Freddie in his underwear...

Spring is in the air – the car booters are starting up again. At the weekend one of them actually had some records worth looking through too. I came away with a mixed bag – 10 records in all that set me back the sum total of £4. In amongst these was one album without a cover, and one with no cover or inner sleeve. After a quick play through them all (except a 78 which takes some logistics to be able to play) it is these two sartorially challenged discs I am most happy with!

Freddie Hubbard’s Echoes Of Blue is the album with no cover. There is no date on the label but when I picked it up I guessed it to be mid-Seventies. Worth a punt but the chances were, I thought, the grooves would contain some pleasant but ultimately tepid jazz-funk. After all, plenty of Fifties and Sixties jazz luminaries did wander off down the jazz-funk path in the 70s. I didn’t really know whether Freddie Hubbard had been one of those. When I got it home and played the album I found it to be full of mainstream jazz – bop, post-bop? I’m no expert in the fine details but I do know I am really enjoying it. So Freddie had not strayed down any side paths and got lost in a mess of jazz-funk? Well, it seems the critics were grumbling at the time that he had sold out and deserted his pure jazz roots and it turns out that the album Echoes Of Blue, although released in 1976, is in fact an amalgam of two of Freddie’s albums from the Sixties – Backlash and High Blues Pressure - featuring three tracks a piece from those albums. A slightly odd format choice for a compilation, but no matter. All is clear now, I think?! I thought it sounded Sixties.

This Freddie album maybe shivering a bit in only its underclothes, and the lack of a cover may have had me puzzling for a while about what I exactly had on my turntable, but in the end it goes down as a good score, a very good score.     

Freddie Hubbard – Backlash  1967

... next, the album in the nude! ...