On Donald Byrd

Exemplary recordings and stray thoughts about and around the trumpeter and composer

“Señor Blues,” a standard from Horace Silver’s book, was recorded late in 1956 and released on Six Pieces of Silver, the pianist’s first album with a working group of his own and one of the frequent sandbars along trumpeter Donald Byrd’s river of fifties sessions. It’s a sticky tune in 6/8 with a Latin tinge, a minor blues, although, in an always sexy move, the first chord change moves from the root (E-flat minor with extensions) to the bVI (B7 with a sharp eleven). Later, Silver added a lyric fleshing out the protagonist, a bounder (and a Latin Lothario stereotype). There’s a good version of that on Anita O’Day’s All the Sad Young Men. On the original, Byrd takes the first solo, two choruses of conversational blues that range from pirouetting exclamations to conspiratorial asides. His tone is open, exciting, glowing, and warm. Byrd would go on to play in many contexts, a few that might alienate some listeners for being too outré, many that did alienate some listeners for being too eager to please. Much of his music, like “Señor Blues,” is simply or complicatedly irresistible. He was an outstanding trumpeter whose playing declined over time, but not ruinously, and his great contributions have much to do with his gifts as a conceptualist and amalgamator.

Photo by Francis Wolff, prepared for NR MINT by Nina Hale.

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He was born in Detroit in 1932 and set up shop in New York in 1955, the phone steadily ringing for gigs and sessions, early on with George Wallington, Oscar Pettiford, the Jazz Messengers, Kenny Clarke, and Hank Jones. He was a lifelong learner and earned many diplomas and credentials, including a doctorate from Columbia, and, in a bit of onomastic determinism amplifying his punning album titles, a pilot’s license. A Rushmore figure in the development of jazz pedagogy, Byrd taught at many schools and was a model of, and an advocate for, the necessity of Black practitioner-educators. His body of work sounds like that of an admired teacher: learned, curious, indefatigable, gregarious. In a happy instance of teacher-student reciprocity, some of Byrd’s Howard University students, and other youngish alums of the school, helped fuel his most prosperous period.

Had we but world enough and time, I’d listen chronologically through Byrd’s catalog of sessions as a leader and sideperson. Instead, I’ve made a concentrated but whirlwind, gappy tour of his work, leaning on old favorites and other LPs and CDs I had to hand, though I found new-to-me things, too. I’ve touched on highlights but have left much unattended. In the comments, feel free to cite your favorites or calmly condemn my omissions.

Byrd made three albums for Transition, Tom Wilson’s idealistic, cash-strapped record label of the midfifties. Forgive a digression: Wilson is most famous for his A&R and production work in sixties rock, where he was one of the few prominent Black producers and where he showed a respect for artistic autonomy, inspired imperfection, and genuine transgression. He was the lead producer on the trio of Bob Dylan albums preceding Highway 61 Revisited. Of those, Another Side has some of music’s most charming lyric flubs and rushed corrections. Dylan might have got his way re: takes had Stalin produced, but it seems that Wilson, too, believed in the sanctity of a ragged-but-right performance. For Verve/MGM, Wilson signed the Mothers of Invention and produced tracks for the Velvet Underground, two iconoclastic groups from opposite coasts of the country and counterculture. The values Wilson applied to all those records were already present at Transition, which also put out records by Cecil Taylor and Sun Ra and aimed for “live concert fidelity” through club recordings and studio dates made in front of an invited audience. Packaging was in the Folkways mode. “Few retakes are made,” Wilson writes in the mimeo booklet accompanying Byrd’s Eye View, “even at studio sessions, in order to preserve the freshness and spontaneity of the jazz improvisations.”

Released in 1956, the likable and unassuming Byrd’s Eye View is a Jazz Messengers album with, on three tracks, an additional trumpeter, Joe Gordon. It was perhaps credited to Byrd for contractual reasons. Gordon, who died in a house fire in ’63, was four years Byrd’s senior and at the time the more ebullient player. When they trade bars on “El Sino,” Byrd recedes on his own album. The sound is distinctive and indeed unvarnished: Doug Watkins’s bass is deep and forward, Silver’s comping not too tucked in, and the drums and horns are drier and not as juiced as they are on many recordings of the period. Hank Mobley contributes two pieces: the plainly titled “Hank’s Tune,” and the wittily titled “Hank’s Other Tune.” In fact, the latter tune is “Late Show,” heard on the Messengers’ Columbia album from ’56. It’s a reliable vehicle for solos; Byrd’s is round and relaxed. “Tension,” Byrd wrote in an instructional article for Down Beat published in ’61, “makes it impossible to swing.” Therapists understate this point.

Of the early Byrd sessions I’ve heard, I’m most drawn to his supporting and collaborative work, most of all when the music has a strong composerly bent. He isn’t an unmistakable presence on Oscar Pettiford’s Another One, which has the bassist’s monumental nearly solo rendition of “Stardust,” but he’s part of the album’s burnished octet, which also includes the great alto saxophonist, composer, and arranger Gigi Gryce. Surely Gryce was an important model for Byrd. Later, the two co-led Jazz Lab, and their like-named album for Columbia from 1957 (there’s also a self-titled album for Jubilee) has meaty tunes carefully arranged for a nonet using precisely the Birth of the Cool instrumentation, with the thermometer turned up a degree. A few of the album’s originals had been introduced on earlier projects, but these versions are distinct. Byrd’s showcase is also the debut of an era-defining standard, “I Remember Clifford,” Benny Golson’s classic eulogy for the virtuosic trumpeter Clifford Brown, who died in a car crash in the summer of ’56 and who had inspired Byrd and everyone. It must have been hard for a young trumpeter not to approach the piece as an emotional litmus test and calling card, but Byrd gets past all that. Wonderful. I’ll never warm, however, to the album’s sprightly “Over the Rainbow.” Can’t taste the lemon drops.

We’ll blow the deadline if we squint through Byrd’s scroll of side dates, but let’s mention a couple more here and along the way. Elmo Hope’s two-tenors sextet album Informal Jazz, from 1956, has Byrd in excellent form and is a way to A/B Coltrane and Mobley at the time. My friend Bryan, a great tenor player who fields my questions about mouthpieces and whatnot and forgives me for not retaining much, thinks of Mobley as the perfect offspring of Sonny Stitt and Gene Ammons, and I love that. If you’d like to hear more of Byrd with Coltrane, the trumpeter plays on the exquisite title interpretation of 1957’s Lush Life. To hear Byrd blow fleetly over rhythm changes, try “Sonnysphere” from Sonny Rollins, Volume One (1957), which also has Wynton Kelly, Gene Ramey, and Max Roach. On 4, 5, and 6, from alto saxophonist Jackie McLean’s Prestige years, Byrd plays a short, muted solo on Mal Waldon’s Expressionist “Abstract.” Byrd keeps very good company. Sometimes in the fifties, he’ll put in a cut’s least memorable solo. To stress, it’s very good company, and music is life, and life shouldn’t be a contest.

Byrd kept up a long partnership with baritone saxophonist Pepper Adams, during which they’d trade marquee positions. The rhythm section on Adams’s 10 to 4 at the 5-Spot, recorded in the spring of ’58 at Greenwich Village’s Five Spot Café, is Bobby Timmons, Doug Watkins, and Elvin Jones (with apologies to Walter Smith III, the title could have been Four of us Are from Detroit, and Bobby Is Not). On Thad Jones’s “’Tis,” Byrd comes out blazing after Adams’s six-cylinder eighth notes, but then he takes some rests and follows interesting melodic ideas, flourishes, and repeated phrases to which the rhythm section has lively responses. You want to be there. The solo fizzles but feels good. Byrd and Adams have a contrasting rapport. Though Byrd isn’t equable, you can see him gauging the wind with a blade of grass before teeing off; though Adams isn’t uncontrolled, he seems to have imbibed the pep talk and is ready for an odds-bucking comeback. Under Byrd’s name they front a two-volume live date from 1960, At the Half Note. These albums were widely available in the eighties, and the good-natured second volume was my introduction to Byrd.

Byrd’s long association with Blue Note starts in ’59 with Off to the Races, on which he’s joined by Adams, McLean, Wynton Kelly, Sam Jones, and Art Taylor. In a piece on Byrd from his 2019 book Jazz from Detroit, Mark Stryker singles out that album’s beautiful ballad “When Your Love Has Gone,” praising Byrd’s “tender virility and endurance,” then lingering to analyze two bars. Styker’s essay is expert and largehearted, and he gently corrects factual errors that persist online. McLean and Watkins are back in the mix on Byrd’s third album for the label, 1960’s Fuego, which also has drummer Lex Humphries and pianist Duke Pearson, who would be an important helpmate for over a decade. The album includes two soul-jazz gems: “Funky Mama,” perfect if you prefer indica strains; and the driving “Amen.” Byrd in Flight, also from ’60, opens with a strong Byrd composition, “Ghana,” celebrating the nation’s recent independence. If you concentrate, the crack of Humphries’ snare hits and the snap of his cross-stick beats work as chiropractic adjustments. The album is made up of two sessions with overlapping bands, so you get McLean here, Mobley there. Mobley’s tone is so warm and punchy, and his solo on that opener is full of harmonic and rhythmic surprise and all sorts of hip ways to negotiate two-fives. It couldn’t be better.

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Byrd’s history of identifying and nurturing talent starts auspiciously. Herbie Hancock, then a recent Grinnell graduate, made his recording debut on an Adams and Byrd’s Warick album, Motor City Scene (check out Herbie’s “Stardust” solo). Hancock returns for the second of Byrd’s 1962 releases, Royal Flush, joining Adams, bassist Butch Warren, and drummer Billy Higgins. Though some of Blue Note’s artists would be granted dispensations, most of its acts, by the sixties, were encouraged to start their albums with a potential radio hit, or at least an approachable blues or gospel-derived number. I rarely resent this, and “Hush” is a groovy blues. The record follows with “I’m a Fool to Want You,” the great ballad of desire, compulsion, and shame by Jack Wolf, Joel Herron, and Frank Sinatra. It’s nice, but Hancock’s playing is unusually oversweetened and Byrd doesn’t seem quite convinced of the song’s anguish. Other pieces are structurally playful. Byrd is obviously paying attention to new stuff.

For Free Form, recorded a few months later, Adams is out, Wayne Shorter briefly in. Shorter, recording with Hancock for the first time, adds stropped, strange beauty throughout. With Shorter, Hancock, Warren, and Higgins together, the session presages later developments and prods Byrd to extend his mitt to stuff already in the air. The opener, “Pentecostal Feeling,” is a gospel blues, very fun to dance to or play along with. Byrd’s totally assured, mood-lifting solo has been transcribed by Erik Sundman, and though transcription can’t bottle the nuance of this sort of thing, it can be fun, if you read a little music, to follow along and watch how he uses rhythmic variation and space. The title track is a long modal piece on which Higgins particularly shines. Today, the experience of listening to the titular piece is circular. Byrd’s career is marked in part by responsiveness or higher-calling trendspotting, and this is one where Miles looms offstage; on the hand, the band—two of whom would join Davis’s second classic quintet—points to Miles’s future. A piece in a broadly similar mode, “King Cobra,” can be heard on Hancock’s My Point of View, on which Byrd appears along with Mobley, Grachan Moncur III, Grant Green, Chuck Israels, and Tony Williams. Blue Note usually had a backlog of albums, and many releases were delayed or shelved, not for qualitative reasons. Free Form didn’t come out till ’66, at which point it still would have sounded great (it does now, after all) but not as revelatory. Had the album been released shortly after the session, “Pentecostal Feeling” would have ushered in Byrd’s next big move.

A New Perspective, comprising five unified compositions, was the trumpeter’s most ambitious album to date, and one of the most ambitiously conceived albums of its time. Byrd wrote three of its pieces, Duke Pearson the other two, including the enduring hit “Cristo Redentor.” It was tracked in a one-day session with an instrumental septet and an eight-piece choir singing arrangements by Duke Pearson under the direction of Coleridge Perkinson. The band is Byrd, Mobley, Hancock, Warren, Humphries, and two people not yet referenced here: the great guitarist Kenny Burrell; and a young vibraphonist named Donald Best, whom Byrd met at the Manhattan School of Music. Though the vocal octet is sometimes described as a gospel choir, that’s not quite it. Byrd, whose father was a United Methodist minister, was thinking of Black university choirs such as the Fisk Jubilee Singers and the Tuskegee Choir, groups established in the postbellum period long before the development of gospel music. Their original repertoires were mainly devoted to spirituals, and Byrd’s wordless vocal pieces arrive like echoes of spirituals in a blues-jazz omnibus. The slow, ten-minute “Beast of Burden” is a marvel of patience, restraint, balance, and depth of feeling. Byrd saw himself as the preacher on this album, and it might be fair to say, on other albums, too, that he confronts struggle from a public more than a psychological vantage, playing to but also through his listeners more than revealing himself in a simulation of a heart-to-heart. Blue Note, apparently, had long resisted the idea behind Perspective, but Byrd prevailed, and it was a substantial hit. “Christo Redentor” was used in the animated movie Soul and is recommended to beginning and intermediate piano students (and anyone). At a stately tempo, it teaches you a lot about blues, about how to mingle minor and major, and how to navigate modulation. And it’s beautiful. A follow-up album, I’m Tryin’ to Get Home, has more glitz and less gravity.

Stryker’s essay describes problems Byrd started having in the sixties with his embouchure, and possibly with Bell’s palsy. As Byrd’s career goes on, his playing tends to be less dazzling, his solos less taxing. But he always had fine melodic instincts as an improviser, and like a great singer with a reduced range, he adjusts sensitively. Some of my favorite Donald Byrd trumpet is from the midsixties to the early seventies. A somewhat surprising Byrd performance from the era is on Dexter Gordon’s One Flight Up, recorded in the summer of ’64. Byrd’s “Tanya” blankets all of Side One. Linked to the Coltrane Quartet, the group meditates over a simple two-part structure built for long cycle rides, and while Gordon’s solo is the showstopper, Byrd’s is inspired, too.

The title tune from ’67’s Mustang is a clave-driven banger by Sonny Red, an alto saxophonist with huge blues feeling and a lovely, insistent tone. Red, who was born Junior Sylvester Kyner, and Byrd, who was born Donaldson Toussaint L’Ouverture Byrd, were childhood friends in Detroit—Red turned Byrd on to bebop. Red’s first foray in New York was a mixed success, but he tried again in ’59 with an eye toward permanence (“Even if I have to eat the bricks,” he told Ira Gitler). His 1960 album as a leader, Out of the Blue, is a once-neglected album now more widely and correctly beloved. As for Mustang, it’s a bit slight but feels at ease and collegial, maybe because of the long friendship between the front line of Byrd, Red, and Mobley. The very hip Slow Drag, from ’68, is more rewarding. The title track is a blues variation with a sturdy but simple foundation, a grassy Roman ruin visited during the off season. One of the solos is rapped by Billy Higgins. The album also has an elegant version of the standard “My Ideal” and a deconstruction of “Secret Love,” the midfifties Doris Day hit that grew more layered and beautiful when it was adopted as a gay-liberation anthem. Byrd’s next album, The Creeper, has Chick Corea, leans avant, and was shelved until 1981. I want to spend more time with it down the road. These were Byrd’s last strictly acoustic albums till the late eighties.

Fancy Free isn’t as electric as a toaster, but Jimmy Ponder joins on guitar and Pearson moves to Rhodes, not, it seems, instantly melding with the instrument. (Pearson’s Rhodes game is strong on subsequent outings.) The album is sanded funk fusion played by a double-rainbow nonet with flutes by Lew Tabackin or Jerry Dodgion up top. The tunes can be televisual, soppy but persuasive. Miles’s Filles de Kilimanjaro would have been an influence but not In a Silent Way, released after Fancy Free was tracked. During the late sixties and early seventies, comparisons between Byrd’s and Miles’s contemporaneous work are inevitable; Byrd won’t walk away unscathed, but that’s no disgrace. Electric Byrd, from 1970, is darker music for a darker year, a distress call at times. It has its subgenre’s stuff: humpback whales with an Echoplex; waves of sound and CIA footfalls, chromaticism over pedal points. The band is similar but expanded. Wally Richardson is now on guitar. You can tell he brought his own wah. Ron Carter’s bass locks with drummer Mickey Roker and percussionist Airto Moreira, fusion’s Zelig and the author of the album’s most transporting piece, “Xibaba.” Strange that Byrd put his name on the closing number, “The Duke,” since most listeners would have heard King Curtis’s 1967 smash “Memphis Soul Stew,” very similar and, well, funkier. Others would have heard Hancock’s “Fat Albert Rotunda,” which laid out other components of the dude’s wardrobe. Just licks, I guess.

Kofi, inspired by funk as well as a West African and Brazilian music, was cut in two different sessions in December of 1970. Never one for half-measures, Byrd studied with musicologists in Ghana before putting together the album, and you can ooze into its layers like jelly in a croissant. It was unreleased till ’95, when it still sounded timely in chillout rooms. The second side is partly atonal. Play “Elimina” for your krautrock friend. Mine never return my texts.

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Like all his peers, Byrd was faced, in the early seventies, with a transformed listening public and a record industry several years into a phase of consolidation, stratification, and cold efficiency. Those changes (in demographics, taste, business) opened porte-cochéres for blockbusters while further marginalizing players looking to extend unexhausted strains of experimentation begun in the sixties. With projects such as A New Perspective, Byrd had already shown his commitment to connecting with Black audiences by stressing the music’s sprawling root system and essential boundlessness. Every period is a rich one for Black music, and the R&B of the late sixties and seventies flowered with beauty and innovation from funk auteurs and consortiums, virtuoso singer-songwriters, new-model harmony groups, puzzlemaster production teams. Byrd’s motivations in working the more crowd-pleasing aspects of this many-pronged scene were doubtless material as well as aesthetic, but they were hardly philistine.

The headspinner or volte-face resulting from this thinking was done with a new team. Larry Mizell and his younger brother, Fonce, were Howard graduates. Larry had majored in engineering; Fonce, a student of Byrd’s, in music. Fonce had been part of the Corporation, the collective of writers and producers who helped make the Jackson 5’s amazing string of singles. Byrd tapped Larry to work on what became 1973’s Black Byrd. Larry, helming his Sky High Productions, wound up writing, producing, and arranging the whole album, though he shares writing credit on two tracks: Warren Jordan helped pen “Mr. Thomas”; and Edward Larry Gordon, who now goes by Laraaji and is a hero of ambient and New Age music, had a hand in “Where Are We Going?” Byrd plays trumpet (sometimes processed, as on his preceding fusion albums), flugelhorn, and sings. Fonce sings, too, and adds second trumpet. The rest of the large group includes heavyweights such as the Crusaders’ pianist Joe Sample, guitarist Dean Parks, and, on different dates, bassists Wilton Felder and Chuck Rainey. The airplane you hear at the top of the album is bound for LA, where seventies session slicks slunk, and the music is joyful, groovy, tuneful, intricate, and commercially savvy. In its singing and lyrics, it’s not division-of-labor music but rather the work of folks doing what felt right outside their core competencies.

Like the great Crusaders’ albums that came before (and after) it, and like many CTI releases, Black Byrd and the Mizell-produced Byrd albums to follow helped established the template for what came to be called smooth jazz, though, unlike, say, a Crusaders album, on which we get hummable themes as well as burning solos over choruses, Byrd’s work with the Mizzell brothers often keeps its solos short. The focus, instead, is on groove and hooks, texture, spare and tasty interlocking parts, licks and improvised phrases. It’s kitschy but badass R&B, in love with the world, played by musicians who also play jazz. You can date it as easily as a leisure suit, but it keeps sounding right. When I work as a live DJ, I always bring this stuff. With Byrd, the Mizells oversaw several follow-ups, including Street Lady (a concept album, I think, about women), Stepping into Tomorrow, and Places and Spaces. On Blacks and Blues, Larry Mizzell, Chuck Davis, and the Sky High team, helped Bobbi Humprey bring the flute’s place in groovy electric jazz to an apogee; and the musical sanctuaries they created with Gary Bartz continue to welcome new congregants. These albums, in their time, were suited to still-with-it grownups, popular with Black Baby Boomer parents, a small number of whose children became hip-hop producers. They used cuts like “Think Twice” and “Flight Time” as madeleines and material. I first heard late Byrd through Main Source, A Tribe Called Quest, Nas, and others.

Though you won’t hear so many finely crafted long solos, you’ll hear lots of peerless playing. On Black Byrd’s “Love’s So Far Away,” listen to how Rainey, the bassist, sets the bottom on the moody F-minor groove. The harmonic rhythm starts slow—that is, the chords don’t change often, but around the :38 mark, there’s a little two-bar turnaround with changes on beats one and three during which Rainey moves up the neck and plays this salient but not ostentatious syncopated ascent from the root to the five. This music isn’t just one of the acorns of the smooth-jazz oak; it anchors yacht rock, especially Steely Dan. Donald Fagen and Walter Becker were indeed steeped in the jazz of their youth (including stuff by Donald Byrd), but they were also listening in the present, especially to R&B and jazz drawing on R&B. After you pop in on “Love’s So Far Away,” return to Steely Dan’s “Kid Charlemagne” or “Josie,” both fantastic, and hear how Rainey lays it down there, too. It’s the same kind of stuff. And the Byrd-Mizell influence continued. Something like Byrd’s “Street Lady” could be heard around the turn of the last century in Basement Jaxx or Daft Punk. And on today’s jazz scene. As Nate Chinen wrote about Black Byrd for Tidal last summer, “the album holds a blueprint for the sonic architecture of so much on our present-day, vibes-forward scene.”

Chinen’s article also summarizes how Black Byrd, like so much of the jazz popular with Black audiences in the seventies and eighties, was dismissed or neglected by contemporary jazz-focused critics, most of them white. Some of Byrd’s peers, too, scoffed. Stryker quotes a damning appraisal from Thad Jones, talking to Leonard Feather in ’78. But Phil Woods, also quoted in Styker, was generous. John Swenson’s entry in 1985’s Rolling Stone Jazz Record Guide is measuredly approving of the early Mizell era, and if we were to dig and dig, we might find the critical establishment wasn’t universally dismissive. But probably close. I’m not exactly working anymore as a professional critic, unless this counts, but speaking for myself in midlife, I fear I’m no longer strongly positioned to shake my head over such misjudgments. Though I have a lifelong interest in Black popular music and love when friends point me to a new thing (usually by the time it’s blowing up), my knowledge of contemporary Black (and all) pop of the past, oh, twenty years is spotty, which makes it harder for me to contextualize music by young players, and no doubt makes me more likely to mistake reference for innovation. It’s hard to hear everything, tricky to get old.

There’s a YouTube clip of Byrd guesting, in 1989, on a talk show hosted by television journalist Tony Brown. You don’t get much time on TV, of course, and it’s hard to find something to say that’s succinct and rhetorically effective but also true. That’s always hard, to say something that sounds good and is also true. When pressed, Byrd talks about the obstacles facing the music, but not right away. “… Everybody in the world is crazy about this music,’ Byrd says, his voice chipped with age. “And if they’re doing anything on Saturday night, more than likely, they’re dancing to jazz or some Black, African American music.”

That’s when Brown should have cued up a record.