ON FIRE: LIVE FROM THE BLUE MOROCCO, A HEATED UNISSUED 1967 PERFORMANCE BY FREDDIE HUBBARD, DUE FROM RESONANCE AS LIMITED THREE-LP SET ON
RECORD STORE DAY APRIL 12

Legendary Trumpeter is Heard at His Ferocious Peak at Sylvia Robinson’s Bronx Club with an All-Star Combo Featuring Bennie Maupin, Kenny Barron, Herbie Lewis, and Freddie Waits

Deluxe Package, Also Available on CD on April 18, Includes New Interviews with Maupin and Barron, Notes by Jazz Authority John Koenig, Appreciations and Interviews with Charles Tolliver, Eddie Henderson, Steven Bernstein, Jeremy Pelt and More
Trumpet master Freddie Hubbard is heard at the apex of his early brilliance in the newly unearthed collection On Fire: Live from the Blue Morocco, which arrives on April 12 as an exclusive, limited three-LP Record Store Day release from Resonance Records.

Remastered from the original tapes by Matthew Lutthans, with the LPs mastered by Bernie Grundman and pressed at Le Vinylist, the previously unreleased set was captured by recording engineer Bernard Drayton in 1967 at the Blue Morocco, a jazz spot located in the New York borough of the Bronx and operated by Sylvia Robinson, later a co-founder of Sugar Hill Records. The collection was produced with the full endorsement of the trumpeter’s son and estate representative Duane Hubbard.

Hubbard’s work with Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers, his appearances on historic recordings by John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman, and his own brilliant recordings as a leader for Blue Note and Impulse! Records led contemporary observers to hail him as the masterful successor to the late Clifford Brown. He is heard on the new release playing a storming set of his own compositions and a pair of smartly arranged standards. Hubbard is backed by his working group of the day, a skilled unit that included saxophonist Bennie Maupin, pianist Kenny Barron, bassist Herbie Lewis, and drummer Freddie Waits.

The package — which will also be issued as a two-CD set on April 18 — is co-produced by Bernard Drayton, his celebrated son and drummer Charley Drayton, and Zev Feldman, the award-winning “Jazz Detective” and co-president of Resonance Records. It includes an introductory essay by jazz scholar John Koenig; new interviews by Feldman with Maupin and Barron; and interviews and appreciations by trumpeters Charles Tolliver, Eddie Henderson, Steven Bernstein, and Jeremy Pelt; and more.

Feldman says, “This album captures Freddie Hubbard at an important point in his career. He had come fully into his own and was forging for himself an honored place in the pantheon of the world’s greatest jazz trumpet players. These live recordings represent Freddie at the height of his powers. The band on these recordings was Freddie’s working group at the time, and they certainly rose to his level.”

“We were excited about Freddie Hubbard coming to the Blue Morocco,” says Drayton, who also captured the previously unreleased recording of Kenny Dorham at the club that is being released for RSD by Resonance. “By 1967, when this album was recorded, Freddie was laying his claim, as Dizzy Gillespie put it, as the greatest trumpet player in the world. Freddie was a dynamo, full of energy and full of pepper. As you can hear, he was on fire. I’m proud to have documented this page in the annals of Freddie’s career.”

Duane Hubbard adds, “My dad, to me and millions of fans, was one of the greatest trumpet players in history. He came to New York from Indianapolis with the drive to be great. In New York, he worked with the top musicians of the time. He took every gig, and he practiced so much and worked so hard that with his natural gifts he rose to be one of the greatest jazz musicians of his, or any, generation.”

“As the performances on this album show,” Koenig writes, “it’s easy to see the qualities that allowed Freddie to make his way into the rarefied milieu of the jazz elite as an instrumentalist. But with this recording, we also have a view of Freddie coming fully into his own as a bandleader. These tracks have never before been heard publicly. They show Freddie in action in a live setting with what was his first regular working band.”

Hubbard’s gifted sidemen of the day testify that playing alongside Hubbard at the top of his game was a thrilling experience.

“Playing with Freddie was very, very intense,” Maupin says. “It was really exciting for me to be able to be a part of the group and be doing these things with him. It was a lot of fun, just great musical fun. For me, playing with someone who had been working with people like Art Blakey, who had that kind of incredible experience, I realized what I needed to do just to keep up with him: I had to really practice a lot. It inspired me to really up my game.”

© Tom Copi
“Musically, playing with Freddie was always great,” says Barron. “Always. And what was great about that band on this record is that with Freddie, we could play all kinds of music. By that, I mean, in one piece, we would go from straight-ahead to avant-garde and switch on a dime, change on a dime. Freddie was always the instigator. If you listened to him, you could tell where he wanted to go and we would just go there with him. It was a great band. I loved playing with them.”

Hubbard’s formidable legacy as a trumpeter has served as an example for his successors on the instrument.

“Hub was one of my trumpet heroes in my youth,” Tolliver says. “Initially coming out of Brownie, by slightly modifying an already great embouchure, he was able physically to fashion and create the style he was aiming for — to execute and muscle the trumpet in a saxophone-like pianistic manner resulting in incredible improvisational feats and solos never heard before, while at the same time delivering a big, sassy, warm, brass sound without ever sacrificing those crucial inherent elements of our art form — swing, the blues, and pure sophistication.”

Henderson recalls, “Freddie dominated the trumpet scene in the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s. He was without a doubt the top of the hill — his trumpet expertise and prowess, his execution and facility, his range. And his compositions were so challenging, over and above what was coming out of the bebop era. They were very difficult harmonically to maneuver through.”

In an enthusiastic outburst, Bernstein says, “This recording is insane! It’s one of the most exciting live documents I’ve ever heard in my life. It’s f!cking mind-blowing. Freddie’s on fire. It’s just so damn good.”


Resonance Records is a multi-GRAMMY® Award-winning label (most recently for John Coltrane’s Offering: Live at Temple University for “Best Album Notes”) that prides itself in creating beautifully designed, informative packaging to accompany previously unreleased recordings by the jazz icons who grace Resonance’s catalog. Headquartered in Beverly Hills, CA, Resonance Records is a division of Rising Jazz Stars, Inc. a California 501(c) (3) non-profit corporation created to discover the next jazz stars and advance the cause of jazz. Current Resonance Artists include Tawanda, Eddie Daniels, Tamir Hendelman, Christian Howes and Donald Vega. www.ResonanceRecords.org