1. You, Baby (You) (Ivy Hunter/Jack Goga/Jeffrey Bowen)
  2. By the Time I Get to Phoenix (Jim Webb)
  3. Electric Eel (Nat Adderley)
  4. Early Chanson (Joe Zawinul)
  5. Denise (Wilson Turbinton/Earl Turbinton)
  6. Early Minor (Joe Zawinul)
  7. My Son (Caiphus Semenya)
  8. New Orleans (Nat Adderley)
  9. Hang on In (Eric Knight)
  10. Halftime (Nat Adderley/Cannonball Adderley)

Nat Adderley – cornet, Varitone cornet (01, 02, 03, 10)
Joe Zawinul – electric piano, piano (07, 09)
Ron Carter – bass
Grady Tate – drums
Harvey Estrin, Romeo Penque, Joe Soldo – flute
George Marge – flute, oboe
Jerome Richardson – flute, soprano sax
Al Brown, Selwart Clarke, Bernard Zaslav – viola
Charles McCracken, George Ricci, Alan Shulman – cello

Produced by Creed Taylor

Arranged and conducted by William Fischer

Originally issued as A&M SP 3005

Recorded on March 26 (04, 07), March 27 (03, 06, 09), May 28 (02, 05, 08, 10) and April 4 (01), 1968, at Van Gelder Studios, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey

01 published by Stone Agate Music (BMI)
02 published by EMI Sosaha Music Inc./R2M Music/Songs of Lastrada (BMI)
03, 08, 09 and 10 published by Upam Music Co. (BMI)
04 and 06 published by Zawinul Music (BMI)
05 published by Turbine Music (BMI)
07 published by Semenya Music (BMI)

(P) 1968

Despite renown as a writer of extremely popular jazz fare (“Work Song,“1 “Jive Samba,” “Hummin’,” etc.) and a key member of one of jazz’s most beloved groups, cornetist Nat Adderley (1931-2000) was probably introduced to Creed Taylor by the producer’s star attraction, Wes Montgomery. It was the brothers Adderley who were instrumental in launching Wes Montgomery’s career on Riverside Records. Both Adderleys featured Montgomery on such pivotal recordings as Nat’s classic Work Song (1960) and Cannonball Adderley and the Poll-Winners (1960). Montgomery was likely repaying the favor here, suspecting that Taylor could offer Nat the sort of production that worked so well for the guitarist. Indeed, Nat maintained a prodigious career of his own apart from his brother’s quintet, with records on Riverside (1958-63), Atlantic (1965-67) and, briefly, Milestone (1968). Taylor was likely well aware of Nat’s own records and accepted the challenge to make the cornetist a star in his own right.

You, Baby, the first of Nat Adderley’s two A&M/CTI albums, was released in July 1968, around the same time of the cornetist’s Milestone album The Scavenger. Both You, Baby and The Scavenger, recorded several months before, were arranged by William Fischer, but several differences can be heard. First, the sax counterpoint (often Joe Henderson on tenor) is replaced here with an unusual combination of violas, cellos and woodwinds – a probable device to distance Nat from his familiar Quintet context. Next, Fischer’s often intriguing charts employ the winds and strings to provide full-on countermelodies (as opposed to Don Sebesky’s more familiar counterpoints) for Nat, pulling the arranger more into the front-line.

Note further, that while members of Cannonball’s Quintet often back Nat in his solo outings, only pianist/composer Joe Zawinul (1932-2007) appears here (he is key to The Scavenger as well). Zawinul, a key component to the success of the Cannonball Adderley Quintet from 1961 to 1969 and a recent Grammy Award winner for “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy,” alternates between electric and acoustic piano here –sounding amazingly like Herbie Hancock – who is heard to good effect with Nat on Sayin’ Something (Atlantic/1966) – on his few acoustic turns. Rounding out the rhythm section are A&M/CTI stalwarts Ron Carter on bass and Grady Tate on drums. 

Nat contributes three of his always-welcome originals, “Electric Eel,” the happy funk of “New Orleans” and the off-beat “Halftime,” a collaboration with brother Cannonball. The standout track is surely Nat’s entrancing “Electric Eel,” a nice corollary to Scavenger’s “Rise, Sally, Rise.” Zawinul’s superbly unique electric piano melds the soulful touches that marked his late work for the Quintet and the spaceiness he’d soon bring to Miles Davis. Fischer’s funky additions (here, counterpoints) on strings and flutes are positively ethereal, similar in some ways to the work of Don Sebesky – making one wonder who was influencing whom? Surely, most any jazz listener in a blindfold test would name Ron Carter and Grady Tate here in only a few bars.

Zawinul also contributes two originals, the impressionistic “Early Chanson” – with a muted Nat on un-amplified cornet – and the evocative “Early Minor,”2 with Nat again muted, buoyed by Fischer’s inspired Gil Evans-like arrangement and Carter’s magnificent bass. South African composer Caiphus Semenya contributes “My Son,” eliciting a particularly moving performance from the cornetist. Semenya and his wife, Letta Mbulu, were long championed by the Adderleys: both recorded many of Semenya songs while Mbulu often toured with the Quintet in the sixties and seventies. 

Marvin Gaye’s 1968 hit “You,” called “You, Baby” here, catches Nat on electric cornet, with Fischer’s striking string and flute countermelody. Jimmy Webb’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” a hit for Glen Campbell in 1967, again finds Nat on the electric coronet, with a cradle of bass flutes and melancholy strings. Earl Turbinton and Willie Tee’s “Denise,“ named for one of Earl’s daughters, gets a zesty samba kick courtesy of Grady Tate and evinces a typically lithe solo from Nat. New Orleans native Willie Tee’s own brother, saxophonist Earl Turbinton, had earlier played with the Quintet, presumably on the group’s swings through the Big Easy and these two brothers, like the Adderley brothers, often worked together during their careers.

You, Baby earned a middling three stars in DownBeat magazine, with reviewer Harvey Pekar saying “[m]uch work must have gone into the making of this LP, yet it is only a partial success.” Pekar lauded Fischer’s arrangements and the strength of such compositions as “Early Chanson,” “My Son” and “Denise,” yet faulted both Adderley and Zawinul for inconsistent performances that are “agreeable” but not up to either’s best. Pekar wasn’t much impressed by Nat’s originals, either.3

While Nat’s solo records rarely found the accolades or success brother Cannonball’s Quintet records received, it is still mystifying that You, Baby never found much of an audience. The record has a number of pleasurable moments on display – though the pop tunes probably age the album rather disagreeably. It is clearly a different venture for Nat Adderley; unquestionably a crossover attempt. But with contributors like Joe Zawinul and William Fischer in tow, a different approach might have merited a better record – as the album’s sequel, Calling Out Loud, amply proves. After several more efforts in this shoehorning-the-soloist-into-a-pop-package (Israel and Shape of Things to Come spring to mind), A&M/CTI had to concede that “the Wes Montgomery formula” probably wasn’t right for everyone.

About the cover: “Buddah” (1968 – Bangkok, Thailand). “Here’s another picture I really liked,” said Turner. It’s a psychedelic image, like the photographer’s “Holy Man,” pictured on Randy Weston’s CTI album Blue Moses, that reflected the era and captured what the album was attempting to accomplish. The image suggests more of a hippie chick on an acid trip than the ascetic, sage and enlightened teacher of the Four Noble Truths. “I was kind of experimenting with trendy colors. You might say this is my salute to that period.”4

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Endnotes:

  1. “Work Song” was first recorded by Nat Adderley in 1960 on an album that featured Wes Montgomery. The song proved immediately popular and became part of the Cannonball Adderley Quintet’s regular repertoire. Hundreds of artists covered the tune, with Adderley’s favorites being by Grady Tate, Nina Simone and Billy Eckstine. But the composer reluctantly reported that the version that brought the most ears to the tune (and bucks to the bank) was the one done by A&M boss Herb Alpert on his 1966 Tijuana Brass album S.R.O. (Nat Adderley, “Nat Adderley – Blindfold Test,” interview by Leonard Feather, DownBeat, August 7, 1969, p. 27. ↩︎
  2. Zawinul also recorded “Early Minor” (featuring the composer on organ) with Miles Davis’ group on February 20, 1969, a performance that remained unissued until the 2001 CD issue of The Complete In A Silent Way Sessions. ↩︎
  3. Harvey Pekar, “Nat Adderley: You, Baby” review, DownBeat, December 12, 1968, p. 23. ↩︎
  4. Pete Turner, “Pete Turner Interview,” interview by Richard Warner, September 2002 (courtesy of the author). ↩︎