Personnel: Sam Rivers (flute, soprano saxophone, tenor saxophone); Ron Carter (bass instrument); Joe Chambers (drums); Freddie Hubbard (trumpet); Herbie Hancock (piano).
Liner Note Author: Don Heckman.
Recording information: 05/21/1965.
Photographers: Francis Wolff; Reid Miles.
Saxophonist Sam Rivers certainly assembled a team of hot soloists for this album. However, his compositions are more than just vehicles for improvisation. Rivers's largely angular, even jarring, melodies clearly seek to define a new direction in jazz; they do not fall back on bebop forms or hard-bop funkiness. Each composition contains an abstract "head" and the harmonic underpinning flatly rejects the usual chord progressions found in most standard repertoire. On this 1965 date, Rivers and his band also avoid the blues format.
"Mellifluous Cacophony" (performed twice here) is one such example. On this composition, Rivers begins with an asymmetrical melody that suggests atonality. However, the soloing remains firmly rooted in the jazz lexicon, as pianist Herbie Hancock, trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, and Rivers himself rip into these changes with abandon. "Euterpe" is an ethereal ballad replete with a long, free-floating form and stream-of-consciousness solos from the quintet. Rivers's own flute solo is marked by questing lines and exquisite modal excursions. Overall, this is intellectually stimulating music that avoids precise definition. Suffice to say, CONTOURS is forward-looking jazz at its best.
On Contours, his second Blue Note album, tenor saxophonist Sam Rivers fully embraced the avant-garde, but presented his music in a way that wouldn't be upsetting or confusing to hard bop loyalists. Rivers leads a quintet featuring trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, pianist Herbie Hancock, bassist Ron Carter, and drummer Joe Chambers through a set of originals that walk a fine line between probing, contemplative post-bop and densely dissonant avant-jazz. Each musician is able to play the extremes equally well while remaining sensitive to the compositional subtleties. Rarely is Contours anything less than enthralling, and it remains one of the high-water marks of the mid-'60s avant-garde movement. Rivers' albums have been in and out of print for decades and this one in particular has been difficult to find on compact disc in America. In 2004 Blue Note reissued it as part of their limited-edition Connoisseur CD series and subsequently added a bonus track in an alternate take of "Mellifluous Cacophony." ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine and Thom Jurek