Search - Cannonball Adderley :: Cannonball Adderley Quintet in San Francisco (20 Bit Mastering)

Cannonball Adderley had left Miles Davis's band just a few weeks before he took his new quintet into San Francisco's Jazz Workshop for a month-long stay in 1959. With his brother Nat on cornet and a tight rhythm section of Bobby Timmons on piano, Sam Jones on bass, and Louis Hayes on drums, Adderley had constructed one of the better bands of the hard bop era, a vehicle in which his elegant sound and blues roots could shine. Adderley's soul-jazz emphasis is immediately apparent on Timmons's opening "This Here," a gospel-suffused waltz, and it continues with the call-and-response horns of "Spontaneous Combustion." But there are other dimensions to the band as well, and Adderley chose their repertoire carefully. Randy Weston's "Hi-Fly" became a jazz standard as a result of the performance here, and there's a blazing version of Oscar Pettiford's "Bohemia After Dark," driven along by Hayes's powerful, almost Blakey-like drumming. Monk's "Straight, No Chaser" lopes along at a crisply swinging pace impeccably defined by Jones's bass. Every musician makes a significant contribution to the date, but it's the collective chemistry that makes it stand out, the sheer joy communicated in well-made, hard-driving music. --Stuart Broomer