Mercy, Mercy, Mercy - The Explosive Jazz of Julian "Cannonball" Adderley

- Cannonball Adderley -

Cannonball Adderley died in 1975, at the height of his creativity and the peak of his musical style. In his 20 years as a jazz musician he helped to push music into the modern day, redefining not just jazz, the entire music industry. In addition to headlining his own jazz band and climbing the Billboard Top 100, he was a key part of some of the most influential jazz albums of the 60's and 70's, filling his short career with a frenzy of creative accomplishments. He was only 46 years old.

Early Life & Early Career

Born in 1928 to an elementary school teacher and a high school counselor in Tampa, Florida. Growing up during the Great Depression, his family often struggled to make ends meet, but his parents always encouraged his love of music. His father, Julian Adderley, played cornet and helped introduce Cannonball and his brother Nat to jazz, helping them buy their first instruments. After high school, Cannonball played with Ray Charles before attending Florida A&M University, where he followed in his parents' footsteps and became a music teacher in Fort Lauderdale. He was drafted into the US Army in 1950, but was stationed in Washington D.C. as a member of the 36th Army Band with his brother, far from combat but close to the jazz scene. Adderley studied music at the US Naval Academy for the rest of his time in they army, and then attended NYU, working towards a PhD in music performance.

New York Years

He never got around to finishing that PhD. Soon after moving to New York, he wandered into the Café Bohemia jazz club in Queens in between gigs, where he was asked to fill in for a sax player who was running late. That night, he played alongside bebop legend Oscar Pettiford, and was catapulted onto the New York jazz landscape, getting billed as the next Charlie Parker - frequently seen as the greatest saxophonist of all time.

From there, his rise was meteoric, and quickly after starting a new band with his brother, he was signed to a new label and noticed by jazz legend Miles Davis, who invited him to join the his band in 1957. While there, he played with fellow jazz legends John Coltrane (on saxophone) and Art Blakely (on drums). After touring with Davis and Coltrane, Adderley started the Cannonball Sextet, taking musicians like Bobby Timmons and Joe Zawinul, who would go on to reshape the music industry into the 70's and 80's, onto the main stage of the 1960's music landscape.

Late Career - Topping the Charts

As the 60's continued, Cannonball and his band continued pushing the music industry into new territory, bringing the brand-new style of electric jazz into the mainstream through his  1966 album, "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy," which rocketed through the Billboard Hot 100, reaching #2 before being covered dozens of times by pop bands through the 60's and 70's. This album, especially its title track, threw jazz out of the past and helped redefine the pop music of the next two decades. It combined jazz, gospel, pop, and funk music into a single artistic masterpiece, which was re-recorded and re-released dozens of times in the following years, most famously by the pop groups like "The Buckinghams," whose re-release topped out at #5. Adderley's fame grew even more through their features in Clint Eastwood's 1971 movie, "Play Misty for Me" and the TV series "Kung Fu," becoming almost a household name. 

Just as he was reaching the apex of his success, Cannonball suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, dying on August 8, 1975, in Gary, Indiana.

Impact & Creativity

Before his untimely death, Adderley left a gigantic, although usually overlooked, impact on jazz, and on the music industry as a whole. Through his music, he pushed the music industry forwards, taking jazz out of the bebop era and laying the foundations for both the disco of the 1970's and modern pop music.

Similar to Steve Jobs' work in combining the technology of Xerox and his background in calligraphy to create the UI of the Mac Computer, Adderley used a collecting thinking style in his Creativity, bouncing his music around the New York jazz landscape to create his own space within the music world. He used the shared his and other musicians shared expertise in the jazz domain to find his place in the jazz world, but used his background in education to bring a new and outside-the-box perspective to his music, not limited by a fixation on expertise in the old styles in his pursuit of revolutionary music. As under the geneplore model of creativity, Adderley expanded on the preinventive structures of early jazz to push the boundaries of contemporary music.

Through it all, Cannonball built his creative work by building on the musicians that came before him. He took the influences of past jazz, the legendary musicians of the greatest artists of his day, and the new technologies of the 20th century to create new and genre-defining types of music.