Jackie McLean

LP version. New Soil was recorded at Rudy Van Gelder's studio in Hackensack on 2 May 1959 and issued as Blue Note BLP 4013. It was not the first session Jackie McLean taped for the label, but it was the first one released. McLean had grown up inside Charlie Parker's sound, and he later credited Charles Mingus with pushing him to find his own tone and concept. The title points that way. The material is still hard bop, but the alto sounds sharper and more personal, and McLean's two compositions already bend the usual theme and solo structure.

The quintet has Donald Byrd on trumpet, Walter Davis Jr. on piano, Paul Chambers on bass and Pete La Roca on drums, with Alfred Lion producing and Van Gelder recording. It was Davis's first appearance on Blue Note, and Van Gelder's stereo mix places the two horns side by side. The mono edition appeared about a month before the stereo one, BST 84013. McLean wrote the two long pieces on the first side. Hip Strut is a medium blues of over eleven minutes that Joe Goldberg's liner notes describe as moving between blues, march and suspended passages. Minor Apprehension is a difficult, Parker-rooted theme that Miles Davis had already recorded as Minor March. Here it carries a strong Byrd solo and an abstract drum episode from La Roca. Davis supplied the second side: the funky, boogie-flavoured Greasy, Sweet Cakes and Davis Cup, which Goldberg heard as a rhumba. Contemporary reviews were mixed, though Cash Box called McLean one of the individual and important new alto voices today in 1959. Don DeMichael, in DownBeat in 1959, gave it three and a half stars and singled out Byrd's solo on Minor Apprehension as a landmark of swinging, inventive trumpet playing. AllMusic now gives it four and a half stars.

This Jazz Images LP (37164, 2019) adds Loodle-Lot and Millie's Delight from Walter Davis Jr.'s own Blue Note album Davis Cup. The front line is the same, with Sam Jones and Art Taylor in the rhythm section.