The Side Men

A better view of the Second Great Quintet can be established by looking over the output of the group's sidemen in the period of its existence. Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, and Tony Williams all released albums as leaders during their stint in the band, and Ron Carter can be found on countless Blue Note albums throughout the 60's. These releases show the band members released from the creative direction of Davis, free to pursue their own interests. Simultaneously, the music on these albums provides a control group for understanding the music of Davis during this period.

Both Herbie Hancock's Maiden Voyage and Empyrean Isles predate Shorter's involvement in the band, and both essentially recreate the band of Miles Davis with the trumpeter replaced by the then up-and-coming Freddie Hubbard. Both also show Hancock's experiments with the mixture of modal and free jazz. Maiden Voyage has rightly come to be considered one of the greatest jazz albums of the 60's. Filled with all-original material, the playing on this album is remarkable for its fluidity in style. The texture of the music changes fro solo to solo, and the impression of a larger compositional structure is suggested when the pieces are considered from beginning to end; this is especially true on the more modal pieces “Maiden Voyage” and “Survival of the Fittest”.

While at times more adventurous than Maiden Voyage – it played home to the entirely improvised piece “The Egg” – Empyrean Isles was the first appearance of the now-popular tune “Canteloupe Island”. The band was reduced to a quartet for this album, leaving Freddie Hubbard as the only horn player. With only four tracks on the album, the music makes up in intensity what it lacks in length. The other two songs, “Olilqui Valley” and “One-Finger Snap” continue to explore modal composition, putting long harmonic stretches up against fast moving chords. Some of Hubbard's finest playing can be found in his solos on this album.

Tony Williams released two notable albums in this time period, Life Time and Spring. While reviews of these albums remain mixed even today, they are important for hearing the creative directions of the then-18-year-old drummer. Both feature all-star casts, with Spring being the only album to contain both Sam Rivers and Wayne Shorter. The music found on these albums remains in the hard-bop/free jazz style of the bands that Williams was playing in at this point in his career, and while none of his compositions are ground-breaking, it's worth hearing the drummer in this setting before he veered off into his other interests, more pop-influenced interests.

On the other hand, Wayne Shorter's acoustic releases from the 1960's have become canonical jazz albums and some of the most influential recordings made after World War II. I've already discussed his compositions in detail, so I'll just cover these briefly. In order, these albums are Night Dreamer, JuJu, Speak No Evil, the Soothsayer, The All Seeing Eye, Adam's Apple, and Schizophrenia. Each has its own flavor, with a general movement from pentatonic, popular music in the earlier albums to dark, chromatic music in the later ones. Ensembles vary from album to album as well, with the most notable example being the band on JuJu: McCoy Tyner, Elvin Jones, and Jimmy Garrison from the John Coltrane Quartet filled in as Shorter's rhythm section, making any references to the other tenor player in Shorter's music even stronger.

Ron Carter recorded few albums as a leader in this period, but together with Jimmy Garrison and Richard Davis, he filled the bass role on a vast majority of the albums released in the 1960's. The recordings of all of these band members are worth investigating, still readily available, and most often fairly low in price. Each of them also played too many roles as sidemen to really list off, but together with their own releases, the four of them did much to shape the sound of the younger generation of jazz musicians recording in the 60's.