From the trumpeter's first recording with the Montgomery Brothers in 1958, it was evident that reports coming out of Indianapolis were true: the city had produced a remarkable trumpet player, one who might equal another twenty-year-old, Lee Morgan. After his arrival in New York, Hubbard quickly proved the point. The two were the enfants terribles of their generation of post-bop trumpeters. Hubbard succeeded Morgan in Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, then went on to a solo career. Hubbard and Morgan admired and, in one celebrated recording, challenged one another.
The precision, lyricism and harmonic ingenuity of Hubbard's playing flourished on a wave of power. Initially, there was a large component of Clifford Brown in his work, but his gifts and his outsized personality overrode any possibility that Brown or anyone else, would dominate his style. There were low points in Hubbard's career: when he answered the seductive call of supposed riches and made a few tepid crossover albums for Columbia, and after 1992 when his embouchure suffered permanent damage from an infected lip. Nonetheless, the dozens of recordings he made under his own name average high in quality, including the sets for Creed Taylor's CTI label that took a pounding from many critics. The early Hubbard albums on the Blue Note label, packed with virtuosity and excitement, are uniformly excellent. Some of his most compelling solos are on other peoples' dates, notably so with Bill Evans on Interplay and Oliver Nelson on The Blues And The Abstract Truth.
After the difficulty with his chops, Hubbard was frequently featured in concert and on recordings with the New Jazz Composers Octet, a cooperative band spearheaded by trumpeter and arranger David Weiss, who idolized Hubbard and later became his manager. I heard them at the Vienne Festival in France in 2000. The band sounded wonderful and was clearly pulling for him, but Hubbard struggled on his signature pieces “Sky Dive," “Red Clay" and “One of Another Kind." I wrote about the festival for Gene Lees' JazzLetter.
Freddie Hubbard, the last great trumpet stylist and innovator in jazz, has been through a miserable few years. He failed to care for an infected split lip and attempted, with characteristic Hubbard bravado, to overblow through the problem. Surgery made it worse. He told me that royalties from his compositions have brought him a comfortable living, but that not being able to play well has kept him frustrated. For him there is agony in the solution, the dogged hard work to rebuild his embouchure. Although he knows that playing long tones saved other trumpeters, he said, “Man, that sh-- is so boring." Hubbard's constitution and metabolism militate against boredom.
The compulsion to power his way through good times and bad resulted in glorious music and monumental frustration. I last spoke with Freddie in 2006 at a reception for National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters. He was in good spirits, if rather subdued, and seemed to have accepted that his chops weren't coming back. We sat around remembering good times together in New Orleans and he favored me with a few unprintable Art Blakey stories. Later at a post-function concert that evolved into a sort of jam session, he was asked to sit in. He declined.
Obituaries are beginning to appear on web sites. Newspapers will have them in the morning. This one from Billboard has the essential biographical details.
No obituary can transmit the authority, muscle and emotional reach of Hubbard's playing. Here he is in 1984 with Blakey, pianist Walter Davis, Jr. and bassist Buster Williams playing Benny Golson's “I RememberClifford."
To see and hear Freddie Hubbard twenty-two years earlier, when he was the fieriest member of The Jazz Messengers, visit this Rifftides archive installment.
