Artist: Freddie Hubbard

Freddie Hubbard was an American jazz trumpeter. He played bebop, hard bop, and post-bop styles from the early 1960s onwards.

Hubbard studied at the Arthur Jordan Conservatory of Music (now the Jordan College of the Arts at Butler University) with Max Woodbury, the principal trumpeter of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra.

In his teens, Hubbard worked locally with brothers Wes and Monk Montgomery and worked with bassist Larry Ridley and saxophonist James Spaulding. In 1958, at the age of 20, he moved to New York and began playing with some of the best jazz players of the era, including Philly Joe Jones,  Sonny Rollins, Slide Hampton, Eric Dolphy, J. J. Johnson, and Quincy Jones. 

In 1960, Hubbard made his first record as a leader,  Open Sesame, at the beginning of his contract with  Blue Note Records, with saxophonist Tina Brooks, pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Sam Jones, and drummer Clifford Jarvis. Six days later he returned the favor to Brooks and recorded with him on True Blue. 

In December 1960, Hubbard was invited to play on Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz, after Coleman had heard him performing with Don Cherry. Then in May 1961, Hubbard played on Olé Coltrane, John Coltrane's final recording session for Atlantic Records. Coltrane also hired Hubbard, Eric Dolphy, and Art Davis, who all appeared on Olé, to record Africa/ Brass, Coltrane's first album with Impulse!, which was begun just after Olé. In August 1961, Hubbard recorded Ready for Freddie (Blue Note), which was also his first collaboration with saxophonist Wayne Shorter. Hubbard became Shorter's bandmate when he replaced Lee Morgan in Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers in 1961. 

Throughout the 1960s, Hubbard played as a sideman on some of the most important albums from that era, including Oliver Nelson's The Blues and the Abstract Truth, Eric Dolphy's Out to Lunch!, Herbie Hancock's  Maiden Voyage, and Wayne Shorter's  Speak No Evil. Hubbard was described as "the most brilliant trumpeter of a generation of musicians who stand with one foot in 'tonal' jazz and the other in the atonal camp". 

Though he never fully embraced the free jazz  of the 1960s, he appeared on two of its landmark albums: Coleman's Free Jazz and Coltrane's  Ascension, as well as on Sonny Rollins' "new thing" track, "East Broadway Run Down."