Brass Trax
Few pop musical genres have been so critically maligned as jazz fusion has. There’s something about the supposed purity of jazz that makes it sacrosanct and serious. Try to use improvisation for funk or pop music and you risk offending the gatekeepers of the art form.
On the other hand, at the beginning of the seventies, jazz fusion was widely popular. Gold record popular. Popularity doesn’t automatically translate to quality, but sometimes it can point a careful listener toward something that the critics have missed. And, in the case of the jazz fusion of flautist Bobbi Humphrey, it does.
Bobbi Humphrey grew up near Dallas, Texas, where she attended Southern Methodist University and caught the attention of Dizzy Gillespie during a talent show. A quick trip to New York, and Humphrey was performing among the elite, playing the Apollo Theater and landing a spot in Duke Ellington’s band. By 1971, the 21-year-old Humphrey would have her first record on Blue Note, Flute In, the label’s first album to be lead by a woman.
Flute In and its 1972 follow-up Dig This are straight-ahead jazz records. Though they are funky and masterful in parts, there is nothing new about them. It wouldn’t be until Humphrey united with the Mizell brothers that she would forge the sound that would win over mass audiences.
Blacks and Blues (1973)
Larry and Fonce Mizell had scored Blue Note an epochal hit when they produced Donald Byrd’s 1972 fusion breakout Black Byrd, and the record label was looking for more of the same. So, Blue Note sent Humphrey to the Mizells for a few sessions, and the resulting effort, Blacks and Blues, would prove to be an even bigger hit than Black Byrd, at least in terms of initial album sales.
The Mizells’ formula was simple. Take the lavish orchestrations that had become the norm for funk music in the wake of Isaac Hayes and Curtis Mayfield and invite accomplished jazz performers to improvise over it. The Mizells gave Humphrey plenty of space to stretch out over the course of the album, and the wealth of her melodic ideas are a major reason that the fusion experiment succeeded.
At times, Humphrey’s flute can seem like an inspired embellishment. A track like “Chicago, Damn,” which floats on a rolling wave of funk, anchored by the ace keyboard work of Fred Perren and a seriously deep synthesizer line, would be dope even without Humphrey. (Which is not to say that it is not considerably doper because of her.) On the other hand, tracks like “Harlem River Drive,” depend on Humphrey’s improvisations for their melodic heft.
Listen to “Chicago, Damn”
Listen to “Harlem River Drive”
Part of the appeal of Blacks and Blues is its spontaneity. Humphrey was still in her early twenties when she cut the record, and she hadn’t had significant experience in a recording studio—especially as a session musician. “I was really young and didn’t realize when we were putting down stuff that you come to a session with chord changes,” she told interviewer Rico Washington. “So with a song like ‘Harlem River Drive,’ all my playing was improvisation. None of that was written.”
And the result? The tune sounds like a summertime trip along the expressway. It’s an idyllic evocation of Humphrey’s home.
Equally spontaneous are the ballads that Humphrey sings. She had never sung lead before the Blacks and Blues recording sessions, and her voice has a childish and raw quality. But what is childish and raw from one perspective is youthfully assured from another. The contrast between Humphrey’s voice, her flute, and the Mizells’ harmonized backing vocals make the track “Just a Love Child” into a nourishing bit of pop.
Listen to “Just a Love Child”
Blacks and Blues would become Humphrey’s best selling album and the standard against which her future work would be judged.
Satin Doll (1974)
Humphrey’s follow-up to Blacks and Blues lacks the focus that gave the earlier album such a punch. The cover of Satin Doll (1974) features a photo of Humphrey’s baby girl, and the album is obliquely dedicated to her. At its core are two standards, Duke Ellington’s “Satin Doll” and Stevie Wonder’s “You Are the Sunshine of My Life,” both of which dramatize Humphrey’s love of her child. But neither track is quite as effective as “My Little Girl.”
Listen to “Satin Doll”
Listen to “You Are the Sunshine of My Life”
Written by Larry Mizell, “My Little Girl” is based around around a sinuous bass vamp, which provides a lush setting for Humphrey’s singing. Her voice is more polished and commanding, and she immediately conveys the maternal affection that has inspired the album. As a statement of purpose, it’s the strongest tune on the record.
Listen to “My Little Girl”
Fancy Dancer (1975)
Humphrey’s final outing for Blue Note, Fancy Dancer (1975) offers an indisputable argument in favor of jazz fusion. It is the kind of music that makes sexytime unavoidable, and even the squarest of jazz purists have to make out with somebody eventually, right? Nothing against the man, but that’s not something that’s about to happen with Ornette Coleman on the stereo.
Fancy Dancer benefits from a group of heavyweight session musicians. The Mizells could count on legendary trombonist Julian Priester, pianist Skip Scarborough, trumpeter Oscar Brashear, and countless others to nail their arrangements dead. Free from heavy lifting, Humphrey’s melodies explore increasingly abstract ideas. At times, her flute sounds like it actually is the titular fancy dancer.
The record opens with the cheery “Uno Esta,” a Larry Mizell confection that has the effect of sounding like the climax of a cocktail party. The rest of the album is dedicated to what happens after the party’s over.
Listen to “Uno Esta”
“The Trip,” the follow-up was a slice of heavy soul jazz, a spacey jam that features no fewer than three synthesizer lines. It has a complexity that goes well beyond what you expect out of a funk song and evokes a nighttime voyage, warm inside a car, through a frigid night.
Listen to “The Trip”
Things have heated up by the time the title track makes its appearance. “Fancy Dancer” has a casual, slightly Latin rhythm that beats underneath a searing guitar line. It’s nearly six minutes of come on, darkly erotic and vaguely sleazy.
Listen to “Fancy Dancer”
“Mestizo Eyes,” the most widely anthologized cut from the album, features Humphrey’s hottest solo of the set. Humphrey blows with an urgency that saturates the track with the aural equivalent of untrammeled lust. By contrast, the come down track, “Sweeter than Sugar” sounds like four minutes of cuddling.
Listen to “Mestizo Eyes”
Listen to “Sweeter than Sugar”
Humphrey’s music got slicker after she parted ways with Blue Note. Larger budgets, more promotion, and a heavier emphasis on the dancefloor allowed Humphrey to shape her creative vision to the burgeoning disco era. But her subsequent records miss the spark that made her collaborations with the Mizells such events. Jazz fusion never recovered from the excesses that awaited it in the later part of the seventies, but, as Bobbi Humphrey’s Blue Note outings demonstrate, it could be something special.
