Cannonball Adderley
“Sometimes we're not prepared for adversity.” — words he offered the audience before playing “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy”
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
Companions ⏳🌊
- FamilyNat Adderley
His brother, three years younger and a cornetist, stood by his elder brother's band all his life and wrote “Work Song.”
- InfluenceCharlie Parker
He absorbed Parker's bebop language deeply, and having emerged the year Parker died, he was hailed as the new Bird.
- ColleagueMiles Davis
Played in his band for nearly two years, learning space and restraint, and recorded “Kind of Blue” with him.
- ColleagueJohn Coltrane
The tenor player who stood beside him in Miles's band; Adderley recalled studying harmony anew at his side.
- PatronOrrin Keepnews
As Riverside's producer, made his peak-era records with him, including the San Francisco live album.
- ColleagueJoe Zawinul
Held the piano chair for nine years, wrote “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy,” and after his death dedicated the tribute “Cannon Ball.”
I. The hungry boy from Tampa · 1928–1948 (age 0–20)
(Tampa) He was born in September 1928 in Tampa, Florida. His given name was Julian Edwin Adderley. His father, Julian Carlyle Adderley, was a teacher and cornet player, and his mother, Jessie, was a teacher as well. In 1931 his younger brother Nat was born. The brothers grew up in a family of Black educators who prized study and music alike, and the atmosphere of that home followed them both for the rest of their lives. (Nickname) The nickname Cannonball, he recalled, was a corruption of “cannibal” (man-eater), a taunt his friends hung on him as a boy for his prodigious appetite. He was a big man, and that bulk became the generous presence he carried onstage, though in later years it also became a burden on his health. (Tallahassee) The family later moved to Tallahassee, the state capital, and his parents taught at Florida A&M, a Black university. He started on trumpet before moving to alto saxophone, at first taking swing-era altoists such as Benny Carter as his models. In a South where segregation was enforced by law, the brothers learned music within the schools, churches, and small clubs of the Black community. The handclaps and shouts he heard in church, and the bent notes of the blues, sank into his body in these years. (Ray Charles) Accounts survive that in the mid-1940s a young Ray Charles, then living in Tallahassee, played with the Adderley brothers. Considering that both men would later make music bridging gospel and jazz in their separate spheres, it was a bond grown from the same soil. (Graduation) In 1948 he completed the music-education program at Florida A&M. In that family, teaching was a more natural path than performing. The temperament of a teacher later carried over into his gift for talk onstage, where he would explain the origins of each tune to the audience.
II. The classroom and the army band · 1948–1955 (age 20–27)
(Classroom) Right after graduating, he became band director at Dillard High School, a Black school in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. By day he taught students how to hold their instruments and play together; by night he played in local clubs. He is said to have relished listening to each student's sound and correcting it, and all his life he thought of himself as a teacher. (Army) Drafted in 1950, he served until 1953. In the service he led an Army dance band and also studied at the Naval School of Music in Washington. It was a period in which he learned in his bones how to arrange, conduct, and keep a group of musicians together. That experience became his capital later, when as a bandleader he was responsible for the livelihoods of several men. (Return) After his discharge he went back to Dillard and stood before a classroom again. In Florida he was already a well-known alto player, but the New York jazz world had never heard of him. Between a steady teacher's salary and the uncertain life of a performer, he chose teaching for a while. (Bebop) Meanwhile Charlie Parker had transformed the language of the alto saxophone with a new jazz (bebop) that improvised at breakneck speed over complex harmonies. Adderley listened deeply to Parker, but his roots were planted firmly in the Black churches of the South and in the blues. His own sound was growing in the place where the quicksilver idiom of bebop met the sticky feel of the blues. (To New York) In the summer of 1955 he went up to New York with Nat, saying he meant to do graduate work. Study was the pretext, but from the moment they arrived the brothers made the rounds of the clubs every night. This trip, on which he set the teaching path aside for a moment, would change his life entirely.
III. Nights at the Café Bohemia · 1955–1957 (age 27–29)
(Bohemia) In June 1955, bassist Oscar Pettiford's band was playing at the Café Bohemia, a club in Greenwich Village. With the saxophonist absent, Adderley, who was in the audience, jumped onstage on the spot (sitting in). The story goes that Pettiford, to test this unknown country schoolteacher, kicked off “I'll Remember April” at a blistering tempo, and that when Adderley kept pace without a hitch, the whole club began to buzz. (New Bird) Charlie Parker had died that March. The jazz world promptly called him the new Bird. The comparison was both an honor and a burden. He revered Parker but was wary of sounding like an imitator, and he worked to find his own color by putting forward the warm tones of blues and gospel. (Contract) Within weeks he recorded his first album as a leader for the Savoy label, with Nat, drummer Kenny Clarke, and others, and soon signed with EmArcy, a Mercury subsidiary. He simply let his Florida teaching post go. A single night's playing had, in effect, changed his profession. (Quintet) In 1956 he formed his first quintet with Nat. The reviews were not bad, but the crowds did not follow. Club fees could hardly cover living and travel costs for five men, and in 1957 he disbanded the group, saddled with debt. (Lesson) The failure taught him that running a band mattered as much as the music. From then on, working with manager John Levy, he became a leader who kept close watch over fees, schedules, and repertoire. And just when the dream he had shared with his brother collapsed, the man who called on him was Miles Davis.
IV. In Miles's band · 1957–1959 (age 29–31)
(Joining) In October 1957 he joined Miles Davis's band. Miles wanted his feel for the blues. The next year John Coltrane returned, creating a six-piece band with alto and tenor saxophones standing side by side. Heroin was common in those days, but Adderley was known as a man who kept well away from drugs, and his cheerful, talkative nature loosened the band's mood. (Contrast) If Coltrane stacked chords layer upon layer and drove ahead in torrents, Adderley flowed as if singing, with a bright, round tone. The two respected each other, and Adderley recalled that beside Coltrane he came to study harmony anew. From Miles, he said, he learned to pare away notes and to use space. (Somethin' Else) In March 1958 he recorded “Somethin' Else” under his own name for Blue Note. It was a rare album on which Miles, then under contract to another label, took part as a sideman, with Art Blakey on drums. That same year he also signed with Riverside, beginning his long association with producer Orrin Keepnews. (Modes) On “Milestones” in 1958 and “Kind of Blue” in 1959, Miles experimented with improvising at length over a single scale rather than set chord changes (modal jazz). Within that unfamiliar framework, Adderley's blues idiom remained a sound with its feet on the ground, adding warmth to the whole record. (Chicago) In February 1959, without Miles, he recorded “The Cannonball Adderley Quintet in Chicago” with Coltrane, Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers, and Jimmy Cobb. He regarded those nearly two years as a time of learning. That fall, he left Miles to put together his own band once more.
With Miles Davis and Art Blakey on an album under his own name, it is the fruit of his years in Miles's band. Its signature track, “Autumn Leaves,” best reveals the contrast between the two men's sounds.
- The bass that stubbornly repeats the same figure (ostinato) in the introduction to “Autumn Leaves” is said to come from pianist Ahmad Jamal's arrangement.
- Miles fits a metal stopper (Harmon mute) into the bell of his trumpet and doles out the melody in a thin, whispering tone. The silence between the notes is his phrasing.
- Adderley's solo that follows pours out in the opposite way, bright and fluent. Slipping the bent notes of the blues in among rapid figures is his signature.
- Blakey, usually explosive, holds back with restrained accompaniment, and Hank Jones's piano supports the harmony without excess. Recorded in March 1958 at Rudy Van Gelder's studio in Hackensack, New Jersey.
It is Miles Davis's album, but Adderley's feel for the blues breathed warmth into this calm experiment. His solos alongside Coltrane preserved the contrast between the two saxophones forever.
- “So What” opens with a pattern in which the bass asks and the piano and horns answer with two notes. The solo order is Miles, Coltrane, Adderley, and Adderley's buoyant solo after Coltrane's dense playing makes a vivid contrast.
- Though this is playing that stretches out over a single scale instead of set chord changes (modal jazz), Adderley never lets go of the blues idiom, lending familiar feeling to an unfamiliar framework.
- “All Blues” is a blues in a lilting meter that divides each measure into two groups of three (6/8 time). Here Adderley takes the solo after Miles.
- Recorded in two sessions, in March and April 1959, at Columbia's 30th Street Studio in New York. Miles brought only simple sketches, there was almost no rehearsal, and Adderley sat out “Blue in Green.”
V. This Here · 1959–1964 (age 31–36)
(Re-formation) In the fall of 1959 he put the quintet back together with Nat (cornet), Bobby Timmons (piano), Sam Jones (bass), and Louis Hayes (drums). The live album recorded that October at the Jazz Workshop, a San Francisco club, sold enormously for Riverside. Timmons's tune “This Here” won over audiences with a rhythm like church handclaps, and the brothers' band, which had broken up in debt two years earlier, became at a stroke one of the best-selling jazz groups of the day. (Soul) This music, which put the feel of gospel and blues up front (soul jazz), moved Black audiences. Some critics looked down on it as commercial, but he never wavered in his view that it was the music of the church and the South he had grown up in. Nat's “Work Song” of 1960, a tune that calls to mind Southern work songs, was a case of the brothers' memories of home becoming music outright. (Eye for talent) Producer Keepnews recalled that it was Adderley who heard guitarist Wes Montgomery in Indianapolis in 1959 and urged that he be recorded. He was as devoted to recognizing and championing others' talent as to his own playing. It was also he who urged singer Nancy Wilson, then working in Columbus, Ohio, to go to New York and introduced the singer to manager John Levy, and the two released an album together in 1961. (Lineup) The piano chair passed through Victor Feldman and, in 1961, to the Austrian-born Joe Zawinul. From 1962, Yusef Lateef joined on tenor saxophone and flute, making it a six-piece band. (Marriage) In 1962 he married Olga James, an actress and singer. (Label change) When Riverside co-owner Bill Grauer died in 1963 and the label went bankrupt the following year, he moved to Capitol Records in 1964.
The live album that set the brothers' band, once disbanded in debt, back on its feet overnight. A sensibility raised in church met the heat of the club and opened the door to soul jazz.
- Before “This Here,” Adderley's voice can be heard introducing the tune to the audience. His calm, humorous delivery, befitting a former teacher, is part of the music.
- The tune pushes in accents like church handclaps over a meter counted in threes. Bobby Timmons pounds out the chords in solid blocks, creating a sound like a church organ.
- Sam Jones's bass and Louis Hayes's drums hold an unhurried, deep, body-swaying rhythm (groove). Cries and applause from the audience break in as if trading phrases with the soloists.
- Recorded by Orrin Keepnews in October 1959 at the Jazz Workshop, a San Francisco club. The live heat, so hard to capture in a studio, is the album's strength.
This is the album that carries “Work Song,” written by his younger brother Nat. The memories of two brothers who grew up together in Florida come back to life in the resonance of Southern work songs.
- “Work Song” is built on call and response: a short melody is tossed out, a rest follows, and then it is taken up again. In every rest you can almost hear a hammer coming down.
- The tune is cast in a 16-bar minor form, carrying the dark color of the blues while turning on a breath different from that of the 12-bar blues.
- Nat's cornet bites rough and short, while Cannonball's alto sings long and round. The difference in tone between the two brothers sharing one stage is well worth listening for.
- Sam Jones's bass holds up the frame of the tune with real weight, and the rhythm never leans ahead but walks on with a heavy tread.
An album made with the singer Nancy Wilson, whom he had urged to move to New York and introduced to his manager. It captures, just as it was, his gift for recognizing other people's talent and pushing it forward.
- In “Save Your Love for Me,” Wilson sings in the manner of a low, tender plea, asking a lover not to spend that love elsewhere but to save it. Her clear diction and restrained breathing are its hallmarks.
- Adderley's alto lays countermelodies behind the vocal, moving as an accompanist who catches the ends of the singer's phrases rather than stepping to the front.
- The album alternates Wilson's vocal numbers with the quintet's instrumentals, so you can hear the difference between the band backing a singer and the band stepping out front on its own.
VI. Mercy, Mercy, Mercy · 1964–1970 (age 36–42)
(Capitol) At Capitol he worked with the producer David Axelrod. A major label's distribution network carried his music beyond the jazz clubs, onto the radio and into ordinary record stores. In 1964–65 Charles Lloyd was with him on tenor, and in 1965 the drummer Roy McCurdy joined and went on to keep the band's rhythm for years. (The hit) In October 1966 he invited an audience into Capitol's studio in Hollywood, dressed it up like a club, and recorded there. The title tune, “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy,” was a slow, gospel-tinged piece Zawinul played on electric piano, and in 1967 it climbed as high as No. 11 on the Billboard singles chart. The hit's composer was the pianist, but Adderley never hesitated to put a colleague's tune out front. (Stories) He was famous as a leader who talked to the audience before each tune. In the unhurried way he explained where a piece came from and what it meant, the habits of his years at the front of a classroom still clung. The short talk he gave before “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” about people unprepared to meet adversity is quoted as often as the music itself. (Pride) In the late 1960s, as the civil rights movement passed its peak, he set the pride of the Black community clearly within his music. In 1969 in Chicago he went to a gathering of Operation Breadbasket, which campaigned for Black economic self-reliance, and recorded “Country Preacher” live. That album, holding the very air of church and rally, shows where his music had always been pointed. (Experiment) In the same years, with Zawinul's electric piano, the band's sound grew steadily wider. He paid no mind to talk that he was chasing fashion. To him, soul and electric instruments were branches grown from the same root.
The peak of the Capitol years and, rare for jazz, an album that reached the popular charts. It captures every side of a leader who put his colleague Zawinul's tune out front and spoke directly to his audience.
- Before the title tune, Adderley speaks briefly about people who don't know what to do in the face of adversity. Those words lay down in advance the feeling of the whole piece.
- The figure Joe Zawinul repeats on electric piano (Wurlitzer) is the heart of the tune. Following gospel harmonies, a slow, swaying rhythm rolls on.
- The horns keep to supporting the melody together, almost like a choir, rather than taking flashy solos. It is an arrangement that reached a wide public by taking things away.
- The title reads like a club recording, but it was actually made at Capitol's Hollywood studio, with an invited audience and drinks laid on.
A live recording made at a gathering of Chicago's movement for Black economic self-reliance. It shows more directly than anything else that his music was turned toward church and community.
- The title tune is a slow, gospel-flavored piece led by Zawinul's electric piano, with a rhythm like a congregation swaying together before the pulpit.
- Adderley's alto draws a note out long, then bends its end and lets it fall like a sob. It is an expression learned from the blues and church music.
- The responses and applause from the seats blend into the playing, and the air of a rally, where stage and audience call and answer, remains intact.
VII. The last stage · 1970–1975 (age 42–47)
(Transition) In 1970 Zawinul left to form Weather Report with Wayne Shorter. The gap left by a colleague of 9 years was filled by George Duke and others, and on the 1971 live album “The Black Messiah,” rock and funk rhythms and electric instruments came even further to the fore. Past forty, he still kept his ears open to new sounds. (John Henry) In the 1970s he moved to the Fantasy label. In the last year of his life he recorded, with Nat, the folk musical “Big Man: The Legend of John Henry,” about the legendary Black laborer who raced a machine with his steel hammer and fell. It was a work that gathered his long-held themes of Southern labor and Black dignity in one place. (Health) He had diabetes and was heavyset. Constant touring took a heavy toll on his body. In July 1975, on tour in Gary, Indiana, he collapsed with a stroke. After about 4 weeks in the hospital, he died there on August 8. He was forty-six. He was buried in Tallahassee, where he had spent his boyhood. (Remembrance) That year he was inducted into the DownBeat Hall of Fame. In 1976 Zawinul included “Cannon Ball,” a tune in his honor, on a Weather Report album. (Brothers) Nat, who stood beside him all his life, kept playing his brother's repertoire until his own death in 2000. The music of a man who began as a teacher and remained one to the end, even on stage, showed how the sophistication of bebop and the warmth of the Southern church could meet in a single person.
Lesser-known stories
(The club) The subtitle of “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy!” calls it a club recording, but it was made in 1966 at Capitol's studio in Hollywood. Drinks were served to an invited audience and the room was dressed like a club to create a live atmosphere. Because a club's name appears on the album, it was long believed to have been recorded at a club in Chicago; the truth became widely known only later, through reissue notes and the testimony of those involved. (Sideman) “Somethin' Else” came out under Adderley's name, but the choice of tunes and the direction of the session are widely judged to have been in Miles Davis's hands. The story goes that Miles, then under contract to another label, took part as a way of repaying a debt to Blue Note's owner, Alfred Lion. In effect, contract terms decided the name on the cover, and a listener who looks only at the cover can hardly see this. (The screen) “Play Misty for Me,” the 1971 film Clint Eastwood directed and starred in, includes footage of Adderley's band playing at the 1970 Monterey Jazz Festival. Because it passes by as a single scene in a thriller, it is seldom mentioned even among jazz fans, yet it is rare footage of his stage late in his prime. (The teacher) Even after he became famous, he often introduced himself as a teacher, and his introductions from the stage were close to short lectures. Though hidden behind a performer's dazzling career, the few years he spent as a high school band teacher were the root of his stage manner and of his habit of pushing others forward.
Glossary notes 📚🔎
Bebop
(Meaning) The most widely accepted explanation is that the name comes from the sounds made when imitating fast melodies with the voice (ba-bop, be-bop). Rather than a word with a meaning, it is an onomatopoeia that resembles the music's rhythm. (In jazz) The jazz created in the 1940s by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and others, far faster and harmonically more complex than swing, which had been music for dancing. Because players had to weave many notes precisely in a short span, it became music for listening and a music of contests of skill. In jump-rope terms, it is like going from simply hopping in time to nonstop, high-difficulty jumping that chains double unders and crisscrosses.
Sitting in
(Meaning) The English sit in means to squeeze in and take a seat. The phrase for briefly sitting in someone else's place became a musical term just as it was. (In jazz) It is when a player who isn't a regular member of the band gets up on a club stage on the spot and plays along. For an unknown player it was a chance to show what they could do, and the band would sometimes test them on purpose with a hard tune or a fast tempo. It is like a strange kid on the school playground asking to join a soccer game: you pass them the ball first and see what they can do. (Elsewhere) In the civil rights movement, a sit-in also refers to the protest of sitting in the seats of a segregated restaurant and refusing to give them up.
Modal jazz
(Meaning) Modal comes from mode, and the Latin root of mode, modus, means a manner or a measure. It signifies one way of laying out notes, that is, the framework of a scale. (In jazz) Jazz that, instead of racing through a set chord progression, lingers long over a single scale and improvises upon it. Miles Davis's “Kind of Blue” is the defining work. Put in terms of drawing, it is like handing someone a large sheet of paper and just a few colors and letting them draw freely, instead of giving them a coloring book with an assigned color for every space. (Elsewhere) Modal is also used for a window that pops up in front on a computer screen and blocks other actions (a modal window).
Soul jazz
(Meaning) Soul means the spirit. The name was given to signal that the music carried the deep feeling that came from Black church music. (In jazz) Jazz that caught on from the late 1950s, putting gospel harmonies, handclap-like rhythms and the bent notes of the blues out front so that it was easy to listen to and set the body moving of its own accord. Adderley's “This Here” and “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” are prime examples. Like a cheer everyone can sing along with rather than a display of hard technique, it aimed to be music the listener could join in right away. (Elsewhere) In food, soul also refers to the home cooking of Black families in the American South (soul food).
Call and response
(Meaning) The English call and response means calling out and answering back. (In jazz) A structure in which one person or one instrument throws out a short phrase and another answers it. It is a tradition carried down from African song, the sermons of Black American churches and work songs, and “Work Song” is built this way. It is exactly the same principle as the count in gym class, where the teacher shouts “one, two” and the whole class answers “three, four.”
Ostinato
(Meaning) The Italian ostinato means "stubborn." The name comes from stubbornly repeating the same figure. (In jazz) Repeating a short figure throughout a piece or for a section of it; in jazz the bass often takes on this role. The opening of "Autumn Leaves" is an example. Just as, when you jump rope, two friends turning the rope at a steady beat let the friend jumping in the middle show off every trick they like, the ostinato becomes the ground beneath the soloist.
Harmon mute
(Meaning) Mute means to deaden a sound, and Harmon is the name of the American company that made this device. (In jazz) A metal stopper fitted into the bell of a trumpet, it softens the sound while creating a thin, buzzing, distinctive tone. Miles Davis used it so often that it became his signature. Just as your voice grows quieter and changes color when you speak with a hand over your mouth, an entirely different sound comes from the same instrument. (Elsewhere) Mute is also commonly the name of the button that turns off the sound on a television or computer.