Spirits of Trane

Junior Cook (tenor sax), Freddie Hubbard (trumpet), George Cables (electric piano), Kent Brinkley (bass), Ralph Penland (drums) and Juno Lewis (percussion). From the album Keep Your Soul Together (1973).

Rudy Van Gelder was the most important American sound engineer in the history of jazz. He recorded several thousand albums, including some of the great classics, with many of the best interpreters in a career lasting more than half a century. He worked for a number of record companies, but most of all for the Blue Note label, where he was from 1953 to 1967. Van Gelder cared for the richness of the natural sound of each instrument and the separation between them, making sure that each detail was audible. He also had the ability to find the mood musicians and producers were looking for.

He was a humble man who kept his techniques secret, from the type of microphones he used to their position next to the musicians in the playing area. His interest in electronics began in his teenage years as an amateur radio. A big jazz lover, he took trumpet lessons. In the university he studied to be an optometrist, and after his graduation he opened an optometry clinic. As a hobby, in 1946 he started recording local jazz musicians at his parents’ house, where he built a small recording studio next to the living room.

This theme is very fast and Cook and Hubbard expose the main melody in unison, and on the bridge the latter adds some phrases and then Penland plays alone the drums in AABA structure. Then Hubbard makes a daring and acrobatic solo using the maximum number of possible phrases with the trumpet. Then Cook comes in with a discourse that begins moderately, but then turns into a torrent of unstoppable notes that follow one another in an overwhelming way. Next the group plays a riff to give way to Cables, whose melodic line is lucid and consistent, but Brinkley introduces walking and when later doubles the time Cables’s solo becomes frantic. The band plays the riff again and Penland enters using the drums with intelligence and skill. To close, the group re-exposes the theme finishing in an apotheosis, but Hubbard still keeps playing some sentences alone until everyone joins together to end.