FREDDIE HUBBARD — The Love Connection (review)

FREDDIE HUBBARD — The Love Connection album cover

Album · 1979 · Fusion

5/5 · 2024-08-23
FunkFreak75

At the time I was so into Chick Corea and had become a very recent fan of Al Jarreau. Plus, beautiful album cover. After buying the record it a was the amazing orchestration of Claus Ogerman that kept drawing me back in--the same man and lush sound that supported Diana Krall's work in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

1. The Love Connection" (8:17) Freddie Hubbard's trumpet has never ever sounded so good as this song. The amazingly air-tight groove from drummer Chester Thompson and electric bassist Stanley Clarke is amazing but then add Claus Ogerman's production values and the arrangement and recording of those amazing horns and you have a song foundation in which there's no way any performer could not be inspired to play their best! (19.5/20)

2. "Brigitte" (6:57) beautiful strings orchestra arrangement to open this one with double bass, piano, and sensitive jazz drums setting up Freddie for one amazingly beautifully tender performance: great melodies through the first two minutes before the tempo and dynamics jump a couple notches with walking bass line and accented drum and conga play. Nice to hear Chick's Vince Guraldi-like sound and solo in the fifth minute--and the way the horns take it back from him at the end of the sixth minute for a wonderful strings-supported recapitulation of the opening melodies to the end. (13.25/15)

3. "This Dream" (9:00) a Claus Ogerman composition, it opens with the orchestra's low end (horns) revealing the main melody followed by its repetition from the upper end (strings)and then Freddie joins in to give his phrasings. Very interesting interplay on this tense, almost-Wizard of Oz-feeling piece of ambiguity. I'm not sure if Claus and Freddie were able to resolve the tension before the jazz combo join in, but it was interesting to hear them try. Chick on piano, Chuck Damonico on double bass, and Chester Thompson on bare-bones brushed drum kit. Chick plays a nice sensitive solo in the seventh minute over the two rhythm instruments, then the orchestra swells and Chick goes Alice Coltrane glissando mode in order to clear the palette for Freddie and Claus to finish it off the way it started. A pleasant and engaging listen--very cinematic--reminding me of some old movie like Billy Wilder's The Apartment. (18/20)

4. "Little Sunflower" (9:20) strings, Chick, and Al Jareau, all at their absolute peak, One of my favorite jazz vocal songs of all-time. (20/20)

5. "Lazy Afternoon" (10:02) the title says it all: and that's just the way I felt as this album side would run its course: all hyped up and blissed out by Al Jarreau, Chick and Freddy's "Sunflower," I would just lay back into the lazy-haze of the adrenal fall and fall asleep to the dulcet breathy tones of Freddie's trumpet and Claus's cinematic orchestrations over the song's first four minutes. But then Chick and the jazz-rock combo join in--with Chuck's surprising funk bass and the saxophone's playing off of Freddie's trumpet spits, but, alas! It's short-lived as the music moves back to soft jazz in the eighth minute for an extended close with just Freddy and Claus' orchestra. But, how appropriate. Those final notes alone make it all so worthwhile! (17.75/20)

A/five stars; a masterpiece of funked up, mellowed down late 1970s pre-Smooth Jazz jazz-rock fusion. The rawness of the jazz-rock fusion that Tony Lifetime and Miles and Johnny Mac and Herbie the Headhunter and Carlos the Santana started has now been refined into what will soon become and be called "Smooth Jazz."