Where Are We Going: When Donald Byrd Went Electric

The heady 3-year/ 4-album span when Byrd pivoted from hard bop to primo funk

Photo by Doug Metzler

On the occasion of Blue Note’s recent Tone Poet reissue of Donald Byrd’s Kofi, I’m posting a piece I wrote about this transitional period in the trumpeter’s career.

Name the famous jazz trumpeter that got his start during bop’s heyday yet continued to push towards greater success for decades after, evolving alongside and incorporating other popular Black musical forms. Who was the trumpeter that discovered Herbie Hancock at the age of 21 and put him on with his band for his recorded debut? Who continued to evolve throughout his career, even though it meant moving first away from a well-regarded quintet and embracing the then-controversial electronic instrumentation in the late 60s? Which trumpeter did the critics hate with a passion, leveling at him the heretical cry of “sell out” as he pushed beyond the confines of jazz and hit upon the sound of the street and young black America? Who became one of the most-sampled artists in hip-hop, influencing yet another generation of Black American artists?

Before you blurt out “Miles Davis,” know that the trumpeter was Donaldson Toussaint L’Ouverture Byrd II. Perhaps it’s a matter of being obscured by the “great men theory” of jazz, but Donald Byrd remains in the shadow of the Prince of Darkness, even though he was every bit the same level of innovator. Byrd was at most one step behind Davis when it came to major innovations in the genre. And in the 1970s, he finally overtook Miles in the public imagination and on the pop charts. 

Thanks to a fortunate turn of events that connected Byrd with disgruntled Motown songwriters and producers Fonce and Larry Mizell, he enjoyed crossover pop chart success and a pop fanbase, a rarity for a jazz musician during that decade. Starting with Black Byrd, he reaped a level of mainstream success that put Byrd albums in any hip record collection in Black households. “I grew up with him in my household, as my father played all the Black Byrd stuff,” Chicago-based trumpeter Marquis Hill tells me. “He had a red Cadillac and would pick me up on the weekends, so I was riding around in the back of the car on the South Side of Chicago listening to this.”

Byrd also soundtracked Don Was’ teenage years in Detroit. “His innovative music could be heard blasting out of dashboard mounted 8-track players and back seat subwoofers all over town…He was a Motor City Trumpet Revolutionary.” That level of ubiquity meant that when the kids in these households started digging into their parents’ dusty record collection looking for beats, he became foundational to the next generation of rappers, beatmakers, and R&B singers. Among those who sampled him: A Tribe Called Quest, Nas, Erykah Badu, Public Enemy, 2Pac, and J. Dilla, to name just a few of the 700+ samplers.

Just how Byrd made that leap from cognoscenti-approved hard bop classicism to hip jazz-funk remains under-documented. It was an evolution that occurred in the span of a fecund 3-year span starting in 1969: Fancy Free, Electric Byrd, the previously-unreleased Kofi, and Ethiopian Knights. “He was clearly searching for a new language, as that bebop language started to fade away,” Hill notes. This change was a summation of Byrd’s life-long quest for knowledge, perception, and deep understanding of his history as a Black man in America. 

“Byrd was a rebel,” Larry Mizell tells me from his home in Los Angeles. “He was big on education, that’s what guided him. He was just a well-traveled guy, in school himself most of his life.” It started at home in Detroit, where his father, Elijah Thomas Byrd, was a Methodist minister who greatly valued education, while his mother turned him onto jazz music and an uncle gave him his first trumpet. He enrolled at the city’s prestigious Cass Technical School, the only magnet school in the city, which nurtured an entire generation of Black Americans. Beyond its sterling academic accolades, the list of musicians who passed through its doors beggars belief: Ron Carter, Dorothy Ashby, Paul Chambers, Geri Allen, Della Reese, even Diana Ross (though as a fashion design student). More recent attendees include Big Sean and Jack White. While still in school, Byrd began gigging with Lionel Hampton.

After a stint in the Air Force, Byrd earned his Bachelor’s of Music from Wayne State University, where he also was a force on the fertile Detroit jazz scene of the 1950s. You could catch him Tuesday nights at the World Stage. The other nights of the week the place hosted theater events, but Tuesday nights the big names on the jazz scene jammed with the younger cats. For Elvin Jones, then an upcoming drummer in his 20s, “the respect that the audience would show, even in that little place, it was just as if you were in Carnegie Hall. It was the same kind of reverence, the same sort of atmosphere.”

You can imagine what a night at the World Stage sounded like on Byrd Jazz, an album that future Bob Dylan and Velvet Underground producer Tom Wilson released on his Transition label. Recorded on August 23, 1955, it captured a sextet featuring Barry Harris on piano, Frank Gant on drums, Alvin Jackson (Milt’s younger brother) on bass, Bernard McKinney (of the large McKinney clan) on the all-too-rare euphonium, and the full-length debuts of two of Detroit’s greatest jazz artists: saxophonist Yusef Lateef and trumpeter Donald Byrd. The band presents an expansive 14-minute read of Bud Powell’s “Parisian Thoroughfare,” two Dizzy tunes, an upbeat take on the standard “Dancing in the Dark,” and two originals from Harris, including a smoldering slow blues named for Yusef.

But Byrd was on the move, his talents swiftly taking him out of Detroit and up to New York, where he moved on to earn his master’s at the Manhattan School of Music, while simultaneously getting a whole other education in New York City’s jazz clubs (he later got a second degree from Columbia University). Byrd earned a law degree from Howard University and then his doctorate from Columbia’s Teachers College. That’s Doctor Byrd to you. (Beyond academia, he also earned his pilot’s license; that’s his plane on the cover of 1975’s Places and Spaces.) He was composer-in-residence at Rutgers, lectured at Columbia and North Carolina College, all before Byrd established the first jazz department at a Black college, Howard University.

Attending his studies and his successful career in jazz came an increasing awareness of being a Black man in America. “We are trying to discover what is black in this music,” he told the Washington Post back in 1968. At that point, Byrd had cut a series of crackling bop albums with his quintet featuring Sonny Red on alto sax, Cedar Walton on piano, Walter Booker on bass and Billy Higgins on drums. That run culminated with Slow Drag (recorded in May 1967). By that point, the civil rights movement was in full swing, with student sit-ins around the country demanding change.