FREDDIE HUBBARD — First Light (review)

FREDDIE HUBBARD — First Light album cover Album · 1971 · Fusion Buy this album from MMA partners
3.5/5 ·
Sean Trane
After the brilliant Straight Life album, Hubbard comes back the following year with the over-sweetish First Light album, recorded in Van Gelder’s studios and again released again on Creed Taylor’s CTI label. Among the big names participating to this session, only Carter, DeJohnette and Airto are not CTI-linked, but Freddie is the only star blowing horns, since the rest of the players appear to be in-house musicians (the horns and the ever-present string secton), just like the stars Hubert Laws (flute) and George Benson (guitars).

Opening on the excellent 11-mins title track (the only Hubbard composition of the album), we’re dealing with a soft Rhodes-led JR/F track that lays down the general mood of the album. Up next is the McCartney Uncle Admiral cover track holding some outstanding instrumental moments (sometimes nearing orgasmic in its first half) with its gentle flutes (four at a time) and its nine-men string section. On the flipside, hostilities open on a Mancini reprise, a slow standard thing drenched in over-sweet string arrangements, then suddenly shifts into a funky middle section, but the strings are not willing to let go of their syrupy coating until Benson’s guitar cranks the juices down the decibel alley, but those pesky strings are not letting, even after Laws’ flute solo, to eventually suffocate everyone in the closing section.

The even more syrupy Yesterday’s Dream is a soppy and sappy ballad, but has a funkier second half tagged on to it, but the strings are still over-present. And as you might guess, it’s not in a Bernstein adaptation (Lonely Town) that these same strings are going to take it lighter, but they are careful to let through Carter and Hubbard’s contribution. The piece is the drop that overflows the bucket, with the absurdly and almost sickeningly sweet strings spoiling whatever standard big-band-like jazz is present on the track. The closing Fantasy piece does correct the trajectory somewhat, but it’s way too late to save the album as a whole.

If the album’s a-side is particularly fine JR/F, the flipside is so overflooded with insufferable string arrangements that this album could get a Third Stream label tagged on to it. If FL held two A-side, it might have been a better album than Straight Life or Liquid Love, but let’s face it, the harm is done and I can’t think of a better expression than half-baked effort.
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