A new era at CTI led by Freddie Hubbard

At Listening Sessions, writer Robert C. Gilbert zeroes in on CTI Records—in particular, three albums that mark “the beginning of a brief, brash era for the label.” His post starts with a discussion of Freddie Hubbard’s Red Clay, the jazz trumpeter’s first outing for CTI:

Hubbard was the brashest of the trumpeters to emerge in the wake of Clifford Brown. His phrases landed hard and his playing seemed fueled by urgency. He also was a versatile stylist. Hard bop was his home base but he could also venture out into the daring territory of the avant-garde. His work in the first half of the sixties on a series of albums on Blue Note chart a remarkable course from precocious upstart to bracing modernist. It was deepened by his work as a sideman on a large number of the decade’s most important albums with the aforementioned Maiden Voyage and Speak No Evil just the tip of the iceberg.

Red Clay took him to the frontier of jazz-rock at the start of the seventies. On the album, the rock is mostly muted, primarily expressed in the title track.

CTI—Creed Taylor International—was founded by Virginia-born producer-arranger Creed Taylor (1929–2022) in the late 1960s, years after he had established Impulse! Records and brought bossa nova to American audiences with Jazz Samba and other releases during a Grammy-winning tenure at Verve. CTI came into its own during what was a truly explosive time for jazz, as Ethan Iverson has recently reported at The Nation. 

Initially a subsidiary of A&M, CTI is revered today for its output of commercially viable, pop-leaning smooth jazz, jazz-funk, fusion, and overall wealth of slick, sample-ready grooves and drum breaks. Not all CTI albums are created equal, and some of those records, with their overstuffed, saccharine arrangements, are excruciatingly bland. A piece about Hubbard in The Village Voice in 1974 called Taylor’s work of the period “comfy, unobtrusive furniture for the ear.”

But many CTI albums are worth adding to the shelf! And the label is a beatmaker’s goldmine. It’s been decades since the release of “Beats to the Rhyme,” a volcanic Run-D.M.C. 1988 B-side that sampled CTI luminary Bob James, James Brown, and, um, Sam Kinison, and there are still new beats to be made from James’s “Nautilus.” (In the wake of Taylor’s death in 2022, lists of “essential CTI records” flooded social media and blogs—author and rap scholar Eric Harvey has a good set of recommendations at his site.) 

The Listening Sessions post cites an in-depth 19-part (!) interview that journalist Marc Myers conducted with Taylor in 2008. The producer told Myers he sought to establish a jazz label that didn’t “ignore other successful types of music of the time that had merit.” He did so with CTI and, later, with the soul-jazz- and R&B-focused KUDU in 1971.

Taylor had gripes about the solos that he felt dominated recordings at the pioneering jazz label Blue Note, but works like The Rumproller, led by trumpeter Lee Morgan, were something of a model for him. The 1965 LP, with its fusion of hard bop, boogaloo, and Latin grooves and innovative cover design by Miles Reid, was the result of Blue Note’s effort to follow up on the surprise commercial success of Morgan’s prior album, The Sidewinder, a bestselling dancefloor-friendly smash that landed on the Billboard pop chart—an unlikely place for a jazz record at the time.

Morgan’s modal masterpiece, Search for the New Land, recorded months after The Sidewinder, was shelved until 1966 because Blue Note’s Alfred Lion wanted a hit that would mirror the soul jazz of The Sidewinder. Creed Taylor wanted hits, too, and The Rumproller and The Sidewinder before it boasted the kind of distinctive crossover appeal he hoped to emulate with his own imprint. 

Wes Montgomery’s A Day in the Life—the first to carry the CTI logo under A&M—earned the #2 slot on Billboard’s R&B chart and featured arrangements of Beatles songs. The subsidiary’s second release, Antônio Carlos Jobim’s Wave, is a luminous bossa nova record embraced by the “easy listening” advocates of the day. A logical follow-up to the work that Taylor did with Stan Getz at Verve, Wave is known by some contemporary crate diggers as “the red giraffe album” for the iconic Pete Turner photograph on its cover. Turner’s work regularly appeared on CTI’s albums, but it’s Price Givens Jr.’s photograph on Red Clay’s cover.

During the interview with Myers, Taylor suggested that Blue Note was “stretching” the “attention span(s)” of listeners with an “imposition of elongated passages” on its albums. This sentiment surfaces in more than one interview with Taylor, as it was part of the impetus for establishing CTI.

When Taylor told Myers that Blue Note was “restricting its reach by having long improvised solos on albums,” Myers called out the fact that exploration underpins Red Clay, suggesting that the album was characterized by “extended solo work and wide-open playing”—attributes that, at the time, seemed to turn Taylor off. 

As Gilbert notes, given Taylor’s documented objections to improvisation, it is strange that such an important period of CTI’s history began with Hubbard’s Red Clay, a creative record that is characterized by the bandleader’s trademark probing hard bop but looks forward to the bold jazz-funk experiments that would follow for him. It was cut over three days at Rudy Van Gelder’s legendary New Jersey studio, and its 1970 release marked the launch of CTI as an independent label. Red Clay “brought the trumpeter’s daring, bellicose style to a wider audience, and then, inevitably, created demand for follow-ups,” wrote critic Tom Moon in his 1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die.*

Following a reissue of Hubert Laws’s Crying Song, Hubbard’s LP made its way to record shops. NBA legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar scooped it up and listened to it every day during the Bucks-Knicks Eastern Division Finals in 1970. (Unfortunately, the Knicks advanced regardless, beating the Lakers to win it all.)

Red Clay boasts a shuffling 12-minute opener stacked with solos from Hubbard, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Joe Henderson. The leadoff piece’s refreshingly “loose” syncopated undercurrent, reported Bill Milkowski at JazzTimes in 2010, owes to the work of 20-year-old drummer Lenny White, who’d recently contributed to Miles Davis’s jazz-rock opus Bitches Brew and other landmark records of the era. White came up with the beat on the spot, with no direction from Hubbard. The drummer told Milkowski that Creed Taylor didn’t book him for many sessions following Red Clay because the producer “wanted a more structured and tight beat” for his records.

“A lot of what they are playing may be characterized as riffing but it is far from noodling,” writes Gilbert at Listening Sessions of the album’s title track. “‘Red Clay’ is a formidable performance. It gives off the feeling of the dial being moved. The remainder of the album charts a gradual return to the cutting-edge jazz of the time.”

See Listening Sessions for Gilbert’s extensive discussion of Red Clay as well as two other pivotal releases of the era—Joe Farrell Quartet and Stanley Turrentine’s Sugar. *Disclaimer: I supported Tom Moon on research for his 1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die. You should read it. It’s a great book.