Jazz hard bop: “Lazy Afternoon”

In 1976, Caricatures, Donald Byrd’s latest album for the Blue Note label, saw the light with the same characteristics as the previous ones, but this time some of the best soul jazz musicians of the 1970s where hired, raising the quality of the music. The environment is emotional and light with ideas close to rhythm and blues, but without losing the jazz spirit. In 1978 Byrd joined Elektra Records, for which he issued Thank You... For F.U.M.L. (Funking Up My Life) (1978), which is made up of songs from The Blackbirds in which he departs from jazz and plays rhythm and blues and disco music, and the following year Donald Byrd and 125th Street, N.Y.C. (1979) with his new group 125th Street, N.Y.C., in which he returns to jazz-funk.

In 1981 he launched Love Byrd, but with the separation from Blue Note and the Mizell brothers, Byrd lost course cornered between his own group and the new producer Isaac Hayes, who plays vibraphone, piano, Fender Rhodes, synthesizers and conducts a vocal quartet. In 1982 he presented Words, Sounds, Colors and Shapes, whose result was the same and after that he left the Elektra label. Then he decided to come back to his hard bop roots and signed with Landmark Records, published Harlem Blues (1988) with widely recognized alto saxophonist Kenny Garrett, Getting Down to Business (1990) again with Garret and incorporating veteran tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson, and A City Called Heaven (1991), but only with Henderson. From 1993 to 2007 he participated in rapper Guru’s Jazzmatazz project (four jazz and hip hop albums), and with the rise of acid jazz and jazz-rap, his 1970s albums were extensively used for samples, even by rapper Ice Cube and hip hop group Public Enemy.

In 1995 the Blue Note label released Kofi, a compilation of hard bop recordings made between 1969 and 1970. From 1996 to 2001 Byrd was a resident artist at Delaware State University, and then from 2009 until his death, creating a $ 10,000 scholarship fund in his name. In 2000 he received the Jazz Masters award from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2006 he issued With Strings for Warner Bros. with a quintet and a complete wind and string section backing them performing a magnificent collection of standard ballads. In his last album The New York Scene (2009) he was part of pianist George Wallington’s quintet, with whom he had played a long time ago, in 1955. Donald Byrd died in 2013 of unknown causes at the age of 80.