Year of Release: 1991
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Liner Notes:
Born in Philadelphia in the forties (Randy on November 27, 1945 and Michael on March 29, 1949), the Breckers were among the first generation of fully trained jazz musicians to see rock music not as an enemy but as an intriguing alternative musical world.
That change in attitude came in the mid and late sixties with the proliferation of album-oriented rock bands made up of accomplished musicians who favored improvisation,expanded harmonic horizons and experimentation in several directions.
Randy attended Indiana University, which had an excellent jazz department headed by David Baker. He even did a lengthy State Department tour with that university's band under the direction of Jerry Coker. When he came to New York in 1966, at the age of 21, he was an assured and inventive trumpet player. His first major gig was with Blood, Sweat and Tears, and innovative group that wedded contemporary rock with big band jazz, and was then led by Al Kooper. Within a year both Kooper and Brecker would be gone and the group would never again reach the height that it had on its first album.
Although already on the ground floor of one movement to fuse jazz and rock, Randy elected to move into purer jazz realms. He won the trumpet seat in Horace Silver's quintet and became immediately established in the jazz world. He also found time to participate in the New York big bands of Duke Pearson, Joe Henderson and Thad Jones-Mel Lewis.
It was around this time that Randy first started telling me about his younger brother, whom he felt was quite an extraordinary tenor saxophonist, then still at Indiana University. He also told me how, probably because they were siblings, they had an almost telepathic musical relationship.
By age 19, Michael turned pro with Edwin Birdsong's R&B band and made his recording debut on Randy's album Score (on Solid State). It was apparent that he was everything that his older brother had claimed he was. Both men were equipped with a deep grasp of the jazz greats who had preceded them and with a quality of invention that made their own styles apparent in the earliest stages of their careers.
In 1970, they helped form a cooperative pop-jazz group called Dreams which included Billy Cobham and which, after bassist Chuck Rainey left, introduced Will Lee to New York. The group caused a stir but had little success. The Brecker brothers were pursuing their own careers in jazz and rapidly becoming regulars in the field of session work.
In 1972, they teamed up as the front line of Horace silver's quintet and a year later provided the same services for Bill Cobham's fusion group. By the fall of 1974, plans for the Breckers to form their own group were being made and they signed with newly created Arista Records.
No one at the time was quite sure of what The Brecker Brothers would or should sound like. Coming off their success with Cobham, it was assumed that the music would be a fusion on the order of Tony Williams' Lifetime and John McGlaughlin's Mahavishnu Orchestra; thunderous amplification, complex but powerful rhythms and machine gun solos.
But Randy, as composer and producer of the first album, had something else in mind. Drawing the band from some of New York's finest jazz-oriented studio players, the Brecker brothers fashioned a kind of state-of-the-art funk and jazz fusion. Randy's intricate, angular and unpredictable tunes were sort f a major key Monk meets Stevie Wonder's horn section (or something like that). They worked beautifully in this new context. Here was not just the long-awaited stepping out of two major musicians, but also a new sound, a new fusion. Soon Michael's rich, melodic and equally unique compositions added to the mix, expanding the band's scope.
The Brecker Brothers band lasted from 1975 until 1982, although neither Michael nor Randy completely curtailed other musical activities. The material was selected primarily by Randy and Michael themselves with an eye toward the music that is of lasting value.
Listening to these performances, I suspect that the influence and impact that The Brecker Brothers band had on all sorts of music will finally come into focus. The fact is that any of this material could easily have been recorded yesterday. It is that valid and that fresh.
(Liner notes by Michael Cuscuna, October 1989)