Bobby Hutcherson died on Monday, August 15 at his home in Montara, California. He was 75 and had battled emphysema for several years. McCoy Tyner was one of Bobby’s most frequent collaborators. Beginning in 1966, they appeared together on Bobby’s Blue Note release Stick-Up! and two years later on Time For Tyner. Bobby appeared on three of McCoy’s Milestone releases in the seventies, and the connection continued through their 1993 duo masterpiece, Manhattan Moods, and McCoy’s 2002 album, Land of Giants. Here they are in 2002 playing John Coltrane’s “Moment’s Notice.”
Hutcherson and Harold Land formed a great quintet (here with Stanley Cowell, bassist Reggie Johnson, and drummer Joe Chambers) in the late sixties. The venture was occasioned by Bobby’s return to his native Los Angeles after he and Chambers were arrested for marijuana possession in New York in 1967. At the time, the city’s draconian cabaret card laws were still in effect, and the loss of the card prevented musicians from working in establishments where alcohol was served. The penalty was particularly burdensome on jazz musicians whose livelihoods depended on working in nightclubs; among the most famous artists who lost their cards were Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, and Thelonious Monk. In Hutcherson’s case it brought to an end the fruitful five-year period he’d spent coming to prominence in New York, but led to a long association with Land and nearly fifty additional years of extraordinary music-making.
Hutcherson leaves a major legacy on records ranging from his associations with Blue Note, Columbia, and Landmark to various freelance efforts to scores of appearances as a sideman. One that sprung to mind this week was his Columbia debut, Highway One. It was the first new Hutcherson release to appear after I’d begun hosting jazz radio shows in the 1977, and it’s remained a favorite. However, Columbia Records, which has been negligent with a great deal of its jazz catalogue from the seventies and eighties, has yet to release Highway One on CD. I found the album’s opener on YouTube. It features the flutist Hubert Laws and pianist George Cables, composer of “Secret of Love.”