Stanley F. Malamed

More than any other genre, jazz seems best suited for the live environment. An artist can improvise in the studio, certainly, but in concert a musician can ignore time limits and stretch creative possibilities. This is especially true of all-star collaborations; they can seem contrived or forced, but when chemistry exists between the players, the result is jazz in its purest, most exciting form. Such is the case on this disc, which features five contemporary giants: Clarke, Larry Carlton, Najee, Deron Johnson, and Billy Cobham. Seventy minutes for seven songs allows the players to interact and solo at length, stretching originals and Miles and Mingus covers to their limit.

Stanley Turrentine was fresh from his brilliant playing on Hammond B-3 maestro Jimmy Smith's Midnight Special and Back at the Chicken Shack sessions when he officially signed with Blue Note Records in 1960, but although the hard bop sax/organ template (which later came to be called soul-jazz) seemed to fit Turrentine like a glove, his first sessions for the label found him working with a more standard jazz format highlighted by a piano-led rhythm section. On Dearly Beloved, though, paired with his eventual wife, Shirley Scott, on the B-3 and the alert and sensitive drumming of Roy Brooks, Turrentine found the perfect pocket for his big, soulful, and slightly raw and bluesy sax tone, and for those only familiar with his later pop crossover recordings with CTI Records, it's a pretty revelatory set…

Stanley Clarke's debut solo effort was issued when he was already a seasoned jazz veteran, and a member of Chick Corea's Return to Forever, which at the time of this recording also included Joe Farrell on soprano sax and flute, and the Brazilian team of vocalist Flora Purim and drummer/percussionist Airto Moreira. Produced by Corea, who plays Rhodes, clavinet, and acoustic piano on Children of Forever, the band included flutist Art Webb, then-new RtF drummer Lenny White, guitarist Pat Martino, and a vocal pairing in the inimitable Andy Bey and Dee Dee Bridgewater on three of the five cuts – Bey appears on four. Clarke plays both electric and acoustic bass on the set; and while it would be easy to simply look at this recording as an early fusion date, that would be a tragic mistake.