Live At Fabrik presents pianist McCoy Tyner's trio with bassist Avery Sharpe and drummer Louis Hayes and guest artist Freddie Hubbard on trumpet and flugelhorn. In actuality, Hubbard's power-packed presence transforms the unit into a co-led quartet, as the cover art acknowledges. The 2 x CD album is, in effect, the chronicle of a summit meeting between two giants of post-bop jazz—one of them, Hubbard, on the rebound from a fall from grace occasioned by his embrace of fusion in the 1970s, the other, Tyner, a bandleader who had never let his standards drop.
- Freddie Hubbard: trumpet
- McCoy Tyner: piano
- Avery Sharpe: bass
- Louis Hayes: drums.
Hubbard exploded on to the scene at the start of the 1960s with a series of Blue Note albums under his own name and that of tenor saxophonist Tina Brooks—and lest we forget, Tyner was the pianist on Hubbard's 1960 own-name debut, Open Sesame. Sideman dates followed for the likes of tenor saxophonist John Coltrane, pianist Herbie Hancock, drummer Art Blakey and reed player Eric Dolphy. The 1970s, by contrast, were for the most part a wasteland, as Hubbard hitched his wagon to fusion and the pursuit of big bucks.
Tyner, on the other hand, after spending the first half of the 1960s as a member of Coltrane's classic quartet, kept the faith, metaphorically and literally (he had changed his name to Suleiman Saud in 1955), unencumbered, unlike Hubbard, by the need to maintain an expensive lifestyle which included a heavy late-1970s cocaine habit.
02 - Announcemet 00:42
03 - Latino Suite 14:36
04 - Body and Soul 14:53
05 - Nero-Terra 25:47
06 - Island Birdie 17:44
07 - Round Midnight 14:43
08 - Blues For Basie 17:10
09 - What Is The Thing Called Love 10:13
