Trumpeter Freddie Hubbard ailing

. . . Still, some of Hubbard's best music in a decade was being realized at the well-appointed Bennett studio in Englewood, New Jersey, thanks to producer-arranger-trumpeter David Weiss, the expertly focused NJCO ensemble and guest tenor saxophone soloist Craig Handy, who tore through a couple of intense, adventurous takes of Hubbard's classic "Theme For Kareem." A longtime Hubbard associate and member of the NJCO when it was formed 12 years ago, Handy enjoyed propulsive support from pianist Xavier Davis, bassist Dwayne Burno and drummer E.J. Strickland, being launched even higher by tautly harmonized, tightly pivoting written parts that gained orchestral weight and colors from crafty balances of baritone saxophone and trombone, alto and tenor or soprano saxes and trumpet. But the trumpeter thickening the blend was David Weiss, not Freddie Hubbard.

"Man, I'm standing in a pool of blood," gasped Handy, perched on a stool, to the musicians in the studio around him after one breathtaking run-through.

Hubbard, listening to a playback of "Kareem" in the control room, approved, saying, "He sounds like Joe Henderson." Henderson had been the soloist on Hubbard's bounding theme when it was first recorded -- with Hubert Laws, Kenny Barron, Ron Carter and Jack DeJohnette -- at the sessions resulting in his Columbia album Super Blue in 1978. I was observing back then, on assignment for Down Beat, and Hubbard was undeniably that date's driving force, leading his one-time dream team with a level of power, precision, originality and personality few jazz trumpeters have rivaled. Flash forward almost 30 years to Bennett Studios, Weiss, Handy, the New Jazz Composers Octet . . . Hubbard is a changed person.

He absorbs himself in the football game on tv, joshes with the NJCO's frontline members Myron Walden, Jimmy Greene, Norbert Statchel and Steve Davis, confers quietly with Weiss, mugs through a photo shoot, but does not command the scene with his instrument, because he's grappling with a challenge as old as jazz.

Ever since Buddy Bolden, the hottest trumpeters to survive burning youth have confronted physical degradation as they age. King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Red Allen, Roy Eldridge, Dizzy Gillespie, Clark Terry, Miles Davis, Don Cherry and Maynard Ferguson all amended their performance practices to contend with their problems. Musical fire and youthful inspiration are by themselves not enough to sustain productive second and third acts of long creative lives.

The sheer physical wear a brass player experiences, compressing flesh and muscle against steel to shape a stream of air for hours at a time compares to the physical exertions that professional athletes endure. However, athletes compete in games of intermittent action scheduled with days between and months off over perhaps a couple of decades. Jazz musicians typically plunge on set after set, night after night, with less physical training, caution or preparation, and have seldom enjoyed comparably front-loaded savings accounts. Factor in the stresses that attend independent, nomadic artistic daredevils, and you know that even players at the highest peak of the jazz profession teeter on a perilous brink.

"Don't ask me the usual stuff - 'When were you born? What was it like to grow up like I did in the Midwest?'' Hubbard, during a food break in the studio's lounge, warns me about our upcoming interview. "It was terrible, what do you think? And I had the time of my life!"

So how about now? Yes, that's the question.

Hubbard turned 70 April 7, 2008, 50 years after coming to New York from his native Indianapolis to launch one of the most prodigious careers in modern music. He has been successfully treated for a number of serious health problems and has stabilized his finances after tax problems cost him his Beverley Hills home a few years ago. With On The Real Side, the recording that came from his December sessions and follow-ups done in California ready for release, and gigs in the offing, he was eager to regain the glory of his reputation. "I've got to get back in the mix," he said with offhand earnestness during an interview in his midtown Manhattan hotel room just before Christmas, following the Bennett Studio sessions and a five-night engagement with the NJCO (sans Handy) at Iridium.

That booking was a happy one in terms of audience attendance and affections. Festive crowds showed up throughout the run, and took pleasure in the Octet's renditions of the trumpeter's signature compositions including "Up Jumped Spring," "Lifeflight" and "Skydive." Hubbard introduced the pieces with brief anecdotes - like how he composed "Lifelight" to commemorate the helicopter airlift that took his wife from a near-fatal car crash to a hospital emergency room -- and played flugelhorn, which is relatively forgiving of his inconsistent strengths. The NJCO fleshed out each number - as it does throughout On The Real Side -- with spark-plug solos by Walden, luxuriously bluesy statements by Greene, incisive bari sax and flute touches by Stachel, mellow and/or bruising trombone by Davis and dynamic grooves dug by the rhythm section. Hubbard held the spotlight, but Weiss -- unfailing alert, adding tone, imposing tempo -- kept it all together.

"Nobody has ever player higher, harder and faster longer than Freddie," Weiss said after the show about his hero. He has assisted Hubbard on two previous albums besides releasing three of his own and two more heading the NJCO. "Some physical diminishment is a fact of life at 70 - he's only human. But Freddie really cares about the music. He's always listening to the new guys, talking about what they're doing and serious about what he's doing. He always tries to blow new melodies."

Clearly, Hubbard has never turned away from music. During his weeks in New York he was intent on going to the Blue Note club to hear trumpeter Chris Botti. ("What's Botti got?" he wondered aloud, several times). And he is in no danger of being forgotten. He knows he's charismatic, exploiting a chameleon-like ability to take on spooky facial resemblances to Oliver, Armstrong and Gillespie, and imitating Miles' voice dead-on. He is beloved even by fans and critics who scold him for not having taken better care of himself. He acknowledges that lip surgery he had in 1992 has made his return an uphill battle requiring a feat of re-definition.

The growth he had removed 16 years ago was not cancerous -- but neither was it benign. The cutting itself hurt his embouchure. His ability to project and hold a clear tone was damaged, so his fast finger flurries often result in blurts and blurs rather than explosive phrases. His ideas are still intriguing, complex when the material incites it, engaging when simple or pretty is called for. His ability to execute, though, is undependable.

"On some nights, he shocks us - we don't realize what he still has in him," Weiss said. "But we don't work often enough for him to really build up his endurance."

Working gives Hubbard a lift, so he was in a good mood for a sit-down. "Feeling better, that's what makes me want to play again," Hubbard said. "A few years ago, I didn't care. I figured I'd made enough records. But then I thought, 'What am I going to do? I can't sit around forever.' I got to making a decision: I want to stay here for a while, I want to be here on this planet."

If he's going to be on the planet, he's going to want to play. It is what Hubbard has excelled at, over and above something like 99 per cent of improvisers who've picked up their horns over the past half century, never mind brass players in classical ensembles. "I hate when guys compare classical and jazz musicians," he said, "because we do things different in jazz. He [the classical trumpeter] plays a passage straight, lays out 20 bars then comes back in. But in jazz we're playing all the time. So it's more work. I've met a lot of classical trumpet players who say, 'How do you play that long? What are you trying to do? If I did that, I'd been dead a long time ago.'"

Not Hubbard, though; he's exalted in stamina almost from the start, which is perhaps why it's so hard for him to pull back. He emerged in a brass age dominated by Gillespie and Davis, in the wake of Fats Navarro and Clifford Brown, just a little behind Kenny Dorham and Donald Byrd (respectively 12 and six years Hubbard's senior). Almost an exact contemporary of Lee Morgan and Booker Little, the young Hubbard was embraced virtually from the moment of his East Coast arrival for his bravura technique, unbridled enthusiasm and impressive adaptability.

That's not how he remembered it. "Chet Baker was the first trumpet player I liked, because he could play soft," Hubbard said, smiling fondly. "I always wanted to play like that. But I got to listening to Clifford and started blowing too hard."

He recounted being shy and insecure at first, too. "Where I first lived, in the Bronx, I didn't go out of the house for about a week," Hubbard said. "I was scared to go downstairs. Imagine a hot summer, July 1958. I'd never been around so many people, such tall buildings. It was a total shock - all this stuff I'd seen in the movies! But then I started meeting nice people, and I couldn't stop hanging out."

In short order Hubbard met and started working with Philly Joe Jones, Sonny Rollins, Slide Hampton, J.J. Johnson and Art Blakey, among many others. He debuted as a leader on Blue Note in 1960 with Open Sesame, which led to his first string of swaggering, soulful, melodic and ferocious small group albums. 

Quickly hailed as a hardbop and post-bop master blaster, Hubbard became one of Blakey's stirring Jazz Messengers - check him out on Buhaina's Delight, from late in 1961 -- and a sometimes blistering, sometimes pensive front line partner to Dexter Gordon, Jackie McLean, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter and Max Roach, among others. He was enlisted in avant-garde projects by John Coltrane (Ascension), Ornette Coleman (Free Jazz), Eric Dolphy (Out To Lunch), Andrew Hill (Compulsion), and electronic composer Ilhan Mimaroglu (Sing Me a Song of Songmy). He also maintained a taste for lyrical, popularly-attuned instrumental music, which he exploited from the mid-'60s through the early '80s in productions on Atlantic, CTI and Columbia Records.

Ready For Freddie was the title of one early recording triumph; throughout his lengthy prime it seemed Hubbard was always ready for a colleague's call, fearless and stouthearted, equipped with sharp phrases and fully articulated high notes. "I was pushing a lot," he said, thinking back. "I always wanted to play like a tenor player, to be as loose as they are. I used to practice with them all the time.

"A saxophonist's pressure is inside, on their teeth," he continued. "For trumpeters, it's against flesh. Which I finally realized, after a few blisters.  All of the older cats had scar tissue. They'd tell me what salve to put on my mouth, how much pressure to use. They all told me I was playing too hard, but I looked at them and saw they all had scars on their lips, so I thought that was the natural thing if you play jazz. You ever see Louis' scar? It was like a crater!"

Observing his elders, Hubbard noticed that they had routines to gain momentary relief. "Miles would put the horn up by his shoulder and cock his head like he was having trouble hearing - but he was taking time to rest. And when Dizzy had his United Nations big band, he'd be dancing around and playing conga drum maybe more than trumpet."

Hubbard attained unusual sales success with the early-'70s CTI albums Red Clay, Straight Life and Sky Dive. In the mid-'70s, he rejoined former Blue Note stablemates Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter and Tony Williams (not coincidentally, Miles Davis' last all-acoustic band) to form the supergroup V.S.O.P. His stint with Columbia was marked by several flawed efforts, and when his U.S. commercial viability suffered a subsequent downturn, he established himself in Japan. When Wynton Marsalis emerged as the Young Turk trumpeter in the early  '80s, Hubbard conspired on three ambitious albums with another prematurely dethroned brassman, Woody Shaw.

"When I was on top and moved west from New York, I left the doors wide open. Woody, he was the next cat, " Hubbard said somewhat sadly. When Shaw died in 1989 at age 45, he was all but blind and had suffered the loss of his left arm after a fall in the New York subway.

"Wynton: I admire him, he used to come to the clubs to hear me, and he'd sit in and he had some stuff," Hubbard said. "But he started saying about the guys who came before him, 'That ain't nothing, I'm going to go all the way back and promote Louis Armstrong.' Well, he copied off my records, he copied off Miles. I don't think you should be a trumpet player and ignore what I played, or Clifford or Lee Morgan or Woody or Miles played, just so you can get to Louis and play a little classical music and try to sway peoples' minds. When I was a kid in Indianapolis our jazz community believed everything had to be modern. If you couldn't play bebop like Charlie Parker and Dizzy, you weren't hip. Going back to Louis, that was forbidden among the cats I grew up with. Who wanted to go back and play that?"

Residing on the West Coast, Hubbard did studio dates, movie work and one-time all-star projects, also maintaining his own band. He described that period with a mix of satisfaction and regret akin to rue. "I had my home in the Hills for 19 years," he said, "but I was never there. No telling who was swimming in my pool."

And all too soon the rigors of jet-set touring spelled by stints of L.A. highlife caught up with him. Initially he denied his injuries and illnesses, but after a while they became irrefutable, and they have persisted. "The doctors tell me, 'You ain't 30 no more, you're 69, so just cool out with the drinking and partying and you'll be all right,'" he said. "There ain't nothing wrong with me now. I've had specialists like sports doctors advise me, but I think I'm going to go further, maybe get some acupuncture. Get more physical therapy.

"I always thought of myself as young," Hubbard mused. "I thought I could still play like I was younger. I still have to get it through my thick head I can't do that, even if I tried, even if I did exercises every day."

Weiss has characterized Hubbard's former soloing as "five choruses, balls out." Having had to modify that style, Hubbard is ambivalent about the result.

"The thing is, as you get older you have to mature," he shrugged. "I know some audiences - not the younger ones so much - may not be satisfied when they hear me, because they've seen me when I could really play. There are also people who come to hear me who haven't heard my stuff live before. It's new to them, and they wonder, 'Wow, can he do that?'

"I've done it before in a small group, but when you play with eight pieces, there's heavy sound coming behind you, and you want to get on top of it," he went on. "Now, I like these kids [the New Jazz Composers Octet]. I'm going to stay with them to get my chops back. I hope we can put it together to do some college gigs. If we could do one-hour sets, I could blast and be cool. If I've got to do two shows a night for three or for nights, well, I can't get with it."

As for those "kids" themselves, Weiss believes they enjoy a productively symbiotic relationship with Hubbard. "He needs us, but we need him, because he makes us better," Weiss said. "He scares us - I mean his history, his gravity, his jazziness, his presence -- and that's good motivation. There aren't enough elders around to put the fear into younger musicians anymore."

Listening to the elders when they were younger - Hubbard on "Theme for Kareem," for instance, when he was 40  - one might ask who was scaring them then. Hubbard possessed enormous creativity in an era when jazz bubbled, boiled, steamed and courted trouble as the most daring, spontaneous expression of creativity America had. In 2008 Hubbard completed his album by painstakingly overdubbing his solos, employing digital technology for the purposes of revisiting, revising and reviving touchstone jazz repertoire.

Now in regard to change and aging, it's up to Hubbard's audience as much as to the man himself to recognize that the myth of eternal youth is just a myth. The triumph of Hubbard's current career is by definition in the present, whenever he's onstage, whatever he commits to recording. How many 70-year-olds front a relevant little big band? His presence is itself evidence of victory over odds and adversity. The glories of his younger era remain on videos as well as several dozen albums still in print. 

"I have to make up my mind I'm not going to play that way again," Hubbard said. "I've got to find a way to play a little easier, spot it a bit more. Come in and play eight bars, let the band play, then take it out. High energy? Most trumpet players out here play a couple of choruses, then sit down. Cats used to say, 'Blow! Blow!' Now people don't want that."

But I don't think he believed it.

howardmandel.com
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