Audio : December, 1958
Charles A. Robertson

An adjective “best” or “most” to quality a jazz album in connection with a time period of a year or so now is used so loosely, appearing almost monthly in some periodical or other, that it has lost all meaning, but this session is clearly “somethin’ else.” Its significance in the growth of Adderley and Miles Davis is likely to be felt for some time. It indicates that Adderley finally has consolidated his individual strivings and an admiration for Charlie Parker into a style bound to become more emphatically personal. He is one of the few alto saxists who absorbed the teachings of Parker and has emerged with the ability to use them to further his own development. May he never return to the slavish copying of tone, or of frantic tempos and vacant exercises which characterize the student.

A great deal of his new stature comes from his recent entry in to the sextet headed by Davis, who has consistently shown a reluctance to imitate a static Miles Davis. Despite his position as one of the most influential trumpeters of his generation, he is carefully broadening the base of his playing. And he is remarkably candid about some of his sources of inspiration, having recognized long before anyone else the appeal Ahmad Jamal would have for the public. On the liner notes, he acknowledges the Chicago pianist’s contribution to his ballad style of Autumn Leaves, and there are traces of it in his muted elaboration of Love for Sale.

But the more revelatory portions of this LP are found on two blues, where Adderley proves to be a real stimulus and serves notice that the new alliance will yield mutual benefits. On the title tune, Davis generates considerable heat, and on One for Daddy-O, brother Nat Adderley‘s tribute to a Chicago disc jockey, his steady movement into upper register might be attributed to this willingness to listen to Louis Armstrong. Dancing in the Dark exhibits Adderley’s way with a ballad, and the talents of Hank Jones as piano accompanist. Sam Jones is the competent bassist and Art Blakey is a pillar of strength on drums.

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Billboard : 10/20/1958
Spotlight Jazz Album

Here’s one of the outstanding jazz sets released in the past few months and perhaps one of the best of the year. It features some truly fine, sensitive trumpet work by Miles Davis, and at times, some of the best work yet waxed by Cannonball Adderley. Both Autumn Leaves and Love For Sale are handed superb treatments by Davis, and Adderley shines with his solo on Dancing In The Dark. An album that will be important to all jazz fans.

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Cashbox : 11/29/1958

One of the many virtues of this stellar lineup of jazzists is that no one is pressing to be “arty”, and the results are sessions of strength, yet unhurried reserve. Of the five tracks, the title session hits the hardest, Dancing In The Dark the softest (Adderley‘s tenor sax is wonderfully caressing here). Fine combo cohesion here.

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Encyclopedia of Popular Music
4th Edition, 2006 : Four stars

When alto saxophonist Julian ‘Cannonball’ Adderley, a high school band director from Florida, passed through New York with brother Nat during a school break, he found more excitement than he was counting on. After Julian offered to sit in for a late reedman, the session’s leader, keyboard player Oscar Pettiford confronted him with the challenging changes of I’ll Remember April, at a breakneck tempo, designed to humiliate the young upstart. Instead, Adderley responded with a solo that became the talk of the town; within days, his recording career had begun, and within a year he was able to give up his teaching job to front a full-time band. Adderley gave up his own band in 1957 when he had the opportunity to become a sideman in Miles Davis epic ensemble with John Coltrane, resulting in some of of the greatest jazz recordings of all time (including Milestones and Kind of Blue). Davis returned the favour in March of 1958, appearing as a sideman on Adderley’s all-star quintet performance for Blue Note, and the resulting session is indeed Somethin’ Else. Both horn players are at their peak of lyrical invention, crafting gorgeous, flowing blues lines on the title tune and One for Daddy-O, as the Hank Jones/Sam Jones/Art Blakey rhythm team creates a taut, focused groove (pianist Hank Jones’ sly, intuitive orchestrations are studies of harmonic understatement). Adderley’s lush, romantic improvisation on Dancing In The Dark is worthy of Charlie Parker or Johnny Hodges, while the band refurbishes Autumn Leaves and Love For Sale into personal cliché-free swingers. And Alison’s Uncle puts a boppish coda on Somethin’ Else, one of the most gloriously laid-back blowing sessions of the hard bop era.

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Jet Magazine : 12/11/1958
“Jazzmen Stitt and Adderley vie for ‘Bird’ Parker’s Mantle”

As 30-year-old alto saxophonist Julian (Cannonball) Adderley lay recovering from minor surgery in his Corona, NY home last week, little did he know that bigger knives were being sharpened for him. For San Francisco newsman Ralph J. Gleason had rocked the jazz world with the “blasphemous” edict: “Cannonball’s Alto Sax Earns Him Mantle of Charlie Parker,” while regretting that Sonny Stitt and others had “remained more Parker than themselves.”

Insulting the injured further, Gleason wrote that Cannonball, “with his own explosive personality, a warm gushing, driving beat and a beautiful sense of form and irresistible swing,” had “become the first fully original voice on the alto since Parker.”

“Foul!” cried alto and tenor man Sonny Stitt in Chicago, insisting, “I played this way before I ever heard of Charlie Parker. Cannonball never even knew Bird. If anybody knew what Bird did, I did. Send me your Cannonballs, your Desmonds and anybody else on alto or tenor. I don’t bar nobody.” Halting only for a breath, Stitt blew a short blast at Dave Brubeck‘s alto man Paul Desmond (1956-58 Downbeat poll winner on alto): “He’s an amateur, really. Anybody can beat him.”

Unaware of the furor the accolade had created, Cannonball admitted that he was both proud and appreciative of the “Parker Mantle.” Said he: “It’s the first time a major jazz critic has come out that strongly for me. But I don’t think of myself so much as the new Charlie Parker as I do ‘Cannonball the First.’ I have been influenced by Charlie Parker’s style and I may speak with the same voice he did, but I prolifically (sic) try to avoid ‘Bird’ statements. I would like to have the same authority as ‘Bird,’ but as Cannonball.”

Commenting on other altoists, the 235-pound Tampa-born Adderley, a Florida A&M grad noted; “Stitt, I think tries to emulate Bird. I think he is almost a carbon copy.”

Of Desmond, he said: “Funk is totally absent from his playing and he can’t cut me.”

Meanwhile, Miles Davis, the jazz trumpeter who for five years played with Parker and now has Cannonball as one of his sidemen, declared: “There’s no new Bird. None of them quality. Bird had harmonics that you just don’t learn. And no two people think alike. Everybody plays Bird’s cliches, but the only man who comes closest to Bird is my tenor man Johnny Coltrane and sometimes he approaches that Bird-like feeling.”

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San Francisco Chronicle
Ralph J. Gleason : 01/04/1959

A Gleason Gasser for 1958

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San Francisco Chronicle
Ralph J. Gleason : 10/26/1958
“Cannonball Is More Than Another Alto Cast in the Parker Mold”

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Titles of the condensed syndicated article in other papers: ‘Cannonball’ and His Alto: An Explosive Jazz Sound … ‘Cannonball’ Recognized as Alto Sax Force … and the version that Sonny Stitt apparently saw … ‘Cannonball’s’ Alto Sax Earns Him Mantle of Charlie Parker

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Ever since the death of Charlie Parker, it has been evident that players of the alto saxophone faced a vital problem.

The Parker style on the alto, just as the Lester Young style on tenor sax, was so obviously one of the right ways to play – if not THE right way to play – modern jazz that in order to achieve any individuality the musician had to be uncommonly gifted. That such men as Lee Konitz and Paul Desmond did achieve achieve individuality on the alto is to their credit. That such men as Charlie Mariano, Sonny Stitt, and others remained more Parker than themselves is to be regretted.

However, during the past year a new force has emerged on the alto saxophone. It is Julian (Cannonball) Adderley, the young Tampa, FL, soloist who has been playing this year with Miles Davis.

Adderley had his own group shortly after his debut on the New York jazz scene three years ago. It was a fine group, and with it, and on his own, he recorded a series of LPs which indicated that he was something more than another alto cast in the Parker mold. True, he played the Parker style, but he brought to it his own explosive personality, a warm gushing, driving beat and a beautiful sense of form and irresistible swing.

This year, two albums by Cannonball indicate that he has now extended himself beyond this frame to become the first fully original voice on alto since Parker. The first of these LPs was the recent Milestones LP (Columbia) with Miles Davis and the group. The second has just been released. It is Somethin’ Else (Blue Note 1595). On it, Adderley is accompanied by Miles Davis, Art Blakey, Hank Jones and Sam Jones, making a most homogenous quintet. There are five tracks, on one of which Cannonball does all the solo horn work and Davis is not present.

The team of Davis and Adderley, I firmly believe, is one that will make jazz history. They have the same essential ties to lyricism and melody and they are both deeply rooted in the blues. To completement Davis’ fragile, almost wispy approach, there is Cannonball’s sturdy, full-blown swing. It is quite interesting to hear them in the series of echoes and responses that are used in the title song and also to observe the manner in which they embroider the haunting melody of Autumn Leaves.

Parenthetically, it is also interesting to note that Art Blakey, who has been the most annoying of drummers in many of his appearances in recent years and certainly the ruination of more other drummers than any single human force is, on this album, a model of restraint and good taste. This may indicated something concerning the opinion of the other dates he has worked on.

To none of the tracks on this album does the group bring the sort of involved jazz writing that has characterized the West Coast jazz dates of recent vintage. Nevertheless, the same indication of classical harmonic orientation and full utilization of musical devices is present. It is a question of how it is done.

Here, in a further step of the development of the Davis style of small group playing, the performance of such a strong musical personality as Cannonball is directed by the way in which Davis plays. It is not that he crowds Cannonball, but that he leads him and occupies certain territory, limiting the choice that is left to the other soloist.

In the hands of a master of improvisation such as Davis, this is an excellent idea and makes Cannonball extend himself. The same principle, applied to rhythm by Blakey on other occasions, is totally obnoxious.

This is one of the best of the year’s albums; a very fine indication of what lies in store for us in modern jazz and an album that is certain to be of lasting value.

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San Francisco Examiner
C.H. Garrigues : 01/04/1959
Jazz’s Significant Seven

If one were to name the ten jazzmen most important in contemporary jazz, the list would undoubtedly include, high up toward the top, the names of Miles Davis, Cannonball Adderley, John Coltrane, Red Garland, Hank Jones, Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones.

Singly, these represent several of the directions which jazz took under the influence (or, rather, the various influences) of Charlie Parker. Davis represented the “preciseness,” the “spatial” feeling which was always in Parker – even when he played at an unbelievable tempo. But Davis, after Parker’s death, tended to turn “sweet.” Though his trumpet retained its preciseness, it tended to sing even more prettily as years went by.

Adderley, on the other hand, headed a numerous group of alto men who sought to match Bird’s fantastic speed, his complex, interesting progressions – and in doing so, missed the essence of the Parker “feeling.” And, in some degree, the same could said of Coltrane.

In recent years, however, there has been an increasing tendency to coalescence: the “hard bop” of Adderley and Coltrane with the lyric and precise qualities of Davis, the sweetness of Davis with the open, warm, swinging quality of Coltrane at his best. How far this has progressed (and how successful it is) is exemplified in a series of recent records by some, or most, of these men.

The first of these in importance (I would list as one of the ten best records of the year) is Something Else (Blue Note 1595) with Adderley, Davis, Hank Jones, Sam Jones and Art Blakey. The teamplay here between Davis and Adderley – in terms of accent, dynamics and timbre – is marvelous to hear, whether you are listening to he relaxed, swinging Autumn Leaves and Love for Sale or the complex and interesting Somethin’ Else. Hank Jones proves again that he is among the first four or five pianists and Art Blakey is amazingly subtle and understanding (for him!) on drums.

Milestones (Columbia CL 1193) has Davis, Coltrane, Adderley, Garland, Chambers and Philly Joe Jones. It is less even than the Blue Note album, Dr. Jekyll, for example, illustrating how even great jazzmen can fail to do anything except blow fast when they are simply trying to blow fast. But Sid’s Ahead and Two Bass Hit show beautiful work between the three horns and make it an excellent record by any standards.

Relaxing (Prestige 7129) is with the same group with Adderley out, and is a demonstration of how beautiful Coltrane and Davis can blow together. Listen, for example, to how Miles’ muted horn builds tension in You’re My Everything until Coltrane’s warm, singing tenor steps in and resolves it as his own chorus opens.

Soultrane (Prestige 7142) is the least successful of the four; here Coltrane tries to make it alone with the rhythm section (Arthur Taylor replacing Philly Joe Jones) and establishes, I think, something I have long suspected: that there is not enough “front line” in such a setup to hold interest – even with the greatest of hornmen playing. Possibly a more melodic drummer might have helped (as Smiley Winters‘ melodic drumming has so greatly helped Judy Tristano’s quartet at the Cabana) but really melodic drummers are hard to find. Nevertheless, it does give an interesting display of Coltrane’s “sheets of sound” and reveal how scintillating a great tenor can be without loss of warmth of tone.

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Down Beat : 11/27/1958
Dom Cerulli : 5 stars

There’s really not too much to say about this set. It’s the result of five thoroughly professional jazzmen playing together and making it.

The outstanding side to me is Autumn Leaves, on which Davis displays his moving lyricism. In fact, Miles is in superb form throughout. He has command of his horn, and there is often a ringing, triumphant sound out of him that is too rarely heard in modern jazz these days.

Adderley continues to build steadily on Bird. The striking fact is that he isn’t just playing Bird, he is playing out of Bird. There seems to be a logical continuity of growth in his playing (note Dancing, on which he is superb); something akin to what John Coltrane is working on for his horn.

Rhythmic support for the horns is first-rate. And don’t fail to hear One for Daddy-O, for Miles, for Cannonball, for Jones, and for the beauty and excitement possible in minor blues.

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Liner Notes by Leonard Feather

What manner of album is this? Julian Cannonball Adderley, the leader of the group that remains so ardently aflame throughout these sides, is an alto saxophonist cast in the Charlie Parker bop mold. Miles Davis, the other half of the front line, has been the subject of learned dissertations in which he is identified with a branch of jazz known as cool music. And Hank Jones, whose piano is the third important voice in the quintet, has spent a substantial part of the past two years as a sideman with a big band led by the King of Swing. Art Blakey‘s drums have been associated with an alleged new school that has variously been billed as “hard bop” and “hard funk.” As for Sam Jones, bass, he is Sam Jones, bass, though lately there has been a tendency to categorize and pigeonhole even the bass players.

What is remarkable about the above-cited facts is not that members of various schools have been able to assemble and collaborate in the production of a superlative jazz album, but rather the fact that they are not really as various as the critics might have you believe. Both Cannonball and Miles agree that there has been far too much labeling of jazzmen, that there is an almost limitless degree of overlapping between schools, and that what counts is not the branding of the music but the cohesive quality of their concerted efforts.

Only three years have elapsed since Cannonball fired his initial salvo at the Gotham scene. He would have been unable to sit on the important night that marked his New York debut had not school been out. School to Julian Adderley meant Dillard High in Fort Lauderdale, FL, where he had been band director since 1948. Wandering north, he and his brother Nat found themselves at the Bohemia, where the incumbent group was Oscar Pettiford‘s combo. It happened that Jerome Richardson had not yet arrived for work, but Julian’s offer to step into the spotlight was greeted with some wariness by Pettiford, who had never heard, or heard of, the plump, cheerful-faced newcomer. To put him in his place, Oscar beat the band off with I’ll Remember April at an impossible tempo. But Cannonball had come up in the Parker school that knows of no tempo impossibilities. He met the challenge with a long solo that just about knocked Pettiford off the stand. Soon the word spread around town, and before many days had passed Cannonball’s record career had begun. By the following year he had earned enough acclaim to enable him to renounce the academic life in favor of a full-time jazz career, touring with his own quintet.

Julian Cannonball Adderley (the name has nothing to do with ammunition; it is a corruption of a cannibal, a nickname given to him in tribute of his healthy appetite) was born September 15, 1928, in Tampa, FL. His music studies at high school and college in Tallahassee between 1940 and ’48 gave him a solid background first on trumpet, later on various reed instruments. He has been a bandleader off and on for the past decade, generally as a sideline during his years at Dillard High, and in 1952-3, while he was still in the Army, as leader of a large dance band as well as a small group.

During a recent television appearance, when he was introduced as a representative of bop in the NBC educational series The Subject Is Jazz, Cannonball was interview concerning his original reaction to Bird, “Well,” he said, “I listened to all the other alto players, and some of them were fine, but there still seemed to be something lacking. When I first heard Bird, I knew immediately that that was it. His style was completely original, far ahead of anything I had heard, and his harmonic sense was unorthodox.” From that point on, the impetus and inspiration behind Adderley’s work was almost exclusively Charlie Parker.

It seems useless to add anything about the contribution to jazz of Miles, probably the most influential trumpeter alive in terms of impact on the present musical generation. What he had learned originally from Clark Terry and others in and around St. Louis he later expanded when he heard Vic Coulson in New York (“it was impossible to try to play like Dizzy so I listened to Vic”). All this experience was slowly leavened into a new personality; what had been a bop partnership with Charles Parker grew into an individual ownership, a talent that knew the virtues of understatement as well as the beauties of a more directly assertive expression. Today Miles finds orientation and guidance in a variety of sources, some of them unlikely, or at least unexpected: “All my inspiration today,” he asserts, “comes from Ahmad Jamal, the Chicago pianist. I got the idea for this treatment of Autumn Leaves from listening to him.”

Autumn Leaves, an extended treatment that invests the composition with a great deal more complexity and elaboration than has ever been heard on any previous version, starts out in a long introduction as an apparently unidentifiable G Minor melody. Miles brings in the theme, followed by Julian; later there is an ad-lib interlude by Hank Jones suggested by Miles, and a return to tempo at a slightly slower pace. Blakey remains discreet and tasteful throughout. The performance closes with another passage that seems to float in mid-air on a nameless minor theme, built around three triads: G Minor, A Minor, and B-Flat Major.

Love for Sale opens with a pretty ad-lib Hank Jones introduction. Miles’ opening statement of the theme is muted and spare, ending the first 16 measures on a moody 9th. There are Latin interludes throughout as the three soloists take turns at the microphone; a repeated riff fades out at the end. Cannonball’s solo on this track is perhaps the most typical of all in the set: the big, round sound, the Parker-oriented phrasing and harmonic sense, consistently interesting linear development all are in evidence.

Somethin’ Else is, to me, the most exciting of the five mood-evoking tracks in this set. It establishes at once, and sustains throughout its considerable length, a certain mood of restrained exultancy, a low-glowing Davis fire that burns contemplatively until stirred to even greater warmth by the members of Adderley’s stimulation. The performance begins with Miles uttering short, simple phrases, mostly between the tonic and dominant of the scale, all answered in echo-and-response style by Cannonball. Though the construction of the piece is the traditional 12 measures in length, its harmonic movement is unconventional and strikingly effective in its creation of a mood. Starting out on F 7th with a flat 5th, it proceeds to D-raised 9th flat 6th, C-raised 9th flat 6th, B-Flat-7th flat 5th, then back to the D-raised 9th, C-raised 9th, and finally moving from C to D to the tonic F. Hank’s solo on this one is in block-chord style. “That delicate touch of Hank’s,” says Miles. “There’s so few that can get it. Bill Evans and Shearing and Teddy Wilson have it. Art Tatum had it.” And in tribute to Art’s manner of swinging the rhythm section he adds, “Sonny Greer used to swing like that with the sticks and brushes in the Ellington band in the old Cotton Tail days.”

One for Daddy-O, dedicated to the popular Chicago disc jockey, Daddy-O Daylie and composed by by Cannonball’s brother, Nat, returns to the 12-bar theme, but this time closer to the traditional funky blues spirit, with an inspiring and inspired beat. After the theme it is transmoded into a minor blues, with Julian alternating between simple phrases and double-time statements. Miles’ solo starts out simply, with a plaintive use of the flatted 7th in measures nine and ten of his first chorus; a couple of choruses later he reached higher than we are normally accustomed to expect from a trumpeter generally associated with the middle register of the horn; but the upward movement clearly is a natural growth rather than a contrived effect.

Some months ago there was a complaint, in a misinformed and insensitive article that appeared in Ebony that “Negroes are ashamed of the blues.” The white author of the piece would doubtless be incapable, on hearing this Davis solo, of perceiving the porcelain-like delicacy of his approach to the blues. Certainly this is not the blues of a man born in New Orleans and raised among social conditions of Jim Crow squalor and poverty, musical conditions of two or three primitive chord changes; this is the blues of a man who has lived a little; who has seen the more sophisticated sides of life in midwestern and eastern settings, who adds to what he has known of hardships and discrimination the academic values that came with mid-broadening experience, in music schools and big bands and combos, in St. Louis and New York and Paris and Stockholm. This is the new, the deeper and broader blues of today; it is none the less blue, none the less convincing, for the experience and knowledge its creator brings to it. Far from being ashamed of the blues, Miles is defiantly proud of his ability to show its true contemporary meaning.

Hank has a couple of solo passages, one in single-note lines, another making economic use of thirds and fourths. After the performance has reached its clearly successful climax Miles can be heard asking for a reaction from the control booth. It need hardly be added that Alfred Lion got just what he wanted.

Dancing in the Dark is Cannonball’s individual showcase. “I made him play this,” says Miles, “because I remembered hearing Sarah Vaughan do it like this.” It might be added that in Julian’s two choruses, since he is not restricted to a prescribed set of lyrics, he does even more with it than Sarah was able to do.

In closing perhaps it would be appropriate to point out, for those not familiar with the latest in terminology, that the title number of the Miles Davis original, which also provided the name for this album, is a phrase of praise. And if I may add my personal evaluation, I should like to emphasize that Cannonball and Miles and the whole rhythm section and, indeed, the entire album certainly can be described emphatically as “somethin’ else.”