Bobby Hutcherson: Stick-Up! (Blue Note Tone Poet series) [BLUE NOTE]

Why you'll love it

This Blue Note Tone Poet series edition is a 180g stereo pressing in a gatefold jacket. Stick-Up! is the first time Hutcherson recorded with McCoy Tyner, and five of its six tunes are his own.

This edition

• Blue Note Tone Poet series
• 180g vinyl
• Gatefold jacket
• Pressed in the USA
• Stereo mix

About the album

The vibraphone is a tricky instrument to make sound tough, all those soft mallets and shimmering bars, but Bobby Hutcherson managed it time and again in the 1960s. Stick-Up!, cut at Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs on July 14, 1966, finds him with a new rhythm section and a front line built for punch. It was his first album without drummer Joe Chambers, with Billy Higgins stepping in.

Joe Henderson brings his big, curling tenor, McCoy Tyner takes the piano chair, and Herbie Lewis and Billy Higgins keep everything moving. Ornette Coleman's "Una Muy Bonita" opens in a sunny, loping mood, "8/4 Beat" and "Black Circle" swing hard, the quartet piece "Summer Nights" gives Hutcherson room to float, and "Verse" and "Blues Mind Matter" dig into his more searching side.

Blue Note held on to the tapes until 1968, and the record surprised everybody by turning up on the German album chart when this Tone Poet edition came out in 2022. A fifty-six-year wait for a chart placing is what's known in the trade as a slow burner.

Also at Kops: more Bobby Hutcherson on vinyl · browse Classic Jazz

Tracklist

Listen

On Blue Note (cat# B0033489-01), a reissue of the 1968 album.