Booker Little And His Quintet feat. Max Roach - Out Front (Remastered) (1961/2022)

At the dawn of the ’60s, jazz was in the midst of a growth spurt that doubled as a culture war. Ever since Ornette Coleman’s 1959 debut at New York’s Five Spot—a gig that’s often viewed as the official unveiling of free jazz—critics and artists had been fretting over the future of the genre like parents of a wayward teen. Much like when bebop swept the scene in the mid-’40s, the prevailing sentiment was that you had to pick a side. Were you a defender of the jazz faith, or a champion of its latest modernist turn?

At least one thoughtful young musician, trumpeter Booker Little, wasn’t buying the binary. As he put it in a 1961 interview, if jazz were mapped on a political spectrum, he’d fall somewhere in the center. “My background has been conventional,” the conservatory-trained 23-year-old told the writer Robert Levin, “and maybe because of that I haven’t become a leftist, though my ideas and tastes now might run left to a certain degree.” He went on to defend Coleman (“…I think I understand clearly what he’s doing, and it’s good”) before touching on one of his core aesthetic tenets. For Little, dissecting an artist’s methods without considering the feelings that informed them made no sense. “I can’t think in terms of wrong notes,” he said. “Because if you insist that this note or that note is wrong, I think you’re thinking completely conventionally—technically—and forgetting about emotion.”

These beliefs were crystallizing at a critical time for the trumpeter. Tragically, he wouldn’t live to see 24—in October 1961, he died from uremia, essentially blood poisoning due to kidney failure. But before his death, he would back up his statements with an album that made the post-Ornette jazz wars seem petty and myopic. Out Front, his third LP as a leader, recorded in two sessions in the spring of ’61, didn’t feel remotely like free jazz. But it crackled with a Coleman-esque charge thanks to the saxophone work of Eric Dolphy, who in 1960 had recorded alongside Ornette on the album that would become the flagship of that movement, and would soon take part in John Coltrane’s most adventurous work to date. Nor did it fit in with the hard-bop sound that defined the jazz mainstream at the time, where fellow rising trumpet stars Freddie Hubbard and Lee Morgan (both born, like Little, in 1938) each found a comfortable home. Yet at moments it swung as hard as a typical contemporary Blue Note recording.

TRACKLIST

1. Booker Little And His Quintet - We Speak (Remastered)
2. Booker Little And His Quintet - Strength And Sanity (Remastered)
3. Booker Little And His Quintet - Quiet Please (Remastered)
4. Booker Little And His Quintet - Moods In Free Time (Remastered)
5. Booker Little And His Quintet - Man Of Words (Remastered)
6. Booker Little And His Quintet - Hazy Blues (Remastered)
7. Booker Little And His Quintet - A New Day (Remastered)