Wynton Marsalis - Black Codes (From the Underground) (1985 Japanese CBS/Sony Vinyl LP)

Wynton Marsalis - Black Codes (From the Underground) | Vinyl LP, 1985 Japanese CBS/Sony (28AP 3097)

• The final recording of Marsalis’s first great quintet: Wynton and Branford Marsalis, Kenny Kirkland, Charnett Moffett (aged 17 at the time of recording) and Jeff “Tain” Watts, with Ron Carter on bass for “Aural Oasis”
• Winner of two 1986 Grammy Awards and added to the Library of Congress National Recording Registry in 2023
• Japanese pressing on CBS/Sony, recorded at RCA Studio A in New York on January 11 and 14, 1985, produced by Steve Epstein

The title refers to the laws passed in former Confederate states after the Civil War to restrict the freedoms of newly emancipated African Americans, and “From the Underground” to the network of abolitionists and safe houses that resisted them. That weight of subject announces an album with more at stake than its predecessors. Think of One (1983) and Hot House Flowers (1984) had established Marsalis as the most prominent young trumpeter in jazz, but Black Codes is where the quintet becomes a working unit rather than a setting for the leader’s virtuosity. Kirkland, Moffett, and Watts reorder accents, superimpose time signatures, and push the harmony in ways that draw openly from Miles Davis’s mid-1960s quintet with Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams. Ron Carter’s appearance on “Aural Oasis” makes that lineage explicit: the bassist of the Second Great Quintet playing with the group most often compared to it.

All compositions are by Marsalis except “Chambers of Tain,” written by Kirkland as a feature for Watts (the drummer’s nickname came from Kirkland, who drove past a Chieftain gas station in Florida and shortened the word). Charnett Moffett was seventeen years old at the recording sessions. Branford Marsalis and Kirkland left the band shortly after these sessions to join Sting, a departure that ended this particular quintet permanently. Liner notes by Stanley Crouch. This is the Japanese pressing on CBS/Sony. Digitally recorded using the Sony PCM3324. Catalogue number 28AP 3097.