https://www.mosaicrecords.com/product/b ... ition-set/Long-time Mosaic fans will know of our connection — professional and emotionally — to Blue Note Records. Our very first collection, just over 40 years ago, featured the complete Thelonious Monk Blue Note library, and it would be followed by retrospectives of many other Blue Note artists throughout our history. We view every opportunity to revisit that seminal label, lovingly remaster long-admired tracks, and discover hidden gems, as going home.
That time. That sound. Those groundbreaking musicians. None more significant to us, and to the development of music, than Bobby Hutcherson.
Hutcherson’s move to New York near the beginning of his career and at the outset of the 1960s could not have come at a more consequential time for the young musician, barely into his twenties, or for Blue Note, where a substantial group of musicians about his age were leading the music in new, freer, and more experimental directions.
In addition to being swept up in an era of change, he contributed to the evolution of the music through his compositions, and to the the use of vibraphone in jazz through his expressive, ringing tone and innovations in harmony and rhythm. Not only was he leading his own dates; he was a supporting player on dozens of others.
Bobby Hutcherson was a close personal friend to Michael Cuscuna. So it seems fitting that this was the final set that Michael produced before his passing. The set features 11 sessions on seven CDs that chart his development from a more mainstream approach at first, to a very rapidly emerging expansive style of writing and performing. The disks also feature many of the most important musicians of the era, on whose dates Hutcherson was a frequent participant.