"
One day, in the early 1960's, Mongo Santamaria called up Herbie Hancock and asked him to sit in as a pianist with Mongo's band, which was then performing at Club Cubano InterAmericano on Prospect Avenue, a popular Latin music spot. Herbie was reluctant to do it because he never played Latin before, but accepted the offer and was doing pretty well by the end of the first set. Then during intermission, Donald Byrd, who was there, asked Herbie to play his original composition "
Watermelon Man" for Mongo. When Herbie started doing this, Mongo's band, especially his huge percussion section, started joining in, and before you knew it the whole club was dancing. Mongo was so excited by what happened that he asked if he could record the song.
He did, and it became his greatest hit."
You may know "Watermelon Man" better from the
jazz-funk fusion version Herbie Hancock recorded for his platinum album Headhunters, but it first became a hit in Mongo Santamaria's version, as
an Afro-Cuban dance song. But without Donald Byrd as
linking pin and mentor to young jazz musicians like Hancock it might never have happened.
In the fifties Byrd had gotten his breakthrough as a trumpeter in Art Blakely's Jazz Messengers and featured as sideman to people like Coltrane and Sonny Rollins. He signed as a solo artist to Blue Note at the end of the fifties and in the early sixties, his musical style, like Hancock evolved into hard bop, a more funkier, more dancable version of jazz than the cool jazz and bebop styles that dominated the fifties. From there on he would further move into what would later become the jazz fusion or jazz funk or fusion genre, working with the
Mizell brothers as a production team. They would produce not only his seventies solo albums, but also the
Blackbyrds group he had formed out of the best of his
Howard University students. In the eighties he would form
a similar group from his students at the
North Carolina Central University.
For the most part of the last thirty years however he stuck to teaching, rather than recording, not only at the universities mentioned above, but also at Rutgers University, the Hampton Institute, New York University, Queens College, Oberlin College, Cornell University, and Delaware State University. He
passed away earlier this month.
Several interviews of Donald Byrd are available on Youtube:
A 1976 Capital Radio 95.8 Greg Edwards interview with Donald Byrd when he was touring the UK with the Blackbyrds.
A 1982 interview for Radio London.
A piece for Rap City with Guru.
And of course
quite a lot of his music is too.
posted by boo_radley at 10:06 AM on February 11