Total Eclipse Bobby Hutcherson

• 1 Herzog 06:34
• 2 Total Eclipse 08:53
• 3 Matrix 06:46
• 4 Same Shame 09:27
• 5 Pompeian 08:52
• Total Runtime 40:32

Info zu Total Eclipse

Vibes maestro Bobby Hutcherson linked up for the first time in the studio with Harold Land on the hard-bop tenor saxophonist’s 1968 album The Peace-Maker, released on the Cadet label. Recorded in two sessions (December 11, 1967 and February 26, 1968), the Harold Land Quintet disc didn’t make many waves. But it did forge the creative union that proved fertile on Bobby’s seven Blue Note releases featuring Harold beginning with 1968’s Total Eclipse and continuing through 1975’s Inner Glow.

While Bobby received plaudits for leaning toward the avant-garde (case in point, his angular mallet work on Eric Dolphy’s 1964 Blue Note album Out to Lunch), working with Harold—a straight jazz shooter who was a member of the Max Roach/Clifford Brown band and whose later lyricism conjured up comparisons to classic John Coltrane—proved beneficial to developing his melody-rich, harmonically involved music. Recorded on July 12, a few months after his first studio session with Harold, Total Eclipse featured Bobby leading his quintet that comprised an impressive rhythm section of pianist Chick Corea (who had recently recorded his breakthrough album Now He Sings, Now He Sobs), bassist Reggie Johnson and drummer Joe Chambers.

With the Hutcherson-Land collaboration just starting to bloom, Total Eclipse expands beyond a typical hard-bop exercise into an exploratory zone. With four of the five tracks composed by Bobby (a Chick tune sandwiched in the middle), the album dips in and out of his adventurous sensibility, ranging from the hard swinging to a space of ethereal expedition. The album opens with elation on “Herzog,” with Bobby and Harold sailing through the theme that opens into Chick inventively rippling a marvelous solo. Bobby follows with a joyous vibes romp (listen to him whooping it up in the background), which leads to Harold’s elated gusts before the entire band returns to the head, with Reggie and Joe keeping the driving beat steady. It’s a great entrée into Bobby’s world.

The title track, the beauty of the bunch, begins as a slow and emotional mood piece then takes off into exhilaration. Bobby lightly ruminates with his mallets, and Harold delivers a spirited break, with Chick supporting sparkling comps. Likewise “Same Shame” shifts from the melancholy to the animated with Harold’s smoky solo a highlight. It’s a pleasing 9:28 ride that clears the pathway for the finale, the trippy “Pompeian.” This is questing voyage music as Bobby opens it with a playful sing-songy waltz theme with Harold laying down his tenor in favor of the flute. The middle of the tune opens up in free form, as an avant-leaning, charged and complex romp with Bobby providing dark colors on the marimbas. The song ends on the whimsical light side again with the theme. A sublime excursion.

In the middle of Total Eclipse, Chick launches into the uptempo “Matrix,” a song from Now He Sings, Now He Sobs, which electrifies the band. Harold and Bobby speed in their solos and Chick revs up for a brief spin while Joe bashes on his drums and Reggie accelerates with a quickened walking bass line. It’s the liveliest jaunt of the collection. Chick, on a break from Miles Davis’s employ, played on the session after filling the piano chair at the quintet’s live dates at the Village Vanguard prior to the recording at Rudy Van Gelder’s New Jersey studio.

Total Eclipse offers the beginning glimpses of the vital Hutcherson-Land Quintet that stayed intact (the official band pianist became Stanley Cowell) into the ‘70s as one of the most important, but often underappreciated bands of that transformational period of jazz.

Bobby Hutcherson, vibraphone
Harold Land, tenor saxophone
Chick Corea, piano
Reggie Johnson, bass
Joe Chambers, drums

Recorded at Plaza Sound Studios, New York, New York on July 12, 1968

Digitally remastered

Bobby Hutcherson
Easily one of jazz's greatest vibraphonists, Bobby Hutcherson epitomized his instrument in relation to the era in which he came of age the way Lionel Hampton did with swing or Milt Jackson with bop. He isn't as well-known as those two forebears, perhaps because he started out in less-accessible territory when he emerged in the '60s playing cerebral, challenging modern jazz that often bordered on avant-garde. Along with Gary Burton, the other seminal vibraphone talent of the '60s, Hutcherson helped modernize his instrument by redefining what could be done with it -- sonically, technically, melodically, and emotionally. In the process, he became one of the defining (if underappreciated) voices in the so-called 'new thing' portion of Blue Note's glorious '60s roster. Hutcherson gradually moved into a more mainstream, modal post-bop style that, if not as adventurous as his early work, still maintained his reputation as one of the most advanced masters of his instrument.

Bobby Hutcherson was born January 27, 1941, in Los Angeles. He studied piano with his aunt as a child, but didn't enjoy the formality of the training; still, he tinkered with it on his own, especially since his family was already connected to jazz: His brother was a high school friend of Dexter Gordon and his sister was a singer who later dated Eric Dolphy. Everything clicked for Hutcherson during his teen years when he heard a Milt Jackson record; he worked until he saved up enough money to buy his own set of vibes. He began studying with Dave Pike and playing local dances in a group led by his friend, bassist Herbie Lewis. After high school, Hutcherson parlayed his growing local reputation into gigs with Curtis Amy and Charles Lloyd and in 1960, he joined an ensemble co-led by Al Grey and Billy Mitchell. In 1961, the group was booked at New York's legendary Birdland club and Hutcherson wound up staying on the East Coast after word about his inventive four-mallet playing started to spread. Hutcherson was invited to jam with some of the best up-and-coming musicians in New York: hard boppers like Grant Green, Hank Mobley, and Herbie Hancock, but most importantly, forward-thinking experimentalists like Jackie McLean, Grachan Moncur III, Archie Shepp, Andrew Hill, and Eric Dolphy. Through those contacts, Hutcherson became an in-demand sideman at recording sessions, chiefly for Blue Note.

Hutcherson had a coming-out party of sorts on McLean's seminal 'new thing' classic One Step Beyond (1963), providing an unorthodox harmonic foundation in the piano-less quintet. His subsequent work with Dolphy was even more groundbreaking and his free-ringing, open chords and harmonically advanced solos were an important part of Dolphy's 1964 masterwork Out to Lunch. That year, he won the DownBeat readers' poll as Most Deserving of Wider Recognition on his instrument. Hutcherson's first shot as a leader came with 1965's Dialogue, a classic of modernist post-bop with a sextet featuring some of the hottest young talent on the scene -- most notably Freddie Hubbard, Sam Rivers, and Andrew Hill, although drummer Joe Chambers would go on to become a fixture on Hutcherson's '60s records (and often contributed some of the freest pieces he recorded). A series of generally excellent sessions followed over the next few years, highlighted by 1965's classic Components (which showcased both the free and straight-ahead sides of Hutcherson's playing) and 1966's Stick-Up! In 1967, he returned to Los Angeles and started a quintet co-led by tenor saxophonist Harold Land, which made its recording debut the following year on Total Eclipse. Several more sessions followed (Spiral, Medina, Now) that positioned the quintet about halfway in between free bop and mainstream hard bop -- advanced territory, but not entirely fashionable at the time. Thus, the group didn't really receive its due and dissolved in 1971.

By that point, Hutcherson was beginning a brief flirtation with mainstream fusion, which produced 1970s funky but still sophisticated San Francisco (named after his new base of operations). By 1973, however, he'd abandoned that direction, returning to modal bop and forming a new quintet with trumpeter Woody Shaw that played at that summer's Montreux Jazz Festival (documented on Live at Montreux). In 1974, he re-teamed with Land and over the next few years, he continued to record cerebral bop dates for Blue Note despite being out of step with the label's more commercial direction. He finally departed in 1977 and signed with Columbia, where he recorded three albums from 1978-1979 (highlighted by Un Poco Loco). Adding the marimba to his repertoire, Hutcherson remained active throughout the '80s as both a sideman and leader, recording most often for Landmark in a modern-mainstream bop mode. He spent much of the '90s touring rather than leading sessions; in 1993, he teamed with McCoy Tyner for the duet album Manhattan Moods. Toward the end of the decade, Hutcherson signed on with Verve, for whom he debuted in 1999 with the well-received Skyline. (Steve Huey). Source: www.bluenote.com

Booklet für Total Eclipse