to be among the tunes reprised by the Rowlez/Mraz duo.

The remaining three compositions deserve far more attention than they have received in subsequent years. "Chief Crazy Horse" shows how the familiar 32-bar AABA form could still be empolyed with distinctive results, "Teru" is one of Shorter's most gorgeous ballads, and "El Gaucho" connects with Brazilian samba in both its rhythm and its manner of spinning fixed melodic material over elegantly mutating chords. It is rather startling to realize that all three of these gems have with rare exception been neglected during the past two decades, a period during which it has seemed that half of all new jazz albums have contained at least one Shorter composition. "El Gaucho" did get a twin-piano reading from Harold Danko and Kirk Lightsey on Shorter By Two in 1983, that Rowles's earlier efforts notwithstanding, can be seen in retrospect to have started the deluge of Shorter covers.

Lee Morgan - The Gigolo (1965)

Nat Hentoff was right on target when he predicted that The Gigolo would come to be regarded in a timeless session. Many Lee Morgan fans have cited the album as one of the trumpeter's best, and it needed features inspired playing on superior program of music. It has also won a special place in listeners' hearts because, as Hentoff could not have known at the time, it represents the final recorded example of one of the greatest trumpet/tenor sax front lines in jazz history.

Morgan and Wayne Shorter first joined forces in the summer of 1959 in Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, where their combination of fire, feeling, wit, and iconoclasm made instant magic. For next two years (until Blakey added trombonist Curtis Fuller to the band shortly before Morgan's departure), their conjoined sound defined one of the greatest periods in Jazz Messenger music on a series of Blue Note albums. As the leading voices in a quintet, they were also featured on albums at the time under the leadership of Wynton Kelly and Shorter on Vee Jay, and on Morgan's own release for Roulette. The Morgan/Shorter partnership on Blue Note, on hiatus for a period while the trumpeter battled personal demons, was reestablished in 1964 and continued intermittenly through 1967. Most of these later encounters involved sextet instrumentations, as on Morgan's Search For the New Land and The Procrastinator, and Blakey's Indestructible; but Night Dreamer (Shorter's first date as a leader), as well as the present sessions, gave us two more quintet gems.

Taken together, Night Dreamer and The Gigolo confirm that Morgan and Shorter remained eminently compatible despite developments in their respective careers that seemed to find them headed in seperate directions. Morgan was enjoying his greatest commercial success with his funky blues hit "The Sidewinder", recorded at the end of 1963, while Shorter was focused on more open and exploratory material as the new member and primary composer in Miles Davis's quintet, which he joined in the summer of 1964. Yet Morgan displays no hesitation in dealing with Shorter's haunting compositions on Night Dreamer, and the music there anticipates ideas Morgan would pursue in his own bands at the end of the decade. Shorter is similarly assured here, in what even at the time were considered the more traditional contours of the present music.

One major change that had taken place since the pair first met was Morgan's growing focus on composition. Unlike his early albums between 1956-1960, in which the vast majority of the writing was left to others, Morgan's Blue Note dates of the 1960s tended to focus heavily and sometimes exclusively on the trumpeter's own creations. His compositions here define a style that, while narrower and more familiar than that of Shorter, encompassed a range of forms and feelings. "Speedball" is the most famous of the originals (it quickly became Morgan's theme in live performances) and the most straighthead, and it includes a 16-bar interlude/coda that is as memorable as the primary 12-bar blues melody. The other two Morgan originals hark back to earlier works by the trumpeter without sounding like mere echoes. "Yes I Can, No You Can't" is clearly fashioned in the mood of "The Sidewinder", but employs a different chorus structure and some of its own harmonic wrinkles. "The Gigolo", heard here in two takes, brings the open 6/8 feel of Morgan's "Search For the New Land" into a structured chorus with a bridge, resulting in a form that recalls a contemporary Freddie Hubbard composition, "Blue Spirits". Each of Morgan's pieces contains a melody that stays in the listener's ear, the true sign of an accomplished writer.

The arrangement of "You Go to My Head" has also become a classic, and remade the standard for many subsequent musicians, in the way that John Coltrane did when he recast "Body and Soul" in 1960. Note also that "Trapped", the only issued performance from the first of the album's two sessions, was listed as Morgan's composition at the time of release but it is actually a Wayne Shorter piece. It might be described as a patterned blues, with ensemble choruses that underscore the rich blends the trumpeter and saxophonist archieved with regularity.

Little need to be added regarding the excellent performances here of the primary horns and the rhythm section. This was a highly compatible group, with each musician at the top of his game and clearly inspired by his partners. Morgan, Mabern, and Higgins had made similar magic earlier in June 1965 on Hank Mobley's Dippin', another title available in a RVG Edition.

Cannonball Adderley - Somethin' Else (1958)

"Miles had helped me when I first came to New York", Cannonball Aderley recalled in a 1960 article for The Jazz Review. "He told me who to avoid among the record companies, but unfortunately I didn't take his advice. Al Lion of Blue Note was one man he recommended".

Adderley's lament about not taking the trumpeter's recommendations to heart no doubt refers to both the early albums Adderley cut for Savoy and his more extensive output for the Mercury subsidiary EmArcy. In the same article, the alto saxophonist refers to the problems at Mercury, including limited control over the content of his albums and other restrictions made more onerous by the long-term agreement Adderley had signed with the company. This situation, plus the debts Adderley's working quintet had accumulated through the fall of 1957, brought him to a point at which he resolved to take greater care with all aspects of his professional situation. In October 1957 he disbanded his own combo and joined Miles Davis for what would prove to be a two-year stay. Shortly thereafter, Adderley began a transition out from under the EmArcy agreement that was not fully completed until February 1959, when the Davis sextet of the time minus its leader cut the album known alternatively as The Cannonball Aderley Quintet in Chicago and Cannonball and Coltrane.

While Adderley ultimately found a supportive home on Riverside, where he began recording in the summer of 1958 and teped the live Cannonball Aderley Quintet in San Fransisco disc in October 1959 that ensured the success of his reorganized band, he did manage to heed Davis's recommendation and create one album under the guidance of Alfred Lion. Somethin' Else was taped on 9 March 1958, nearly a month before the saxophonist made his first studio session under Davis's leadership. It carries such marks of the Davis input as the stealthy arrangement of "Autumn Leaves", which had grown much brisker by the time a later Davis band got around to recording it live in 1963, and the venerable "Love For Sale", which the Davis band recorded for Columbia three months later (though the track remained unreleased for nearly two decades). Other signs of Milesian influence are the calm, conversational delivery of the title track and the newfound lyricism in Adderley's playing that followed from his nightly experience at the trumpeter's side.

Credit for the intimate, economical force of the album should really be shared among Adderley and producer Lion as well as Davis, who was clearly putting several of his most refreshing insights into practice. The outstanding rhythm section that propels the music with such sureness and taste had ties to all three of the session's prime movers. Hank Jones had been present on Adderley's first recordings as a leader for Savoy, as well as on several early dates led by Cannonball's brother Nat. Like Davis and Blue Note iron man Art Blakey, Jones had also been an associate of Adderley's primary influence, Charlie Parker. Sam Jones was an old Florida friend of Adderley's who had joined the saxophonist's quintet at the end of 1956 and preceded to distinguish himself with Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk and on several recording sessions before signing back on for Adderley's second and ultimately successful turn as a leader. The instant rapport achieved by the quintet is thus the production of much shared and common history, though the tensile strength that they create throughout a totally unique feeling that can be attributed to the sensitive musicianship of all concerned, including the supposedly hard bopping leader and drummer.

In addition to the five compositions contained on the original LP issue of Somethin' Else,a sixth title from the session was unearthed in the Blue Note vaults and initially released in Japan in 1982. Logs contained no identifying information regarding the performance, and the track was given the name "Allison's Uncle" because Nat Adderley's daughter was born on the day it was recorded. Further research has revealed that the mystery tune is a Hank Jones composition that the pianist recorded as "Bangoon" with the Gigi Gryce/Donald Byrd Jazz Lab quintet for an album on the Jubilee label in August 1957.

Wynton Marsalis - Live at the House of Tribes (2005)

Jazz is not where you find it; jazz is everywhere, and Wynton Marsalis has consistently played it the world over for the last 25 years. He has led large and small bands in public and private situations across America, through Europe, Russia, Asia, Australia, Alaska, Canada, the Caribbean, South America and North Africa. Marsalis knows that the language of jazz is a lingua franca; when you swing, play the blues, deliver the romantic mood of the ballad, or lay into Latin rhythms, there is always a body of listeners ready to hear jazz as the spiritual elixir that it is. None of the talking of any sort means as much to a musician as the emotional force, the bond of soul and feeling, that gathers heat in the air when sound and the need to be moved meet. Then the space of performance and its circumstances are remade in the inimitable way we only expect from the invisible art of music.

The quality of such occasions accounts for why Marsalis has been selling out clubs and concert halls throughout his career as a leader. The endless, standing ovations, the packed dressing rooms of well-wishers and autograph seekers, the many presents brought by listeners, the small army of students he has inspired or taught or given instruments, and the family dinners to which he has been invited, all add up to encouragements to continue on his chosen task, which is to deliver the artistry and the feeling of jazz wherever and whenever he can.

The performance here is, as are all Marsalis recordings, a culmination of where he was at the time of documentation. It was captured at what is an almost annual winter performance at the House of Tribes on East 7th Street in New York's Lower East Side, a section of Manhattan where jazz, poetry, and theater have been presented in alternative situations for more than five decades. The performance space at the House of Tribes is very small but the sound is superb and the audience comes expecting to have its soul boiled in the hot oil of deep feeling. That audience is made up of all colors and is from all backgrounds and religions, a common feature of Lower East Side. For all of their differences, the people there have one thing in common; they love the propulsion of swing as it arrives in the sound of jazz. Theirs is a desire for the timeless quality of joy that the artistry of jazz packs into every second as the cold, formlessness of the moment is overcome by the heat of human personality and the refinement of empathetic interaction. Somebody could say they come looking for a groove, and somebody else could say that when Wynton Marsalis is at the House of Tribes, they get just what they are looking for -and as much of it as they can stand.

Those unaware of the expansiveness of Marsalis's career might be surprised to find him playing in a low-income neighbourhood for an audience of no more than 50 people. They would find that surprising because they know he is one of the biggest stars in the world of jazz and could command a substantial fee at any high style room or concert hall in New York City. Such people would be unaware that Marsalis comes from a lower-class community in New Orleans and has always been willing to support any organization that seeks to offer art to the people. In short, Marsalis has never been a doily afraid of the grease and the gravy on the table. He, like all great jazz musicians, is from the people and brings the message of the people, which is the fundamental good news of life. That is the optimism that defines the struggle at the center of the blues, the universal desire to meet dreams in the temporary forms of flesh and blood, or to present the sorrows and revelations of life as one has known them.

Of the House of Tribes, Marsalis says "It's a small community space where they can have theater. It has the type of feeling that those places have in the South. It is a grass roots situation. The people are devoted to keeping the community in touch with art. You can feel the dedication in the air. These kinds of places are all over the world and they exist for the same reason. People make them happen, regardless of money or attention or any of the things that we are often told you have to have in order to do something. For me, playing at the House of Tribes is like being at home, back in the environment of pure dedication, the kind of feeling that makes you want to become an artist".

"The audience at the House of Tribes is of all ages but that audience has that thing in common that is always true of jazz audiences. They come to hear people play, and they come to swing and have a good time. You can hear it in their responses, which are not cliché imitations of people having a good time. This is the sound of an actual good time, which makes you want to play more and play better. The audience can always give you that".

Though we were not there, we can now experience, over and over, first-class contemporary jazz deep in the blue pocket of swing and full of the creations one expects of its very best players. Greg Osby says that Marsalis is the most original and comprehensive trumpet player to arrive in jazz since Woody Shaw, and Shaw himself revealed his accurate sense of the future in something he told Maxine Gordon about the younger trumpet player. While they were listening to him in the concert, Shaw said he was absolutely sure that Marsalis was destined not only to take the trumpet to new heights, but that he would elevate the making and presentation of jazz music as well. Given all that Marsalis has achieved on every plane, that has proven to be true. But this recording is not about the breadth of Marsalis, it is about nothing other than playing jazz. In that context, Marsalis's extraordinary sophistication continues to deepen the power of his art while delivering it with the greatest command of his instrument since Dizzy Gillespie and Booker Little. "Green Chimneys" and "Donna Lee" should convert any doubters. The heat, sweep, scale, and substance of Marsalis's thematic inventions reiterate, at almost every captured moment, that he is, as Betty Carter once said to him "the destinity of the music. The music needed him. He had to appear, and he eventually did".

Wess Anderson, as made clear on "Green Chimneys" is a startlingly original master of the alto sax. His other equally original features prove him the kind of improvisor we hear very little of at this time of academic school boys playing memorized patterns. Though a young man, Anderson is the best version of old school; he is a genuine melody maker of the first order, heavy in his harmony, and glowing in his rhythm. "Above all" Marsalis says, "Wess has heavy soul. It goes deep but it's also bouyant, and he loves to swing all night. He and I have invaded jam sessions all over the world. Wess Anderson is always ready to play and spread that good feeling. That's why musicians and listeners love him".

"Green Chimneys" also reiterates the fact that Eric Lewis is another of the fantastic piano players that Marsalis has introduced to the jazz world. Lewis is possessed of a talent that expresses itself free of the Herbie Hancock and McCoy Tyner methods that have become perhaps too common among the less imaginative of the younger piano playeres. Kengo Nakamura and Joe Farnsworth are two of the most prominent rhythm section players of the day. They have control of their instruments, which means they never play too loud and throw off the balance of the band. They know how to listen, support, and drive. They are top of the line professionals with artistic sensibilities. The same can be said of guest percussionist Orlando Rodriguez.

When you put that all together, you get everything a jazz lover needs; swing, melodic invention, harmonic surprise, rhythmic freshness, and a collective sense of improvising impassioned and logical music on the wing, surely the great performance gift that jazz has brought to music. Enjoy this indelible hot scoop of soul. It was made amongst the people, and for the people, which means that the music had you in mind.

Wayne Shorter - Speak No Evil (1964)

Wayne Shorter has never taken the conventional approach to his career. His exceptional gifts as a saxophonist and composer has never been combined with a self-effacing stance that has set him apart from the outset. Where his contemporaries were grabbing every opportunity to record as leaders and chomping at the bit to form their own working bands, Shorter took a far more measured and audacious approach. Despite his stature as the most original and profound of the tenor saxophonists to emerge after Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane, and his similarly elevated status as a composer of uniquely original music, Shorter remained with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers from 1959 to 1964; then he continued to ignore the call of leadership and joined Miles Davis. Shorter's personal discography was similarly modest. Before signing a contract as a solo artist with Blue Note around the time he left the Messengers, he could only claim a pair of albums for Vee Jay under his own name.

Fortunately, what most listeners considered the long overdue collaboration of Shorter and producer Alfred Lion took place at a period of rapid growth and prolific output for the saxophonist. Speak No Evil, Shorter's third Blue Note session in eight months, captures a pivotal moment in his evolution. His tenor playing, clearly formed by both Coltrane (the urgent tone and bold harmonic choices) and Rollins (thematic continuity and frequently broad humor), had rather facilely been considered a variation on Coltrane's work by some, and the appearance of Coltrane stalwarts McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones plus former Coltrane bassist Reggie Workman on Shorter's previous Blue Note dates only underscored the comparison. Jones is once again present here; but the rhythm section is completed in this instance by Herbie Hancock and Ron Carter, Shorter's new associates in the Miles Davis quintet. Hancock and Carter bring a more open, space-conscious attitude to the music, one that Shorter into different areas without in any way diminishing the integrity of Jones's contribution. For his part, Shorter reveals a deeper lyricism and a more elegant use of unusual melodic shapes and harmonic extensions. Without sacrificing any power, his work had grown more poetic. His writing was evolving as well, "fanning out" as he puts it in his typically insightful comments to annotator Don Heckman. Shorter had already proven capable of retaining his compositional individuality while creating material for the specific needs of Art Blakey, and he would soon repeat this feat with the music he wrote for Davis. Here he is writing for himself, and the singular balanace of harmonic complexity and melodic grace, of assertion and calm that had marked such pieces as "Black Nile" and "Armageddon" (from Night Dreamer) and "Yes or No" (from JuJu) reached an even more exalted plateau with the six works heard here. The imagery, which Shorter clearly had in mind as indicated by his comments on the material, is conveyed in sound pictures that are no less apt for their structural unorthodoxies; and the overall themes of folklore and legend are realized as much by what Shorter leaves out as by what he includes. In these respects, and in such moments as the incredible opening tenor saxophone note on "Infant Eyes", it is tempting to claim the influence of the new boss on Shorter's music. Yet Shorter's ideas (what Joe Zawinul would call "the new thinking") were already headed in this direction eight months earlier on his Blue Note debut Night Dreamer, and Davis is on record as having sensed a kindred yet autonomous spirit in Shorter's music from his earliest days with Blakey.

The saxophonist could not have asked for more sympathetic musicians that the ones he recruited for this session, including his former Messengers mate Freddie Hubbard. Shorter paid them the respect their talents deserved by conceiving a program of challenging original music, and the band in turn honored him by meeting the challenge with total mastery. Together they created a body of music that has inspired musicians and listener s for over three decades, and which is supplemented in the latest RVG Edition of the album with a previously unissued take of "Dance Cadaverous". Jean Sibelius's Valse Triste, the composition that inspired "Dance Cadaverous", was coincidentally recorded by Shorter less than three months later in a sextet version, and can be heard on the Blue Note album The Soothsayer, where Hubbard and Carter are also present.

Lonnie Smith - Think! (1968)

The leader of Think! is one of two keyboard-playing Lonnie Smiths who emereged in the 1960s and have caused more than a bit of discographic confusion. The other, slightly older Lonnie Smith (Lonnie "Piano" Smith, if you will) recorded under that name with Roland Kirk and a few others. By the time he joined Pharaoh Sanders in 1969, he began using his middle name as well and was henceforth known as Lonnie Liston Smith.

The present Lonnie Smith (or Dr. Lonnie Smith, as he has taken to call himself in recent years) was born in 1942 in Buffalo and began his musical career while still a teenager in a doo-wop group that also included Grover Washington Jr. Fascination with Jimmy Smith's 1960 Blue Note album Midnight Special led Smith to the organ, an instrument he mastered without formal instruction. While sitting in with Jack McDuff's band in 1964, he met and immediately bonded with McDuff's guitarist George Benson. The encounter led to the formation of Benson's own quartet in 1966 (a band that would soon also feature drummer Marion Booker Jr.) and to Smith's recording debut with Benson and Columbia.

Benson's band made enough of a splash to earn Smith his own Columbia album, Finger Lickin' Good, but what really cemented the reputations of the guitarist and organist was their contribution to Lou Donaldson's 1967 Blue Note hit Alligator Boogaloo. Smith participated in two more sessions with Donaldson over the next year, and then landed his own contract with the label, with Think!, the first of five albums Smith recorded as a leader over the next two years.

The personnel involved here, and the variety of material featured, make this far superior to the organ-combo norm of the late 1960s. In addition to the soulful, still-underrated Melvin Sparks and the always reliable David Newman , the band includes trumpeter Lee Morgan, who had participated in some of the greatest organ jam sessions in history with Jimmy Smith a decade earlier. While taking his music into more contemporary post-bop areas at the end of his career, Morgan also began making occasional appearances with organists again. He returned for Lonnie Smith's next album, Turning Point and did guest turns with Blue Note artists Larry Young and Rueben Wilson, all in 1969. Two days before his murder in 1972, Morgan made his last studio appearance with another organist, Charles Earland on Prestige. As was the case on those other dates, Morgan never had to simplify his approach to accomodate the format (hear his turnarounds on "Slouchin") and the soulful content of his contributions were a given. He also blends well with Newman, who was Morgan's frontline partner on the trumpeter's 1967 Sonic Boom.

On "The Call of the Wild" and "Slouchin", a three-piece Afro-Latin percussion section under the leadership of Henry Brown is added. They lend a particularly orgiastic rhythm vibe to the former track. Norberto Apellaniz, credited as a second conga player here, was regularly heard on bongos in Brown's popular combo of the time, the Latin Soul Brothers.

The material is fairly straight-forward, with a minimum of harmonic movement, yet there is a variety in the arrangements and consistent quality in the solo contributions. Among the three covers is "Three Blind Mice" that borrows directly, albeit at a slower tempo, from the arrangement of the nursery rhyme that Curtis Feller crafted for Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers in 1962.

Smith's subsequent history is indicative of the struggles that all organists encountered. The rise of electric pianos and other keyboards in 1970 signaled what appeared to be the death knell of the Hammond B-3. Public interest dropped so precipitously that Smith's final Blue Note date, the presence of Benson notwithstanding, remained unissued for a quarter century. Odd Smith albums appeared on a variety of labels throughout the next two decades, until a few trio albums for the Japanese Venus imprint in the early 1990s reminded the world that the now-turbaned Dr. Smith remained at the peak of his powers. As these notes are written, Smith has just released a new collection under his own name on Palmetto. He continues his work regularly with Lou Donaldson, and has become the organist of choice for musicians of diverse styles and generations.

Lee Morgan - The Sidewinder (1963)

The gloss that Leonard Feather's liner notes provide Lee Morgan's career in the period immediately preceding The Sidewinder disguises what was the most dispirting stretch of the trumpeter's life. In the throes of a drug habit and after the Spring of 1961, no longer a member of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, Morgan spent two years in a kind of career limbo. What little recorded evidence exists, such as his January 1962 Take Twelve album for Jazzland, indicates that Morgan's trumpet playing remained impressive; but his dependency kept him from regular work, and a number of other young trumpet players including Don Cherry, Don Ellis, Freddie Hubbard and Booker Little stepped into the breach and attracted the public's attention.

Morgan's plunge into obscurity was so emphatic that, while back at home in Philadelphia, he reportedly heard a jazz radio program offer a Lee Morgan memorial tribute.

Fortunately for Lee Morgan and for jazz, he rallied; and Alfred Lion was there to document Morgan's new, rededicated self. The trumpeter had not been a Blue Note contract artist since 1958, having signed a deal with the Chicago Vee Jay label before his lone effort on Jazzland, yet he maintained a Blue Note presence from 1958-1961 through his work with Blakey and on his own 1960 album Lee-Way (made with Vee Jay's permission). Proof that Morgan was ready to move forward again was first heard on two Blue Note sessions from 1963 where he appeared as a sideman, Hank Mobley's No Room For Squares and Grachan Moncur III's Evolution. A month to the day after the Moncur album was taped, Morgan returned to Rudy Van Gelder's studios to record his own The Sidewinder.

What resulted was a surprise commercial hit. The title track took off, cracking the Billboard charts and ultimately serving as the soundtrack for an automobile advertising campaign. Morgan's attractive blues line, with the plunching sustained vamp that Barry Harris contributed to the arrangement and the clever harmonic wrinkle described in the original liner notes, transported the trumpeter from his recent nadir to the Hot 100. While it obviously had a significant impact on Morgan's career, "The Sidewinder" also encouraged Alfred Lion to attempt to duplicate this success with other artists in the Blue Note family. Rhythmically assertive, often over-extended opening blues tracks on subsequent Blue Note albums became the norm, though they rarely rose to Morgan's level of either inspiration or sales.

This fallout combined with sheer familiarity has left many listeners with negative feelings about "The Sidewinder" in particular and The Sidewinder in general. For them, a fresh listen should clear away the stale air of countless imitations, because the title track is filled with glorious playing. These musicians understood how to create a blues groove with feeling and intelligence, and the choices they make (Henderson's repeated figure in his second chorus and Harris's use of octaves when the piano solo begins, to cite two examples) provide lessons in how to effectively structure an improvisation that communicates. The rapport displayed throughout the album is a sign that important professional connections had been made, connections that in the case of Morgan and Higgins played themselves out over many subsequent Blue Note albums. Henderson's ability to galvanize other musicians' dates was announced in no uncertain times -his solo on "The Sidewinder" presages the similarly monumental tenor choruses he would lay down on Horace Silver's "Song For My Father" 10 months later- and the Harris/Cranshaw/Higgins rhythm section was reunited on Dexter Gordon's memorable 1965 album Gettin' Around.

Morgan's articulate descriptions of the music and the players plus Feather's astute analysis of the individual performances require only two additional comments. One concerns the alternate take of "Totem Pole", which might have sounded perfectly acceptable for the release if we did not have the superior master take. Hearing both in sequence illustrates how the slightest adjustments can lift a performance from the very good to the exceptional.

The second point concerns Lee Morgan the composer. When Morgan first recorded for the label as a leader between 1956-1958, he left the writing to others. After joining the Jazz Messengers, where he shared the front line with prolific composers Benny Golson, Hank Mobley and Wayne Shorter, and where Art Blakey always encouraged his sidemen to create original material, Morgan compositions began appearing with greater frequency, yet he still looked to others for the bulk of material on his own albums. Morgan's Jazzland LP was one of the first on which he wrote a majority of the tunes, and The Sidewinder found him responsible for all of the music for the first time.

So this album also announced that the new Lee Morgan was also a talented writer, a quality that would stand him a good stead on his subsequent Blue Note recordings.

Wayne Shorter - JuJu (1964)

This album is a central document from perhaps the central year in the artistic development of Wayne Shorter. It was recorded in August 1964, as Shorter completed a term lasting nearly five years as a member of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. One month later, the tenor saxophonist joined Miles Davis for what proved to be an even lengthier tenure. This was also the year in which Shorter signed a Blue Note recording contract, and embarked on an intensive documentation of music under his own name that fans and followers considered long overdue.

Shorter's contributions to not one but two legendary editions of the Blakey band as both soloist and composer/musical director exceed those of any other Messenger save Horace Silver. Free For All and Indestructible, Blakey albums recorded for Blue Note earlier in 1964, remain memorable examples of his Blakey period from late in Shorter's stay. He also contributed to several earlier Messenger sessions, and to Blue Note dates led by Freddie Hubbard, Donald Byrd, and Lee Morgan; but prior to 1964, Shorter's own recordings were surprisingly few in number. Before his Blue Note debut Night Dreamer was issued, Shorter's name had appeared on only two Vee Jay albums. That label's The Young Lions (a prescient title in more ways than one) might also be considered a Shorter date, given the prominence of his compositions; yet it, like most of Shorter's other studio appearances to that point, placed him in an ensemble with other horns. We now know that a Shorter quartet album had been cut in 1960, so "JuJu" is not chronologicaly his first work with such a rhythm section. It was the first to appear, however, which made this second Blue Note release a particularly revealing portrait.

The personnel Shorter enlisted for the album and the sound of the music they created makes consideration of the John Coltrane quartet so inevitable that the absence of reference to Coltrane in Nat Hentoff's liner notes must have been intentional. While he stressed the working relationship of Shorter and Workman, Hentoff might have added that Tyner and Jones had served in Coltrane's band almost as long as Shorter had in Blakey's, and that -before Jimmy Garrison became the bassist identified with classic Coltrane quartet music- Workman had filled the group's fourth slot. Several compositional elements employed by Shorter, including the triple meter of the title track and the harmonic suspensions on "Mahjong" and "Yes or No", had been popularized by Coltrane's group, while the size and urgency of Shorter's sound recalls Coltrane as well. Yet Shorter brought his own slant to bear, just as he put a different spin on Blakey's music than his predecessors in that band had provided. The pithiness of Shorter's expression, its combination of boldness and vulnerability, and the similar juxtaposition of structural sophistication and melodic directness in the writing signal the emergence of a truly unique style, one issuing from a mind that is highly analytical yet suffesed with the fantastic.

At this point, that style was clearly based in ideas that this particular rhythm section understood quite well. The music fits Tyner and Jones perfectly, especially in the pendular motion of several pieces, and one is hard pressed to imagine even so magnificent a trio as the Hancock/Carter/Williams unit of Miles Davis's quintet playing "JuJu" or "Mahjong" as effectively. Tyner, bursting with ideas throughout, takes dramatic advantage of his position as opening soloist on several tracks. Jones is power personified, and his complex polyrhythms are beautifully recorded. Both musicians add further evidence for the propositions that; great players who were recorded by several engineers sounded better when Rudy Van Gelder was engineering, and great players who recorded at Van Gelder Studios for several labels sounded best when Alfred Lion was producing. Above all, though, the band serves Shorter's vision, and it is just as easy to hear intimations of the saxophonist's future as any allusions to another ensemble's present. For two examples, note how "Deluge" anticipates "Tom Thumb" and the uncommon beauty that links "House of Jade" to "Infant Eyes".

As has been the case on several Blue Note sessions, compact disc technology allows the release of alternate takes, and the two heard on the latest RVG Edition version of this album are strong performances. The alternate "JuJu" is a model of urgency tempered by lyricism, though it lacks the abandon that ultimately makes the original master superior. On the other hand, the relaxed air of the alternate "House of Jade" creates a distinct aura that strikes this listener as more effective than that informing the more deliberate master.

Stanley Turrentine - That's Where It's At (1962)

At the time this album was recorded, few active musicians were as ideally suited for collaboration as Stanley Turrentine and Les McCann. Each was a young modernist with deep roots in the jazz tradition and both had risen to a prominent place in what annotator Dudley Williams refers to as "the new soul movement". Yet there were two obstacles to overcome before a Turrentine/McCann partnership could be forged. The pianist, though a native of Kentucky, lived and primarily worked in the Los Angeles area, while the saxophonist's domain was decidedly East Coast. There was also the matter of recording contracts, with Turrentine a Blue Note artist and McCann signed to Pacific Jazz. Recording projects with special guests from rival companies have become commonplace in recent years; but in the highly competitive 60s, independent jazz labels gave permission for their stars to appear elsewhere rarely if at all, and generally only when a reciprocal appearance could be arranged.

These problems were solved when McCann brought his successful trio (known as Les McCann Ltd) to New York for a stand at the Village Gate at the end of 1961. As the pianist tells the story in his liner notes to one of two Pacific Jazz albums that resulted, he met Turrentine while visiting the musicians' union, and the two immediately agreed to do an album together. A deal between the respective labels was struck, and Turrentine joined the pianist's trio, trumpeter Blue Mitchell, and tenor saxophonist Frank Haynes for the aforementioned live recording, taped on December 28th. Five days later, it was Turrentine's turn to play host, and the present collection resulted.

Both men are already had favorable experience in this tenor-plus-trio format. McCann's unit had recorded in support of Teddy Edwards on the 1959 album It's About Time, before ever taping a session of its own, while one of Turrentine's initial Blue Note efforts had been his Blue Hour parley with the Three Sounds. In this instance, however, the rhythm section was not a regular working trio. As the notes indicate, Herbie Lewis was in the process of leaving the Ltd, after a year long tenure and relocating to New York, while drummer Otis Finch was in the midst of his first major jazz gig with Turrentine's wife, organist Shirley Scott. Coincidentally, Lewis had recorded with Turrentine during an earlier New York visit the previous June, on Scott's Prestige album Hip Soul.

The material here is well-paced and surprisingly varied given that the first hour tracks are blues, with a good mix of tempos that allow everyone to shout, preach, and whisper at the appropriate moments. McCann contributed four titles, of which all, save the medium-tempo "Pia", which had also been recorded by his trio. Of those, the standout is "Smile, Stacey" which also had been taped at the Village Gate without added horns. This romping opener starts at a level of great intensity and then builds, like a Mingus-like six-against-four feeling early in the tenor solo. Given this dynamic performance, it is surprising that others have not reprised "Stacy" more frequently, although trombonist Fred Wesley did a nice arrangement for four horns on his 1991 disc Comme Ci Comme Ça. "We'll See Yaw'll After While, Ya Heah", the Ltd's signoff number first heard on a live album cut in San Fransisco, is given a full treatment here for the only time on record.

Stanley's "Soft Pedal Blues" and his brother Tommy's "Light Blue" complete the program. The latter, a relaxed 32-bar opus, had been previously recorde by Horace Parlan (with Booker Ervin and Grant Green) on Parlan's Blue Note album Up & Down, where Parlan included an introduction that is omitted in these versions. The alternate take included in the new version of the album as a bonus track provides fresh solo choruses from the featured players and Lewis.

As compatible as Turrentine and McCann proved to be, they went their seperate ways for the next quarter-century, reuniting only in 1984 at the time of the Blue Note label's reemergence for two tracks on the Turrentine album Straight Ahead. Their short-lived partnership, both here and on LesMcann Ltd in New York, suggests that there was much more soulful music they might have made together.

Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers - Moanin' (1958)

"Staying with the youngsters", a credo Art Blakey espoused from the bandstand of Birdland five years earlier, was reaffirmed in no uncertain terms on this album. The drummer had celebrated his 39th birthday three weeks before entering Rudy Van Gelder's studio for the return of the Jazz Messengers to Blue Note, following the group's brief affiliaion with Columbia, World Pacific, Savoy, Elektra, Bethlehem and RCA. This was a new group, with members seperated in age by nearly two decades; yet Blakey rose to the challenge much as the equally venerable Miles Davis did a few years later when introducing his ESP band of young players. In both cases new blood bred a new era, as well as leading in the present instance to one of the most beloved albums in jazz.

Excepting Pittsburgh native Blakey, this was an all-Philadelphia edition of the Messengers that found each sideman coming into his own. The precocious trumpeter Lee Morgan, no longer either a teenaged phenom or under the shadow of Dizzy Gillespie in the latter's trumpet section, had blossomed into an astounding stylist, and his power and expressive brilliance here sustain the maturation documented in the previous year on his own Blue Note sessions The Cooker and Candy. Bobby Timmons, himself only 22 yet a label familiar since his Cafe Bohemia session with Kenny Dorham, also emerged here from the ranks of fluent Bud Powell disciples to the ranks of a recognizable stylist whose affinity for the sanctified (as a soloist, and even more importantly as a composer) was critical in defining the era's soulful zeitgeist. Jymie Merritt's work was less familiar to jazz listeners of the time, yet (as a Leonard Feather's original notes make clear) his decade-long apprenticeship in rhythm and blues, blues, mainstream jazz and modern jazz had formed an approach to the bass that was a model of intelligent melodic choices, steadfast time and selfless strength. Notwithstanding the contributions of Morgan, Timmons and Merritt, there is no disputing that Benny Golson defined this edition of the Messengers. Three months short of his 30th birthday and the veteran of affiliations that overlap those of his hometown friend and contemporary John Coltrane, Golson was extremely well prepared to serve as a musical director of the group. Golson's playing and writing had been featured in the recently dissolved Gillespie orchestra that also included Morgan, as well as on several of Morgan's early Blue Note albums; but his contributions here are even more imposing. It was Golson who recruited his fellow Philadelphians for service with Blakey over the course of 1958, and while the sanctified Timmons composition "Moanin" became the album's runaway hit, it was Golson who was responsible for the majority of the material. He met the challenge of spotlighting the leader with the substantial "Drum Thunder Suite" (which delivers a wealth of melodic material while also creating a context for Blakey's exceptional mallet work) as well as the infectious "Blues March", which did as much to establish Blakey's trademark shuffle groove as "Moanin". The Messengers' "March" quickly eclipsed the original record version of the tune, which Blue Mitchell had cut with Philly Joe Jones drumming for Riverside four months earlier. Golson's more lyrical side comes through on "Are You Real" in the tradition of such earlier long-lined efforts as "Just By Myself", and the magnificent "Along Came Betty", as indelible a melody as any Golson has penned and perfectly orchestrated and executed to boot. These four compositions, as least two of which are classics, represent a level of output that was commonplace for Golson in the late fifties -and with "Moanin" added create a bounty of original material that any bandleader would envy. Golson's instrumentalist matched the earlier impact of Horace Silver and anticipated the contributions of such future Messengers as Wayne Shorter, Bobby Watson and Donald Brown. Timmons, who like Morgan served more than one term with the Messengers, would later supplement his more modest yet equally pivotal contribution to the Blakey book with "Dat Dere" and "So Tired".

None of this in any way diminishes Blakey's personal triumph here. Much like the dignified cover portrait by Buck Hoeffler (rather than Blue Note mainstay Frank Wolff), the album presents a definitive image of the drummer-leader, one that gave new emphasis to the strutting dance-oriented figurations in Blakey's arsenal. Some commentators were upset with this stress on the backbeat, although both the results here and in further editions of the band demonstrate that Blakey was still ready to lead more straight-ahead charges and delve further into the music's African and Afro-Latin sources. What the backbeat really delivers here is the complete Art Blakey, which makes this collection (originally known simply as Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers) one of the essential chapters in the history of jazz rhythm, and therefore, jazz itself.

Andrew Hill - Smoke Stack (1963)

Don Heckman states quite clearly that Smoke Stack was Andrew Hill's second visit to Rudy van Gelder's Studios for Blue Note. What could go without saying, given the pictures of previous issues that accompanied Heckman's notes on the back of the original LP, was that it was the fourth Hill album to be issued. Those numbers suggest how challenging the music included here sounded -then and now- as well as to the priority the pianist assigned to this music among the voluminous body of original compositions he brought to the label.

Producer Alfred Lion had clearly been excited by Hill, hearing in his playing and composing a deep and original concept akin to those of previous Blue Note discoveries, Thelonious Monk and Herbie Nichols. Yet Lion must have sensed that this particular quartet playing these seven originals would pose a challenge that listeners might feel unprepared to accept on the basis of his only previous effort, the iconoclastic though far more conventional quartet session Black Fire with Davis, Haynes and Joe Henderson, taped only a month earlier. So Hill was brought back a mere month after Smoke Stack for Judgement, with the same rhythm section plus Bubby Hutcherson. Perhaps the magnificence of Hill's next effort, the sextet Point of Departure from March 1964, would have delayed any of the pianist's unreleased music. The fact that Hill chose to document to the present configuration of piano, two basses, and drums so quickly in his recording career confirms the importance he placed in both the unusual setting and the music he crafted for it.

Employing two basses in a rhythm section had been used on previous occasions, most notably by John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman, although Hill's approach to the challenge differed in that he did not really hear his bassists as two equal voices. This is why Smoke Stack can not be fully understood if viewed as one of three Hill albums with the Davis/Haynes rhythm section. With the exception of "Verne", where Eddie Khan lays out, Davis is in truth more the second feature voice, one that -given the tonal and textural mesh of piano and bass- could assume a more constant and interactive role in a quartet setting than Henderson's tenor of Hutcherson's vibes.

The wizardly Davis fills this part to perfection, stressing the ambiguous edges of what at this stage remained odd but still defined structures. Khan is the accompanist here, and goes about his business in a self-effacing way (one can only wonder what magic might have arisen if a third Chicagoan, Wilbur Ware, had joined Hill and Davis in this effort). Khan met a number of musical challenges in recordings of the period with Henderson, Freddie Hubbard, Jackie McLean, and Max Roach, and shows his own exploratory bent in solos on "30 Pier Avenue" and "Ode to Von".

Roy Haynes is the perfect for the combustible control that this music evokes. He is constantly elaborating the beat without losing it, and his own tonal/textural mesh of empathic snare, tom-tom and cymbal figures creates a brilliant balance of its own with the perpetual thickening and thinning, rising and falling of Hill's piano. The piano/drum exchanges on both takes of "Ode to Von" are among the best examples of a piano/drum partnership that deserves reviving.

Adding to the unusual sound of the two-bass quartet is the unpredictable nature of Hill's compositions. When Mosaic Records issued a box-set of Hill's work in 1995, producer Michael Cuscuna had the foresight to enlist Bob Belden in helping to decipher Hill's schemes. "Belden can transcribe most music in real time" Cuscuna reported, and what Belden discovered in this instance was a 50-bar title tune and a 22-bar "Not So", among other challenging if less asymmetric offerings. Given the way Hill develops thematic kernels, both within the written line and in his improvisations, a sufrace coherence is sustained that takes the listener along the unusual choruses in surprising comfort.

Each of the four alternate takes (which first appeared in 1995) was considered for release on the original LP. The alternate "Smoke Stack" opened the session and contains a shorter piano solo. The master of "Ode to Von" (for Von Freeman, still unknown outside Chicago at the time) preceded the alternate and receives a more combustible performance, while the master of "The Day After" came first and seems more settled. The influence of Monk is most clearly felt on the master of "Not So", cut after the alternate. Finally, the trio piece "Verne" is named for Hill's first wife, the late organist Laverne Gillette.

Stanley Turrentine - Hustlin' (1964)

After the Adderley Brothers, Stanley Turrentine and Shirley Scott represent the most prominent and prolific example of family teamwork in 1960s jazz. The saxophonist and organist were married during those years, and built upon the reputations each had established independently as recording artists prior to their union. During a stretch of slightly more than seven years between 1961 and 1968, Turrentine and Scott documented their partnership frequently on Scott albums for Prestige, Impulse and Atlantic, and on several of Turrentine's on Blue Note sessions as well as his one Impulse release. The beginning of their shared discography in June 1961 saw attempts to get around perspective contractual conflicts, with a Stan Turner taking sax credits on Scott's Prestige album Hip Soul while Turrentine's Dearly Beloved on Blue Note featured organist Little Miss Cott. No one was fooled in either instance, and the half-hearted subterfuge was abandoned on subsequent albums.

While they toured as a unit throughout the decade, both Turrentine and Scott liked variety in the recording projects. For his part, Turrentine only designed five of his Blue Note sessions around Scott, which is not even a third of his output of the label. Three of the five were produced in the year that seperates the February 1963 Never Let Me Go (Scott's first Blue Note credit under her own name) and the present session. Each Turrentine date with Scott has its own distinct feeling thanks to adjustments in instrumentation, though it is worth emphasizing that most of their recorded encounters include a bassist. We tend to think of the "classic" organ/tenor configuration as a quartet completed by a guitar and drums, like the Jimmy Smith recording units on Midnight Special and Back at the Chicken Shack that marked Turrentine's debut on Blue Note. Of course, one thing that made Smith incredible is that he never used a bassist and always supplied his own bass lines (He never carried a horn in his working band of the time, either). Scott generally worked with a bass and without a guitar when recording under her own name, on the Eddie Davis Prestige sessions that initially established her reputation, and in her partnership with Turrentine. She contributes intriguing bass lines on Dearly Beloved, a rare tenor/organ/drums date in Scott's discography; but the pianistic clarity she achieved through her personalized settings of the organ stops is heard to better advantage when an acoustic bass is holding down the bottom, as Bob Cranshaw does here.

Where Ray Barretto's conga drums were employed on Never Let Me Go, and Blue Mitchell's trumpet graced Turrentine's next album with Scott, A Chip Off the Old Block from October 1963, the added starter here is Kenny Burrell. The saxophonist and guitarist had first demonstrated compatibility on the aforementioned Jimmy Smith albums, and on such other memorable occasions as Burrell's Midnight Blue, and the guitarist is once again an ideal collaborator here. He is both modern enough to flow through the chords of the pop songs and soulful enough to sustain the mood of the blues titles; his supple guitar is a fine complement to Scott's organ sound; and he accompanies with shifting figures that add a quiet charge to the background. In this last regard, note "Trouble (No.2)" where Burrell's supporting work stays out of a fixed pocket and leads Scott into some surprising responses.,

Few players in the modern mainstream had Turrentine's gift for assembling programs including both arcane tune choices and the down-to-earth lines that the last Turrentine/Scott sessions for Blue Note (from August 1968) referred to as his Common Touch. This second "Trouble" has different, hard-shuffling feeling than the version contained on "Never Let Me Go", where Barretto played tambourine. It is from the book of popular vocalist Lloyd Price, whose band's up-tempo instrumental version of "Misty" was the basis for another successful jazz cover by organist Richard Holmes. It provides a touch of gospel that effectively contrast the no-nonsense minor blues "The Hustler" and the airier blues waltz "Ladyfingers". The traditional African-American melody "Goin' Home", which Dvorak had adapted for his famous symphonic work after a visit to the United States, adds another distinct blues flavor that the band addresses with dignity rather than false fervor.

There is also great dignity in the two remaining selections, especially when Turrentine plays the melody choruses. Stating a theme without undue distortion and still getting your own personality across is a mark of distinction for any jazz soloist of any era. The way Turrentine plays "Love Letters" and "Something Happens To Me" let us know, even without hearing the lyrics, exactly what these songs mean, and also announces that we are in the presence of a true master.

Wayne Shorter - The All Seeing Eye (1965)

With hindsight, this challenging and highly rewarding album appears to be an anomaly in Wayne Shorter's career -the largest acoustic ensemble effort to appear under his name, and the most open in structure until the beginning of his electric period with Super Nova nearly four years later. At the time of its release, however, many people heard this music as a logical extension of Shorter's previous work and a characteristic statement from the more explanatory wing of the Blue Note family. Both the future progress of the saxophonist/composer's career and then unheard contemporary works that have since come to light reinforce the exceptional nature of this music.

Shorter had been uncommonly prolific during 1964, his first year as a Blue Note artist. Three classic albums of his playing and writing were recorded in that year - Night Dreamer, Juju and Speak No Evil. Even though The All Seeing Eye was the next Shorter album issued by the label, we now know that two additional sessions had been recorded earlier, The Soothsayer and Etcetera, which means that Shorter had completed six albums in a mere 18 months! While The Soothsayer and Etcetera are both worthy statements by one of the period's most important artists, producer Alfred Lion clearly felt that the freer use of tempo and structural daring of the present collection made it more indicative of where Shorter was heading. That the music here is more of an emotional piece with the incredible tenor sax work Shorter contributed to the Miles Davis Quintet Plugged Nickel recordings from the end of the 1965, is a judgement borne out by The Soothsayer and Etcetera.

The music should also be heard in the context of other Blue Note recordings from the period such as Bobby Hutcherson's Dialogue and Components, Tony Williams's Spring (featuring Shorter) and Andrew Hill's Compulsion. On these albums, modal and free improvising appeared to be merging, with rhythmic continuity loosened up without totally abandoning familar notions of swing. Larger ensembles than the typical quarter or quintet were often involved, although the energizing muscle of the rhythm section players proved to be just as important as the flexibility of the front-line soloists. As far as the rhythm section goes, little need to be said regarding Shorter's Davis Quintet mates Herbie Hancock and Ron Carter, while the equally brilliant Blue Note house drummer Joe Chambers reflects the influence of Tony Williams as well as his own composerly slant on the music.

The five horns present a tale of two cities, Indianapolis and Newark. Hubbard and Spaulding are the Indiana contingent, with the trumpeter, a longtime familiar of Shorter's from the tenure the two shared in Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. Spaulding had played Shorter's music before, at The Soothsayer session of the previous April, and would play it again (on flute as well as alto sax) on Schizophrenia in 1967. Trombonist Grachan Moncur III had worked with the Shorter brothers in the reportedly precocious Nat Phipps band that Amiri Baraka recalled hearing at high school dances in Newark during the early 50s. The trombonist also used Wayne on his Some Other Stuff LP for Blue Note.

This was the sole Blue Note appearance for Wayne's older brother, the late Alan Shorter, who is otherwise best remembered for his work on Archie Shepp's 1964 Four For Trane and his own 1968 collection Orgasm. Baraka, writing as Leroi Jones in a 1959 Jazz Review piece that was the first article on Wayne in a national publication, reported that the pair were known as "the two weird Shorter brothers" in their native Newark, and the familial iconoclasm comes through clearly in the writing and flugelhorn solo on "Mephistopheles".

Given the subject matter of the program here, a final connection might be noted to "A Love Supreme", which the John Coltrane Quartet had recorded 10 months earlier. Shorter, like Coltrane, possessed the unique inquisitiveness and focus to address such infinite subjects, though typically the resulting music here shows greater ambivalence and eccentricity. It also marked the penultimate product from a period that produced a deluge of music under Wayne Shorter's name. He was back in the studio with Hancock, Chambers and Reggie Workman four months later to record the tracks for Adam's Apple, then allowed 13 months to pass before recording Schizophrenia and another 30 prior to Super Nova. By then, the young man that Leroi Jones had recalled in 1959 as "rather distant" with a "secret smile" had begun moving toward a persona that would make him the jazz world's version of the Cheshire Cat.