Whatever I play must have something to do with the melody of the tune. My first responsibility is to the song-to the tune we’re playing. “I’m trying to keep my mind constantly on the song.
“I do try a lot of different things, but within a structure,” he continued. That’s the scary thing-going ‘out there’ and then getting back in. “You never know what you might do you might mess up. “That’s part of the excitement of playing-gets that adrenaline flowing,” he said in a 1985 interview. Part of the thrill of hearing Hutcherson was that he was willing to take chances.
Hutcherson gradually moved into a more mainstream, modal post-bop style that, if not as adventurous as his early work, still maintained his reputation as one of the most advanced masters of his instrument.” In the process, he became one of the defining (if underappreciated) voices in the so-called ‘new thing’ portion of Blue Note’s glorious ’60s roster. His bio on states that, “Along with Gary Burton, the other seminal vibraphone talent of the ’60s, Hutcherson helped modernize his instrument by redefining what could be done with it-sonically, technically, melodically, and emotionally. This coloristic range of sound, which he often used in the service of emotional expression, was one reason for the deep influence he left on stylistic inheritors like Joe Locke, Warren Wolf, Chris Dingman, and Stefon Harris, who recently assessed him as ‘by far the most harmonically advanced person to ever play the vibraphone’.” More than Milt Jackson or Lionel Hampton, his major predecessors on the vibraphone, he made an art out of resonating overtones and chiming decay. Hutcherson had a clear, ringing sound, but his style was luminescent and coolly fluid. Writing in The New York Times when Hutcherson died from emphysema at age 75 on August 15, 2016, Nate Chinen said, “Mr. Things got better, and Hutcherson became one of the most important voices on vibes starting in the 1960s. “I think I hit the first two notes,” Hutcherson recalled, “and the rest was complete chaos.” But, as Hutcherson told NPR, the stage manager saw all the black marks on the bars and, thinking he was helping, wiped them clean. His friend marked the bars on Hutcherson’s vibraphone with a marker so he would know what notes to play. Although he hadn’t been playing very long, he and a friend who played bass entered a music contest. Bobby Hutcherson’s career didn’t get off to a very promising start.