The early ’70s were great times for horn players who wanted to be rock ‘n’ rollers. Jazz was shrinking, and though soul revues often featured horn sections, guitars ruled rock, pretty much to the exclusion of everything else but keyboards and other rhythm instruments.
That started to change in 1967, when Al Kooper and Steve Katz put together the original lineup of Blood, Sweat & Tears — influenced, Kooper said, by a Chicago group called the Buckinghams, whose hit “Kind of a Drag” featured a rousing brass counter-melody. By the end of the decade the producer of that record, James William Guercio, had manned the controls for BS&T’s second, hit-studded LP and took control of a less-jazzy unit that married horns with hard-rock guitar called the Chicago Transit Authority. Suddenly rock with horns was everywhere.
Those two bands are the only ones most people remember, but there were others who explored the territory with some success. Chase, named after its founder, trumpeter Bill Chase, was briefly one of the most exciting.
Chase was old for a rocker, because he wasn’t one. Born in 1934, Chase graduated from Berklee College of Music and played in Maynard Ferguson’s and Stan Kenton’s bands in the late ’50s before spending several years as lead trumpeter in Woody Herman’s Thundering Herd. By the late ’60s he was working as a bandleader and arranger in Las Vegas when he gathered three other jazz trumpeters and a rock rhythm section and vocalist for his eponymous fusion band.
Lacking saxophones, trombones or any other wind instrument but those four trumpets, Chase’s sound owed a lot to Ferguson — it rocked, sure, but players still wanted to show off their chops. The band’s first album, also eponymous, sold 400,000 copies on the strength of its single, co-written by Chase and vocalist Terry Richards. It only made it to No. 24, but it made a big impression on all the high school band nerds I knew.
The follow-up album lacked a hit single and sales suffered accordingly. Chase’s third album, “Pure Music,” moved away from rock towards straight jazz, and the band was working on a fourth when Chase and three other band members died in a plane crash in Minnesota. “Close Up Tight,” like most of that album, was purely instrumental.
