Kenny Dorham: Una Mas - One More Time (Blue Note 80 series) [BLUE NOTE]

Why you'll love it

Part of the Blue Note 80 series, this is a 180g reissue of a hard bop gem. Dorham wrote all three tunes, led by the 15-minute bossa-flavoured title track.

This edition

• Blue Note 80 series
• 180g vinyl
• Stereo mix

About the album

Kenny Dorham spent years as the trumpeter other trumpeters quietly admired, playing with Charlie Parker, the early Jazz Messengers and Max Roach before stepping out as a leader. For this session at Rudy Van Gelder's New Jersey studio on April 1, 1963, he brought in a band that now reads like a who's who: Joe Henderson on tenor saxophone, Herbie Hancock on piano, Butch Warren on bass and a 17-year-old Tony Williams on drums.

Just three tunes fill the album, all Dorham originals, and nobody is in a hurry. "Una Mas (One More Time)" takes up all of side one, a 16-bar tune with a bossa nova lilt that Dorham said let you switch to almost any kind of feeling, from bossa to blues. He'd recorded it before under the title "Us," but this is the version that stuck. "Straight Ahead" swings hard and gives Henderson room to roar, and "Sao Paulo," named for the Brazilian city Dorham visited on a 1960 tour, is half bossa and, in his words, half something else.

It's one of the warmest records in the Blue Note catalogue, and a fine place to meet Henderson and Hancock early in their careers. The title translates as "one more," which is also roughly what everyone says when it finishes.

Also at Kops: more Kenny Dorham on vinyl · browse Classic Jazz

Tracklist

Listen

On Blue Note (cat# 7764740), a reissue of the 1963 album.