Charlie Byrd Album

Charlie Byrd - Byrd Song (1965) {Riverside OJCCD-1092-2 rel 2006}
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© 1965, 2006 Riverside Records / Fantasy / Universal | OJCCD-1092-2 / 00025218709224
Jazz / Bop / Classical Jazz / Guitar

Eclectic is an adjective easily applied to Charlie Byrd. Over the course of his career the guitarist shaped a reputation as a genre-hopping virtuoso who crossed over into Latin, classical, country and popular music camps, while retaining his abiding affection for jazz. His preference for acoustic over-amplified strings also set him apart from his peers. Certain myopic critics saw his versatility as a symptom of a jack-of-all-trades, master of none syndrome. Byrd responded to his skeptics with album after album replete with exemplary technical skill. His choice of material, on the other hand, wasn’t always so ironclad.

Tasteful, low-key, and ingratiatingly melodic, Charlie Byrd had two notable accomplishments to his credit applying acoustic classical guitar techniques to jazz and popular music and helping to introduce Brazilian music to mass North American audiences.

Collectables combines two very different back-to-back recordings made by guitarist Charlie Byrd for Columbia in the mid-'60s. Travellin' Man (issued in 1965) is a live gig at the Showboat in Washington D.C., a club he was playing in - and owned - 36 weeks out of the year. He is featured with his bass playing brother Joe, and the rather astonishing drummer Bill Reichenbach. The program consists of everything from originals like the title cut and the country and bluegrass tinged opener "Mama I'll Be Home Someday" to Michel Legrand's "I Will Wait for You." With tunes like the Richard Rodgers and Stephen Sondheim standard "Do I Hear a Waltz," Billy Strayhorn's "U.M.M.G.," and Django Reinhardt's "Nuages" sandwiched in between. It' is a hard swinging date where Byrd, a great melodic improviser, turns original arrangements inside out and pours his love for bossa and blues into everything he plays…

When Charlie Byrd recorded Byrd in the Wind in 1959, he was still two years away from discovering bossa nova. The guitarist had yet to interact with Astrud and João Gilberto or record anything by Antonio Carlos Jobim, and he had yet to become a major player in the Brazilian jazz field. Nonetheless, Byrd was an impressive jazzman even before he discovered bossa nova. Byrd (who sticks to the acoustic guitar on this album) already had a recognizably melodic sound - one that underscored his appreciation of Django Reinhardt as well as Andrés Segovia and the Spanish school of classical guitar - and he would have left behind a worthwhile catalog even if he had retired in 1960. The guitarist's classical leanings are hard to miss on Byrd in the Wind, especially when he employs woodwind players (all of them members of the National Symphony Orchestra) on some of the selections…