Milt Jackson, Sunflower

Being a brilliant musician and making truly great records is not necessarily related.

It can be a completely different skill. The saxophonist Paul Desmond had a telepathic musical relationship with Dave Brubeck, a group leader who knew how to put a record together. The more lackadaisical Desmond rarely played anything less than beautifully but his solo albums most often lacked the special “Classic!” spark that his playing contained.

Milt Jackson is my favorite vibraphonist but he definitely falls in the Paul Desmond camp — a fantastic soloist who often needs a strong guide to lead him from making a good album to a crafting a great one. Maybe that is why many of my favorite Milt Jackson  sets are collaborations — “Bags” with Miles, Coltrane, Wes Montgomery, Ray Charles, Coleman Hawkins, Oscar Peterson, Stanley Turrentine, and, of course, the Modern Jazz Quartet, where pianist John Lewis, very much from the Dave Brubeck mold, was the group leader, sound architect, and principal composer. Lewis had an almost austere, stripped down piano style that would never win him any popularity polls but it allowed Jackson, his star soloist, to relax, lean back, and just let his mallets fly without a worry in the world.

Producer Creed Taylor recorded four albums with Jackson for his CTI label in the 1970s, and while they are all good, one of them, Sunflower from 1972, may just be the very best solo record the vibraphonist cut under his own name. It was an instant hit, immediately going into the jazz Top 5, and it went on to become the biggest selling LP in Milt Jackson’s storied recording career (which lasted from about 1944 to 1999!!).

I’ve already written-up a couple albums produced by Creed Taylor here, including Blues And The Abstract Truth, and there will be plenty more to come– the producer really concentrated on crafting jazz sets that stand up as complete albums rather than just jam sessions. Taylor did it for Impulse, Verve, Bethlehem, and his final label, CTI.

The Cover.

Come on, that is a beauty.

CTI was famous for its lush gate-fold album covers, which featured iconic  Pete Turner photographs. Creed Taylor loved Turner’s work and struck a deal with him. Since Turner was a commercial artist he was sent around the world on assignments to exotic locations. Off-the-clock, he would carry around his camera and snap away. He gave his best pix to Creed Taylor, who would match the mood of the music from a session with a Turner photo and an album title. For this one look at how the colors and feel of a sunflower are somehow evoked with ostriches (unsightly birds looking celestial in profile here) at day’s end. Elegant cover design for the win!

The CTI Touch.

CTI’s lush album cover art was so popular that the label had a side business selling them as poster art for condo walls, upscale malls, and dorm halls. The label was also able to move serious music product during the decade when non-Fusion jazz was no longer a part of the mainstream marketplace. CTI truly were middle-of-the-road in the best way, placing one foot in fusion jazz-funk and the other in acoustic bop. If there was a third-leg to CTI it would be swank orchestral pieces, often based on classical masterworks, which managed to be wonderfully cheesy — the jazz equivalent of a Roger Moore Bond movie.

Creed Taylor had already marketed jazz records as desired luxury items at Verve and Impulse but with CTI he knew he had to reach a changing music marketplace that was into amazing pop records as diverse as Abbey Road, What’s Going On, Innervisions, and Moondance. Taylor signed the greatest, can-handle-everything jazz artists available (Herbie Hancock and Ron Carter are ever-present as sidemen, for instance) and was able to mix in acoustic jazz originals, standards, pop covers and funked-up classical pieces. This meant CTI could out-epic progressive escape fests by the likes of Yes, Genesis, and Pink Floyd but these jazz records were cut in two days instead of labored over for months the way pop records were. Rudy Van Gelder’s pristine sound design also helps.

A song-based approach ensured that tunes from CTI were played on R&B radio and on FM rock channels that saw a connection between “Stairway to Heaven” style guitar epics and a grandiose, but oh so funky, subset of CTI cuts. It was normal for CTI platters to top the jazz charts, make the R&B Top 10 and place in the middle part of the pop Top 100. And, most of these albums had serious jazz content on them. Many of them were pure acoustic post-bop or the more avant-garde side fusion.

Some CTI releases, particularly those from Bob James, George Benson, and Grover Washington, Jr., were even more commercial and would lay the foundation for what became smooth jazz. Both Benson and Grover were brilliant musicians and would cut their best records for CTI. Bob James is another story but, weirdly, he’s the most sampled by rappers, kind of like how tough hip-hoppers seriously love their Phil Collins.

You can see right away that jazz-snobs hated CTI (Radio play?? Records that sell?? Heresy!) in the same way bitter rock critics feted Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart over Elton John or The Stones, as if being artistically daring in ways that a vast general public can enjoy is such a bad thing. Ironically, the label is now celebrated for its sound by a younger generation of audio elitists who discovered the catalog through a voluminous number of  hip-hop and electronic samples. Creed Taylor always strove for a large audience but he generally did so with quality music, whether it was breaking bossa nova in the States at Verve, signing John Coltrane to his fledgling Impulse label, or getting a buttoned-up cool jazz icon like Milt Jackson to get funky at CTI.

The Music.

OK, CTI history lesson over. Back to Milt Jackson’s Sunflower.

There are only four cuts on the vinyl edition of the album and every one of them is different. Somehow, it all holds together as a uniform LP, with Herbie Hancock playing acoustic piano on side 1 and plugging in for the groovier side 2.

If CTI made a kind of Jacuzzi jazz then Sunflower’s four tracks has every CTI motif on it except for a  classical-fusion number or a disco-funk-jazzer (and if you think I am joking, Deodato had CTI’s biggest selling single with surprise hit version of “Also Sprach Zarathustra” that was a classical-funk-fusion-disco smash!).

The opening cut is “For Someone I Love,” a Milt Jackson original. Smart move with the title, Mr. Jackson, as you can tell everyone from your wife, to your kids, to ladies on the road, or even to band mates, that it was written just for them. The tune kicks off with Jay Berliner’s Spanish style guitar before Jackson’s vibes and the rest of the band comes in. After a couple of minutes the orchestra swells in ways that recall both movie love scenes from the 1970s and waiting in dentist offices during the same era. But the strings fade quickly and Milt goes on a supple vibes solo over Billy Cobham’s increasingly ornate, almost military inspired drum work. Jackson’s solo is so tasty that you don’t even notice it takes a couple of minutes for Freddie Hubbard to take over on his horn. Hubbard is both stately and intense, as Cobham goes insane behind him. All the instruments are stripped away until just Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Cobham are left, stoking up the heat as they go. Jackson and Hubbard lead the entire ensemble back in for an extended, surprisingly gentle landing. What a trip.

Next up is a cover of Michel LeGrand’s “What Are You Doing The Rest of Your Life?” This one became a standard in the 1970s but it was written for a neat 1969 movie ironically title The Happy Ending about an upper crust housewife having a nervous breakdown/confronting the disappointments in life. Arranger Don Sebesky starts off with Italian restaurant violins before the full orchestra comes in. Jackson was a ballad master and he plays beautifully here. There are also some key moments for Hubbard and an equally restrained, but emotive, Hancock. The strings here are strong enough to almost make me want to join a motorcycle gang but just go with it and it ends up on the right side of floridly romantic.

Side 2 opens with the tune that has become a deep cut/crate diggers classic,  a brooding cover of “People Make The World Go Around,” the sociopolitical protest hit from The Stylistics. As much as I still love the original A.M. wonder, I listen to this cover even more today. It is funky as hell without actually being funk. Plus, it carries a sense of danger to it without being nihilistic. Great work from everybody on this one, with Herbie being the funkiest and Cobham proving he can streamline his often wild drum style with ease (his work is a big part of what makes Sunflower so much fun).

The album ends with the title cut, a Freddy Hubbard original that takes the album into creatively fertile post-bop territory. “Sunflower” proves that Milt Jackson could thrive in the same space that the younger Bobby Hutcherson occupied on his still cutting edge Blue Note releases. Even here Don Sebesky sneaks the orchestra in for a few bars. Hubbard states the melody and Milt and Herbie get to solo their hearts out. Then it’s all over.

That’s it. 4 numbers and the album is over. Sometimes four tunes done four different ways are all you need to make a great record.

— Nick Dedina