Donald Byrd: Black Byrd [BLUE NOTE]

Why you'll love it

This Blue Note reissue is remastered on 180g vinyl with an MP3 download included. Black Byrd stands among Blue Note's best-selling albums, and it gave its name to Byrd's protege band, The Blackbyrds.

This edition

• 180g vinyl
• Remastered
• Download card included

About the album

Donald Byrd had made plenty of fine straight-ahead jazz for Blue Note by the early 1970s, so he went looking for something else and found the Mizell brothers. Larry Mizell produced, with his brother Fonce, a former Motown producer, helping out, and the sessions ran at The Sound Factory in Hollywood in April and November 1972.

Byrd plays trumpet, flugelhorn and electric trumpet and sings a little, over a Los Angeles session crew that reads like a who's who: Joe Sample and Freddie Perren on keys, Dean Parks and David T. Walker on guitar, Chuck Rainey and Wilton Felder on bass, Harvey Mason on drums and King Errisson on congas. "Black Byrd" rides a fat groove, "Love's So Far Away" and "Sky High" glide, and "Where Are We Going?" closes it with a soulful lift. Perren and Byrd both add vocals, which gives "Sky High" and the title track an easy soul-radio feel.

Listen for the jet taking off at the start of "Flight Time"; the sleeve credits the effect to Elektra Records, which must be the most polite borrowing of a cup of sugar in jazz history.

Also at Kops: more Donald Byrd on vinyl · browse Classic Jazz

Tracklist

Listen

On Blue Note (cat# BN-LA047-F), a reissue of the 1973 album.