Song of the Day 7/12: The Blackbyrds, “Rock Creek Park”

Guest post by Nathan Arizona

Donald Byrd was a highly regarded mainstream jazz musician, “one of the finest hard-bop trumpeters,” says the website AllMusic. He was also one of the great jazz mentors. There was the time, for instance, when he let a young Herbie Hancock pick his brain when he was crashing on Byrd’s couch plotting his career course.

But Byrd also mentored in an academic setting, serving as visiting professor or artist-in-residence at a number of universities throughout his career. His final stop was Delaware State, where he was a visiting professor twice late in career. Another Delaware connection: His first major gig was replacing Wilmington great Clifford Brown in Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers after Brown was killed in a car crash at a young age.

Byrd’s teaching career rewarded him in many ways, but maybe never more than when he served at Howard University in the early ’70s and plucked his most talented students from the classroom to back him on the new kind of music he was making. He also formed a separate band with the students called the Blackbyrds, who played similar music with a little more pop spin. Byrd produced, wrote songs and sometimes joined them on trumpet.

Byrd was shifting to a more commercial jazz-funk style. This outraged some jazz purists, but his album “Black Byrd” became the all-time best-seller on the storied jazz label Blue Note. He had wisely chosen Larry Mizell to help out. Mizell was one of the most successful producers and arrangers of the fusion style Byrd was adopting. He brought a little Philly soul to Byrd’s sound, a little Curtis Mayfield, a little blaxploitation-movie jazz. “A melting pot of black music styles,” one critic called it. Mizell had graduated from Howard about a decade earlier.

The Blackbirds formed there by Byrd were hitmakers. Their best-known was “Walking’ in Rhythm,” but another called “Rock Creek Park” also scored big. The reference is to the sprawling park in the middle of Washington, D.C. That’s where they go “walking in the park” for the purpose of “doing it after dark.” Pretty sure what they were doing, but there were some sports involved, too. This was about the extent of the lyrics, but they do get stuck in the mind. “If you can’t think of anything else, you’re done,” band member Keith Kilgo once explained.

Kilgo, who grew up in Washington, hung out in the park as a teen-ager. “It’s where you take your girlfriend with a bottle of wine,” he told an interviewer. “After dark, the whole scene changes. The bugs, the sounds, the creatures that crawl around . . . yeah, lots of wonderful things happen in the dark.”

Here’s “Rock Creek Park.”

Meanwhile, Byrd was hitting the jazz charts with songs like “Black Byrd.” The band kind of eases into it, but it starts to build pretty quick. The Blackbyrds are in this one. Byrd doesn’t hog the stage.

This is the Blackbyrds’ most familiar song.