Donald Byrd - Places and Spaces (2021 Blue Note Classic Vinyl Series)

Donald Byrd - Places and Spaces | Vinyl LP - 2021 Blue Note Classic Vinyl Series 180g (3596800, Kevin Gray/Optimal)

Donald Byrd started his Blue Note career in 1958 as a hard bop trumpeter recording alongside Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane and Hank Mobley. By 1972, when he began working with Larry Mizell, the music had changed completely. Mizell produced Black Byrd, Street Lady and Stepping Into Tomorrow before this, each album moving further from jazz convention and deeper into funk, soul and studio production. Places and Spaces was their fourth collaboration and their most refined.

Larry Mizell wrote or co-wrote five of the seven tracks. Fonce Mizell, his brother, co-produced, played clavinet and acoustic piano, and sang background vocals. The rhythm section was Los Angeles studio players at their peak: Chuck Rainey's Fender bass, Harvey Mason's drums, Skip Scarborough's Rhodes. Wade Marcus arranged the strings and conducted them. The result is music that sounds both meticulous and loose, every element placed precisely while the groove sustains the illusion that nobody is trying too hard.

"Wind Parade" opens Side A with one of the most immediately recognisable introductions in jazz-funk: Byrd's flugelhorn over strings and Rainey's bass line. "Dominoes" has been the album's most sampled track. "Change (Makes You Want to Hustle)" bridges disco and jazz-funk in a way that only this specific moment in 1975 could produce. Side B opens with the title track, Byrd and Mizell's most spacious collaboration. "Night Whistler" features James Carter whistling over the ensemble. "Just My Imagination" closes the album with the Strong/Whitfield Temptations piece rearranged through the Mizell production filter.

This is the 2021 Blue Note Classic Vinyl Series 180g pressing, mastered by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio, pressed at Optimal Media GmbH.