Donny Hathaway - Extension of a Man - Blu-Ray Audio Disc

2024

Ranging from inner-city soul to orchestral grandeur to a bluesy ballad to easy-listening pleasantries, Extension of a Man was Donny Hathaway's most ambitious album, the justly titled capstone to his phenomenal career. Coming, however, from one of soul music's most widely talented figures, this wasn't exactly a surprise; both of his previous studio full-lengths, Everything Is Everything and Donny Hathaway, treated soul as merely a starting point to express his multitude of ideas concerning music and arrangement, song and performance.

On Extension of a Man, the ambition began and peaked with the opener, a six-minute orchestral piece titled "I Love the Lord; He Heard My Cry, Pts. 1-2." Arranged and orchestrated for 45 musicians by Hathaway himself, it applied the buoyant optimism of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue to a religious context, and segued smoothly into the transcendent "Someday We'll All Be Free," one of Hathaway's most beloved songs. The next two pieces, "Flying Easy" and "Valdez in the Country," were also Hathaway originals, first recorded during the late '60s as part of Chess studio groups; the first is a piece of pop-soul fluff lifted up by his superb reading, the second a smooth jazz-fusion jam with Hathaway illustrating on electric piano his excellent improv capabilities.

"Love, Love, Love" and "Come Little Children" were the charting singles, the former a sublime love song heavily influenced by Marvin Gaye's What's Going On. Unfortunately, these disparate pieces, brilliant as they are, don't coalesce into a single work as well as on his masterpiece Everything Is Everything, but Hathaway never stops impressing with his conceptions of arrangement and performance.

John Bush ~ AllMusicGuide

Blu-ray With 192/24 Resolution Quadraphonic And Hi-Res Stereo Mixes Transferred From The Original Half-Inch Four-Channel Masters Quadraphonic sound, or 4.0 surround sound, utilizes four audio channels connected to four speakers positioned at the corners of a listening space. The multi-tracked audio is mixed dimensional, immersing the listener in an expansive soundscape.

Donny Hathaway's final studio album, EXTENSION OF A MAN, released in 1973, was a collaborative effort with renowned musicians Stanley Clarke (Return to Forever), Fred White, Al Kooper, Billy Preston, and many more.