Tommy Flanagan - Poet - Whitney Balliett

© Introduction. Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“Since leaving Ella Fitzgerald in 1978, Tommy Flanagan's playing seems to get better and better; he is currently many jazz fans' favorite pianist and can always be counted on to deliver a flawlessly swinging performance. "I've been seeking out a lot of songs that I haven't played before, particularly ones by Ellington, Strayhorn, Tadd Dameron and Tom Mclntosh (who is one of my favorite writers around today) along with many younger composers. There is a wealth of music out there that I hope to record in the future. I'd also like to feature my piano with a large orchestra sometime. I've very much enjoyed the past ten years, travelling the world playing with my trio. I can't hope for anything more than good health and good music. There is always more music to be played!"

— Scott Yanow, notes to Tommy Flanagan Let’s Play the Music of Thad Jones [Enja 8040-2]

“Once when I asked Tommy who his favorite pianists were, he responded with a seemingly  never-ending list that included Fats Waller, An Tatum, Teddy Wilson. Bud Powell, Hank Jones, Barry Harris, Wynton Kelly, Horace Silver, and Erroll Garner Within a portion of this list is a miniature  evolution of jazz piano. Flanagan's style shows several of these men as influences. His idiom is Powellian but his keyboard attack is softer because his Powell has been tempered by Jones. Harris, a Detroit contemporary, is of similar bent and has been credited with having exercised a great deal of influence over musicians in his area including Tommy himself. The Flanagan touch is light but firm, his lines fluid and warm; his music, emotionally valid.”

- Ira Gitler, notes to Tommy Flanagan Trio Overseas [Prestige 7134]

“Flanagan is never less than first-rate. But once in a while—when the weather is calm, the audience attentive, the piano good, the vibes right—he becomes impassioned. Then he will play throughout the evening with inspiration and great heat, turning out stunning solo after stunning solo, making the listeners feel they have been at a godly event.”

- Whitney Balliett

Copyright ® Whitney Balliett, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

Poet

“A procession of lyrical, horn-like single-note pianists have come down from Earl Hines. They are, in Count Basie's words, "the poets of the piano." Mary Lou Williams may have been the first. After she had absorbed Jelly Roll Morton and Fats Waller and Hines and Art Tatum, she became a kind of bebop pianist, and a bebop teacher as well, who showered pianistics on young revolutionaries like Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell. Teddy Wilson was next. (Tatum came a few years earlier, but he was an orchestral pianist.) Wilson's calm, invincible, almost mathematical right-hand patterns transfixed a generation of pianists, among them Billy Kyle, Nat Cole, Hank Jones, Jimmy Rowles, and Lennie Tristano. Kyle's right-hand figures dashed, and he had an electric way of accenting the first note of crucial phrases. 

By the early forties, Nat Cole had become the most beautiful pianist in jazz. Everything he did sparkled—his touch, his tight, surprising, effortless lines, his deft lyricism. Jones had a crystalline touch, too, and he softened and updated Wilson's right-hand figures. Rowles mixed Wilson and Tatum with his own witty, acerbic harmonic vision, developing single-note lines that suggested Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. Tristano, working different sides of Wilson and Tatum, spun unbroken melodic lines that never breathed and that had a demonic urgency. John Lewis and Erroll Garner were the last and most eccentric of the Hines-Wilson generation. Lewis was a pointillist and Garner a primitive. Pianists had discovered that they could find almost anything in the abundant Hines. 

In the mid-forties, Bud Powell, who came out of Kyle and Tatum, hypnotized a new generation of pianists. His single-note figures were nervous, hard, driven. They had, particularly at up-tempo, a coarse quick-wittedness. His admirers came in two groups: the early bebop pianists Dodo Marmarosa, Al Haig, Duke Jordan, Joe Albany, and George Wallington; and the younger and far more original Horace Silver, Tommy Flanagan, Barry Harris, and Bill Evans. (Two exceptional single-note pianists who arrived in the fifties but did not follow Powell were Dave McKenna and Eddie Costa. McKenna admired Tatum and Nat Cole, and Costa liked Tristano.) 

Evans combined Silver and Tristano and Nat Cole with his own special introversions, and, in due course, became the most influential pianist since Bud Powell. Few pianists who have appeared since the mid-sixties have escaped him. Then two totally unrelated things happened: in 1978, Tommy Flanagan quit Ella Fitzgerald, whom he had accompanied for ten years, and in 1980 Evans died. Flanagan went out as a solo pianist (sometimes with bass and drums, or just bass), inching into the sun, and, the most diffident of men, has become Evans' successor.

Jimmy Rowles, the dean of single-note players, has said this about Flanagan: "Tommy is a magnificent pianist. I can't think of anything but accolades—as an accompanist and a soloist. We used to hang out a lot at Bradley's. We'd go through songs, talk shop. You'd be surprised at his repertoire. How many pianists around today know 'Down by the Sycamore Tree'? Tommy can be distant at times—loath to open up. But he's a funny man. Whenever I first see him, I always ask him how he is, and hell say, 'Doing the best I can with the tools I have.'" 

And Bradley Cunningham himself has said: "Tommy is debonair and witty. I like his company. And I love the way he plays. I hired him about ten years ago, during one of the Newport festivals, when he had a little time off from Ella. I hired him with George Mraz. Nobody came the first night—none of my people. Being in the business, I know that these things happen, and all you can do is throw your hands in the air. Tommy and George kept looking around, then looking at one another. But they were together musically, and after the place closed that night they played some of the most inventive, swinging music I've ever heard. Piano players are supposed to make you laugh, then break your heart, and that's what Tommy does."

Flanagan is of medium height and heft, and he has a bald head with a skirt of grayish hair, and a thick balancing mustache. He wears glasses and has shy eyes. When he talks, he bends his head to the right and examines the left side of the room, or bends his head to the left and examines the right side of the room. He has a soft handshake and a soft voice—his words duck out. But much of this is disguise. He has a handsome, dimpled smile, and he laughs a lot. Flanagan lives with his wife, Diana, on the upper West Side. The living room of their apartment faces south and holds sun much of the day. There are lace curtains at the windows, and two royal-blue velvet sofas. Diana Flanagan's books line one wall, and include Malraux, June Jordan, Alec Wilder, Paul Robeson, James Agee, Duke Ellington, and May Sarton. 

Flanagan sat in his living room one afternoon and talked about himself. He does so tentatively, as if he had just met the person he is talking about.  Flanagan was born, in 1930, in Conant Gardens, the oldest intact black community in Detroit. An extraordinary musical eruption took place in Detroit in the forties and fifties—an oblique compensation for the vicious racial conditions in the city at the time. Flanagan had this effulgence on his mind: "There were older Detroit guys like Milt Jackson and Hank Jones and Lucky Thompson, who left early and came back to play gigs," he said. "And there were local guys like Willie Anderson, who never left. He had long, beautiful fingers, and he was self-taught and could also play bass, saxophone, and trumpet. Benny Goodman tried to hire him, but he never would go—maybe he was embarrassed at not being able to read. 

And there was a whole bunch of us—some younger, some older—who didn't get away so fast: Roland Hanna, who went to school with me; Paul Chambers; Doug Watkins; Donald Byrd; Kenny Burrell (he loved Oscar Moore, and we put together a Nat Cole-type trio); Sonny Red Kyner; Barry Harris; Pepper Adams, who came from Rochester and played clarinet when I first knew him; Curtis Fuller; Billy Mitchell; Yusef Lateef; Tate Houston; Frank Gant; Frank Rosolino; Parky Groat; Thad Jones and Elvin Jones, who are Hank Jones' brothers and came from Pontiac, a little way out; Art Mardigan; Oliver Jackson; Doug Mettome; Frank Foster, who's from Cincinnati; Joe Henderson; J. R. Monterose; Roy Brooks; Louis Hayes; Julius Watkins; Terry Pollard; Bess Bonnier; Alice Coltrane; and the singers Betty Carter and Sheila Jordan. 

We gave weekly concerts at a musicians' collective—the World Stage Theatre. We worked at clubs like the Blue Bird and Klein's Showbar and the Crystal and the Twenty Grand. We played in the Rouge Lounge, and at El Sino, where Charlie Parker worked. As teen-agers, we'd stand outside the screen door by the band-stand, looking in at Bird. All this lasted into the mid-fifties. Then people began to leave—Billy Mitchell ended  up with  Dizzy  Gillespie,  Thad Jones  with  Count  Basie,  Paul Chambers with Paul Quinichette, Doug Watkins with Art Blakey, Louis Hayes with Horace Silver.  I stayed around until 1956, when Kenny Burrell and I left for New York. 

"They still had jam sessions uptown then — Monday at the 125 Club, Tuesday at Count Basie's, Wednesday at Small's — and they were the best place to get exposure. Of course, if you were new in town you had to wait a long time to sit in. Sometimes I didn't get on the stand until three-thirty or four in the morning. But I made my first record after I'd been here only a few weeks. It was for Blue Note, and it was called 'Detroit—New York Junction’ - and Thad Jones and Billy Mitchell were on it, and so were Kenny Burrell and Oscar Pettiford and Shadow Wilson. Not long after that, I did a date with Miles Davis and Sonny Rollins. I met Coleman Hawkins through Miles, and I did a date with him. I had my first nightclub gig at Birdland, when they asked me to fill in for Bud Powell. I first appeared with Ella Fitzgerald that July at the Newport Festival. Then I joined J. J. Johnson, and I was with him for a year, and we travelled all over Europe. I stayed in New York after that, working around and recording. I married my first wife, Ann, in 1960. We were divorced in the early seventies. We had three children—Tommy, Jr., who lives in Arizona, and Rachel and Jennifer, who both have babies and live together in California. Ann was killed in an auto accident in 1980.

"I started the first of two long gigs with Ella in 1962, and I stayed with her until 1965. Then I spent a year with Tony Bennett. By this time, I had moved to the Coast. I did mostly casuals, which is what they call club dates. Things were sewed up out there—it was very cliquish. Ella was living in California, too, and in 1968 I got another call from her, and I stayed ten years as her musical director. She was great to work for after you got to know her, but it was rough in the beginning. I was insecure anyway, and when I'd make a mistake she would say something like 'If it's going to be like this, I'm getting out of the business.' So I'd say to myself, 'I've got to tighten up my act. After all, I'm the musical director, and I don't want to be responsible for her quitting.' But she never forgot our birthdays—things like that. Working for Ella was different from working for a lot of singers, because she had such high standards. Her intonation was perfect. Jim Hall once said that he could tune up to her voice. I finally left Ella because the travelling got to be too much for me and because in 1978 I had a heart attack."

The doorbell rang, and Flanagan let in his wife, who was loaded to the gunwales with groceries. "I'm sorry, Tommy," she said. "I couldn't get at my keys with all this stuff. I got some grapes and some cookies. I'll bring them out after I get things unpacked." She is a handsome, dark-haired woman. Her hair sets off her face, which is very pale and has an almost Victorian transparency. Her voice is louder than Flanagan's, and she moves twice as fast. Flanagan sat down again, and said, "My heart attack kept me in the hospital seventeen days, even though they kept telling me it was a mild one. I quit smoking and cut down on drinking and started getting some exercise, which is mostly walking. I walk all over the city. I work up to a good pace. Maybe I take after my father, who was a postman. My brothers and I figured out once that he walked at least ten miles on his mail route. Before he carried mail, he worked for the Packard motorcar company, but the government was a lot safer during the Depression. 

He was born in 1891, near Marietta, Georgia. He served in the Army during the First World War, and after the war he came North. Before that, he had floated around in Florida and Tennessee. He was about the same height as me, and we looked alike—we both lost our hair early. He loved music, and sang with a quartet, which dressed in spats and all. I saw a picture of him once holding a guitar, but I never heard him play one. I was the youngest of six children, five of them boys. What with so many boys, he laid down the law. He kept us in check. He had a way of sending us to the basement, of taking privileges away. But he showed us all the things of how to be a good person. He had the kind of sense of humor where he'd start telling a joke and laugh so hard he never got to the punch line. 

My mother, Ida Mae, was short and small and beautiful. She was from Wrens, Georgia. She was born in 1895, and she came North about the same time as my father. She had some Indian blood. They were married just before the twenties. She did a lot of church work—in fact, my parents started a church near where we lived. She loved music even more than my father did. She knew who people like Art Tatum and Teddy Wilson were, and when I'd put on one of their records she'd say 'Is that Art Tatum?' or 'Is that Teddy Wilson?' and that made me feel good. She taught herself to read music.  She was shy and easygoing, and very resourceful about things like cooking and sewing. She made a lot of our clothes, and she made beautiful patchwork quilts. It was rough going in the thirties, but she smoothed everything over and always made it seem like we had enough. She died in 1959, and my father died in 1977, at the age of eighty-six. 

My oldest brother, Johnson Alexander, Jr., moved into my father's house to take care of him before he passed, and my brother and his wife still live there. My sister, Ida, worked for a doctor, but she's retired. She had seven children, the last two twins. My brother James Harvey passed a little while ago, and Douglas works in the Detroit school system. Luther lives in Lansing, and is with a community-service agency. My father's house has a front porch and a back porch, now enclosed, and four bedrooms, two up and two down. There's a milk door in the kitchen, where we used to put the empties for the milkman. When I was little, it still looked very country where we were. The streets were dirt and had deep gullies on both sides. They weren't paved until the late thirties. I walked a mile to my first school, and took two buses to high school, which was not in our area, and which my sister and brothers went to, too. The schools were mixed, but there was a lot of racism everywhere in Detroit. The result, of course, was the race riots of 1943.

"We always had a piano in our house, and I was fooling with it as soon as I could crawl up on the bench. On my sixth Christmas, we were all given musical instruments. I got a clarinet, and the others got a violin and drums and saxophones, and the like. Eventually, we had a little band, and we played some strange music. I didn't like the clarinet too much, because it was so hard to get a sound out of. But I did learn to read music on it. I sent away for a fingering chart to a Dr. Matty, who had a radio program, and I learned through listening to him and because they used the same chart in school. I could play some by the time I got to intermediate school, and in high school I could blend in with the band without sounding too terrible. I started piano lessons when I was ten or eleven, and built up to Bach and Chopin. I studied with Gladys Dillard. Her classes got so big that she opened her own school and had a staff of seven or eight teachers. I saw her recently in Detroit when I gave a solo concert, and she looked real good. All this time, I had been listening to Fats Waller and Teddy Wilson and Art Tatum and to all the big bands. In high school, Bud Powell took hold, and so did Nat Cole. Nat Cole had that same thing as Teddy—a nice, clean technique, a bright attack. He could swing, he made his notes bounce.

"I didn't escape the Korean War. I got drafted near the end, and I spent two years in the Army. I did my basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, in Missouri, which was on the same latitude as South Korea, and even had a similar terrain. So the minute basic was finished they cut my orders to send me overseas. It was nightmare time. Then I discovered that they were holding auditions for a camp show. One of the skits had a pianist in it, and I tried out and got the part and stayed in Missouri. But I went over a year or so later. I had been trained as a motion-picture-projector operator, and I was sent to the port city of Kunsan. The war was still going. Late at night or very early in the morning, this North Korean plane would come over, flying under our radar, and drop a couple of bombs. We called him Bed-Check Charlie. The one good thing about my Army career was that I kept running into Pepper Adams."

Diana Flanagan brought in a plate of grapes and a plate of ginger cookies. Flanagan took two cookies and thanked her, and she went back to the kitchen. Flanagan finished his cookies and ate some grapes. He was silent for a while. Then he said, "The other night at the Vanguard, somebody asked me for the umpteenth time what pianists influenced me. The fact is, I try to play like a horn player, like I'm blowing into the piano. The sound of a piece—its over-all tonality—is what concerns me. If it's a blues in C, you play the whole thing like a circle. You have the sound of C in your head, your mind is clouded with the sound. The chords of a tune are not that important, and neither is the melody. But they are both there if you get lost. Hardly any of my material is new, although it may be new to me. When you add new songs, it gives your playing a lift. I particularly like Kern, Arlen and Gershwin. I also love Ellington and Strayhorn and Tadd Dameron. No matter what you play, though, it's hard work. After I do a week's gig, I like to rest, I like to heal."

Flanagan demands close listening. His single-note melodic lines move up and down, but, since he is also a percussive player, who likes to accent unlikely notes, his phrases tend to move constantly toward and away from the listener. The resulting dynamics are subtle and attractive. These horizontal-vertical melodic lines give the impression of being two lines, each of which Flanagan would like attention paid to. There are also interior movements within these lines: double-time runs; clusters of flatted notes, like pretend stumbles; backward-leaning half-time passages; dancing runs; and rests, which are both pauses and chambers for the preceding phrase to echo in. Flanagan is never less than first-rate. But once in a while—when the weather is calm, the audience attentive, the piano good, the vibes right—he becomes impassioned. Then he will play throughout the evening with inspiration and great heat, turning out stunning solo after stunning solo, making the listeners feel they have been at a godly event.

Diana Flanagan came into the living room. Flanagan stood up and stretched and said it was time for his walk—that today he was going down toward Lincoln Center and back up through Central Park. He put on a tan cap and left. Diana Flanagan took a cookie and sat on the sofa. She said that the two best things she had ever done were to come to New York and to marry Flanagan. "I had come from Ames, Iowa, where my father finally settled," she said. "He was born in Russellville, Kentucky, and when I was growing up we lived in Clarksville, Tennessee, and Hopkinsville, Kentucky, and Goldsboro, North Carolina. My father sold insurance. He sold men's clothes. He worked for Frigidaire. He worked for National Cash Register. He was a quiet, subtle, sweet person, a courtly person. His name was William Kershner, and he was of Scottish, Irish, and German descent. Tommy, whose father spent time in Tennessee, and my father, who spent time there, too, used some of the same colloquialisms—like 'slipperspoon' for 'shoehorn.' My father died in 1971. My mother is almost ninety, and lives in a nursing home now. She was born in Philadelphia. Ruth Stetson. Her father was English, and her mother was French and Irish. She has always been interested in music and books. She's very witty, very emotional. I had a scholarship and studied music for two years at the University of Iowa. Then I came to New York. It was 1949. I had always thought New York was my destination. I was brought to the World's Fair in 1939, when I was nine or ten, and I never got over it. I went to Columbia, and took courses in drama. I had been a violinist, and I was also a singer. I used the professional name of Diana Hunter, which is pretty embarrassing. I sang around New York, and went on the road with Elliot Lawrence and Claude Thornhill. Thornhill was very kind to me. He still played beautifully—those dreaming single-note things, like 'Snowfall.' In 1956, I married a tenor saxophonist named Eddie Wasserman. He'd been to Juilliard, and he had worked for Chico O'Farrill and Charlie Barnet. And he was in the Gene Krupa quartet for a long time. I stopped singing professionally in 1962, and Eddie and I were divorced in 1965. I went to City College and graduated with a degree in English literature. Then I studied education at Bank Street. I taught music, English, and black studies for ten years—first in Bedford-Stuyvesant and then in the South Bronx. I quit just before Tommy and I were married, in 1976.

"We read to each other quite a bit. He's interested in everything I am, and I'm interested in everything he is—except sports. His gentleness and quietness are deceptive. He is a strong man, and he has a lot of spirit and funniness. He's lovely to live with. Everything he says has a kind of double meaning—an edge to it. We have a lot of play like that between us. We laugh all the time. He dances—little tap steps, little side shuffles—around here, but he won't do it in public. Once, when we went to hear Duke Ellington at the Rainbow Grill, he took me out on the dance floor and just stood in one spot, swaying from side to side. I still sing sometimes late at night, and he plays for me. We know a thousand songs nobody else knows anymore."”