FREDDIE'S DEAD
Jazz trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, 70, dies in Sherman Oaks
By David Cotner
It was not the best of all possible years for jazz – not only did the field lose such titans as Kind of Blue producer Teo Macero, Lester Young’s drummer brother Lee Young and reedsman Jimmy Giuffre, but there was an unusually high loss of jazz trumpeters. British players Tommy McQuater and Humph Lyttelton, bebop maestro Hal Stein, Preservation Hall Jazz Band leader John Brunious Jr.; Pete Candoli and Dick Sudhalter . . . all gone in 2008. Subsequently, the problem with finding someone from the Golden Age of All Things with something to say is that most have already passed away.
Freddie Hubbard, who died on December 29 at age 70 after suffering a heart attack in late November, remained almost peerless for the 50 or so years with his chosen instrument. Also almost without peer: the tragedy of the ruptured lip that effectively halted his playing since 1992. Imagine doing something you love your entire life and forced to suddenly and necessarily decelerate because it causes you agony to do so.
Despite this, Hubbard played Catalina Jazz in April for his 70th birthday (in tandem with the release of his recent On the Real Side LP) in an arrangement that featured Art Blakey alumnus George Cables on piano, Cannonball Adderley’s drummer Roy McCurdy and veteran James Spaulding on alto sax. Although Hubbard played on the binary stars of free jazz – John Coltrane’s Ascension and Free Jazz by Ornette Coleman – it’s said that he never fully found himself under the thrall of the new sound. Structure and melody are such difficult and beautiful things to forsake entirely, even while his playing vaulted him squarely into the vanguard of free jazz – that unruliest of all possible beasts, rejected by most people in favor of either dry-cleaned nostalgia or the chocolate-cheesecake inoffensiveness of “smooth” jazz.
Hubbard’s intellectual curiosity would serve him well; he was not above working with truly “out” players such as Turkish avant composer Ilhan Mimaroglu on the 1971 antiwar statement Sing Me a Song of Songmy. Hubbard can be heard at his most vital on The Night of the Cookers (Blue Note), recorded live in 1965 at Brooklyn’s Club Marchal, force and dynamic interplay appearing most vibrantly on the song “Jodo,” alongside late and lamented bop trumpeter Lee Morgan (and Spaulding on alto sax).
Almost as surprising as the age at which Hubbard died – he was, after all, relatively young for such a groundbreaking music-maker – was the place in which he did it: Sherman Oaks. One usually thinks of the wizards of art as living in relatively exotic locales – Europe, say, or Tarzana. And yet the point of free jazz is that one is, well, really free – in music and all aspects of one’s life.
Kris Tiner, in Los Angeles: “He did things on the trumpet that you’re just not supposed to be able to do – piano licks, saxophone licks, Coltrane licks! For a young trumpet player becoming interested in exploring the freer forms of jazz . . . [he] was a gateway drug! I think I can speak for many trumpet players: Freddie Hubbard is our Coltrane. And like Coltrane, much of Freddie’s music represents the highest possible manifestation of virtuosity.”
Dave Douglas put Hubbard, and the instrument, into perspective in his New Year’s Day blog: “Even with centuries of innovation in brass instrument making, the trumpet is still basically a metal tube through which one is expected to blow, vibrating the lips against the opening at one end. That’s basically all it is. Technical mastery is far from the reason Freddie Hubbard is the most imitated player of the last half-century. It was what he did with that mastery – the inventiveness of his harmonies and the ingenuity of his rhythmic propulsion. Freddie’s impact is so profound that you often don’t have to mention him when noting a young player’s influences. Freddie is always there. He had a lot to say, and we all soaked it up.”
And finally Dave Weiss, the trumpeter who played alongside Hubbard in April: “I think every trumpet player that’s come up since 1964 has been strongly influenced by Freddie Hubbard at one point or another; he’s certainly probably the last great innovator we’ve had.”
Published: 01/08/2009
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