At the age of 20, Freddie Hubbard was working with veteran jazz artists Philly Joe Jones, Sonny Rollins, Slide Hampton, J.J. Johnson, Eric Dolphy, and Quincy
Jones. He was barely 22 when he replaced Lee Morgan in Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. While earning a reputation as a hard-blowing young lion, he had
developed his own sound, distancing himself from the early influence of Clifford Brown and Miles Davis and won Down Beat's "New Star" award on trumpet.
Throughout the 60s Freddie worked as a sideman with Max Roach and Herbie Hancock. In the 70s, Freddie recorded a series of albums on CTI Records, winning a Grammy award with First Light. In the 80s Hubbard was again leading his own
jazz group, a repertory of hard-bop and modal-jazz pieces. An exceptionally talented virtuoso performer and one of the greatest of hard bop
trumpeters, he contrives to create impassioned blues lines without losing the contemporary context within which he plays.
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