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Author:  David Luebbert Posted:  1/6/08; 1:06:44 AM Topic:  Adam's Apple Msg#:  5400 (in response to 5398) Prev/Next:  5399/5401 Reads:  1189

Larry, very interesting comment about Adam's Apple.

The tune Adam's Apple, I hear as a blues that uses a Latin figure in its accompaniment, with altered harmony in the last four bars of the 12 bar blues form.

If you've ever listened to Vince Guaraldi playing for the "Peanuts" TV specials from about the time of this album, like on the tune Linus And Lucy, you can hear similar Guaraldi playing similar figures to what Herbie Hancock plays on this tune. These ideas were floating around in the jazz community.

Hancock played with Latin percussionist Mongo Santamaria on gigs before he joined Miles Davis. And drummer Tony Williams, who Hancock played so well with in Davis' band, obviously made a study of many Latin, Afro-Cuban, Brazilian and Aftrican rhythms. To me it seems natural that this particular group of musicians would be interested in doing blues in this way.

Now the album Adam's Apple does have a number of other great songs on it, which use pretty advanced harmony and very fresh sounding soloing ideas.

Teru has extremely unusual harmony and melody but it's played very slowly so that you have time to absorb its innovations. Even now you don't often hear jazz composers and soloists using ideas like this, so your coments about Shorter's futurism apply here.

The "502 Blues", which Jimmy Rowles wrote, is a jazz waltz that's very attractive and cliche-free and Shorter and Hancock create wonderful solos using individual solo ideas.

In Chief Crazy Horse, Shorter has Hancock playing a piano figure that sounds like a horse walking slowly downtrail. When Shorter plays the tune's melody, he uses a saxophone timbre that sounds like a Sioux singer, and holds notes for long duration as happens in Sioux chants.

Footprints uses a bass figure that brings to mind waves flowing up a beach and washing footprints away in the sand.

The El Gaucho has a feel of a rider racing and cutting with horse to control a running cattle herd.

Shorter is an impressionistic composer and improvisor. The titles he gives his music give you a hint about what he was thinking about when he wrote a piece and sometimes what he thinks about when he solos. He frequently mimics some feature of his subject in arrangements he writes.

When I first heard these songs after I finally tracked down a copy of this album (it took me about a year and a half because it was nearly out of circulation in the late 1970's), I danced along with them pretty frequently. The music was a lot of fun to listen to when I did that and the music all made sense to me pretty quickly.

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