Ron Carter - Spanish Blue (1978 Japanese CTI Limited Edition Stereo Vinyl LP)

Ron Carter - Spanish Blue | Vinyl LP, 1978 Japanese CTI Limited Edition Stereo Reissue (LAX-3184, CTI Original 1500 Series, King Record Co. Ltd.)

• Three Carter originals inspired by a stay in Barcelona during the Miles Davis years, plus an eleven-minute reading of “So What” by the man who played it live with Davis for five years
• Billy Cobham, Hubert Laws, Roland Hanna, Jay Berliner and Ralph MacDonald, a CTI house band at its most assured, recorded by Rudy Van Gelder at Englewood Cliffs in November 1974
• Japanese limited edition on King Records as part of the CTI Original 1500 Series, with Bob Ciano’s original cover design and Alen MacWeeney’s photography

Ron Carter recorded a run of leader albums for Creed Taylor’s CTI label across the mid-1970s, and Spanish Blue is the one that draws most directly on his years in the Miles Davis Quintet. Two of the three Carter originals take their names and their rhythmic feel from time Davis’s group spent in Barcelona during the 1960s: “El Noche Sol” and “Sabado Sombrero” use Latin inflections without overdoing them, anchored by Ralph MacDonald’s percussion and Hubert Laws’s flute threading lines above Carter’s bass. “Arkansas”, the longest track at over ten minutes, is more grounded in post-bop and lets Jay Berliner’s guitar colour the arrangement alongside Leon Pendarvis’s electric piano. But the centrepiece is “So What”. Carter played this tune with Davis from 1963 to 1968 and knew its harmonic structure from the inside. His version runs more than eleven minutes, with Roland Hanna on both piano and electric piano, and it becomes something quite different from the Kind of Blue original: less about modal coolness and more about texture and space, with Carter’s bass leading rather than accompanying.

The session was recorded at Van Gelder’s studio in November 1974 and produced by Creed Taylor with the same care for sound and presentation that defined CTI’s catalogue. Billy Cobham, who had played on Carter’s previous CTI albums, drives the rhythm with a controlled intensity that sits between hard bop and fusion without committing fully to either. Laws is used throughout as a colour instrument, his flute adding a warmth that offsets Cobham’s precision. Carter plays double bass exclusively (this was before his experiments with piccolo bass on the 1977 album Piccolo), and his tone is deep and resonant. This 1978 Japanese pressing is manufactured and distributed by King Record Co. Ltd. as part of the CTI Original 1500 Series, a limited edition reissue programme. Catalogue number LAX-3184 (original US CTI catalogue: CTI 6051 S1).