Cecil McBee
Alternate Spaces

Miles Davis, Andrew Hill, Sam Rivers, Yusef Lateef, Keith Jarrett, Jackie McLean, Wayne Shorter. If you have played with such people, the pedigree indicates that you are a jazz musician of caliber. But history is full of eternal session men, eternal backups, eternal second fiddles.

Cecil McBee is a great Session Man, with an overwhelming resume even by 1977 (see the names above, and they are not all), a double bass player of great technique and robust sound, and with a great desire to express his own compositional talent in a memorable record, to be passed down to posterity.  The desire to stand out from  the crowd was already evident in “Mutima,” his first solo album in 1975 (already an excellent album), as well as in “Music from the Source” a couple of years later.

But it is with this “Alternate Spaces” that McBee finds the perfect balance; It is with this album of excellent Post Bop, where the lesson of Free Jazz  is fully assimilated and reinterpreted, that he accomplishes a very personal, original, and effective concept of writing.      

The stunning “Consequences” is emblematic in representing the expressive strength of this album. It is a piece with a deeply meditative and ecstatic tone, in which Cecil McBee makes the double bass vibrate with the bow creating an atmosphere of anticipation for something, an acceleration, an explosion that will never come;  a sensation of the undefined and magical extends throughout the piece, with the trumpet and saxophone first in unison, then in counterpoint to contour the unruly polyrhythms of Allen Nelson.

Chico Freeman marvelously divides himself between the soprano and tenor in the persistent and Latin-infused “Come Sunrise,” the central track of the album  in which the percussions of Don Moye are the ideal substrate on which to unleash melodic surges of great impact and emotional tension; The phenomenal Don Pullen on piano carves himself a very respectable space in “Sorta, Kinda Blue,” a more conventional bop in which even Joe Gardner can lift his head and ring out a perfect trumpet solo.

Overall, more than anything else, McBee towers, astounding in all sauces, whether accompanying, wielding the bow, or launching into vertiginous solos (the opener “Alternate Spaces” begins with a long and spectacular double bass solo).

“Alternate Spaces” is certainly an album to spin at some point, definitely not essential for understanding the history of Jazz, but one of those that has plenty of depth,  equally much musical beauty, a mature, varied, and eclectic Jazz record; A “must” but only for ears hungry for great Jazz.