Charles Tolliver - Live at the Captain's Cabin (2024)

Tolliver was born in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1942 and moved with his family to New York City when he was 10.

During his childhood, his grandmother gave him his first horn, a cornet he had coveted. Tolliver was attending Howard University in the early 1960s as a pharmacy major, when he decided to pursue music as a career and return home to New York City. He came to prominence in 1964, playing and recording on Jackie McLean's Blue Note albums. In 1971, Tolliver and Stanley Cowell founded Strata-East Records, and Tolliver released many albums and collaborations on Strata-East.

Live at Captain's Cabin is a newly discovered gem from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada that finds Music Inc in absolutely fine form at a club called the Captain's Cabin. Playing mostly original music from Tolliver the band let's loose in the live setting. In his words "The players I had, John Hicks, Clint Houston and Cliff Barbaro. I just let them go do their thing and I didn't rein them in so we could have some pretty wild renditions of things, which if I were to do it now with a different rhythm section, it would sound different. It would be different. But I think that 50 something years ago that we were just expressing the exuberance of playing together and being on the road and the songs that I composed at that time, a few of them I still play, are completely different."

This is recording is an incredible document from an amazing band that was continually pushing boundaries.

Charles Tolliver – trumpet
John Hicks – piano
Clint Houston – bass
Cliff Barbaro – drums