I knew Freddie Hubbard, the great jazz trumpeter who died on Dec. 28. He'd suffered a heart attack a month earlier in Los Angeles and succumbed to complications while in Sherman Oaks Hospital. He was 70 years old.

I first interviewed Freddie (no one referred to him by his last name, as is customary in the jazz world) in 1978 for the Soho Weekly News in New York. I was a young music journalist who had lucked into jazz assignments for Down Beat. SWN music editor Peter Occhiogrosso was always game for a controversial story, and Freddie had provided me with one when I called him at home in California for an interview just days before his New York concert appearance.

"You want a story? Tell them I'm not coming," Freddie said. "Tell them, fuck it - I ain't makin' enough money and I want to live good. And the money's out here and I want it... Now you called Freddie Hubbard and you got the story."

Freddie eventually begrudgingly flew in for the gig at Lincoln Center's Avery Fisher Hall and played a lackluster 45-minute set.

My interest in Freddie stemmed from a series of recordings he'd made starting in 1970 for the CTI label. Straight Life practically turned me on to jazz. Its heavy Latin rhythms pulsed as Freddie and his stellar bandmates (including Herbie Hancock) soloed powerfully. Me and my high school friends lit our first joints and jammed to Straight Life's 17-minute first side.

Freddie arrived in New York in 1958 with horn in hand and immersed himself in the city's raging bebop scene. In last June's Down Beat, Howard Mandel put Freddie in perspective: "He emerged in a brass age dominated by [Dizzy] Gillespie and [Miles] Davis, in the wake of Fats Navarro and Clifford Brown, just a little behind Kenny Dorham and Donald Byrd. 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."

According to AllMusic, Freddie recorded nearly 90 albums under his name. He jumped from label to label (Blue Note, Impulse, Atlantic, Columbia, Fantasy, Music Master), always seeking a better deal.

By 1978, jazz musicians were finding fewer opportunities to play their original style of music and began "selling out" by going blatantly "commercial" - fusion, crossover, what ultimately disparagingly became known as "smooth jazz." Freddie was anything but smooth. He played his trumpet so hard that one day this would come back to haunt him.

Super Blue is my favorite post Straight Life Freddie album, because he proved you could mix daring tunes with easier-listening numbers and still produce memorable music. (Also in '78, he contributed a solo to "Zanzibar" on Billy Joel's 52nd Street album.)

Several years later, when I interviewed Freddie for a Down Beat cover story (Nov. '81), he bitterly complained that Super Blue had not been promoted well. But Freddie also acknowledged, "When Columbia gave me money, I moved to L.A., bought my house, cars, a pool. But then I started acting weird, like telling jokes at concerts. I ain't Flip Wilson."

More than 20 years after coming to New York, Freddie was lost in La-La Land. He partied and spent money until the IRS caught up with him and took his Beverly Hills home. Even worse, in 1992, he developed a growth on his lip that needed to be removed, seriously hampering him for the rest of his life.

"All the older cat have scar tissue," Freddie explained to Mandel. "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 [Armstrong's] scar? It was like a crater!

"I hate when guys compare classical and jazz musicians," Freddie continued, "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 have been dead a long time ago.'"

Howard Mandel edited my Down Beat story, "Money Talks, Bebop Walks." He's the author of Miles, Ornette, Cecil: Jazz Beyond Jazz. Read his complete Freddie Hubbard article here

Blog by Steve Bloom

Also see: More Steve Bloom blog posts

Comments (1)

1 Monday, 19 January 2009 14:56

jazz cat

gOOD TO SEE YOUR RESPECT! KEEP IT UP! CAN YOU DIG IT?

www.the-jazz-cat.com

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