This album is a rarity and can be purchase for a lump sum, try to find it and make sure you don’t get ripped off. Or you can get the album in a two record set and with another great album (CD Version), “Soul Trombone.” Soul Trombone is quite expensive also but you can download the MP3 for a more favorable price. OR you can get both in MP3 fashion and with a great price here. You do have a choice, so you decide which way it’s better. “Cabin in the Sky” will be featured here for the Jazz Con Class listeners and for a week and placed in the big band playlist. Very interesting combination of strings and Jazz, it’s different and very experimentally entertaining. Great stuff, enjoy! Check the schedule link for play times. The listeners will rather confused to find out why it was a “commercial” failure. Marc Myers explains more, here in his blog Jazzwax:
If you love Miles Davis’ Miles Ahead and Porgy and Bess—both arranged by Gil Evans—then you simply must consider Curtis Fuller’s Cabin in the Sky. Recorded over two days in April 1962 for Impulse, the album’s orchestrations are on par with both Davis albums and frame Fuller’s trombone beautifully. [Pictured above, Curtis Fuller]
On the album, Fuller (like Davis) is cast as a wandering, vulnerable soloist who must spar with surging sections of the orchestra that hurl all sorts of heavenly bolts at him. From start to finish, Cabin in the Sky is a masterpiece that truly needs fresh critical consideration.
At the time, however, the album was a considered a commercial flop—through no fault of Fuller or Albam. Which is both tragic and baffling, considering its spectacular qualities and the musicians involved. Here’s who we’re talking about……..Continue Here
More on Curtis Fuller:
Curtis Fuller was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1934. He came to music late, playing the baritone horn in high school and switching to the trombone at age 16. Detroit, at the time, was the breeding ground for an astonishing pool of fresh, highly individual talent.
Milt Jackson and Hank Jones had already gone to New York and made their names. But coming of age in Detroit in the early fifties were Fuller, Donald Byrd, Elvin and Thad Jones, Paul Chambers, Louis Hayes, Kenny Burrell, Barry Harris, Pepper Adams, Yusef Lateef, Sonny Red, Hugh Lawson, Doug Watkins, Tommy Flanagan and many others who would make the mid-decade migration to New York and eventually international recognition.
In 1953, Curtis left the local scene to serve his two-year stint in the army, where he met and played with Cannonball Adderley and Junior Mance among others. When he returned home, he began working with Yusef Lateef’s quintet. The Lateef quintet came to New York in April 1957 to record two albums for Savoy and a third produced by Dizzy Gillespie for Verve.
Word of Curtis’s talent spread rapidly around New York. Although he initially came under the spell of J.J. Johnson and listed Jimmy Cleveland, Bob Brookmeyer and Urbie Green among his favorites, Fuller came to New York at the age of 22 with a unique style and sound.
In May, after being in town for about a month, he recorded with Paul Quinchette and made his first albums as a leader: two quintet albums for Prestige with Sonny Red featured on alto. Like the Blue Note debuts by Kenny Burrell and Thad Jones the prior year, he used mostly transplanted Detroit players…….Read More
