Cannonball

Julian ("Cannonball") Adderley is a jazzman with a nagging, but not unique, problem: the more successful he becomes, the less his original, far-out fans like him. One of his recent albums, The Cannonball Adderley Quintet in San Francisco (Riverside), sold 50,000 copies--phenomenal for a jazz record--and climbed to the bestseller charts along with such towering competitors as Fireside Sing Along with Mitch. Last week Cannonball and his men were shouting it up at San Francisco's Jazz Workshop. "The rhythm," complained a beard to a ponytail, "doesn't hang together the way it did last year." But outside, the customers were waiting in line.

In the old days, back in Cleveland's Modern Jazz Room, enthusiastic crowds of perhaps six couples used to gather to hear Cannonball (alto sax), and his brother Nat (cornet) launch into one of their driving versions of Cannonball's own Sermonette or I'll Never Stop Loving You. The crowd at the Workshop last week was closer to 200, and instead of sitting reflectively in their chairs, they were standing on them screaming. On the bandstand, Cannonball looked like a large, comfortable Buddha, sleepily contemplating some secret pleasure. But when he raised his hamlike right hand and with popping fingers lined out the beat, the music of his quintet came pouring forth with an urgent, camp-meeting-style exuberance that no other group can come close to matching these days.

Cannonball is a brilliant improviser and he stitches his agile figures with a warmth of tone, a turbulence, and a gusto that is the envy of every other saxman in the business. In their most popular number--This Here, by Pianist Bobby Timmons--the quintet pours cool brass over the driving beat in long, looping lines that seem to glide through the roof and into the night.

Cannonball got his name not from his propulsive style but from his gigantic appetite: a friend who saw him wolfing down steak nicknamed him "Cannibal," which in slurring repetition gradually came out "Cannonball." Born in Tallahassee, Fla. 31 years ago, Cannonball played trumpet in high school, switched to sax in college, spent several years as music director at Fort Lauderdale's Negro high school before forming his own group. He was "hung up on technique," Cannonball recalls, and his style was far more frenetic. Then he spent a couple of years with Miles Davis, from whom he learned "control." When he lost Pianist Timmons, he replaced him with his present pianist, Barry Harris, who influenced him to switch from neobop to an accent on ballads. After that, it was only a question of time before Cannonball's following reached to the very fringe of squaredom. "If this is the road Cannonball is going to travel," sniffed a Down Beat review of one of his albums not long ago, "he will only succeed in making money."

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