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 '70s 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 midtempo 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