The Breathless Charm Of Tina Brooks’s Minor Move

on Blue Note Records
Reviewed by Henry Cherry

Soulster James Brown was known as the godfather of soul for a reason. His syncopated music had the sound of a crisp, rehearsed band that could stop on a dime. In live shows, the singer demanded that same precision found on his studio recordings. Brown regularly fined bandmembers onstage for miscues and dropped notes, dancing his way over toward the offending bandmember in mid-song and flashing with his hand the amount of the fine. It’s been lauded as part of his perfectionism, a backbone of his “hardest working man in show business.” But to be clear, that is business, not music. Legendary pianist Herbie Hancock has a story about blowing a chordal progression on a live date with Miles Davis in the sixties. Every bit the hard charging personality Brown was, Davis was explosive, one former art director described him as nasty. Because Hancock’s mistake was glaring, he expected some backlash from the mercurial band leader. Instead, Davis returned to a solo, incorporating the notes of Hancock’s misstep into the song, in effect, righting the wrongness. That’s an essential demarcation between the rigid and formulaic commercialism of pop music and the open-ended ingenuity of jazz. Hancock remembered in the recent documentary, Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes, “I had judged what I had done. Miles didn’t judge… He heard it… as a part of the music.”