McCoy Tyner / Freddie Hubbard Quartet: Live At Fabrik

Warning! Highly Flammable Material! This superb album, recorded in Hamburg in 1986 and never previously released, ought to come with a caution, so incendiary is it.

Strictly speaking, Live At Fabrik presents pianist McCoy Tyner's trio with bassist Avery Sharpe and drummer Louis Hayes and guest artist Freddie Hubbard on trumpet and flugelhorn. In actuality, Hubbard's power-packed presence transforms the unit into a co-led quartet, as the cover art acknowledges. The 2 x CD album is, in effect, the chronicle of a summit meeting between two giants of post-bop jazz—one of them, Hubbard, on the rebound from a fall from grace occasioned by his embrace of fusion in the 1970s, the other, Tyner, a bandleader who had never let his standards drop.

Hubbard exploded on to the scene at the start of the 1960s with a series of Blue Note albums under his own name and that of tenor saxophonist Tina Brooks—and lest we forget, Tyner was the pianist on Hubbard's 1960 own-name debut, Open Sesame. Sideman dates followed for the likes of tenor saxophonist John Coltrane, pianist Herbie Hancock, drummer Art Blakey and reed player Eric Dolphy. The 1970s, by contrast, were for the most part a wasteland, as Hubbard hitched his wagon to fusion and the pursuit of big bucks.

Tyner, on the other hand, after spending the first half of the 1960s as a member of Coltrane's classic quartet, kept the faith, metaphorically and literally (he had changed his name to Suleiman Saud in 1955), unencumbered, unlike Hubbard, by the need to maintain an expensive lifestyle which included a heavy late-1970s cocaine habit.

But by the mid-1980s, Hubbard was back on the same page as Tyner and keen to prove it. The opening track on Live At Fabrik is a fiery performance of Tyner's propulsive "Inner Glimpse," on which Hubbard matches Tyner's intensity lightning flash by lightning flash, and the temperature rarely drops for the next two hours.

In a 2001 interview with All About Jazz's Craig Jolley, Hubbard said that, back in the 1960s, "Lee Morgan was the only young cat that scared me when he played. He had so much fire and natural feeling. I had more technique, but he had that feeling." Many listeners, including hardcore Morgan fans, would dispute the "natural feeling" part of that judgement, both as regards high-octane material such as "Inner Glimpse" and ballads such as John Green's "Body And Soul" and Thelonious Monk's "Round Midnight," both of which are given emotionally charged readings by Hubbard (and Tyner). Disc one concludes with a twenty-six minute performance of Hubbard's "Neo-Terra," previously heard on his ghastly Bob James-produced 1976 Columbia album, Windjammer. This time out it makes for exhilarating rather than infuriating listening (although to nitpick, Hubbard's pyrotechnics do at times touch on flash rather than substance).

And so the party continues. Side two highlights include Tyner's high spirited "Island Birdie" and raucous "Blues For Basie." The sound is perhaps a little boomy at times, but that may have been unavoidable in the cavernous converted-factory space of Fabrik which appropriately, the liner notes tell us, at one period manufactured explosives. Tyner and his trio are high impact throughout Live At Fabrik, but perhaps the biggest cause for celebration is Hubbard, back with a bang.

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