Red Mitchell, bassist, and Harold Land, tenor saxophonist, formed a hard bop quintet around 1960. The featured track here is “Triplin’ Awhile”, drawn from the Hear Ye! Album of 1961, which I bought at the time and still have. This was a fine group of musicians as you can tell immediately. The trumpet of Carmell Jones is a treat for me and so is Harold Land’s sax. This music does not go out of date. Mitchell at that time had been very active in the West Coast jazz scene for ten years or so, and he would be in demand for many years thereafter.
Red Mitchell was another in a large set of jazz musicians (and ordinary Americans) making a living peacefully without resort to war. However, the biographies of the older musicians frequently mention entering the military, often via the draft. Musicians often are entrepreneurs running a service business, and they move around to deliver that service. Red worked in Stockholm for many years. Red was aware of the peaceful influence of jazz. “In September 1991 he and Horace Parlan visited Moscow as the first privately sponsored jazz musicians to perform in the Soviet Union. Russian television followed them from the airport to concert halls, Red’s master class and studio recording sessions. ”
Red understood jazz as connecting people. In his own poetic words:
Ok, Every nation has its own
Traditions and its language,
And to take good care of them is really laudable;
And the language and traditions find
Their way into the music
With results that now and then are really audible
But the function of the music is
To get beneath our differences –
Communicate directly, soul to soul.
It’s the nearest thing to
Universal language we’ve developed
And its purpose is to make the whole world whole.
3:44 am on September 20, 2012
