My guest today is a torch bearer of melodic improvisation.
A master of melodies, chromatic modal patterns of improvisation that open space for drummers like Eddie Marshall and Joe Chambers who say "Hello to the Wind."
My guest came of age under the iron man sweetheart Eric Dolphy when he went by the more formal Robert. But his endearing nature, positive path of constant creation created love amongst his bandmates so soon he was known as Bobby.
His impact on the east coast jazz scene was heavy. He showed up and Rudy Van Gelders studio with Bob Cranshaw and Al Harewood playing solos on Grant Green records that my generation perseveration over.
The crisp Angular feeling of the music from hard bop to post bop with a mix of avant garde more rhythm based solos. More rooted in the blues.
The music was evolving organically and my guest was a Sage and spirit to many young jazz fanatics like Jack Fulks and session drummer Jim Keltner who would sit in the front row of some swampy bar to watch my guest and Charles Lloyd give literal interpretations of themselves with a little Milt Jackson and Jimmy Lunceford mixed in.
My show is about lineage. Tracing the roots of music on this continent to its origins. The birthplace of modern jazz is The Americas and it spread out to the west coast to clubs like The Keystone Korner where my other guest found a home for himself nestled in between a police station and the Inflated Tear of "Change" sung so poignantly by Eugene McDaniels in the opening clip.
My guests humbleness and groundedness is what makes him a transcendent figure much like my other guest who played keyboards for awhile and than became an impresario running the most elastic, flexible, swinging jazz club in the Bay Area. It was the greatest because he diversified the music, it felt like a home with the cornbread and the continual appearances from my guest and Harold Land, Sonship Woody Theus Woody Shaw and thousands of other Eulipian characters.
Both my guests have a deep affection for one another and it runs decades deep as they have taken the roller coaster of life which they are still on. Keeping the world safe for bebop, re-bop and all other contiguous orbital love Bobby Hutcherson and Todd Barkan, welcome to the JFS.