Over the past few years, I’ve become increasingly interested in the creative jazz that emerged from California from the 1950s to the 1980s. The most important proponents of the avant-garde out West were musicians like Jimmy Giuffre, Ornette Coleman, Horace Tapscott, Vinny Golia and the Cline Brothers.
Two of the most important figures in the progressive jazz scene were multi-reedist John Carter and trumpeter/cornetist Bobby Bradford. During the mid to late 1960s, this forward thinking duo came together to help form the New Art Jazz Ensemble and remained close collaborators until Carter’s death in 1991.
Through the whims of legendary record producer Bob Thiele, Carter and Bradford were given a chance to present their unique style of jazz to a larger audience. They released two outstanding recordings, Flight of Four and Self Determination Music on Thiele’s Flying Dutchman label in 1969 and 1970. The recordings did not make the tandem household names but they did firmly entrench them as standard bearers of the new music on the West Coast.
I recently had the good fortune to speak with Mr. Bradford about these two recordings and the events that led up to their creation. Through Mr. Bradford’s memories and a bit of research, I was able to gain some insight into the music.
John Carter
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| Carter |
John Wallace Carter was born in Ft. Worth, Texas on September 24, 1929. He was introduced to music at an early age through his parent’s record collection and the music of the Baptist church his family attended. Carter first got involved in music by playing the mellophone then moved on to the clarinet at the age of 12.
Carter started playing professionally at 14 after he had picked up the saxophone and flute. Carter’s association with saxophonist Ornette Coleman and drummer Charles Moffett began in the 1940s as bebop zealots but, as there was no work for jazz musicians, they all played as part of the R&B scene of middle Texas.
Carter was a brilliant young man. He graduated high school at the age of 15 and attended Lincoln University in Jefferson, Missouri, where he received his Bachelor’s of Arts in 1949 (just 19 years old). While he attended Lincoln, Carter continued to play and tour infrequently, mostly with Kansas City based blues musicians like George Baldwin. Carter continued his education at the University of Colorado where he received his Masters in 1956. Between 1949 and 1961, Carter found work by teaching music in the public schools of Ft. Worth.
In 1961, Carter relocated to Los Angeles with his wife, with whom he would have four children. He was able to find work as a traveling music teacher, driving from school to school. Carter had originally wanted to try his hand as a studio musician but found that the sacrifice wouldn’t be worth it – studio work would have consumed all his time and wouldn’t have let him focus on his own individual musical development.
Carter maintained a busy schedule as an educator but still played as frequently as he could. He knew and performed with many of the Los Angeles based musicians, including pianist Hampton Hawes and saxophonist Harold Land. By the 1960s, Carter had begun looking for new musicians that were interested in the new directions he had been exploring. It was his friend Ornette Coleman that recommended Bobby Bradford.
Bobby Bradford
Bobby Lee Bradford was born July 19, 1934 in Cleveland, Mississippi. He spent his early childhood in Mississippi. Unlike Carter, Bradford’s relocation to California took a few attempts to hold.
The first was by car in 1944 when Bradford’s stepfather, mother and brother went to look for better opportunities out West. His stepfather’s brother had already established himself in California and work at the Douglas aircraft manufacturer looked promising – ultimately it wasn’t. After a brief spell in Detroit right after the unsuccessful Los Angeles try, Bradford decided that he didn’t see eye to eye with his stepfather and moved to Dallas to settle in with his father at the behest of his mother. This was in 1946 and he was 11 1/2 years old.
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| Bradford |
Bradford had played a little piano as a child in Mississippi but began playing music in earnest in 1949 when he picked up the cornet in 10
th grade. He was immediately attracted to the fledging sounds of bebop and began practicing religiously. Bradford was able to get gigs playing in R&B bands backing touring vocalists at the time. Among the musicians that he befriended in high school were David “Fathead” Newman, James Clay and Cedar Walton.
The Dallas and Ft. Worth jazz scene was expansive at that time. It wasn’t until Bradford was a freshman at Samuel Huston College in Austin, Texas that he finally played with that “Ft. Worth musician who was doing some far out shit.” The occasion was Bradford’s friend and drummer Charles Moffett’s wedding. A jam session was set up to celebrate at the Victory Grill in Austin. That was where Bradford first heard Moffett’s best man, the saxophonist Ornette Coleman.
Bradford’s next rendezvous with Coleman wouldn’t occur until he left college after a year and a half for Los Angeles in 1953. Bradford hadn’t been getting what he wanted out of Huston College and decided to try his luck out West. He settled in with his mother and stepfather. It wasn’t long after his move that Bradford met Coleman on the Red Car, a train that ran between Long Beach and downtown Los Angeles.
Coleman had moved to Los Angeles after leaving the Pee Wee Crayton band. When Bradford met him, the saxophonist had already married poet Jayne Cortez and was living at her parents’ home. Coleman was interested in playing with Bradford but was also looking for employment, which Bradford was able to help him with. Bradford was working as a stock guy at Bullock’s department store and was able to get Coleman a position there.
The two musicians met frequently at Coleman’s in-law’s house to practice. Coleman and Cortez moved shortly thereafter to an apartment over a commercial garage where the musicians had more opportunity to play their music.
Coleman and Bradford were able to find gigs every so often playing bebop and Tin Pan Alley tunes in the red light district of Los Angeles, including a number of gay bars. While his concepts weren’t fully realized, Coleman had begun adding his own tunes to the group’s repertoire though the group played mostly tunes with chord changes.
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| Ornette Coleman |
“Ornette never gave an inch,” said Bradford. “He stuck to his guns. People ask if I was working on something similar? Hell no, I wasn’t. It was all Ornette. I wasn’t thinking about playing tunes without chords. It was Ornette that made me see the possibility of linear improvisation. His melodic themes attracted me and made my bebop playing better.”
Bradford received his draft notice in 1954. He volunteered which allowed him to opt for either the Air Force or Navy for a span of 4 years. He chose the Air Force and reported for service on December 28, 1954. Bradford spent those four years playing in the jazz band, where his technique “went up 200 percent.”
By this time, Bradford was married with twin boys and a young daughter. He decided to return to school to finish his degree so that he could teach music. Bradford enrolled at the University of Texas in Austin where he attended for one year and a semester. The University was on the other end of town and proved to be a hassle to get to between work and family obligations.
Bradford was then offered an opportunity for a scholarship at Huston-Tillotson University. Huston College had merged with Tillotson College in 1952. The proximity made it much easier for Bradford. For their scholarship, Bradford had to be a “music gofer” - playing in every ensemble while maintaining his job at a local bowling alley.
Professional opportunities didn’t dry up while Bradford was at Huston-Tillotson, in fact, though he had to turn many down. Coleman called in 1960 to ask Bradford to play on his Free Jazz album (Atlantic SD 1364, 1961). Bradford asked the University administration if he could leave but as it was the middle of a semester, he would have received an incomplete. His absence prompted Coleman to use trumpeter Freddie Hubbard in his stead.
Broke during the spring of 1961, Bradford decided to join up with Coleman in New York City. Contrary to many reports, Coleman was still playing frequently but not recording beyond his own rehearsal tapes. The saxophonist had put together a new ensemble due to a falling out with trumpeter Don Cherry, whom Bradford replaced. There were auditions for bassist and drummer, the spaces eventually going to Jimmy Garrison and Charles Moffett respectively.
The new ensemble opened at the Five Spot during the summer of 1961 with all new music. The group played regularly throughout the summer and fall of that year all over New York City, including the original Jazz Gallery (where there was an art exhibition running concurrently) and Birdland. The only gig that Bradford recalled outside of NYC was a single hit in Cincinnati, Ohio where Coleman introduced his Free Jazz Octet that featured Bradford and Don Cherry, soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy, bassists Garrison and Art Davis and drummers Moffett and Ed Blackwell. (Apparently there are rehearsal recordings of this group, nothing more).
Bradford continued to travel between New York and Texas, playing music on the weekends while working a day job and going to school the rest of the week. Bradford didn’t do much playing outside of the Coleman ensemble, though he occasionally played in Latin dance bands - what he called “pre-salsa” bands. He tried bringing his family to New York shortly but Coleman began his boycott of the local club scene that left Bradford out of work and forced him to return to Texas. Bradford’s family had moved into a Federal Housing Project in Austin, just able to survive on his modest income.
In May of 1963, Bradford graduated from Huston-Tillotson. He immediately got a job teaching music at a school in Crockett, Texas. It wasn’t long until he decided to try his luck in California again. Bradford packed up his family and moved back in 1964.
When he arrived in Los Angeles, Bradford found work as a workman’s comp adjuster for Los Angeles County. The County made him report in San Bernadino, which was far from his Los Angeles home. The family eventually settled in Pomona, closer to work.
The twain shall meet…
It was a few years before Carter and Bradford met. After playing with numerous groups and a hectic teaching schedule, Carter was looking for something new. He was a good friend of Ornette Coleman from his days in Ft. Worth; Carter even conducted Colemans’s first symphonic work “Inventions of Symphonic Poems” in May 1967 at the UCLA Jazz Festival.
Carter asked Coleman for a player recommendation; Coleman recommended Bradford and gave Carter Bradford’s phone number. The two had known of each other while in Texas but had never met.
In an interview with Frank Kofsky in Jazz & Pop (Vol 9, #1 – Jan. 1970) Carter recalled: “I was interested in getting a thing going, and Ornette said, well, you and Bobby Bradford ought to get together because Bobby Bradford is here in California somewhere. But he didn’t know where Bob was at the time, so he called to Texas, to a mutual friend of ours, and he had Bob’s brother’s address, phone number, so I called him. Bob and I finally got together like that, and were already working by the time of the big band thing at UCLA, in 1966.”
Bradford assumed that the “big band thing” was the Coleman work at the jazz festival mentioned above. That occurred in 1967 and did not involve Bradford.
Carter called Bradford shortly after and the two hooked up. Carter lived in Los Angeles with his family while Bradford’s was in Pomona. Rehearsals would require a long commute. One rehearsal space they found was a studio that was opened on 103rd Street and Grandee Avenue for the local black community after the Watts riots of August 1965. It was interesting to note that a large portion of the studio’s funding came from actor and liberal philanthropist Larry Hagman, who would later portray the inscrutable conservative J. R. Ewing on the television sitcom Dallas.
Carter and Bradford began to audition rhythm section players in order to form an ensemble. Carter knew many of the musicians around town and was able to put his feelers out. The two recruited drummer Eldridge “Bruz” Freeman (brother of saxophonist Von and guitarist George Freeman from Chicago) and bassist Tom Williamson. The resulting group was named the New Art Jazz Ensemble.
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| NAJE - Williamson, Carter, Bradford & Freeman |
Gigs were hard to come by in and around Los Angeles.
From the Frank Kofsky interview in Jazz & Pop (Vol. 9, #1):
Carter: First of all, there’s no place for exposure. We’ve been playing where we’re playing – in the ghetto – for a long time. There are only three jazz clubs in the town.
Kofsky: Why do you suppose you can’t get booked into clubs?
Bradford: First of all, if we were playing straight up-and-down kind of jazz, it would help. But playing what we’re playing, and not being the kind of music that the mass of people are going to rush into the club to hear, the club owner – being concerned with having a group there that a crowd of people are going to come to hear – is not prepared to take any kind of chance on a group like ours, where, if an owner is going to take a chance, they’d rather take it on a group that at least they are personally happy with.
New York Times critic Robert Palmer had this quote from Carter in a 1982 article about the duo and their collaboration since the 1960s:
In 1969, when the quartet led by Mr. Carter and Mr. Bradford had already been together for two years, the trumpeter picked up a drinking glass and remarked to a friend, “You could put all the money this group has made in the last two years – in nickels – in there and not even reach the top.” (April 30, 1982, p. C16)
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| Ray Bowman |
The group had their first public appearance at the Century City Playhouse in early 1968, as reported in the
DownBeat Ad Lib Los Angeles section for February 8 (Vol. 35, #3). This was a gig produced by Ray Bowman - “The Sol Hurok of the avant garde” as
DownBeat would call him. Bowman was a music critic and promoter in Southern California that presented the New Art Jazz Ensemble many times during the late 1960s and early 1970s at venues like the Playhouse and the Ice House in Pasadena.
It might have been at the Century City Playhouse that John Hardy heard the NAJE. Hardy would soon be the first to record the group.
John Hardy was a biology professor at Occidental College, ornithologist and co-owner of the independent jazz label Revelation Records. Hardy invited the NAJE to perform and record at Occidental on January 16, 1969. The ensemble performed to an audience in the College’s Herrick Lounge. There was no money advance but the group was willing to make the recording for the exposure.
Seeking (REV-9, 1969) was released in the spring on Revelation. The group didn’t make any money but had a recording to their name. The initial announcement of the upcoming recording was made in the March 6, 1969 issue of
DownBeat (Vol. 36, #5) along with the group’s performance at the Cal State Jazz Festival. The March 20, 1969 issue (Vol. 36, #9) showed that the ensemble had played at Shelly’s Manne Hole for three nights.
Reviews for
Seeking were very good. They included a 4 ½ star review by John Litweiler in the September 19, 1969 issue of
DownBeat (Vol. 36, #19). Litweiler was especially impressed by Bradford’s playing but was concerned that the ensemble’s aural proximity to Ornette’s efforts might ultimately hinder their success.
(There are some that dispute the recording dates between Seeking and Flight of Four. Bradford was sure that Flight of Four was recorded after the Seeking session. Some discographies show Flight of Four being recorded on January 3, 1969, others - including Lord’s Discography - later in April. Bradford was sure it was a later date. The rest of this article is based on the April recording date.)
Bob Thiele and Flying Dutchman
Legendary record producer Bob Thiele had already had a storied career by the late 1960s. He had begun early creating his own Signature Records at the age of 17 to record his jazz heroes. Thiele later made a name for himself producing records for Decca and Coral Records. He was responsible for producing perhaps Louis Armstrong’s biggest hit, “What a Wonderful World.”
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| Bob Thiele |
In 1961, Thiele took the reins of Impulse! Records from the label’s founder Creed Taylor, who had gone on to head Verve. Thiele brought in one of the recording industry’s most diverse rosters of musicians including John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, Shirley Scott, Yusef Lateef, Albert Ayler and Pharoah Sanders.
It was the “What a Wonderful World” session that would be the catalyst for Thiele’s departure from Impulse!. The producer had run into increasingly stiff resistance from the president of ABC-Paramount Larry Newton. Newton was on Thiele’s case about his choices for Impulse! and his other production work for ABC-Paramount.
Thiele had written “What a Wonderful World” with George David Weiss with the intent of having Tony Bennett record it. Bennett turned the song down. Thiele then offered it to his hero and friend Louis Armstrong. The recording was scheduled for July 1968.
Legend has it that Newton was on hand at the session for a publicity shot with Armstrong. Newton found out that Thiele was planning to have Armstrong record a ballad. He was livid. Newton had wanted to release a more pop oriented number like those that had already been successful for Armstrong. Apparently, Thiele and Newton had it out in the studio and Thiele eventually got Newton locked out of the studio while Armstrong recorded the tune.
Ultimately, the single wasn’t promoted in the United States and sold poorly domestically. The release did extremely well when released overseas, including being the best selling single of 1968 in the United Kingdom.
At this point, Thiele was looking for a way to get out of ABC-Paramount. Thiele established his own production company later in 1968, which was announced in Billboard magazine. He named the company Flying Dutchman Productions after the ghost ship of nautical legend – which was doomed to sail the seas forever. Thiele continued as an independent producer at Impulse! for a while. He managed to license a couple of recordings from Ornette Coleman and record Pharoah Sander’s Karma during this time (Karma’s success eventually got Sanders signed to Impulse!).
Restructuring at ABC-Paramount gave Thiele a perfect opportunity to shove off. The Impulse! offices moved to Los Angeles in January 1969. Thiele remained in New York City.
Flying Dutchman Productions finally took flight in April 1969 with funding from Dutch based Philips. Thiele’s production group included three labels: Flying Dutchman, BluesTime and Amsterdam. Thiele also brought a handful of musicians with him, including Louis Armstrong, Johnny Hodges, Gato Barbieri and Oliver Nelson.
Thiele was also on the lookout for new talent and the West Coast was one of his first stops to find it.
Carter and Bradford Meet Thiele
The “What’s Happenin” section of Jazz & Pop for April/May 1969 (Vol. 8, #4/5) announced Thiele’s intentions:
Flying Dutchman Soars
Flying Dutchman Productions, Ltd., headed by Bob Thiele, has signed the John Carter-Bobby Bradford Quartet and pianist Horace Tapscott to the new Flying Dutchman label. Thiele, long noted for discovering new talent, signed and recorded the aforementioned West Coast jazz artists in April. Thiele has started a new blues label for FD, called Blues Time. Already signed are Joe Turner, T-Bone Walker, Otis Spann and Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson. Watch these pages for further adventures of the Flying Dutchman!
Interestingly, the same issue of
Jazz & Pop had Carter # 10 for clarinet and Bradford # 8 for trumpet in their Reader’s Poll. No doubt due to their release of
Seeking a short time prior to publication.
In the spring of 1969, Thiele went to Los Angeles on a search for West Coast talent. The producer had already begun putting together his initial slew of releases, which would include a collaboration between Oliver Nelson and Steve Nelson (
Soulful Brass, FDS 101), the jazz rock super group Spontaneous Combustion (
Come and Stick Your Head In, FDS 102) and electro-acoustic composer Jon Appleton’s first album (
Appleton Syntonic Menagerie, FDS 103).
Another interesting release that Thiele had produced was a spoken word record by the Los Angeles based drummer cum poet cum critic Stanley Crouch called Ain’t No Ambulances for No Niggas Tonight (FDS 105). Crouch was originally from California and had been involved as a critic and occasional drummer for some of Los Angeles’s progressive jazz scene. (I reached out to Crouch to talk about his possible involvement in furthering Thiele’s interest in the West Coast musicians. He asked me to follow up another time.)
Bradford recalled auditioning for Thiele after the recording of Seeking, so presumably in the spring of 1969. The audition might have been at the behest of Crouch, who would have been involved in the Los Angeles music scene at the time. While with Thiele, Carter and Bradford recommended that the producer look into recording pianist Horace Tapscott and saxophonist Black Arthur Blythe.
Some discographies have shown that Flight of Four (FDS 108), the first recording that Carter and Bradford did for Thiele, was recorded on January 3, 1969. This would be before the recording session for Seeking. It would be unlikely that this happened as Thiele would have just barely have had Flying Dutchman together as a production company at that point. The date was probably given as 1969, the discographers adding January later on.
Furthermore, the recording session for Horace Tapscott’s The Giant Is Awakened (FDS-107) was held on April 3, 1969 and the release was before Flight of Four. The Jazz & Pop notice mentioned that both Flight of Four and The Giant Is Awakened were recorded in April, therefore the April 1, 1969 recording date for Flight of Four has been the most likely date. The fact that Bradford and Carter recommended Tapscott for a session probably meant that the recordings were made closely together on one West Coast trip for Thiele.
Tapscott went on to say in his autobiography Songs of the Unsung that Thiele was pushed by Crouch and Carter to record his group. Bradford has maintained that Thiele was extremely independent and wasn’t forced to do anything, rather he was very interested in discovering new talent in and around Los Angeles. Tapscott mentioned that he was very impressed that Thiele came to the ghetto to meet with him, though he was wary of what the producer might do with his music. Ulimately, Tapscott left it up to a vote of the band members whether they should record, they voted “yes.”
From the June 26, 1969 issue of DownBeat (Vol. 36, #13):
Meanwhile, other local avant-gardists are having some luck in getting their music recorded. The New Art Jazz Ensemble, co-led by John Carter, reeds, and Bobby Bradford, trumpet (Other members are Tom Williamson, bass, and Bruz Freeman, drums), have recorded for Revelation records and are about to wax for Bob Thiele’s Flying Dutchman label, which has also signed another avant-garde Los Angeles combo, the Horace Tapscott Quartet.
Bob Thiele Emergency
To announce the first slew of recordings for Flying Dutchman, Thiele put together a compilation featuring contributions from most of the artists that were to have releases in the first eight releases of the label. Released under the name Bob Thiele Emergency, the double LP
Head Start (FDS-104) was the introduction of the Flying Dutchman record label to the world.
Like his earlier attempt
Light My Fire (Impulse!, AS-9159), Thiele tried to provide a mixture of all the musical styles that he was involved and influenced by into one recording.
Head Start featured a hodgepodge of groupings and styles blended together into long tracks meant to tell the story of jazz or overt political statements.
Head Start was also the first release on Flying Dutchman that featured the playing of John Carter and Bobby Bradford. The quartet was tacked into the final movement of a sidelong piece entitled “The Jazz Story.” The piece was a pasting together of different groups playing music in styles representing the inception of jazz to the present - including the blues, swing, bebop and the avant-garde. Representing the avant-garde, the ensemble played the Carter composition “In the Vineyard” after a recorded statement from Ornette Coleman (“there will always be new forms of music”). “In the Vineyard” later became one of the group’s frequently played tunes.
The “In the Vineyard / Avant Garde” concluded the horns fade out while Horace Tapscott can be heard taking over on the piano.
Bradford: “It was a spliced together event.”
He meant that the quartet was never in the studio with Tapscott and that the pianist’s playing was overdubbed onto a track (an outtake) recorded at the Flight of Four session. It sounded as if the trumpet and clarinet tracks were taken out of the mix and Tapscott played along with the rhythm section until the conclusion of the track. The music broke momentarily before the pianist started up on a different tune in a trio.
A large supplement to the July 1969 issue of Jazz & Pop magazine (Vol. 8, No. 7) heralded the emergence of the new label. It featured a long article on the Head Start album, which included a short quote from Thiele:
For the last (“In the Vineyard / Avant Garde”), according to Thiele, ‘we used Horace Tapscott on piano, and the John Carter-Bobby Bradford group – great musicians from the Watts area who exemplify the music of today.’
Flight of Four
On April 1, 1969, the members of NAJE recorded the material that would be released on
Flight of Four (FDS 108). The session was engineered by Eddie Brackett, who had recorded hits by the Ventures, the Cricketts and Dean Martin. Bob Thiele had recently used Brackett as an engineer on a handful of jazz releases for Impulse!, including sessions for saxophonist Tom Scott and guitarist Mel Brown. Brackett would also record Horace Tapscott’s
The Giant Is Awakened two days after this session.
The liner notes for Flight of Four did not provide info on the studio the album was recorded but Brackett had been working predominately at United Western Recorders in Hollywood. The studio complex at 6050 & 6000 West Sunset Boulevard was one of the most popular in Hollywood, having been used by artists like Frank Sinatra and the Beach Boys. The 6050 West Sunset address was originally called United Recorders and the 6000 address Western Studios. They are now Ocean Way Recording Hollywood and EastWest Studios, respectively.
The Carter / Bradford session most likely took place in the B Room at the United Recorders building at 6050 West Sunset.
The ensemble recorded mostly Carter original tunes, with one exception - “Woman” by Bradford.
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| Ocean Way Recording formerly United Recorders |
Bradford: “John was a prolific writer. He wrote every day, so he always had a lot of stuff. I always waited for the Lord to give me inspiration. I didn’t sit around with a green visor and a sharpened pencil.”
No information was found that listed the order the material was recorded.
The first track to appear on the LP was Carter’s “Call to the Festival,” introduced by Freeman’s martial drums and Williamson’s rumbling bass before the winds present the intricate, linear melody. The ensemble typically avoided a counting off tempo, instead they’d maintain eye contact to initiate the tune and segue into solos and further development. The tune provided a space for the ensemble to explore varying tempos, dynamic ranges and moods, while maintaining a strong since of melodic direction. The conclusion was especially strong.
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| Eddie Brackett |
“Call” was a good example of why Bradford maintained that Bruz Freeman was the “first free drummer.” Unlike the early Ornette Coleman drummers that kept time while Coleman floated above (Bradford: “Ornette wouldn’t count but it was always in time, especially with Moffett.”), Freeman was able to switch between marking time and playing free. Bradford and Carter referred to the free rhythm section playing as the “scramble” - basically, the propulsion of the rhythm section without staid rhythmic ideas.
There was an obvious indebtedness to the philosophy of Coleman, including similar musical concepts and instrumentation. Carter played alto on “Call,” which was Coleman’s primary instrument. There were obvious melodic devices used similarly to Coleman’s, including the “crying” sound that Coleman used so frequently in solos and in composing.
Another Carter composition “The Second Set” had a shorter melodic theme and higher tempo, which launched quickly into solos. Carter took the first on alto, showing his fleet fingered forays and passionate overblowing to dramatic effect. Williamson’s bass playing was especially strong in the trio segment, extremely forceful and demanding. Bradford’s trumpet solo provided many interesting thematic ideas but he eventually settles on a repetitive figure of descending notes for a number of choruses. Overall, the texture remained staid as the ensemble had strong forward motion throughout, breaking only for a powerful Freeman drum solo.
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| Freeman |
The only Bradford composition on the session was “Woman,” a ballad led by the trumpet player and bass with some percussion rejoinders. This was the first recording of this song, spaced out so much that it is hardly recognizable when compared to the later versions, including one on
Live – One Night Stand (Soul Note, 121 168-1). Carter appeared on clarinet for the track delivering a subtle but poignant solo over the very atmospheric accompaniment of Freeman and Williamson. The effect was haunting and possibly one of the most tender moments the group recorded.
