During his lifetime live albums were a staple of Adderley’s career on record. Those live albums keep coming, one year short of the half-century since his death.
This one will come as a surprise to anyone who has this band’s work mentally filed away as soulful, earthy, swinging and nothing more. It reveals just how much the group was a work in progress and something of a musical sponge; it absorbed what was going on around it.
George Duke’s arguably the main reason for this. Even at this relatively early stage in his career he was a prodigiously gifted pianist and this, in tandem with the group’s willingness to come to terms with Miles Davis’s electric output, takes the music outside of the assumed zone. It enters a more rarefied place, as on the lengthy Black Messiah, where Duke channels McCoy Tyner-like intensity and the group collectively works in defiance of the expected.
Perhaps inevitably, Autumn Leaves will provoke those in the know to check back on the version of it Adderley cut on his Somethin’ Else album for Blue Note. The comparison reveals how much Adderley’s muse had moved on in the intervening years. Repeated listening will confirm this.
Discography
Black Messiah; Autumn Leaves; Soli Tomba; Walk Talk (Baby That’s What I Need); Into The Scene; Doctor Honoris Causa; Hummin’; Directions; Mercy, Mercy, Mercy (78.57)
Adderley (as, ss); Nat Adderley (c); George Duke (p, elp); Walter Booker (b); Roy McCurdy (d). Olympia Theatre, Paris, France, 25 October 1972.
Elemental Music 5990449
