Just around the time that
Chuck "Feels So Good" Mangione's melodic pop/jazz albums were peaking commercially, Fantasy reached deep into his bebop past for this two-fer, combining the second
Jazz Brothers album,
Hey Baby!, his first album as a leader, and
Recuerdo. With brother
Gap on piano,
Sal Nistico on tenor,
Steve Davis on bass, and future
Cannonball Adderley mainstay
Roy McCurdy on drums,
Hey Baby! is perfectly competent, nicely swinging hard bop from the period. Throughout,
Chuck plays the upward-tilted trumpet that was given to him by his idol
Dizzy Gillespie -- a frequent attendee of the
Mangione family's orgies of Italian cooking and jazz jamming. Barely out of his teens, there's no sign of the
Mangione of the 1970s in his completely conventional hard bop turns, although technically he seems to be in the best shape of his recorded life -- and yes, he can swing mightily and proclaim a ballad like "Old Folks" with the brashness of youth.
Gap, the leader of the unit, plays in the prevalent funky school manner of the time.
Recuerdo shows that
Mangione, still only 21, was wielding some clout over at Riverside Records, managing to record with a prestigious rhythm section of the time:
Wynton Kelly (piano),
Sam Jones (bass), and
Louis Hayes (drums).
Mangione's self-composed title track displays a most unusual sound -- mallets on tom-toms rolling in six-eight time, an exotic tune, a cool flute from
Joe Romano. Although that is the only flash of originality on another otherwise conventional hard bop session,
Mangione's tone is beginning to soften from the
Dizzy-inspired peaks on the earlier album, and starting to cultivate the fragile quality that he would exploit on flugelhorn decades down the road. There are bop fanatics who still swear by these early sessions and won't listen to any later
Mangione.