Back Talk

“Back Talk” is a 1976 compilation pairing two mid-1960s Cadet/Argo big-band sessions led by arranger-saxophonist Oliver Nelson and alto saxophonist Lou Donaldson, who never actually recorded together but whose work was packaged as a single double LP under Chess's ownership change. The first half draws on Nelson's 1964 Chicago date, cut at the height of his run as one of jazz's most in-demand arrangers following the success of “The Blues and the Abstract Truth,” showcasing his command of voicing a mid-sized horn section while still soloing on tenor. The second half comes from Donaldson's December 1964 New York session, arranged and conducted by Nelson himself, which found the veteran Blue Note-honed alto man working in a larger, more orchestrated setting than his usual soul-jazz combo format. Donaldson had already built his reputation through the late 1950s and early 1960s as one of the most reliably swinging, blues-rooted altoists to come out of the Charlie Parker lineage, a sound that helped define the soul-jazz movement. Nelson, meanwhile, stands as one of the era's most influential jazz composer-arrangers, equally comfortable with hard bop small groups and lush big-band writing, a skill he would carry into a prolific career scoring film and television. Critical attention to both source albums has tended to favor their original, individually conceived sequencing, but each has been valued by collectors as a snapshot of mid-1960s Chicago and New York studio jazz filtered through Nelson's arranging pen.