After recording for
Fantasy for nearly a decade, Tjader signed with better-known
Verve Records, founded by
Norman Granz but owned then by
MGM. With the luxury of larger budgets and seasoned recording producer
Creed Taylor in the control booth, Tjader cut a varied string of albums. During the Verve years, Tjader worked with arrangers
Oliver Nelson,
Claus Ogerman,
Eddie Palmieri,
Lalo Schifrin,
Don Sebesky, and performers
Willie Bobo,
Donald Byrd,
Clare Fischer, a young
Chick Corea,
Jimmy Heath,
Kenny Burrell,
Hank Jones,
Anita O'Day,
Armando Peraza,
Jerome Richardson, and others. Tjader recorded with
big band orchestras for the first time, and even made an album based on Asian scales and rhythms. Tjader's biggest success was the album
Soul Sauce (1964). Its title track, a
Dizzy Gillespie cover Tjader had been toying with for over a decade, was a radio hit (hitting the top 20 on New York's influential pop music station
WMCA in May 1965), and landed the album on 's Top 50 Albums of 1965. Titled "Guachi Guaro" (a nonsensical phrase in Spanish), Tjader transformed the Gillespie /
Chano Pozo composition into something new. (The name "Soul Sauce" came from Taylor's suggestion for a catchier title and
Willie Bobo's observation that Tjader's version was spicier than the original.) The song's identifiable sound is a combination of the call-outs made by Bobo ("
Salsa ahi na ma ... sabor, sabor!") and Tjader's crisp vibes work. The album sold over 100,000 copies and popularized the word
salsa in describing Latin dance music. The 1960s were Tjader's most prolific period. With the backing of a major record label, Verve, he could afford to stretch out and expand his repertoire. The most obvious deviation from his Latin jazz sound was
Several Shades of Jade (1963) and the follow-up
Breeze from the East (1963). Both albums attempted to combine jazz and
Asian music, much as Tjader and others had done with
Afro-Cuban. The result was dismissed by critics, chided as little more than the dated exotica that had come and gone in the prior decade. Tjader also recorded a notable straight modern jazz live album,
Saturday Night/Sunday Night at the Blackhawk, San Francisco, with his regular quartet in 1962. Other experiments were not so easily dismissed. Tjader teamed up with New Yorker Eddie Palmieri in 1966 to produce
El Sonido Nuevo ("The New Sound"). A companion LP was recorded for Palmieri's contract label,
Tico, titled
Bamboleate. While Tjader's prior work was often dismissed as "Latin
lounge", here the duo created a darker, more sinister sound.
Cal Tjader Plays the Contemporary Music of Mexico and Brazil (1962), released during the
bossa nova craze, actually bucked the trend, instead using more traditional arrangements from the two countries' past. In the late 1960s, Tjader, along with guitarist
Gábor Szabó and
Gary McFarland, helped to found the short-lived
Skye record label. Tjader's work of this period is characterized by
Solar Heat (1968) and
Cal Tjader Plugs In (1969), precursors to
acid jazz. == Fusion years (1970s) ==