Jan 29 2009
Cannonball!
Julian “Cannonball” Adderley is one of those oft-unsung heroes of jazz. Maybe he just wasn’t as flashy as a Dizzy or as intense as a Miles. Maybe he didn’t have the tragic story and life-cut-short saga that “Bird” did. It’s hard to say why he sometimes goes overlooked, but for me, he was always one of the greatest.
Cannonball was a chubby kid. He hung around with other musicians as he grew up and one of them, looking at his gut, said it looked like he had swallowed a cannonball. From that moment on, his nickname was cemented.
Cannonball was good enough that Miles Davis asked him to be part of “Kind of Blue.” His ablum “Somethin’ Else” I feel is a companion piece to that album as they were recorded very close to each other with many of the same musicians, including Miles. It’s a great album and, in my opinion, one of the most important out there. Maybe it didn’t shatter jazz conventions and rewrite the way jazz was played and recorded, but it’s a great album of jazz tunes by some of the best musicians of the day.
Radio station WDCB was playing some Cannonball this morning as I drove into work. It reminded me how much I enjoyed his music and his albums. So, I thought I would go to my ol’standby YouTube and see what they had for Cannonball. So, here is Cannonball live. In fact the musicans here are:
Cannonball Adderley - alto sax
Nat Adderley - cornet
Yusef Lateef - tenor sax, oboe, flute
Joe Zawinul - piano
Sam Jones - bass
Louis Hayes - drums
The tune is the classic “Brother John.”
