Cannonball Adderley Quintet in Stuttgart on Jazzhaus

courtesy of Naxos of America

A little over a week ago the German Jazzhaus label released its latest recording of a live jazz concert produced in conjunction with the SWR>>music archives of Südwestrundfunk (southwest broadcasting) in Stuttgart. The concert took place in Stuttgart on March 20 at the Liederhalle. The performance was by the Cannonball Adderley Quintet, which alto saxophonist Adderley formed with his brother Nat on trumpet. Their rhythm section consisted of Joe Zawinul on keyboards, Victor Gaskin on bass, and Roy McCurdy on drums.

Nat was the younger brother of the two, and his Wikipedia page cites a claim by Scott Yanow that he spent most of his life in his older brother’s shadow. Nevertheless, Nat was the composer; and three of the selections from this concert program are his originals. Indeed, the final selection was his “Work Song,” which became one of the most memorable creations of the hard bop era and now enjoys the status of a “jazz standard.” The other member of the quintet that contributed compositions for the Stuttgart program was Zawinul. His “Rumpelstiltskin” is the opening track, and he goes hog wild in a coda the likes of which never surfaced in later years when he joined Miles Davis to seek out a “fusion” of jazz with rock.

One of the things I like about jazz is its ability to take a highly popular show tune (which has achieved popularity through qualities that come close to the line of the insipid, perhaps even crossing it) and turn it into something that warrants serious listening, even without the words for which it was written. The ne plus ultra master of that transformative technique was John Coltrane, who managed to develop inventive improvisations of epic proportions based on “My Favorite Things” from The Sound of Music. In Stuttgart Cannonball came up with a way of playing Leonard Bernstein’s “Somewhere” (from West Side Story) with a sincerity of both expressiveness and invention that definitely carries the attentive listener beyond the trivialities of the original setting.

Unless I am mistaken, this quintet visited the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when I was an undergraduate. I missed them on that occasion. However, as I listened to this recording of a performance that took place during my second year of graduate school, I realize that my head was not yet in the right place to appreciate what that quintet had to offer. Now I can listen to a recording of one of their concert performances and enjoy the fact that my listening skills are now up to apprehending just what this group was doing during that wild decade of the Sixties.