Jazz Cafe Presents Freddie Hubbard

This one is a head-scratcher. Collectables' massive eight-disc box set of Freddie Hubbard recordings contains some of his most experimental and wide-ranging, if not his very best, recordings for the Atlantic imprint — a relationship he began when he left Blue Note in 1966. Strangely, while some of the titles one might expect to be here, most importantly, Backlash his label debut, are missing, others are included, such as Black Angel, Soul Experiment, and Echoes of Blue. Inexplicably, his most experimental (and least successful) recording for the label, Sing Me a Song of Songmy, is here in its entirety, which stands so far outside the rest of his catalog it feels like a complete error in judgment on the part of the compilation's producers. Hubbard fans no doubt have most of the material here. This collection also has nothing extra. It is assembled from the CDs and two-fers Collectables issued individually in the early part of the 21st century.