Billboard : 02/19/1966
Jazz Spotlight

The marriage of jazz and Latin music has been attempted many times, but it seldom comes out as successful as on this outing. McFarland and his group give cool, relaxed performances on such Mexican-American numbers as South of the Border and Mexicali Rose and even give Limehouse Blues a Latin-jazz flavor.

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Asbury Park Press
Don Lass : 06/25/1966

It’s ironic that respected jazz musicians should borrow a sound from Herb Alpert, a trumpet player who found jazz too difficult. But that’s the case here. McFarland, an arranger and marimbaist-vibraphonist of considerable renown, has created a dozen Tijuana-sounding scores and uses veteran trumpeters Clark Terry and Joe Newman as the base for his star-studded little group. Overall, the sounds are far more rewarding than those produced by the more commercial Tijuana Brass. McFarland’s scores avoid the sameness Alpert’s band attains and open the way for some intriguing solos by Terry, Newman, valve trombonist Bob Brookmeyer, and Toots Thielman‘s harmonica. The leader’s variations on Limehouse Blues, which is a long way from Tijuana, Soul Bird, Mexicali Rose, Marcheta, and Tijuana are especially interesting.

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HiFi / Stereo Review
Joe Goldberg : July, 1966

Performance: Superb
Recording: Excellent
Stereo Quality: Excellent

The coarsening of a musical idea to make it more commercial is far too common a practice. What Gary McFarland has accomplished with his new album, Tijuana Jazz, is so rare that I can’t recall its having been done before: taking a strictly commercial idea and making far better music from it than is contained in the model. The model, in this case, is Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass, and McFarland has taken Alpert’s formula (two trumpets, trombone, Latin rhythm) and turned it into one of the most refreshing, witty, completely delightful jazz sets to come along in a very long time.

Clark Terry, of the patented puckish tone, is the major soloist, and trombonist Bob Brookmeyer is right behind him. McFarland has worked with both men on innumerable occasions, and they with each other, so their rapport is a given factor, not something to be strived for. McFarland has been accused of walking a tight wire between jazz and straight pops. That may be so – certainly the dark night of the soul is not his forte – but even if it is true, in this instance he has found the perfect vehicle for his skill, sense of humor. and penchant for Latin rhythms and lean orchestration.

I suspect my favorite track here is Limehouse Blues, in which Brookmeyer’s and Terry’s lovely solos, the perfect guitar backing, the ricky-tick asides, all build, with the addition of Joe Newman, to a marvelously wild triple-play neo-Dixie chorus.

If you have only half as much fun listening to this album as these superb musicians obviously had in making it, it will be your best buy in several months. The engineering matches the music.

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Milwaukee Journal
Leonard Feather : 03/19/1966

With the Tijuana Brass in the center of the best seller arena, it was inevitable that other groups would toss their horns into the ring. A couple of brave bulls, flugelhornist Clark Terry and vibraharpist McFarland, in Tijuana Jazz, reach for an esthetic level above that of the group they are imitating and succeed in outswinging them by a Mexican mile.

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Ottawa Citizen
Jack Batten : 06/18/1966
Gary McFarland is the Duke’s Successor, No Matter What Those Purists Say

The editors of Down Beat magazine and most other jazz purists swooned in outrage last summer when McFarland released an album called Soft Samba (Verve V-8603). McFarland is a dashingly good-looking, 33-year-old composer and arranger from New York and, until Soft Samba, he’d been cheered by the jazz audience as the logical successor to Duke Ellington, the master composer-arranger himself. McFarland had earned his reputation with a series of strikingly attractive scores written for such consummate jazz performers as Gerry Mulligan, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Stan Getz and Johnny Hodges. But for jazz buffs, Soft Samba turned out to be something else again.

The material in the album, for one thing, included a lot of tunes by – square! – John Lennon and Paul McCartney: I Want To Hold Your Hand, A Hard Day’s Night, And I Love Her. And there was very little improvisation by the septet that played the songs; instead, aided by some multiple tracking, McFarland actually hummed along with himself on each track. Well, Down Beat dismissed the album with total disdain and jazz fans set about revising their lists of logical successors to Duke Ellington.

But, save us from jazz purists; the fact is that Soft Samba is an utterly charming recording. It comes along like a walk, taken sprightly down a green city street under a June sun. It’s subtle and fun and enchanting and I find the instrumental voicings concocted by McFarland, his own vocalese and the gentle Latin rhythms that move under the songs, to be simply irresistible.

So is almost all of McFarland’s music. It’s currently displayed on some half dozen available recordings, all uniquely different but all touched by McFarland’s fine light hand. The Jazz Version of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying ((Verve V-8443) shows off his style in big-band writing; it favors looseness, humor, and solos and ensemble figures that enter and leave when you least expect them. Point of Departure (Impulse A-46) is a sextet recording and it’s most valuable for McFarland’s own deceptively casual vibraphone playing, and for an excruciatingly melancholy composition of his called Amour Tormentoso.

On the The Gary McFarland Orchestra (Verve V-8518), McFarland leads a string quartet, two reeds, rhythm section, vibraphone and the enormously gifted pianist, Bill Evans, through some lovely, cool, spare melodies – especially one called Reflections in the Park, which has been incorporated into a successful modern ballet. Tijuana Jazz gets into still another bag; it’s done in a kind of Tijuana Brass style, but inspired by a jazzman’s wit and joy. Some of the tunes on the album – South of the Border, Mexicali Rose – you wouldn’t believe any more than you’d believe the Beatles songs. But McFarland pulls everything off and proves, for me if not for those jazz purists, that he really is the most talented creator of musical atmosphere Duke Ellington.

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Saturday Review
Stanley Dance : 03/12/1966

It was inevitable that the extraordinary success of Herb Alpert‘s Tijuana Brass would be echoed in jazz. McFarland has bene conscientious in the matter of local color, even managing to transplant Limehouse and Sweet Georgia Brown to Mexico, but the responsibility for placating the jazz audience has been left to mostly to Clark Terry, who happily shrugs himself free of the context in several cases. Records like this, like Skitch Tonight by Skitch Henderson (Columbia CL 2367) and Classic Bossa Nova by Marty Gold (Victor LPM 3456), will presumably be esteemed by Terry collectors of the future just as some of Paul Whiteman’s were by Beiderbecke collectors.

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Van Nuys News
Mike Davenport : 04/08/1966

The Tijuana Brass, because of their phenomenal success, have spawned a host of imitators. A recent album by one of them puts the original to shame. The album is Tijuana Jazz (Impulse A-9104), and features the writing of the extraordinarily talented and gifted McFarland and the playing of Bob Brookmeyer (valve trombone), Clark Terry (fluegelhorn), and Toots Thielman (harmonica).

Gary’s writing is extremely imaginative and he employs a variety of Latin rhythms to set off such a variety of material as Marcheta, Limehouse Blues, Sweet Georgia Brown, Mexicali Rose and a host of originals.

There is a great deal of fine blowing here, as well as plain, simple fun. Intrinsic in the playing of all the participants is warmth and humor, and this album captures it admirably.

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Down Beat : 04/07/1966
Michael Zwerin : 4 stars

Lately I have been listening to a lot of rock-and-roll. I don’t know why but I like most of it. Either my taste is degenerating or else the quality of popular music is improving. Maybe I am attracted by the simplicity and innocence of its spirit.

Whatever it is, my appreciation doesn’t include Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. All I can think of when I hear them is those poor guys having to play A Taste of Honey the same way every night. It’s very depressing. Also, the arrangement is catching, and I resent it – I feel roped in, conned.

McFarland‘s Tijuana Jazz is considerably better than Herb Alpert, and, though it may sound like a negative reason, this is why I give it four stars.

I’ll explain. If a track from this album makes the charts – which I think is possible – it would be important, in a very basic way. It would open doors.

Even Alpert’s success is encouraging – so is Ramsey Lewis‘. Apparently people are willing to listen to instrumental music again. Now McFarland follows with a more musical, and occasionally really exciting, version of instrumental pop. When the masses become accustomed to hearing popular music conceived and played intelligently, they might eventually support intelligent jazz. So, I suppose my four stars are as much for etymological significance as for musical quality.

“Quality” is the first word I think of listening to Clark Terry. Everything works – sound, time, intonation, sense of humor. I’ve never particularly cared for Bob Brookmeyer, but on this one he sounds fine… again, he’s certainly better than Alpert’s Tijuana Brass.

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Liner Notes by Nat Hentoff

In a view of McFarland‘s attachment to the sounds and sights of Mexico, he is a logical master – along with Clark Terry – of these revels which fuse the Mexican milieu with jazz. Required for this tangy brew are musicians of wit, some whimsy and a considerable amount of warmth. Those are among the characteristics of the co-leaders as well as of the incisive Joe Newman, the blurrily epigrammatic Bob Brookmeyer, the pungent Toots Thielemans, and the prestigious rhythm section of Barry Galbraith, Bob Bushnell, Grady Tate and Mel Lewis.

The instrument on which McFarland is heard throughout is particularly appropriate to the proceedings. An offspring of the African xylophone, the marimba was developed in Central America. It is capable of more textural – and hence more emotional – nuances than the xylophone and is especially suited to the gentle but passionate Latin jazz way of expression that courses through this album.

What makes these scores additionally beguiling is the play of textures – the graceful, limber marimba of McFarland; the Belgian-Mexican-jazz “soul” of Toots Thielemans’ harmonica; the biting, crackling brass; the speech-like blues-laced solos of Clark Terry; and the burnished, penetrating sound of Joe Newman. And a further, insistently personal aural thread is that of Bob Brookmeyer. Below, maintaining a rolling, quasi-hypnotic beat, are the rhythm forces with Willie Bobo providing crisply accented punctuations.

For additional diversification, there is a range of material – the achingly lyrical Marcheta, the unabashedly romantic Mexicali Rose, and newly cooked perspectives on such standards as South of the Border, Limehouse Blues and Sweet Georgia Brown. There are also the celebratory Tijuana, the durably inflammatory Soul Bird (Tin Tin Deo), and the affectionate Fantastic, That’s You.

Gary McFarland’s contributions include his impressionistic Acapulco at Night, the inviting Granny’s Samba, the sprightly Mary Jane, and the expectant Ira Schwartz’s Golden Dream. That last title requires explication. McFarland’s manager and general business factotum is Norman Schwartz, once a musician himself. It is Norman’s vision that a large jazz orchestra, under Gary’s direction, be eventually established in New York for concerts in which a wide scope of current jazz compositional directions and be explored. Why Ira Schwartz in the title? That’s what McFarland calls his business mentor.

In his arrangements for this blending of idioms, McFarland has created sunny brass exclamations, sections of autumnal wistfulness (as in several Bob Brookmeyer solos), evocations of carnival buoyancy and occasional suggestions of the coolness of twilight. This is, in sum, a series of multi-colored impressions – of places and moods, of ways of relaxing and ways of loving. And listeners who bring their memories – or their nostalgia for places they’ve never been – to these sketches will find their own images of sun and border streets and nights that provide a variety of hedonistic challenges.

The album has further functions. For listening without daydreaming, there are the bracing, often witty improvisations of Terry, Newman, Brookmeyer, and their associates. And on gregarious occasions, this Tijuana Jazz can serve as a foundation for inhibition-releasing dancing.

In any case, the intent of the revels is to, in a sense, bring jazz into warmer climes and out of doors. These are not “street musicians,” in the Mexican sense, but the feeling I get from much of the music here is that of an informal parade – a parade of high spirits, bold colors, and the particular quality of auditory kicks that comes from brass-powered story-tellers with room to shout.

No further annotation, it seems to me, is required. This is, after all, a visceral rather than an intellectual journey. The next step is to raise the volume, pour some tequila – with salt, and listen. The temperature will soon rise.