Cannonball's Samba

An underloved live gem from 1970 featuring Flora and Airto with the Cannonball Adderley Quintet

The Brazil-leaning album most jazz people know from alto saxophone master Julian Cannonball Adderley is Cannonball’s Bossa Nova, a crisp and mostly marvelous studio set from 1962. Though he immediately returned to explorations of hard bop and soul jazz on his studio records, Adderley continued to explore Brazilian songs and rhythms in performance. During the early ‘70s period when he was collaborating with arranger David Axelrod, Adderley added a few guests to his working quintet — among them vocalist Flora Purim and percussionist Airto Moreira — for a four-song project recorded live with an audience at a New York studio

The Happy People (recorded in 1970 and released in 1972) is the least “arranged” of the Axelrod projects. It begins with a breezy extended samba; Adderley’s alto solo shows just how fluent he was with the cadences and over-the-bar-line stretching possibilities of the samba polyrhythms. There are spry turns from George Duke and cornetist Nat Adderley, and throughout — particularly on a funk rendition of Milton Nasciment’s “Maria Tres Filhos” — the rhythm section attains a quintessentially Brazilian state of grace, making grooves that are earthy and airborne at the same time.

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