At The Village Gate
Herbie Mann

Atlantic Records
[1380-1]
LP cover art - Abidine

_____Jazz musicians can feel a draft with all the windows shut. The wet finger held aloft is symbol and symptom of their calling; the emotional winds they tap from within can invite tempests. They're misunderstood, we're misunderstood, everybody's misunderstood; but musicians know the path to artistry wends through thickets of misunderstanding and they walk the path defensively.

_____Herbie Mann - slender and medium tall, fine features translucent, trimly bearded (but not coiffed) for a Passion Play - is as stubborn and testy as they come. At the first hint of a challenge, his eyes narrow, his lips close thinly. A stone mask of frigid amusement or haughty contempt, he puts down the offender.

_____And then it's over. The challenge was personal, not musical.

_____In any musical joust, Herbie Mann is his opponent's number one fan. He is as delighted with the traditional folk musicians he hears overseas as with his American jazz idols. Sometime ask him, "...Herbie, how about Zoot Sims?..." You won't get an answer. He'll just laugh at his own helpless speechless admiration for Zoot Sims.

_____Let me tell you about one time Herbie Mann conceded defeat cheerfully and in public, and I tell you this so you will see how lacking in envy is his affinity for new musical experience.

_____In the summer of 1961, Herbie Mann joined other jazz stars in a concert tour of South America, where it was winter; that's the way it is. A local promoter in Rio de Janeiro, owner of the theater for one of the concerts, invited the troupe to spend the afternoon before the concert eating and drinking and sunning at another of his places, a huge open terrace overlooking trees and ocean from a hillside some miles outside the city. (Rio was almost the only place the musicians were entertained by jazz fans who didn't try to talk about jazz. Instead of "...Who is greater, Louis Armstrong or Ornette Coleman?..." it was "...Take two drinks over and ask her to dance with you...")

_____The promoter sent a private bus to carry the musicians to his resort. Only, the bus already had a band on it: about fifteen friendly little cariocas and their leader, their teacher at one of Rio's samba schools. They had been hired to come along and sing, play, and dance for the Americans; and their performance was already underway. On the bus for a full hour, they beat and scraped Brazilian rhythms, dancing and singing in the aisle as the bus rode through Rio, past the Technicolor beauty of Sugarloaf Mountain, along the fabulous Rio beachline, and into 'Black Orpheus'.

_____Then, as the saying goes, the fun began.

_____Mountains above them, ocean waves below, food and drinks on all sides, the whole panamerican party of two dozen made an orgy of rhythm, the visitors knocking on glasses, ashtrays, and commandeered instruments, the Brazilians dancing and singing as a company then stepping out for solo gymnastics in hillcountry rhythms against the samba, bossa nova, jazz, and what all beats being made.

_____The music didn't stop on the bus ride back. And when they got to the hotel it didn't stop either. Monte Kay polled the jazz men and it was agreed the Brazilians should be invited to join the Americans onstage at the evening's jazz concert. Near the concert's end, the American master-of-ceremonies was to tell the audience a local outfit was at the rear of the auditorium and they were to come forward to the stage to augment one of Herbie Mann's Latin-based pieces. This was explained to the samba school teacher in poor Spanish, worse Portuguese, fair English, and excellent gestures, with the hope he understood.

_____The teacher understood okay. As the emcee announced "...Monsueto Campos Menezes e sua escola de samba!...", fifteen instruments went BOOM-diddyboomboom!, BOOM-diddy-boomboom! and the boys and girls danced down the aisles singing and beating with all they had. The audience swiveled and went mad.

_____After a moment of shock, Herbie Mann capitulated. He closed his jaw again, grinned, threw up his hands, went to the side of the stage, and "let" them take over the rest of the program. He kept muttering "...I want to record with them. I'm going to fly back down here and record with them..."

_____If Herbie Mann thus passed this major test of his flexibility, it was the only time in South America he was tested and bested. Roy Eldridge, Coleman Hawkins, and Jo Jones were on the bill too; and Zoot Sims and Al Cohn, and Chris Connor. The names Coleman Hawkins and Roy Eldridge had preceded the men. The cheers for them were as fully built-in and guaranteed as merited. But at a surprising number of shows it was Herbie Mann's flute cocktail that broke it up. The audiences really dug Herbie Mann and his percussionist Ray Mantilla, and they didn't wait till solos ended to show it.

_____The Latin temperament is less restrained than the fashionably cooler disposition of the jazz audience at the Village Gate, where this record was made. The enthusiasm is the same, but instead of crowd-sounds you get all the music each man played.

_____It may be, as Irving Berlin almost wrote, that "There's No Ism Like Chauvinism," but Herbie Mann fights it. Herbie Mann himself is American, of Roumanian and Russian descent; and drummer Rudy Collins, of African and American lineage, is from the Bronx.

_____But Ray Mantilla, the diminutive Tom Dewey playing percussion, has Peruvian and Puerto Rican parents. Ray Mantilla was the only guy on the South American tour who could and sure did talk with everyone.

_____Hagood Hardy (bio), the youthful vibes player, is Canadian.

_____Percussionist Chief Bey, white-robed and pillbox-hatted, who has to tell cabdrivers not to take him to the UN, is from Dakar.

_____Bassist Ahmad Abdul-Malik, fiercely blackbearded, strong, solid, swift, and the gentlest of men, is of Sudanese ancestry.

_____"Comin' Home Baby" adds a second bassist. Ben Tucker contributed the piece and plays a solo full of double-stops reminiscent of Jimmy Blanton.

_____"Summertime" is lyrically fluted by Herbie Mann, standing half-hula at the microphone at the right. Herbie Mann has twenty different flutes from everywhere in the world, but on all three tunes he plays the "regular" C (concert) flute.

_____"It Ain't Necessarily So", a 6/8 treatment filling all one side, is the performance that best reveals whatever one seeks of national origins in the musicians' playing. Ahmad Abdul-Malik's impassioned bass solo sounds like he's playing an oud, which Ahmad Abdul-Malik does play in other circumstances. He was pretty emotional anyway because he'd collected three separate traffic tickets trying to get to the Gate on time. Chief Bey's solo is pure African in a climactic spot near the end of "It Ain't Necessarily So". The audience cheers as Chief Bey prepares to play, and the laying of hands on drums is as judiciously and as effectively measured as just the right amount of garlic. The flute solo is Mid-Eastern. "...If anybody would not know me..." says Herbie Mann, "...and heard this record, he'd say I'm Jewish. Or..." laughing, "...Arabic."

...these are Willis Conover's original 1961 LP liner notes.

Herbie Mann: a bio
_________________Herbie Mann (Herbert Jay Solomon) was born in Brooklyn on April 16th, 1930. Herbie Mann has played a wide variety of music throughout his career. He became quite popular in the 1960s but in the '70s became so immersed in pop and various types of world music that he seemed lost to jazz. Fortunately Herbie Mann has never lost his ability to improvise creatively as he has shown in recent times.

_____Herbie Mann began on clarinet when he was nine but was soon also playing flute and tenor. After serving in the Army, he was with Mat Mathews's Quintet (1953-54) and then started working and recording as a leader. During 1954-58 Herbie Mann stuck mostly to playing bop, sometimes collaborating with such players as Phil Woods, Buddy Collette, Sam Most, Bobby Jaspar and Charlie Rouse. He doubled on cool-toned tenor and was one of the few jazz musicians in the 1950s who recorded on bass clarinet; he also recorded in 1957 a full album (for Savoy) of unaccompanied flute.

_____After spending time playing and writing music for television, in 1959 Herbie Mann formed his Afro-Jazz Sextet, a group using several percussionists, vibes (either Johnny Rae, Hagood Hardy or Dave Pike) and the leader's flute. He toured Africa (1960) and Brazil (1961), had a hit with "Comin' Home Baby" and recorded with Bill Evans.

_____The most popular jazz flutist during the era, Herbie Mann explored bossa nova (even recording in Brazil in 1962), incorporated music from many cultures (plus current pop tunes) into his repertoire and had among his sidemen such top young musicians as Willie Bobo, Chick Corea (1965), Attila Zoller and Roy Ayers; at the 1972 Newport Festival his sextet included David Newman and Sonny Sharrock. By then Herbie Mann had been a producer at Embroyo (a subsidiary of Atlantic) for three years and was frequently stretching his music outside of jazz. As the 1970s advanced, Herbie Mann became much more involved in rock, pop, reggae and even disco. After leaving Atlantic at the end of the 1970s, Herbie Mann had his own label for awhile and gradually came back to jazz. He recorded for Chesky, made a record with Dave Valentin and in the 1990s founded the Kokopelli label on which before breaking away in 1996 he was free to pursue his wide range of musical interests. Through the years Herbie Mann has recorded as a leader for Bethlehem, Prestige, Epic, Riverside, Savoy, Mode, New Jazz, Chesky, Kokopelli and most significantly Atlantic.

...from Scott Yanow.