Freddie Hubbard

LP version. Open Sesame was the first album Freddie Hubbard made as a leader. It was recorded on 19 June 1960 at Rudy Van Gelder's studio in Englewood Cliffs and issued by Blue Note as BLP 4040. He was 22 and had come to New York from Indianapolis, where he made his first recordings as a sideman. This session gave him a band of his own and a programme that balances fast hard bop with ballads. It is also one of the few sessions that paired him with the tenor saxophonist Tina Brooks, a writer as well as a player. Ira Gitler wrote the liner notes, and the cover pairs a Francis Wolff photograph with Reid Miles's design.

Producer Alfred Lion placed Hubbard and Brooks in front of McCoy Tyner on piano, Sam Jones on bass and Clifford Jarvis on drums. Jones was on loan from Riverside, as the original sleeve notes. Brooks wrote two of the six pieces, the title track and Gypsy Blue, and later critics often single them out as the strongest themes of the date. Hubbard contributed Hub's Nub, the last piece on the original LP. The rest comes from the songbook and from rhythm and blues. There is the Burke and Van Heusen ballad But Beautiful, then All Or Nothing At All, and Rudy Toombs's One Mint Julep. Reviewing the album in DownBeat in 1961, John A. Tynan heard a youthful virility and aggressiveness. Billboard had already found him thoroughly in command of his horn in 1960. Much later, The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings placed the album in its core collection, and CD reissues added alternate takes of the two Brooks pieces.

This Jazz Images edition (37163, 2019) is a limited stereo 180g LP in a gatefold sleeve, mastered and lacquer cut by Kevin Gray according to Discogs. It adds Azil, from Walter Benton's Jazzland album Out Of This World, recorded in New York on 19 September 1960 with Hubbard, Benton, Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers and Jimmy Cobb.