There is no way that the keenly astute Creed Taylor was unaware of trumpeter Freddie Hubbard (1938-2008) by the time Walking in Space was made in 1969. But, remarkably, Quincy Jones’ record marks the first appearance of Freddie Hubbard on any CTI album. In only a decade, Hubbard stormed the jazz world as a Jazz Messenger, a solo artist with a string of impressive albums for Blue Note (1960-66) and a first-call sideman who made notable appearances on such landmark records as Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz (1961), Eric Dolphy’s Out to Lunch (1964), John Coltrane’s Olé Coltrane (1961) and Ascension (1966).
Hubbard’s experience with Quincy Jones dates back to The Quintessence (1962) and continued with Golden Boy (1964) and Jones’s first soundtrack, The Pawnbroker (1965). Nearly all of Herbie Hancock’s early hits – “Watermelon Man,” “Maiden Voyage” and “Cantaloupe Island,” etc. – prominently feature Freddie Hubbard. All of this suggests that Freddie Hubbard was pretty flexible, but Taylor had only previously worked with Freddie Hubbard on Oliver Nelson’s The Blues and the Abstract Truth (Impulse/1961 – another landmark) and Lalo Schifrin’s Once a Thief (Verve/1965).
Hubbard had signed to Atlantic Records at about the same time that Taylor was starting at A&M in 1967. The first of Hubbard’s Atlantic albums, Backlash – featuring his standard “Little Sunflower” (later covered by Milt Jackson, with Hubbard, on the 1973 CTI album Sunflower) – signaled Hubbard was headed in a new, more soulful direction. Two more “soul experiments” ensued. Hubbard had only recorded his Atlantic album The Black Angel the month before the Walking in Space sessions and was probably looking to make a change.
At the time, Creed Taylor was a month away from the first sessions for his own independent label. (In between all this, Hubbard waxed two other A&M/CTI projects: George Benson’s The Other Side of Abbey Road and Quincy Jones’ Space sequel, Gula Matari.) Whatever alchemy there was to the deal, it was only six months later when Taylor produced Hubbard’s CTI debut, Red Clay. The album was an immediate hit and helped make Freddie Hubbard a star. The album’s title track became perhaps the last of Hubbard’s jazz standards – though plenty of worthy originals were still to come – and helped establish CTI early on as a successful independent entity. Creed Taylor has said that when Red Clay found its audience, he no longer wanted to try to produce pop, rock or folk acts.1
Taylor recognized that his gifts were best utilized in the production of jazz, his kind of jazz. Red Clay then became the CTI benchmark and, for better or worse, the ideal of what jazz in the seventies could or would sound like. Hubbard became one of the original CTI All Stars and recorded an additional four solo albums for the label through 1973, including the Grammy Award-winning First Light in 1971. (After Hubbard left the label, CTI issued two live albums the trumpeter made with Stanley Turrentine and Herbie Hancock as well as two Hubbard compilation records.)
In 1973, Hubbard signed a lucrative contract with Columbia Records, where he recorded a diverse variety of popular, though critically-lambasted albums through 1980, while maintaining his charter membership in Herbie Hancock’s straight-ahead V.S.O.P. quintet.
By the early eighties, music tastes were changing yet again and Freddie Hubbard recorded for a number of labels in a variety of different settings. Only a few stood out in any way: the Keystone Korner concert recordings (1981), Sweet Return (1983), Live at Fat Tuesday’s (1991) and Blues for Miles (1992) among them. Hubbard never found the direction or distinction so much of his earlier music had promised. Consequently, it is his CTI albums that are arguably among the strongest and most memorable in his vast catalog.
Endnote:
- As told to the author. ↩︎