The Fox

This is a great jam album. I had no idea who Harold Land was until listening to the Benny green album Magic Beans. Each track had a title of an influential musician that inspired Benny throughout his career. I am always looking for more tenor styles to study. I also found out about Kenny Drew-these 2 artists i now enjoy thanks to Mr Green as well as Amazon. The only downside to this album is the production seems a little off on a few tracks, meaning certain instruments, are not mic'd to good. No prob with that as i am sure most jazz fans enjoy a little primitiveness in a studio recording for organic effect.

One of a very few albums that I have featuring Harold Land which I acquired back in 2004.......more than likely because West Coast jazz was supposed to be so laid back compared to East Coast jazz. Well, this album seemed to be very contradictive to that premise starting off with the title song which is really rapid fire hard bop exercising everyone's chops!Of the six tracks on this cd, two of them were written by Land and the other four by pianist Elmo Hope, which brings me to the other sidemen, none of which I'd heard of before including Hope. This either proves, likely, that I'm not that well traveled or that these musicians never climbed out of obscurity. At any rate, they appear to be quite compatible when you listen to the harmony of the horns and the solos throughout the set. The only player I never recalled as a soloist was the bassist, Herbie Lewis.There is only one slow tempo cut, "Mirror-mind Rose", which is hard to describe by me other than it seems to create a dark melancholy mood. The other cuts are very bright and up-tempo. The listening experience is enhanced because, for me, these compositions were a first time experience and I tend to listen a little more intently to unfamiliar material. The slections are symbolic of the bop patterns of the era. Why only four stars? The album didn't set me on fire as a "must have" which is dependent of course on the individual listener. I can recommend it because it is a good hard bop session featuring a quintet who knows what they are doing.

Great jazz like my father listened to if my father listened to jazz....I love the smooth confidence of this group. Land was a forerunner of a whisper wrapped in a scream. Part of "The Great 100."

Terrific disc and hearing it with the knowledge that this album is what spurred Cannonball Adderley to want the producer to take charge of his recordings make it even more interesting!

Most albums on Contemporary are excellent but some stick out a bit more. This is one of them. Harold Land is one of those guys, like Hank Mobley, that never came into the main light. Not yet, that is. He has a great tone, he swings and this set is one of his best. It is a real team effort. A real group full of stars. Go get it!

My other Harold Land was dreamy, seductive, mellow jazz. My preference and love for background. This would be great for a Jazz, jazz lover but wasn't what I wanted. Nothing wrong with it from the music part..just not my style.

Mr Chell's offhand dismissal of Elmo Hope in his review here deserves a response. While The Fox is clearly Land's album--Land provides two of the tunes and recruited Dupree Bolton, who sounds like a far-more-daring version of Dizzy Gillespie--it was also clearly conceived as a session co-led by Elmo Hope, who wrote four of the tunes and solos first on a couple of them. The greatness of the sessions that produced this album, besides the inspired horn work by both Land and Bolton, is that they provided a full-blooded setting for the compositional work of Elmo Hope, whose intricate, puzzle-like tunes were almost snake-like in their complexity, but also dripping with sadness and emotionality frequently all-too-lacking from the "bebop" school from which Hope arose. Elmo Hope was one of the most criminally neglected talents of the 1950s and 60s, and Land at the time was all too aware of it, making The Fox Land's lasting tribute to the audacity of Hope.

When Harold Land left the Max Roach-Clifford Brown Quintet to attend to family matters back in California, he may have forfeited any chance at "stardom," but his recorded legacy is no less sterling. A slight man, whose horn almost seemed to dwarf him, Harold was easy to overlook on the bandstand (I recall how out of place he seemed at a "tough tenors" session matching him with Dexter, Jug, and Jaws). But listening to him carefully and repeatedly on virtually any of his recordings is to experience one of the most ceaselessly inventive, warmly intelligent voices this music has ever produced. No one plays with a cannier sense of logic--it's as if he sees the whole playing field before each of his solos. The destination is clear to him from the outset, and the marvel for the listener is in experiencing his opportunistic note choices and efficient phrases--forward-leaning lines that always reach their target without being predictable."The Fox" is not my favorite Land session. One wishes he had included a couple of standards, or that the competent but unexceptional Elmo Hope had been replaced by Carl Perkins or Victor Feldman. But the recording more than lives up to its reputation as a classic. If it's your first exposure to Land, it may be a good idea to begin in the middle of the program. Listen to his elegant, dynamically sensitive phrasing on the head of "Little Chris," then notice how he maintains that glowing, vibrant quality throughout his solo. Compared to a Sonny Rollins (who replaced him in the Max-Clifford group), Harold's is a quiet, unassuming voice, but it's also as purposeful, resourceful, and purely musical as any on record. It requires a certain amount of brilliance to impress an audience; it takes another form of genius to attend to the music exclusive of its effects. Harold Land never wasted a note--which is why his recordings remain priceless.