THE BRECKER BROTHERS: LIVE AT THE BOTTOM LINE (March 6, 1976)
A BAND OF BROTHERS
Welcome to the first and only official live release by the original line-up of the Brecker Brothers Band.
It’s rather an historic occasion when a live recording by the original Brecker Brothers line-up turns up. That it took nearly 40 years to do so only ups the ante. There is quite a lot of history behind and around the band members, the release of the gig contained here, and Randy and Michael Brecker in particular.
It all starts with The Brothers’ (initially Randy’s) relationship with Allan Pepper and The Bottom Line - a strong and long-standing one. As Randy recounts, “Allan Pepper and I go back to around 1966 when he and his wife, Eileen, and Stanley Snadowsky were booking “Jazz Interactions” [a series of concerts and workshops which brought live jazz performances to New York City public schools and The Village Gate] and I was sitting-in with Phil Woods. We later played at The Gate, with the group, Dreams, which Allan also presented. I even played at The Red Garter club with Dave Liebman. That space later became the Bottom Line club we all know.”
Soon after, Randy landed a spot in the horn section of the Al Kooper-era, rock meets jazz supergroup, Blood, Sweat & Tears, but abruptly quit (on the same night as Kooper) in favor of a gig with seminal jazz-crossover master, pianist Horace Silver. Silver had had substantial success with radio-play jazz singles like, “Song For My Father.” “When I told Grady Tate that I had dropped a rock gig for a jazz gig,” laughs Brecker, he grabbed me and yelled, “Are You Crazy!?” Brother Michael would later join with Silver as well, before the two formed The Brecker Brothers.
After Randy’s stint with Horace Silver, it was on to the band that would bring The Brothers to the world stage - together. Dreams is widely recognized as a seminal voice in the jazz-rock movement and, therein, Randy and Michael ably picked up the gauntlet thrown by Tony Williams’ Lifetime, and electric Miles - well before The Mahavishnu Orchestra and Return To Forever headed in that direction. In some ways, Dreams was a kind of proto-BBB and included keyboardist Don Grolnick, and bassist Will Lee - not to mention a pre-Mahavishnu Billy Cobham, on drums – another Silver alum.
Originally hailing from Philly, these pioneering brothers of jazz-rock fusion had their beginnings in a mid-‘60s/early ‘70s popular music world, where fusing elements of jazz with multiple styles of music was the order of the day. The Brothers added their own approach to composition and the spontaneity of virtuoso soloists sailing atop of what can only be described as a truly singular band in the annals of jazz.
Is this jazz? The music contained on this disc keenly reflects a moment in our cultural history where the roads of jazz, rock, funk, R&B, and even classical, came together to create a lithe, mobile, and plastic form of this uniquely American music. At turns emulating James Brown & The JB Horns, and Weather Report, and at others, Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters band, or Return to Forever, The Brecker Brothers take was still wholly their own mixture. Their music, firmly horn-based and decidedly NOT guitar-based, shows us just what a very unique case The Brecker Brothers band would make for that fateful meeting of jazz and rock.
There had been a handful of brass-heavy units, like rock concern, The Ides of March, trumpet-led, Chase, and of course, Chicago but none had focused as much creative energy as The Breckers did on sophisticated, multi-sectional harmonic composition and edge-of-your-seat solo flights, while proudly wearing their funk on their sleeves. This sublime music emerges from that brief moment when jazz and rock mixed, matched, and coexisted quite happily in a post-Hendrix & Sly Stone world – a world where funk had come to infuse popular music as well as jazz - and where melody, musicianship, and improvisational firepower met on the friendliest of terms, making for a new and vibrant listening experience.
History shows that, as early as 1970, The Brothers had learned well the lessons of putting horns on equal footing with guitars. They plugged in. They electronically processed and amplified their horns in real-time to make them even more aggressive and cutting. Randy Brecker recalls, “We used Funk Boxes (envelope followers), wah-wah pedals, and I also used an ‘echoplex.’ It all started when John Abercrombie didn't show up at a Dreams rehearsal, but his wah-wah was lying there in front of his amp. I plugged it into my Barcus Berry pick-up, and it sounded great. The Funk Boxes were the best. They were made like pieces of shit, and they went out of biz fast, but they were a great envelope effect - like the one Will used on the opening of “Cactus.” We started using things like that in 1970 with Dreams, so we could hear ourselves and cut through. This was before Miles. He used to come to hear Dreams all the time at the Village Gate, and that’s when he asked Billy Cobham to play on Bitches Brew, which has the well-known echoplex trumpet on it.”
As surprising as it may sound, what started as a Randy Brecker solo album some 40 years ago ultimately became a benchmark of fusion-era jazz - The Brecker Brothers.
Randy Brecker explains, “I’d gone to summer music camps with David Sanborn when we were teens, and we had always stayed in touch. When I moved to New York in ’66, he was playing with Paul Butterfield. When Michael moved to New York in ’69, so did David. I joined Michael and Barry Rodgers in the band Dreams, which later included Will Lee and Don Grolnick. After Dreams broke up, I thought it would be great to write some original music for a horn section, with Mike, and Sanborn, and me. I didn’t have a goal other than working on a solo record. At that time, Don Grolnick, Will Lee, Steve Khan and Chris Parker all lived in the same building, so Mike and I and Dave would go over there once a week just to try out tunes. We were like a family.”
Brecker continues, “Right before I was ready to make demos of my new stuff, I got a call from Steve Backer (who’d been hired by Clive Davis to find artists for the new Arista label) saying, ‘If you call this band ‘The Brecker Brothers’, I will sign you to Arista.’ Steve really wanted to call it that, and we had never thought of the name, believe it or not! Clive really loved our tunes, but called me up and said, ‘You guys have to do a single, or I’m not putting this out.’ The next day, we went in and jammed up and quickly recorded ‘Sneakin’ Up Behind You’ and Clive just loved it. Arista released the single and really pushed it. It did quite well for us, and that’s what sold the first record.”
This 1976 Brecker Brothers concert from The Bottom Line comfortably exists right alongside other high watermarks in the realm of ‘70’s creative music. Having put Mahavishnu to bed, John McLaughlin unplugged and moved on to create new world music with Shakti. Jeff Beck’s Wired and Jan Hammer’s Oh Yeah were blazingly au current and sold like hotcakes. This was also the year that drummer/singer Phil Collins stepped up on Genesis’ fusion-tinged, A Trick of The Tail, and his own jazz-rock amalgam, Brand X. Zawinul & Shorter’s new Weather Report presented Black Market, and Joni Mitchell offered her Hejira both which featuring an up-and- coming bass phenom, Jaco Pastorius, whose debut album happened to include The Brothers handing in some spiffy horn-section punch. Add to this a thriving, pre-disco funk scene that included the likes of Kool and The Gang, The Commodores, Parliament (with whom The Brothers recorded “Mothership Connection” - get the idea?) plus, let us not omit The Average White Band, and you have just a glimpse of the playing field for an incredibly vibrant year in music – one that also included The Brecker Brother’s follow-up Arista release, Back To Back. They went on to record four more albums for Arista, and from 1975-1982 garnered a total of seven Grammy nominations.
This 1976 Brecker Brothers show sports a fascinating and rather effective set list. Both the sophisticated and the silly are warmly embraced, as The Brothers present material from their self-titled first record (“Creature of Many Faces”, “Rocks” & the hit “Sneakin’ Up Behind You”) and their follow-up, Back To Back, with the mighty “Night Flight” - remarkably, Michael Brecker’s very first composition. Also featured here are non-Brecker items: “Cactus,” a Don Grolnick tune originally recorded by Joe Beck, and the then-unrecorded David Sanborn feature penned by Randy called, “It Took A Long Time.” Mystery remains as to why Sanborn only appears on this feature number, “Night Flight”, and “Sneakin’.” The reels found in the BL archive strangely only include him on these three selections. “It may have been that he had a session, or another gig, or wasn’t feeling well that night,” posits Brecker.
What is so extraordinarily striking about this Brecker confab is how effectively they manage to balance groove with complexity, and sophistication with fun. This no doubt reflects, at least in part, The Brothers’ experience of working with the master of the jazz hit single, Horace Silver. “We had him in mind all the time as a bandleader and composer,” explains Brecker. “Horace was one of the first fusioneers, too. Bebop, funk, gospel, world music - he knew how to play great music that was also accessible. His tunes all had little harmonic twists and turns for the musicians but funky beats for, as he put it, “the chicks at the bar who want to shake their asses.”
Why is this the first and only official live release by The Brecker Brothers Band, you ask? Perhaps surprisingly, because it documents a group that rarely played live, much less toured extensively. This is due in part to a 1970’s music world replete with the percolations of a vital studio recording scene, wherein the most talented of musicians were kept busy tracking for television, movies, commercials, and all styles of solo and horn section spots - regardless of musical genre. “We were making a living in the recording studios,” recalls Brecker. ”The clubs paid next to nothing, as did 'opening act' gigs. Clive Davis was always begging us to go out on the road, but we weren't going to blow the studio work.”
Session work that year included a brief stint by The Brothers as part of Frank Zappa’s horn section, recording for Zappa: Live in New York, featuring a blazing mutant trumpet solo by Randy Brecker. “Frank was a stern taskmaster. No fooling around. Once, during a performance of ‘The Black Page,’ he noticed that Lou Marini was playing it on soprano instead of tenor, so he made us stop and start over. On the ‘Purple Lagoon’ solo, I just remember being blasted by the rhythm section – they were really loud!”
Without a doubt, loud & proud describes this first Brecker Brothers Band in action. The group is put into 4-wheel drive by the sleekly-grooving, well-oiled machine that is the nimble rhythm team of Will Lee, Chris Parker and Sammy Figueroa. They constantly supply the connective tissue and hold down an undeniable and indelible groove. Keyboardist Grolnick’s electric piano solos are oh-so-elegant, and he delivers the necessary clavinet funk. Guitarist Steve Khan steps up as yet another of the band’s dynamic soloists, and he makes sure to bring the rock when the rock is required. The resultant blend of mayhem and form, abandon and razor-sharp execution, makes for an unparalleled meeting of clan-collective minds.
A Family Band. A Band of Brothers.
Maybe not literally, but figuratively – oh, hell yes.
Gregg Bendian
Michael Brecker (March 29, 1949 – January 13, 2007)
To the popular music world, he’s that sax player on James Taylor’s “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely” and Paul Simon’s “Still Crazy,” but in the realm of jazz history at large, he is widely regarded as the most influential tenor saxophonist since John Coltrane.
It’s difficult to believe that “Night Flight” is literally Michael Brecker’s very first composition - and hearing it nearly 40 years later one is struck by how it is at once very slick and very catchy – almost giving the feeling of a lost or unknown instrumental by Steely Dan, with extended solo aplomb. The bonus track version of “Night Flight” sports a slightly different arrangement and a brisker, more urgent tempo. We offer these two different takes for pure enjoyment, and for the joy of examining one of the great minds in jazz history already working feverishly to forge a new kind of saxophone vocabulary.
After the Brecker Brothers, Michael Brecker went on to record and perform as sideman and leader with a “who’s who” of the world’s very greatest jazz musicians including Herbie Hancock, Jack DeJohnette, Chick Corea, George Benson, Pat Metheny, Quincy Jones, Charles Mingus, McCoy Tyner, Elvin Jones, and many, many more. Michael Brecker died from complications of leukemia in New York City. He is sorely missed.
