Billboard : 09/30/1957
Score of 76

Straight ahead modern blowing by Drew, D. Byrd, H. Mobley, etc., that is impressive for its vitality and lava-hot flow. Pianist Drew plays inventively and with strong rhythmic thrust, but it is trumpeter Byrd who is the scene-stealer throughout. Consistently fine blowing here will convince modern buyer.

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Cashbox : 10/05/1957

The entry contains seven sessions, three performed with a quintet, four with quartet setting, headed by pianist Kenny Drew. On both counts the crews (the same on the two settings, minus Mobley on tenor sax in the quartet cuts) perform with class musicianship as they take on a group of four evergreens and three originals. Trumpeter Donald Byrd is given lots of room to move engagingly about. Save a good spot on the jazz shelf for this item.

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Audio 
Charles A. Robertson : December, 1957

An aptly titled album brings Kenny Drew into the studio in a quartet, featuring trumpeter Donald Byrd on four numbers, which is expanded to a quintet by the addition of Hank Mobley, tenor sax, on three others. One of the most promising younger pianists, Drew has been overshadowed during much of his career by Horace Silver, whose footsteps he has followed with growing individuality, though he was born a month earlier in 1928. Both have the same sound background and technical skill, but now seem bent on divergent paths. Silver is becoming more preoccupied with complex rhythm and Latin beats, while Drew turns here to the show tune in You’re My Thrill, It’s You or No One, Why Do I Love You, and the title tune. Also in this direction is his melodic original Carol, an emotionally moving indication of his maturing talent. Byrd contributes Little T, while Wilbur Ware, bass, and G.T. Hogan, drums, are rhythmically agile in uptempo numbers such as Rollins’ Paul’s Pal.

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Oakland Tribune
Russ Wilson : 10/06/1957

It has been more than a decade – a long time in the history of jazz – since bop put a powerful sauce in the musical kitchen. Intrigued by its pungency, a lot of cooks began dousing it on indiscriminately, thereby destroying the other flavors requisite to a pleasing dish. Many youngsters in the jazz household were reared on such peppery pablum. But as the years passed, the more perceptive began to realize they were not getting well-balanced meals. They began to whip up their own recipes, using the sauce for spice but keeping it in culinary perspective.

A fine seven-course dinner of such new fare is offered here, with pianist Drew as host. On four courses he is joined by trumpeter Donald Byrd, bassist Wilbur Ware, and drummer G.T. Hogan. On the other three tenor saxophonist Hank Mobley is joined to the group. It all adds up to a funky, pulsating blowing session, the modern overtones of which do not disguise the link to an important past. Byrd is scintillating, Drew has never sounded better and Mobley demonstrates control and a fine lyrical taste at slow tempos and imagination on the up-tunes.

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San Francisco Chronicle
Ralph J. Gleason : 11/03/1957

Pianist Drew and a rhythm section are joined on one side by Donald Byrd and Hank Mobley and on the other by Byrd alone. This is really very good modern jazz with excellent solos but with occasional tempo troubles. Drew and Byrd play well at all times.

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Down Beat : 12/12/1957
Don Gold : 4 stars

Essentially, this is a blowing session, although there is more of a semblance of order to it than in many sessions. Although this is presented as a quintet-quartet session headed by Drew, Byrd is the heart of the LP.

He is a technically proficient, lyrically fresh soloist. Side two features Byrd with piano, bass, and drums. It is his side, although Drew plays admirably in support and solo. You’re My Thrill, played as a ballad, is handled with great delicacy by Byrd. The three tunes that follow it, including Sonny Rollins‘ simply constructed Paul’s Pal, are vehicles for Byrd solos and he expresses himself. fluently.

The quintet side contains the virtues of the quartet tracks, for the most part, but they are a trifle more cluttered than the Byrd-with-rhythm tracks. Byrd is not up to par on New, but makes a melodic contribution to Drew’s ballad, Carol. It’s You becomes a line spoken by a hurried lover as the two horns lead the pack from start to finish.

Mobley plays competently on his three tracks and, on Carol, is sustainably inventive. On uptempo tunes, Drew creates furiously, with a good deal of fire. on the slower tunes he tends to plod with obvious deliberation. However, he’s less concerned with ballads here and manages to communicate warmly. Ware is excellent. Hogan tends to attack, rather than utilize, the drums, but the horn men here are used to this kind of support and proceed without getting flustered.

This, then, is another fine example of Byrd’s ability. Particularly on side two, where he is relatively free to blow, he indicates a growing awareness of the scope of emotional expression in jazz. He has much to say here and it’s all worth hearing.

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Liner Notes by Orrin Keepnews

This Is New happens to be more than just one of the song titles here, more even than a visually evocative phrase that suggested a photographic cover idea too good to be passed by. It also happens to be a quite apt description of what is taking place musically in this album:

This is current jazz played by musicians who are young, but who have considerable playing experience. All of them also have much the same sets of jazz roots and attitudes. They are men to whom the jazz revolution preached by Bird and Dizzy and Monk at the start of the 1940s is the important starting point. But in referring to the music that developed primarily out of the early-’40s experimentation, it must be noted that roughly a decade and a half has gone by since Minton’s. And that is actually more calendar time, for example, than elapsed between the issuance of King Oliver‘s earliest records and Benny Goodman‘s!

The fact is that at least a full jazz generation has grown up in that time, and that jazz has changed considerably. But, perhaps because it takes a good deal of time to get perspective on such things, or perhaps because there has been no violent upheaval of form (certainly nothing comparable to the differences between Swing, or Dixieland, and Bop), there is a strong tendency to lump everything recent together as “modern.” Well, not quite everything: there is a wide variety of experimentation, and there is the music of the West Coast jazzmen, and most of this gets called “cool,” as distinguished from the sort of music you hear in this album, which is usually tagged as “post-bop,” or “hard bop.” Sometimes of course the lines get blurred, as will happen with any oversimplification: Miles Davis‘ man-walking-on-eggshells trumpet tone is often singled out as the starting point of cool jazz, yet by background and continuing jazz context he belongs to the boppers, and his influence is surely importantly felt in the work of younger horn men like Donald Byrd.

But the major point to be made is that by now the music of the disciples of bop has emerged as an entity, as a self-contained style. Giving it names like “post-bop” may obscure this point, making it seem as if this is more-of-the-same, but it’s not at all like that. This is jazz with basic distinctive qualities of its own, and these qualities seem to be very effectively and excitingly in evidence here.

Above all, this is “funky” jazz, taking that word in its current meaning of earthy, almost gutbucket, with a decided overall feeling of the blues. It is a far less frenetic and self-conscious music than much of early bop (which often failed to conceal its dogged determination to be ‘different’). Some critics complain that there is excessive attention to top-speed tempos, but I find a high and effective proportion of swinging middle-tempo material. Wholehearted, unembarrassed ballads are rather rare; but there are occasions, as with You’re My Thrill here, when everything jells beautifully and soulfully. It is a rhythmically sound jazz (whereas early bop, busily working out new concepts of the functions of rhythm instruments, was not always so), and one reason for this may well be the emergence of a large crop of outstanding bassists, of whom Wilbur Ware is one of the most impressive. This is a music aware of newer harmonic ideas without being pretentious about it, and capable of re-exploring the basic and ‘old-fashioned’ jazz art of ensemble playing: listen particularly to the big sound of Byrd and Hank Mobley together on This Is New; and also on It’s You or No One, which they had recorded, but quite differently, when both were members of Art Blakey‘s Jazz Messengers. (The Blakey group, incidentally, has been something of a post-bop training school: its frequently shifting personnel has also included Drew and Ware.)

Kenny Drew is rapidly maturing into one of the significant younger pianists. Born in New York City in 1928, he has worked with a wide variety of major jazz performers (for fuller biographical detail, see the notes to his previous album for Riverside: RLP 12-224). Although his approach indicates the influence of Bud Powell and, to an extent, Thelonious Monk, he is almost unique among modernists in also appreciating and making use of the heritage of such pre-moderns as Teddy Wilson and Fats Waller. Donald Byrd, still in his very early twenties, is quite clearly the coming young man on trumpet; Hank Mobley is among the most highly regarded of current tenor men. Wilbur Ware, since coming to New York from Chicago about a year ago, has quickly established himself as among the most formidable bass players, both in solo work and as a rhythm man. G.T. Hogan, who has worked with Illinois Jacquet and Stan Getz, considers this his jazz record debut, and it is a highly promising one.