Freddie Hubbard - Here To Stay
Another one of those situations where you wonder about Blue Note decision making in the day, as this late 1962 quintet session is about as fantastic as anything Hubbard was doing at the time and wasn’t originally released until 1976. Hubbard could barely do anything wrong, especially with Wayner Shorter joining him on sax and for the most part this is a drifting, elegaic sort of hard bop session, stately in its own way, perhaps not as fierce as Ready for Freddie or Hub Tones, but moody in a way that sets it apart from a lot of hard bop albums. Hubbard, naturally, is in great form and even if its not one of Cedar Walton’s best dates, the horns more than pull their weight.
Alice Coltrane - Huntington Ashram Monastery
Alice’s second solo LP and definitely more on par quality wise with the debut than what was to come after, in fact after listening to it, it’s hard not to see Ptah the El Douad as a quantum jump in relevance and the moment of arrival for Alice as a solo artist. It’s also not difficult to see why HAM has only been released on CD in Japan as part of the overall Impulse Alice Coltrane reissue series accompanying the Translinear Light release. While it’s of interest in that it’s some of Alice’s most virtuoso playing in all of her catalog, showing her as a most capable jazz pianist even in a traditional session, the album flow as harp piece gives way to piano piece makes me think of it more as a showcase than a conceptual entity in itself, as Alice would go on to make example after example soon after this. The Tyner-esque riffing does shine a bit of light from some of the jazz pieces however it doesn’t save this from being an album best saved for later in the ouevre.
Hero s/t
Hero’s eponymous album is a good example of an album hurt by its production, even the finally legit reissue presents it possibly in its best light. It’s got quite a bit of muffle and given the record’s style puts it somewhere between Hight Tide and Eiliff, a lot of the complexity of the album gets lost in the murk. Which is too bad because given close attention there are some really great songs here, even though it’s still difficult to place this in Italy stylistically, much of this sounds like a classic German album, very psychedelic with a hard rock bite. I’m really growing fond of the album despite the sound quality, although I do suspect it will put a ceiling on the overall grade for me. 11ish and nudging to a 12.