‘Cirrus’: When Vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson Hit A Stratospheric Post-Bop High
The mallet maestro’s overlooked 1974 album is one of his later unheralded masterpieces.
With their radically different sounds, two Blue Note LPs released in the mid-60s – Eric Dolphy’s avant-garde manifesto Out To Lunch! and Dexter Gordon’s hard-bop offering Gettin’ Around – seemed worlds apart. But both records had a common denominator in featuring Bobby Hutcherson, a young musician who brought a fresh, cliche-free approach to the vibraphone. Signed by Blue Note’s co-founder Alfred Lion in 1963, Los Angeles-born Hutcherson proved a catalytic figure in the label’s history, galvanizing its hard-bop roots while pushing musical frontiers with a cutting-edge fearlessness. Hutcherson proved to be one of the iconic jazz label’s longest-serving and most prolific recording artists, recording 22 solo albums between 1963 and 1977. His groundbreaking 60s work – which produced masterpieces like Components, featuring the jazz standard “Little B’s Poem” – has often overshadowed his 70s recordings. Among them, 1974’s Cirrus deserves much wider recognition.
By 1974, Blue Note drastically differed from the independent New York-based company Hutcherson had joined eleven years earlier. In 1966, Alfred Lion retired, selling his company to Liberty, a major label which merged with United Artists in 1969. Consequently, Blue Note’s head office moved to California, where Hutcherson had returned in the late 60s. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, the 33-year-old formed a new touring band and was eager to feature them on his next studio venture. He reunited with tenor saxophonist Harold Land – with whom he had co-led a band and made recordings during the late 60s and early 70s – and brought in another good friend, the virtuosic trumpeter Woody Shaw. “Woody was a lot of fun,” he told Richard Seidel in 2006. “He doesn’t play connecting lines; he plays these unusual intervals within the diatonic scale.”
Listen to Bobby Hutcherson’s Cirrus now.
Completing the line-up in the studio was saxophonist/flutist Emmanuel Boyd, pianist Bill Henderson, bassist Ray Drummond, drummer Larry Hancock, and percussionist extraordinaire, Kenneth Nash, whose myriad credits included Herbie Hancock and Alice Coltrane.
Produced by Dr. George Butler, Cirrus came together during two days in April 1974. The first track, “Rosewood,” is a lively and intricate fusion-esque track, which is one of several other cuts on Cirrus highlighting Hutcherson on the marimba, a tuned wooden percussion instrument. Penned by Woody Shaw, “Rosewood’s” title, according to Hutcherson, was “a combination of his mother’s name and his father’s.”
Hutcherson’s band sizzles on two further uptempo tunes – the driving “Wrong Or Right” and the hard-swinging title track, both featuring dazzling Shaw solos – but the most impressive music comes in the shape of two slower numbers. Hutcherson’s marimba is spotlighted again in the serene soundscape “Even Later.” “This was influenced by some wedding music that Stanley Cowell had written when we were together (“The Wedding March,” from Hutcherson’s 1968 recording Spiral), and that kind of stayed with me,” explained the vibraphonist, who re-recorded the piece as “Later, Even,” on his 1976 album The View From The Inside.
Immersive, too, is the marimba-led “Zuri Dance,” the album’s centerpiece, which Hutcherson stated in 2006 “was influenced by (drummer/composer) Joe Chambers and some of the things we did on the Components album.” With its hypnotic rhythms and mournfully blended horns, the piece also highlights Kenneth Nash’s coloristic yet subtle percussion touches.
Offering an impressionistic kaleidoscope of color, texture, and atmosphere, Cirrus found Bobby Hutcherson hitting a stratospheric post-bop high. With its ingenious compositions – especially the ballads – it’s the undoubted pick of the vibraphone master’s 70s Blue Note albums, capturing Hutcherson at a significant but often overlooked juncture in his storied career.
