Billboard : 06/06/1961
Spotlight Pick

Cannonball Adderley is featured in front of a big band on this album. Set includes the hot-selling jazz alto saxist playing his first chart item African Waltz and his current entry The Uptown. Besides these two sides Cannonball also is heard blowing in front of the big band on Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and on choice jazz items like West Coast Blues, and Kelly Blue. Arrangements and conducting have been done by Ernie Wilkins. Some pop action can be expected on the strength of Adderley’s chart record.

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Cashbox : 06/10/1961

With a successful “pop” single (the title tune) neatly tucked away as a reference, Adderley will now be able to open doors to a previously-uninterested pop audience. This LP could do it, for it contains the brand of surging, soulful, bluesy music that has “made” him on the jazz scene. Session includes, of course, African Waltz plus a collection of standards and new jazz compositions. Among them are Stockholm Sweetnin’, Blue Grass Groove and Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. Could be another pop chart jazz item.

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Audio
Charles A. Robertson : September, 1961

These ceremonial chants signal Cannonball Adderley‘s graduation to the world of big bands, and the solo regret is that the eighteen-piece unit operates only in a studio. The title tune is a spirited English import which hit the popularity charts as a single, both in this version and the original reading by the Johnny Dankworth orchestra. Ernie Wilkins worked out a snaking new arrangement for the Adderley crew, and the leader’s alto sax is featured on the first recording of the Galt MacDermott tune to attain LP status. Wilkins also enlarges with telling effect on such topical small-group favorites as West Coast Blues, The Uptown, Kelly Blue, and Blue Grass Groove. Bob Brookmeyer is credited with I’ll Close My Eyes and Stockholm Sweetnin’.

Cornetist Nat Adderley shares solo honors with his brother, and the whole group drives furiously and gives a surging lift to the ensemble passages. A band of this sort could fill the dance floor at Freedomland or summer resorts, and booking agents are missing a bet if they underestimate the value of the Adderley name. They should have no trouble selling a similar band on a seasonal basis next year. Solos by Brookmeyer, Oliver Nelson, Jerome Richardson, and Wynton Kelly barely tap the band’s potential, and the realistic stereo of Ray Fowler’s engineering at Plaza Sound Studios makes this outing sound like a promise of things to come.

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Hartford Courant
Jim Barrows : 07/02/1961

Making an album out of his already a hit African Waltz, Adderley will pull at least a couple major hits from this excitingly different batch of jazz instrumentals. Picking Something Different and West Coast Blues to make the hit charts. Many of the numbers are that swinging brand of three-four on four-four time That young piano genius (of 10 years ago at Fort MacPherson) Wynton Kelly joins the Adderley brothers, Brookmeyer, Olatunji, Nick Travis and a raft of others for the big bash. That fabulous alto is syrupy on a slow but impressive Smoke-Gets-Eyes. Many plaudits to that whiz of an arranger Ernie Wilkins for a most important contribution to jazz: reasonable seasoning.

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Kansas City Star
James Scott : 07/16/1961

Cannonball Adderley‘s venture into the big-band world is successful. In African Waltz the impressive roster includes brother Nat, Bob Brookmeyer, Wynton Kelly and Charlie Persip. With a 9-piece brass section the group screams. But there are gentle moments, too, notably when Kelly and Jerome Richardson are heard. It all kicks.

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Miami Herald
Fred Sherman : 09/24/1961

Florida’s own Cannonball Adderley is breaking through that narrow doorway that separates the jazz purist from the big money of the pops market. The title piece of his latest Riverside album, African Waltz is getting a lot of attention from people who wouldn’t be caught dead with a real jazz album in the house. This is big music from an orchestra conducted by Ernie Wilkins. The Waltz has warm colorations with the repetitive passages needed to secure the casual listener.

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Oklahoma City Advertiser
Earl Thomas : 06/22/1961

It is not in the least unusual to hear Cannonball wailing away as only his poll-winning alto style can, but to hear him with a huge band instead of the usual rhythm-section-and-that’s-all combo, is a bit rare! The excellent arranging of one Ernie Wilkins must come in for some honorable mention while we are handing out bouquets, as do the charts by sidemen Bobby Brookmeyer and Wynton Kelly. The Riverside company is in a spurt of wonderful jazz releases, but this album is about as good a big band sound that your record budget can find these days, and the ‘new’ three-four jazz rhythm hasn’t found a better place for showcase to this date.

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Roanoke Times
Arthur Hill : 06/24/1961

Alto saxophonist Julian “Cannonball” Adderley has been a very busy man since our last survey of his activities. For one thing, Mr. Adderley has made a significant contribution to that current phenomenon of the recording industry – the rise of the 45 rpm jazz single.

African Waltz is the name of both the album and the hot-selling single. Riverside claims that it is making all the record charts and putting up a good battle with the rock and roll crowd for the listeners’ attention.

There seems to be some basis for this claim. While tuning the radio spectrum for one of those good out-of-town stations one night, I happened to hear the tune, preceded and followed by more conventional rock and roll selections, on a Roanoke station that prides itself on operating 24 hours a day on the assumption that all the fair citizens of this town are teenagers in heart and mind, if not in body.

Cannonball Adderley’s African Waltz is taken at a fast 6/8 clip with heavy rhythmic accent, which accounts for its mass appeal, I suppose. Mr. Adderley’s guttural saxophone work is totally unlike anything else I have heard him do and this selection stands apart from the rest of the album, much like that old cliché about a sore thumb.

The Riverside album was made to frame the Adderley brothers, Cannonball and Nat, in a big band context. The results of the experiment were exciting in such selections as Kelly Blue, I’ll Close My Eyes and Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.

But the Adderleys, particularly Nat, seemed unsure of themselves with a large band backing them. In most cases, the band work was listless and, on at least one occasion, downright sloppy.

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San Francisco Chronicle
Ralph J. Gleason : 10/22/1961

Jazz music does not get on the commercial hit parade, at least that’s what popular conception of the situation is.

Yet twice in the past year jazz instrumental numbers have rated very high on the Billboard Best Seller charts nationally.

One of them was African Waltz by Julian Cannonball Adderley, who is currently leading his small group at The Jazz Workshop. The other is Take Five by the Dave Brubeck Quartet which plays a concert tonight at the Berkeley Community Theater.

African Waltz was a mixed blessing to the Adderley group. To begin with, Julian says, it created a “distorted picture of the group because the group on the record was a big band and not the small band we use in the clubs. But it did give us a broader expanse of fans. It also made our name better known and results in several TV offers and it increased the sale of our other LPs.”

Sometimes, however, Adderley feels that people who bought his other albums because they were first intrigued by African Waltz were disappointed. “They expect us to sound like that.”

However, of the new audience attracted to his music, Adderley feels he has kept “about 40%. If we were selling 1,000 pieces a month (Ed Note: Record trade people refer to LPs as “pieces”) of number 311, which is what the number of our LP in San Francisco is, and we get a hit single, we get close to a 30 percent increase in sales. So commercially it is good.”

“It also poses a problem playing the tune over and over again. We have a policy now, not to play the hit tune more than once a night.”

Adderley and Brubeck both agree that having a hit tune has opened up the commercial exploitation of radio time to them. It has gotten them countless air plays which cannot help but build up the group’s image, somewhat as institutional advertising does.

“Disc jockeys are relieved to find something they like that is permissible to play,” Brubeck says. “We don’t know yet what effect it will have in the audience. We get some indication from the younger members by their applause when we announce it. They know it. But when you get people dancing in 5/4 time, you’ve done something! They don’t dance much in 5/4, but they are now. We cut it two years ago and I had absolute faith in it as a single.”

Adderley’s tune, African Waltz was recorded “to give us something suitable for airplay, deliberately.” So it’s interesting to see that both jazz men made their hit tunes on purpose.

Paul Desmond, who wrote Take Five, says “it now has a life of its own. It makes you feel like a Frankenstein.”

“It happens I know exactly where it is at the moment on the charts. It is exactly number 25 nationally! It’s curious to hear it in another version. George Cates did it on Dot and it sounds like a polka.”

The whole record trade has been watching the success of Adderley’s disc and of Brubeck’s. It may start a trend to jazz singles because this business will issue anything that sells even if, as one wry writ commented, it turns out to be good as well as commercial.

“The big problem is keeping the tune to a three minute limit,” Brubeck says. “We’ve got three others ready now and Columbia is planning to issue six singles a year.”

Things just might be looking up on the juke box hit parade.

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Down Beat : 08/17/1961
John S. Wilson : 3.5 stars

Ernie Wilkins has written a set of funk-grooved arrangements based in most cases on funk-grooved compositions for a potentially excellent big band featuring the Adderley brothers. As can be seen from the personnel, this is a strong, highly capable line up. But Wilkins has kept his writing within a relatively narrow area, and the solo possibilities are scarcely explored at all since the Adderley brothers and Wynton Kelly get practically all the solo space.

Taken one at a time, these are skillful performances that draw on the writing of some of the more provocative current jazzmen – Wes Montgomery, Junior Mance, Kelly, and Nat Adderley. But strung out one after the other, Wilkins’ sameness of treatment emphasizes the similar vein in which all these men are composing.

Two arrangements by Bob Brookmeyer (Stockhom Sweetnin’ and I’ll Close My Eyes), lighter and airier than Wilkins’, provide a welcome change of pace along with a treatment, by Wilkins, if Smoke Gets in Your Eyes that shows off Cannonball as a warmly romantic but disciplined ballad soloist.

Cannon’s alto fits well into the big-band format – he has the talent for emerging from an ensemble with an exciting promise – but Nat Adderley is the most consistently effective of the soloists. Both brothers have distilled their onetime flamboyance to stronger, sturdier styles, but it is Nat, partly through the nature of his horn, who has arrived at the more intriguingly lean, pungent conception.

African Waltz, which has won some reclaim because, as a single, it managed to get into the upper reaches of the pop music charts, is just about what you’d expect to find on the pop charts – a heavy, repetitious riff given some interest only by Richardson‘s bright piccolo soaring over the lumbering ensemble.

An interesting semantic distinction is made on the back liner: Orrin Keepnews’ notes assert that the orchestra is “led” by Cannonball but, according to the credits, it is “conducted” by Ernie Wilkins who also wrote most of the arrangements and, presumably, had some positive notions of how they should be played.

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Liner Notes by Orrin Keepnews

If you’re looking for today’s music in its biggest and most exciting form, this unique album is strictly for you.

The surging, compelling, thoroughly earthy sound of this orchestra, led by Cannonball Adderley and including as impressive a roster of jazz stars as have ever been assembled, has already been responsible for a major breakthrough on the musical front.

In March of 1961, the issuance on a 45-rpm single record of the rip-snorting Adderley performance of African Waltz caused a swift and totally unlooked-for upheaval. Quickly and enthusiastically accepted by a wide public, it leaped almost overnight into the best-seller category. For the first time in many a year, a jazz instrumental charged onto the “charts” of biggest-selling records compiled by the key weekly publications of the music business: Billboard and The Cash Box. In an era when it is customary to bemoan the absence of anything other than superficial gimmicks and noise on the popular music scene, it was particularly startling to see a disc bearing the name of a top-ranked jazz artist moving up towards the top end of the lists of the nation’s hits, and to hear the powerful big-band beat of African Waltz sharing radio time across the country with the latest efforts of Presley, Darin, Connie Francis and all those brand-new groups whose names we didn’t quite catch.

Now this very different kind of waltz makes its initial appearance in album form, as part of a most impressive array of rich and rousing big-band arrangements, each conveying that same distinctive feeling of foot-stomping excitement and urgency.

These recordings represent Julian “Cannonball” Adderley’s first venture into the big-band area. But the combination of swinging, earthy jazz and widespread popular appeal is nothing new for the number one alto sax star. Ever since the Fall of 1959, when he left his featured spot with Miles Davis’ group to form his own quintet, Cannonball has met with a most gratifying series of successes. His group’s first album, The Cannonball Adderley Quintet in San Francisco, which included Bobby Timmons’ memorable soul-tune, This Here, was an immediate and overwhelming hit. The quintet — which co-features the cornet of Cannonball’s brother Nat, who can also be heard on this LP — has gone on to produce two other best-selling albums to date. It has played to enthusiastic and overflowing crowds in clubs and at concerts from, for examples, New York to Los Angeles and Boston to Dallas, and has made two thoroughly triumphant European tours.

Much of the credit for the unusual and rich-textured sound of this album must go to Ernie Wilkins, one of the very best of today’s arrangers, whose credits include many scores featured by the orchestras of Count Basie, Quincy Jones and Harry James, among others. African Waltz and seven more here are his work, with Bobby Brookmeyer responsible for the others.

Fittingly enough, the composer credits on this album are also highlighted by the names of some of the brightest young artists on today’s jazz scene, men like Nat Adderley, poll-winning guitarist Wes Montgomery, and pianists Wynton Kelly and Junior Mance. A number such as Quincy Jones’ Stockholm Sweetnin’ is well on its way to becoming a jazz standard, and several of the other, newer tunes here are not going to be far behind.

Back in its good-old-days in New Orleans early in this century, jazz was unquestionably a thoroughly “popular” music. In the Swing Era of the 1930s, the widely acclaimed bands of Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Glenn Miller and the like produced many of the biggest hits of the day. It may well be that the stage is again set for the reemergence of jazz into the spotlight of full-scale public acceptance. If that is to be the case, this album — with Cannonball’s inventive, swinging and soulful alto soaring over the brilliant sound of the full band — is certainly an excellent way to celebrate that return and to get it under way.