The Adderley Brothers get down to the nitty gritty in the cradle of jazz with Ellis Marsalis and friends.

Finding themselves in New Orleans in early 1962, Nat and Cannonball Adderley noticed that there were quite a few excellent, blues and swing-drenched jazz players. Leave it to Cannonball to act upon his intuition, just like he did when he called Riverside label boss Orrin Keepnews in 1959 when the quintet was firing on all cylinders at the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco, which led to smash hit and perennial favorite Live In San Francisco. From New Orleans, Cannonball called in on Keepnews again and requested that they record with a couple of good but relatively unknown NO musicians. And so Nat Adderley’s In The Bag came to pass. That was the advantage of being part of the independent music business.

The cats that the Adderleys met were tenor saxophonist Nat Perrilliat, drummer James Black and pianist Ellis Marsalis, supposedly the first time that the beloved educator and head of the Marsalis dynasty was recorded on wax. Many recordings would follow, if only decades later, after two of his six sons, Wynton and Branford, broke through in the early 1980’s. Marsalis sadly passed away from Covid-19-related pneumonia in 2020.

It was a good idea to represent modern jazz from New Orleans, since it was rather underrepresented in The Big Easy, town of traditional jazz and rhythm and blues. In The Bag was certainly not the ‘first modern jazz session in New Orleans’, as Keepnews claims in the liner notes, though it is evident that practically all modernists worked in rhythm and blues and traditional settings to earn a living and were into their own thing exclusively at after-hours spots, notably artists like clarinettist Alvin Batiste and Ed Blackwell, the unique drummer who would join the groundbreaking free jazz group of one-time New Orleans-resident Ornette Coleman in Los Angeles in the late 1950’s.

Contrary to Keepnews’s statement, there had been modern jazz recordings in New Orleans, even if they were very few, among those Golf Coast Jazz Volume 1, recorded by the American Jazz Quintet featuring Marsalis, Blackwell, Batiste, saxophonist Harold Batiste and bassist Richard Payne in 1959. Modernists as saxophonist Mouse Bonati and pianists Ed Frank and Frank Strazzeri were represented on various New Sounds From New Orleans albums, though they, to be sure, were not New Orleans-born. But to the credit of Keepnews, these recordings were very obscure and only reissued decades later. His remark raises the question how many modern jazz recordings there approximately have been in New Orleans in the bop and hard bop period of the 1950s-60’s and which releases and artists are we actually talking about?

In The Bag, on the strength of the high-profile presence of the Adderley Brothers, has been reissued over the years. It’s a fine, blues-drenched session. Nat Adderley’s catchy line In The Bag ends with a coda full of naughty odd notes. It becomes immediately clear that the hard tone and sassy playing of Nat Perrilliat is a great asset. James Black’s Sister Wilson is a first-class hard bop burner. Adderley’s ballad playing on cornet on Marsalis’s R.S.V.P. has the right touch of control and emotion. Marsalis, a saucy accompanist throughout, takes vivid center stage during Yusef Salim’s mid-tempo Low Down, spurred on by Black’s gritty accents.

Mozart-in refers to its composer Alvin Batiste, who was nicknamed “Mozart” because of his prolific composing career. It features another jubilant solo by Nat Adderley, who isn’t afraid to engage in buoyant high whoops, appropriately Satchmo-like as vivaciousness is concerned. The band also took Chatterbox from the Alvin Batiste book, familiar terrain for the New Orleans clan, having been recorded earlier on the beforementioned Golf Coast session by the American Jazz Quintet.

The Adderleys made every effort necessary to limelight unsung cats. Cool guys with a big heart.