Destiny’s Children

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).

In 1953 Rudy Van Gelder met Alfred Lion, founder of Blue Note Records, who was impressed with the clarity of the sound of his recordings. Then, Lion hired him and the label became a landmark in the world of jazz focusing on the hard bop style and releasing key avant-garde and free jazz albums. In 1959, Van Gelder finally began working as a full-time sound engineer and moved his studio to a new facility in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, which looks like a chapel, with high ceilings and good acoustics, and where he remained since then. In a few years he was required by New York independent labels, such as Prestige Records, and also collaborated with Savoy Records, among others.

In 1965 the label Blue Note was acquired by Liberty Records and in 1967 Lion retired. Record companies started hiring other sound engineers, but during the early 1970s Van Gelder joined the CTI label, whose production was quite commercially successful, with some albums well received by critics. Then he worked as a freelance until in the 1990s, Sony Records, owner of the Blue Note recordings, asked him to remaster more than 200 albums. Also, Concord Records, owner of the Prestige recordings, asked him to remaster some of them. He died in 2016 at the age of 91 years.

The introduction to this funky theme is rendered as a call and response between Brinkley on the one hand, and Cook and Hubbard in unison on the other. Afterwards Cable plays a captivating and subtle passage until Cook and Hubbard finally expose the main melody in unison, separating themselves on the bridge in AABA structure. Next Hubbard enters with a soft and sensitive speech, but then introduces more powerful and vertiginous phrases. He is followed by Cables with an intense and ingenious solo full of enthusiasm while Cook and Hubbard make a sound mattress underneath. Then the group plays the main melody of the theme, Hubbard comes back to offer a passage with some sound surprises, and to finish the group re-exposes the introduction and ends abruptly.