Cashbox : 11/11/1967

The Cannonball Adderley Quintet moves though a five-session jazz set. The tracks are Do Do Do (What Now Is Next?, I Remember Bird, Walk Tall (Baby, That’s What I Need), 74 Miles Away, and Oh Babe. The quintet consists of Julian “Cannonball” Adderley, alto sax; Nat Adderley, trumpet; Joe Zawinul, piano; Victor Gaskin, bass; and Roy McCurdy, drums. Jazz enthusiasts should dig this LP.

(editor’s note: I hate these “list the tracks, list the personnel” reviews where it’s 100% obvious that no one has actually listened to the record, but one of either Billboard or Cashbox is important for dating the release of the record, so I’ve left it in.)

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Appleton Post-Crescent
David F. Wagner : 12/17/1967

Since Adderley‘s pianist, Josef Zawinul, struck a responsive popular chord when he wrote Mercy, Mercy, Mercy, the quintet has enjoyed tremendous chart success, which must not be confused with achievement. After all, success is not synonymous with excellence. Cannonball’s recent material, in a jazz sense, has been less than stimulating, and he is aware of the critics’ scorn, but not particularly worried. This Ip contains much of the same gutsy r&b style that “Mercy” offers, but it also returns the quint into the jazz world, thanks to an interesting 74 Miles Away, another Zawinul composition. It is 13:47 in length and its title was derived from the meter (7-4). It is quite explorative and, along with I Remember Bird, goes at least 74 miles toward making old Cannonball a groove again.

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Cincinnati Post
Hap O’Daniel : 11/10/1967

Cannonball Adderley, a genial giant of a man who plays music for people who want to have their corn bread and eat it too, opened a four-night engagement last night at the Living Room.

Playing his first local club date in more than four years, he drew a full half-house (the rear portion was closed off) which responded to practically everything his hard charging quintet dropped on them. Currently one of the hottest names in pop-jazz music, having crossed the line (often more imagined than real) and climbed the Top 40 charts, Adderley could play nothing but concerts. But he doesn’t shun clubs.

“There’s a more relaxed atmosphere in a club,” he says, “because people can eat, drink, move around. Musicians can blow better, keep their chops in shape, work out some new things.”

“I never fail to be amazed at some of the unlikely people who like our music,” he said. “Here tonight I see several middle-aged couples who happen to be digging very much what we are doing.”

Cannonball’s music ranges from the grits-and-greens variety of “soul” through hard bop and some well-conceived new things. Other alto saxophone players such as Paul Desmond and Johnny Hodges have a purer tone, but for range and intensity of feeling, Adderley would be hard to top.

He fronts a very together group, with brother Nat on cornet, Viennese-born (South Vienna, judging from his soulful compositions) pianist Joe Zawinul, Victor Gaskin on bass and Roy McCurdy on drums.

The name of their game is communication with the audience, both musically and in the way the music is presented. Cannonball, who has served as a disc jockey for Voice of America and other radio outlets, doesn’t believe in getting hung up on technical details. He introduces each number with warm, whimsical, good-humored fashion, getting the audience into the music with the musicians, giving his sidemen full credit for their contributions. Jazz could use a hundred leaders as articulate and outgoing as this man.

The music also reflects this sense of humor. Much of it is contributed by Nat Adderley or Joe Zawinul, both talented composers and arrangers. Zawinul, who also uses electric piano (which produces a sound like a combination of guitar and organ) for blues effects wrote Mercy, Mercy; he and Nat collaborated on Oh, Babe, a blues put-on in which Nat sings in mumbles style and Zawinul adds a well-trimmed screech which breaks up the audience.

The highlight of the evening, though, was the title chart from their just-released Capitol album, 74 Miles Away, written by Zawinul. Cannonball gets into an Oriental bag on alto, Nat sings and growls through his cornet, getting
the lowest notes you ever heard emit from that instrument, and Zawinul manages somehow a drone bass effect on piano while laying down an imaginative melodic background with his other hand.

This group also has its quieter side, reflected in the different instrumental combinations they use on ballads like Come Sunday, The Masquerade is Over, Too Late Now and Yours Is My Heart Alone.

Cannonball, whose future includes a full schedule of concerts and club dates plus tours of Mexico and South America, has a new direction he’d like to take. “I’d like to work out a definitive combination of African music, both vocal and instrumental. with jazz,” he says. “That’s where the possibilities are unlimited.”

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HiFi Stereo Review
Nat Hentoff : March, 1968

Performance: Fluent, but rather shallow
Recording: Very good
Stereo Quality : First-rate

Cannonball Adderley and his colleagues have a fluency that too often becomes simply facile. Rooted in the blues and the basic jazz tradition, including but not going too far beyond Charlie Parker, Adderley and his men are lively and swing easy. But their work does not stay long in the mind. An exception here is Joe Zawinul‘s 74 Miles Away, which is more challenging to its players and listeners than most of Adderley’s book; still, it does not achieve its full potential. Perhaps I am asking more of Adderley than he wants to give. He does please audiences; he does get the spirit moving, though he seldom probes the spirit very deeply. And yet I wonder what would happen to him musically, and particularly to his brother Nat, if he were to challenge himself and his band more. I mention Nat because I feel he especially has yet to explore fully the scope of his talent, and that talent may be more fresh and penetrating than his brother’s. But what I ask for, in these parlous times for jazz, might lead to much less employment for the Adderley brothers. And that is a problem a critic doesn’t have to face. Still, he does have to speculate on what might lie beyond the limits of security.

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Liverpool Daily Post
Alan Pinch : 03/25/1968

Another group at present apparently stuck in a popular groove are the Cannonball Adderley Quintet.

Says the leader: “When we have a hit going for us, people may come in the club just to hear that number, but once they’re inside, we have no trouble getting them interested in everything we do.”

Maybe, but successive Adderley LP’s are beginning to take on a quality of sameness, particularly as they all appear to be recorded live in front of what is described as “a hip and responsive crowd.”

Side one of 74 Miles Away (Capitol T 2822) sounds almost like a repeat of Mercy, Mercy. Mercy and other recent Adderley albums. Even I Remember Bird, presumably played in sincere tribute, has a commercial aura.

By far the most interesting item is the title tune, composed by Joe Zawinul, the quintet’s pianist, whose 7/4 setting frees Cannonball for some high-register alto improvisation that is his specialty. On the other hand, brother Nat is merely straining for effect with his freakish trumpet sounds in this number, and Nat’s vocal on Oh Babe is clear evidence of the wiseness of his decision to become an instrumentalist rather than a singer.

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Richmond Times-Dispatch
Jack Ellis : 11/04/1967

“Don’t call it rock. Don’t call it soul. Just call it jazz, because that’s all we play,” said Julian (Cannonball) Adderley last night just before he and his quintet played a concert before a packed house at Virginia Union University’s Barco Stevens Hall.

The friendly, Buddha-like man, who has taken his group some 60,000 miles this year on concert and college dates, insists that jazz “is an attitude, a feeling of creativity that comes from deep down inside and when it comes out the end product is entirely unpredictable.”

The Adderley quintet, consisting of Julian on alto saxophone, his brother Nat on trumpet, Joe Zawinul on piano, Roy McCurdy on drums and Victor Gaskin on bass, has remained constant for some three years since the departure of tenor saxist-flutist Charles Lloyd for the green fields of psychedelia.

Julian’s tone, broad as his back, is in turn harsh and grating and soulful and lyrical as befits the mood. And his brother Nat brings a rapport on horn that is seldom achieved in such a tightly knit group. But the anchor of the Adderley force is the rhythm section.

A better bassist than Gaskin couldn’t be found anywhere. His arcos are superb and his bowing leaves nothing to the imagination. His foundation patterns draw a straight line from here to eternity for the rest to follow.

Pianist Zawinul, not many years ago a Hungarian freedom fighter, is a master of his keyboard and a close second to Gaskin as an integral rhythm force.

McCurdy’s drumming is just what it should be – unobtrusive, steady and solid with a phenomenal sense of time. His solos are inventive and never boring.

The two-hour session opened with the swinging Big P, dedicated to bassist Percy Heath and featuring a remarkable bit of ensemble work between the brothers Addreley. An eyes-closed listener would have sworn it was the work of more than just one reed and one brass, so fine is their shading.

The brilliance of Julian Adderley’s tone shone in Manha de Carnaval from “Black Orpheus” and continued on through Leonard Bernstein’s Somewhere from “West Side Story.”

The group’s change of pace kept the audience in full, hand-clapping swing with Mercy, Mercy, Mercy the Adderleys’ current bluesy chart buster.

In Roy McCurdy’s solo on Bohemia After Dark, there was not a wasted rim-shot or paradiddle, just pure rhythm with a percussionistic melody line.

But the icing on last night’s cake was a new blues by both brothers called 74 Miles Away, which, incidentally, is the title of their new Capitol album.

It is also a rocker, replete with tambourines, Zawinul at an electric piano and both brothers in soaring, roaring flight, a fit ending to an altogether too rare outing of real jazz in Richmond.

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Down Beat : 01/25/1968
Pete Welding : 3 stars

This set’s chief claim to distinction is 74 Miles Away, written by Zawinul in 7/4 and swung with perfect gusto.

Cannon’s solo, the first on this nearly 14-minute performance, is absolutely stunning – full of slashing power that never lets up and spun out with total command and effortlessness. And swing! This is one of the finest, most contained, totally engaged, and most relentless improvisations I’ve heard from the altoist in a long time.

The interest is somewhat diminished in Nat‘s solo, which follows. It suffers in comparison with Cannon’s, but beyond this the cornetist never seems to develop anything at all cohesive in the course of his extemporizing here, and finally it sputters out in a bit of clowning with the mouthpiece (I believe).

Gaskin‘s climbing, dark-hued bass figures lend this segment its sole interest, and he continues to perk things up behind Zawinul‘s mulling piano solo (parts of which employ a kind of simple “prepared piano” technique- i.e., a tambourine has been laid over some of the piano strings).

Little else in the album – recorded “live,” incidentally – approaches this performance in sweep or intensity, and in fact the bulk of the set is made up of comparatively lightweight fare.

Nat’s vocal on the throwaway Oh, Babe is humorous on the initial hearing but wears rather thin with repetition. Leonard Feather’s gently affecting tribute to Charlie Parker, Bird, is given an attractive reading, with Cannon’s touching alto particularly outstanding.

The necessary quota of earthiness is dolled out on Nat’s Do, Do, Do (which quite strongly resembles various Horace Silver compositions in the genre), with appropriately gutty playing by all, and on Zawinul’s Walk Tall, which attempts (complete to electric piano) to duplicate the group’s earlier success in this area, Mercy, Mercy, Mercy and Why Am I Treated So Bad? Good, representative performances but nothing outstanding. If you’re an Adderley Brothers fan, you’ll not be disappointed with this set.

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Liner Notes by Leonard Feather

“Live,” whether used as an adjective or a verb, seems singularly appropriate when it is applied to Julian “Cannonball” Adderley and his Quintet. No jazz group presently active seems to come alive more buoyantly on the bandstand, and no other combo has benefited more fully from the advantages of recording live.

This latest session was a triply happy occasion for the Adderleys, since it marked a family reunion. Julian and Nat had brought their wives to Hollywood. Mr. & Mrs. Adderley Sr. were in town on a visit from Florida, visiting with their sons, and having a ball. Mr. Adderley, who used to be a cornetist, commented after one of Nat’s solos: “You sound almost as good as I used to.” During I Remember Bird, he said: “I remember me!” Their radiant pride was an additional incentive to the two sons, as the recording got under way before a hip and responsive crowd.

Cannonball, of course, is the orator supreme among jazz combo leaders. He neither ignores his listeners nor puts them on nor condescends to them; he addresses them as if they were newfound friends. It is in this spirit that you hear the session start; after being presented to the audience by KBCA disc jockey Jay Rich, Julian introduces the opening number, Do Do Do.

All the way from the opening vamp by Joe Zawinul on electric piano, this Nat Adderley tune has the spirit of the blues, transmuted into 32-bar chorus form. As you might deduce from the subtitle (“What Now Is Next”), this beguilingly basic theme has been equipped with lyrics (by Gail Fisher, the prettiest songwriter in town), and will no doubt be heard as a vocal vehicle in due course, following a pattern established by Miss Fisher’s lyrics for Mercy, Mercy, Mercy!

Many years ago, Julian Adderley said: “I listened to all the other alto players … something seemed to be lacking. When I first heard Bird, I knew immediately that that was it.” From that point on, Charlie Parker provided the impetus and inspiration behind Cannon’s development of his own style. As an early friend and admirer of Bird, and as an Adderley fan ever since he first breezed into New York in 1955, I was doubly gratified hen Cannon used my dedicatory blues, I Remember Bird, as a basis for his own tribute to Parker’s memory. Julian, Nat and Joe all dig in here with solos straight from the heart.

Walk Tall, by Joe Zawinul, has a history not unlike that of Mercy. The latter grew out of a background theme he had developed for Esther Marrow, a singer he was coaching. Miss Marrow, whose background clearly goes back to church music, has appeared with Duke Ellington‘s band at various houses of worship, performing in Duke’s program of sacred music. Walk Tall, which has the same sanctified feeling as Mercy, was a collaboration between
Zawinul, Miss Marrow and J. Rein. Again we have a candidate for vocal treatments, under the alternate title, “Baby, That’s What I Need.”

Joe’s tune, 74 Miles Away, derives its name from the meter. Written in 7/4, it swings with perfect ease and includes some of the most adventurous improvisation of the entire session. Julian establishes a carefully-constructed tension, using upper-register notes with a montuna-like background by Joe, bassist Victor Gaskin and drummer Roy McCurdy. Nat starts in a meditative mood, establishes a Middle Eastern scalar quality, then ventures into some wild sound effects that may convince you he is playing bass trombone.

With the Adderleys shaking tambourines to build the intensity, Zawinul offers a magnificent demonstration of the scope and resourcefulness he can bring to modern jazz piano. The baffling tonal innovations were produced by the insertion of a tambourine over some of the strings.

Oh Babe, as Julian says, is “the stone, natural-born blues.” Nat’s vocal (he started his career as a child singer before taking up a horn) shows how you can have fun with the blues without satirizing it. The screams, by the way, are contributed by various members of the group at whom Nat pointed the microphone when he reached the tenth bar of each vocal chorus.

Not long ago, Cannon told me: “When we have a hit going for us, people may come in the club just to hear that number. But once they’re inside, we have no trouble getting them interested in everything we do. We play things that are very commercial, others that are very modern, and we like ballads, and of course the blues. But we never play anything we don’t like and don’t believe in.”

These sides offer exhilarating evidence of Julian Adderley practicing what he preaches.