The Bill Hardman Quintet 

Saying Something

(Fresh Sound)

BY THE time that I heard the bop trumpeter Bill Hardman playing with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers at Ronnie Scott’s in the mid-’70s, he’d already travelled a hard and meandering jazz road.

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1933, he played with Tiny Bradshaw’s blues band (1953-55), with Charles Mingus in 1956, recorded with Jackie McLean (Jackie’s Pal) in the same year and had his first stint with Blakey between 1956-58.

In 1961 he recorded his first album as leader, Saying Something, now at last reissued on Fresh Sound and sounding as vibrant as ever with a marvellous rhythm section of drummer Jimmy Cobb — who had recorded the renowned Kind Of Blue album with Miles Davis in 1959 — pianist Ronnie Mathews and Detroit bassist Doug Watkins, with Bob Cunningham taking over on two of the album’s tracks.

On alto saxophone was another Detroiter, the shimmering and under-recorded hornman Sonny Red, who recorded his own album for Blue Notes, Out Of The Blue, in 1959-60, but who faded into obscurity as bop lost its prominence in the decades that followed.

Hardman’s tetchy sound was not like the clear and burnished timbre of his great bop contemporary Clifford Brown, whose death in a car crash when he was only 26 in 1956 had robbed jazz of its most translucent trumpet tone.

It was as if, like Howard McGhee from Tulsa, Oklahoma, Hardman played on the very edge of his pitch, sounding more vulnerable, as if his notes courted danger, so close were they to falling precipitously to some unwanted and unintended place.

Hardman’s long solo on the album’s opening track Capers gives off his zest and audacity as he blows above the rhythmic power of his confreres, skirting over their restless beat like a fleeting bird.

Sonny comes levitating in, his sound airy, and Mathews’s light keyboard touch keeps a similar off-the-ground propulsion of sonic energy.

The melodic fullness of the ballad Angel Eyes finds an able brass troubadour in Hardman as he hovers susceptibly over the theme, the sudden clipped endings of his notes giving the tune an even fuller delicacy.

Sonny’s sudden ascents and tumbling cadences give even more compulsion to this most sublime of jazz standards.

Back to more predictable bop sounds in Hardman’s own piece Jo B, where his edgy beauty shines through a chorus full of clipped phrases and unexpected high reaches.

Sonny plays on with astonishing fluency and a transparent ease above Mathews’s relentless comping.

Then first the pianist followed by a delving Watkins, and a flurry of drums from Cobb gives all members their solo moments.

Mathews swings out for the introductory sequence of another Hardman opus, Buckeye Blues, showing a felicitous Sonny sailing freely over the rhythm, his featherweight notes never touching the earth.

Hardman is in top mettle, his horn singing a blissful kind of blues.

Mathews strikes his keys blithely too and Watkins dances deeply across his strings. This is bop at its most buoyant and with an inseparable sense of unity.

Next is Assunta, a tune by another trumpeter composer, Cal Massey, and played fast, with first Harman and then Sonny tearing into their choruses.

Cobb crashes into his drums before the pace slows down for the final ensemble.

The speed is even hotter for It Ain’t Happened Yet, another Hardman tune set up for the trumpeter’s tart tone and Sonny’s gliding solo, and as the quintet come romping home you know that it’s happening right now.

The bonus track has Hardman as the lone horn, and it’s Tom McIntosh’s ballad, With Malice Towards None.

He blows it straight, with a touch of terseness, but no less lyrical because of that.

Hardman was anything but a prolific leader of recording dates. He cut three albums on the Muse label between 1978-81 and then waited until 1989 before getting his final opportunity with the Danish Steeplechase label and a sextet album What’s Up?, a vibrant session with front-line partner Junior Cook on tenor sax.

He died in Paris in 1990 as an always-in-demand sideman, perennially blowing on the edge of his sound.