The partnership between keyboard player Joe Zawinul and saxophonist Cannonball Adderley that lasted most of the 1960s was, in its way, as remarkable as that between Wayne Shorter and Zawinul in Weather Report in the 70s.
For some reason, however, while everything recorded by the latter group has been available on CD since the relatively early days of the format, five of the 10 tracks on a new Capitol compilation, Cannonball Plays Zawinul, are being released in that medium for the first time.
Listening to them, it's hard to understand why this music has been neglected for so long. Certainly, the records were successful enough at the time. Zawinul's Mercy, Mercy, Mercy sold half a million singles for the Cannonball Adderley Quintet, before going on to become an even bigger pop hit for The Buckinghams. And, by jazz standards, just about everything the leader recorded sold well.
That may, of course, be the problem. Before his untimely death in 1975 from a stroke (generally supposed to have been brought on by too much good living), Adderley was the subject of much critical sniping for the unforgivable offence of selling too many records.
He's also suffered from unfriendly critical comparisons to John Coltrane, under whose shadow he fell almost as soon as he'd emerged from that of Charlie Parker. He arrived in New York within months of Parker's death, and his record company promoted him initially as the 'New Bird', even though Benny Carter's influence on his playing was equally apparent, and his more rounded tone and bluesier rhythmic sensibility clearly owed little to Parker.
Almost as soon as he'd demonstrated that he really was his own man, Davis enlisted him for the quintet that made Kind of Blue, and with Coltrane's star in the ascendant Adderley's playing was faint-praised by comparison. Even today, with Coltrane and Davis's iconic status assured, Adderley's role on the album tends quite unjustly to be written of as merely that of supporting player.