Freddie Hubbard - Here to Stay (1985 Japanese Blue Note Promo Reissue Vinyl LP)

Freddie Hubbard - Here to Stay | Vinyl LP, 1985 Japanese Blue Note Promo Reissue (BNJ 71073 / BST 84135, Blue Note 4000 Series Original Collection 100, Toshiba EMI)

• A quintet session with Wayne Shorter, Cedar Walton, Reggie Workman and Philly Joe Jones, three of whom were Hubbard’s bandmates in Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, recorded in a single session on December 27, 1962 at Van Gelder Studio
• Shelved for fourteen years: Reid Miles designed the cover and Blue Note assigned the catalogue number in 1963, but the album was not released until 1976, possibly because Hubbard’s output for the label was already so prolific
• Japanese promotional pressing from 1985 in the Blue Note 4000 Series Original Collection 100, manufactured by Toshiba EMI

By December 1962, Freddie Hubbard had already recorded five albums for Blue Note in just over two years: Open Sesame, Goin’ Up, Hub Cap, Ready for Freddie, and Hub-Tones. He went into Van Gelder Studio on the 27th with a quintet that drew from the Jazz Messengers roster. Wayne Shorter, Cedar Walton and Reggie Workman were all current or recent Messengers, and the chemistry between them is audible: the group plays with the tightness and directional confidence of musicians who have spent time on the bandstand together. Philly Joe Jones, who had defined the drums in Miles Davis’s First Great Quintet and the Bill Evans Trio, brings a different energy to the rhythm section, with a swinging propulsion that pushes the front line. The album was recorded, the cover designed by Reid Miles, the catalogue number assigned, and then the whole thing was shelved. Fourteen years passed before it was released, in 1976, as BN-LA 496-2.

The programme is six tracks. “Philly Mignon” (a play on “filet mignon,” for Jones) opens with hard bop confidence. “Father and Son” is a Cal Massey composition. “Body and Soul” is the Coleman Hawkins standard, given a reading that lets Shorter and Hubbard both stretch. “Nostrand and Fulton” is named for the Brooklyn intersection. “Full Moon and Empty Arms” (based on themes from Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto) and “Assunta” close side B. The shelving was almost certainly not about the quality of the music. Hubbard’s output was simply too fast for the release schedule, and Blue Note may have held it back to avoid flooding the market with his name. What resulted is an album that sounds like a lost session from the label’s golden years, because that is exactly what it is. This 1985 Japanese pressing is a promotional version in the Blue Note 4000 Series Original Collection 100. Manufactured by Toshiba EMI. Catalogue number BNJ 71073 (original Blue Note catalogue: BST 84135).