Stanley Turrentine - Sugar (1978 Japanese CTI Vinyl LP)

Stanley Turrentine - Sugar | Vinyl LP - 1978 Japanese King Record Reissue (CTI LAX 3177, CTI Original 1500 Series, limited edition)

• Turrentine's first and finest CTI album, three extended tracks with Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, George Benson on guitar and Ron Carter on bass, including the title track that became his signature tune
• Fifteen-minute reading of Coltrane's "Impressions" fills the entire B-side, with extended solos from Turrentine, Hubbard and Benson over Butch Cornell's organ and Billy Kaye's drums
• Japanese limited edition pressing on King Record, produced by Creed Taylor, engineered and mastered by Rudy Van Gelder, with Pete Turner cover photography

Stanley Turrentine had spent the 1960s on Blue Note and Prestige, recording prolifically as a leader and as a sideman with Jimmy Smith, Max Roach and his then-wife Shirley Scott. Sugar was his first album for Creed Taylor's CTI label, and the shift in production approach is audible immediately. The title track opens with a mellow, slow-burning blues groove that gives every musician room to stretch. Lonnie Liston Smith's Fender Rhodes provides the harmonic cushion (he appears only on this track), Ron Carter walks underneath, and Turrentine's tenor enters with a tone that AllMusic described as silken compared to the breathier sound of his Blue Note years. George Benson's guitar solo builds from single-note lines into more aggressive, R&B-inflected runs, and Freddie Hubbard follows with a solo that pushes harder still. "Sunshine Alley", a Butch Cornell composition, shifts into a Latin groove with Pablo Landrum's congas prominent and Cornell switching from electric piano duties to organ, the vibe more relaxed and rhythmically loose.

Side B belongs entirely to John Coltrane's "Impressions", stretched to fifteen and a half minutes. The modal structure gives all three soloists open space, and the interplay between Turrentine's tenor, Hubbard's trumpet and Benson's guitar makes the case for why these musicians kept crossing paths on CTI dates throughout the early 1970s. Cornell's organ adds warmth beneath the solos without ever dominating the texture, and Carter and Kaye maintain the rhythmic foundation with the steadiness that a performance of this length demands. The whole album was recorded in November 1970 at Van Gelder's studio in Englewood Cliffs, produced by Creed Taylor, engineered and mastered by Rudy Van Gelder. Pete Turner's cover photography is part of the distinctive CTI visual identity that Taylor built across the label's catalogue, with liner photographs by Chuck Stewart. This is the 1978 Japanese limited edition on King Record (LAX 3177), part of the CTI Original 1500 Series, with Japanese liner notes alongside Ira Gitler's original English notes.