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."”

Bill Holman - The Arranger's Monk - Gary Giddins

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

“Seldom in receipt of the kind of plaudits some other arrangers seem swamped in, Holman has quietly put together an awesome body of work, and recent records find him in peerless form. …. A View From The Side [1997] is replete with frighteningly elaborate scores dispatched with the utmost elegance: to cite a mere two examples, sample the almost fantastical interplay of the sections on 'I Didn't Ask" or the rich, sobering treatment of 'The Peacocks', a concerto for Bob Efford's bass clarinet. Brilliant Corners [1998] is no less of an achievement and, considering the difficulty of arranging Monk tunes for big band, these ten charts seem like the work of a magician: has anyone dared score the title-piece in such a way? Here is one of the genuine masters doing his greatest work.”

• Richard Cook and Brian Morton, The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6th Ed.

“Holman internalized Monk long ago. He has had Monk pieces in his band's book since the 1970s and included "I Mean You" in his 1988 JVC album Bill Holman Band. In preparing for this compact disc, he sought out Monk's recordings to identify the pieces he wanted to arrange, but once those decisions were made, he cut off contact with Monk."

"I wanted to do it my way," Holman says, "so I decided to leave the area."

Holman says that his writing for the Monk pieces is more like the work he has been doing the past few years for orchestras in Germany, Holland and the Scandinavian countries.

"I'd always had that American big band thing in the back of my head when I was writing for my band," he says. "I didn't feel that the traffic in this country would bear too much 'out' stuff, that Americans like big bands to sound like big bands. This has abrupt changes in texture and mood, operating outside of the typical dance band vocabulary."....

"It's great to do things like that because jazz bands were locked into that four-part harmony for so many decades that to get away from it completely is freedom. Some of the guys in the band are still trying to figure out how these things fit into the harmonic scheme. Well, a lot of times, there isn't any harmonic scheme."

My conclusion is that Willis Leonard Holman is a wonder. Monk should have stuck around for this one.”

• Doug Ramsey, booklet notes to Brilliant Corners The Bill Holman Band Plays The Music of Thelonious Monk [JVC 2066-2]

The following piece featured in Gary’s Weather Bird: Jazz at the Dawn of Its Second Century [2004] and was originally published in Village Voice 17 February 1998. It is used with the author’s permission.

© Copyright ® Gary Giddins, copyright protected, all rights reserved, used with the author’s permission.

“A Holman arrangement is distinguished by several hallmarks, chief among them his ability to keep several balls in the air at the same time. Something is always happening….. A typical Holman moment is an epiphany of sorts, as if contemplation of the melody at hand spurred an unexpected juxtaposition, idea, or joke.”

“Bill Holman, who may be the premiere living jazz orchestrator and is surely a contender, is back, at 70, in rare form. One of the best records of 1997 was A View from the Side, and whatever 1998 brings, few albums can top Brilliant Corners: The Music of Thelonious Monk. Holman always keeps busy in Los Angeles and Europe, but records released under his name are so infrequent that they support a long-standing cult without confirming his reputation as a major figure in the development of big band music. Brilliant Corners may not change that, but it provides standards for an idiom that too often waffles in amateurish unoriginality and is sure to keep you searching for more of the same.

The work of all great arrangers raises the question of where the line is drawn between composition and orchestration. Several of the best, from Gil Evans to Nelson Riddle, were insignificant melodists who brought organizational genius to the melodies of others. Holman has composed several effective pieces—"Invention for Guitar and Trumpet," "The Big Street," "Far Down Below," "Concerto for Herd"—but he is never as inspired as when recasting a familiar tune. He is at bottom a variations man and a good theme frees his imagination, which exults in diverse effects, tempos, humor, melodic juxtapositions, and vigorous rhythms. The wonder of his Contemporary Concepts, written for Stan Kenton in 1955, is that he simultaneously reconfigured the big band for a world bereft of ballrooms while stressing the Count Basie dictum to pat your foot, in addition to transfiguring melodies like "Stompin' at the Savoy" and "What's New" and turning the intransigent "Stella by Starlight" into a concerto for Charlie Mariano that would have earned the alto saxophonist a footnote in jazz history all by itself.

Yet the concerto style is not Holman's forte, except in the Bartok sense of a concerto for orchestra. A Holman arrangement is distinguished by several hallmarks, chief among them his ability to keep several balls in the air at the same time. Something is always happening. It is a cliche to say that a bandleader makes a small group sound like a big band or a big band sound like a combo. Holman makes a big band sound enormous—given the luxury of 16 musicians, he seems to imply, "use them, all of them, all the time." Another hallmark is his distinctive use of counterpoint, which he never launches in a Bach-like fantasy, one melody bouncing off another, but in a kind of unison responsiveness, as though the melody under discussion suggested one or two related melodies that fit when played together. Why settle for a single tune when you have enough musicians to play several? Another hallmark is that the result is never cluttered and the secondary melodies often have a linear integrity to match the originals.

A typical Holman moment is an epiphany of sorts, as if contemplation of the melody at hand spurred an unexpected juxtaposition, idea, or joke. Brilliant Corners bubbles over with them. Indeed, Monk's title isn't a bad description of Holman's method. He keeps the big, colorful balls floating in front of your eyes, but you don't want to miss the action at the edges. A few Holman moments: Toward the close of "Thelonious," he harmonizes Monk's insistent one-note theme (actually, three notes, not that you'd notice) for unison flute and piano and you realize that the tune is Morse code—in any case, Monk code; in the middle of "'Round Midnight," he inserts a four-note riff from an introduction popularized by Miles Davis, but gives the first three staccato notes to the trumpets and the fourth to a wry trombone, conveying conversational whimsy even in this fleeting transition; "Rhythm-a-ning," a chart from 20 years ago and inspired by Basie's "Little Pony," begins with Monk's theme-how conventional!—but at the second eight bars is joined by a parallel figure and, after the chorus, the tempo crashes and the reeds invoke five seconds of Tadd Dameron's "Hot House." Holman is a fiend for Rorschach-test allusions. Elaborate variations on "Ruby, My Dear" include a bar of "Groovin' High," "Brilliant Corners" is spelled by a Charles Ives interlude, and a fleering reference to "Nardis" wafts by during one of the transitions in '"Round Midnight."

The endings of all 10 selections are pure Holman and utterly savory, none more so than the gearing up of drums to launch three thunderous blasts of brass in "Straight, No Chaser." On a few occasions he uses bent or sliding notes. The ultimate slurp is a tailgate trombone lick some six minutes into "Friday the 13th." Before you can wonder what it's doing there, the band is off on a full-throttle shout chorus, but the performance closes with solo soprano saxophone, which just happens to finish with a left-field slur. "Misterioso" is nothing but Holman moments. A bright two-note riff is immediately countered by a deep-blues bass figure to remind you what kind of piece this is. Then the melody hits and you have all three in the air—the riff, the bass line, the tune. Profligate with invention, Holman writes a completely different variation after each solo, though they all counter ominous blues voicings with unexpectedly cheerful riffs, including one that has the reed section competing with itself and another that amounts to a four-bar swing era interlude, right before a deep-blues bass solo. The other great blues, "Straight, No Chaser," is deconstructed from the top down, so that in the first few minutes the band plays not Monk's theme but a Holman variation based on the same rhythm; when a canonical transition two-thirds through finally triggers Monk's tune you feel you have earned its comfort, but before long Holman—whose chords are now waxing in heft and dissonance—can't resist pointing out that it reminds him of Til Eulenspiegel.

I haven't mentioned the soloists, and there are good ones —especially the saxophonists Lanny Morgan, Bill Perkins, and Pete Christlieb (whose "Rhythm-a-ning" cadenza pays homage to Wardell Gray). Solos in work like this invariably seem somewhat generic. Like a film or theater director, a bandleader exercises control over the performances when he chooses his cast. When big band soloists were innovators, they were as important as arrangements and sometimes more so. But as Basie pointed out when he regrouped in the early '50s, the writing lingers on after the soloists have gone. Holman has a crew of solid professionals up to every task he assigns, but the play is the thing and during the best of solos it is the orchestral backing, rhythmic change-ups, and Monk allusions (often fanciful or abstract) that excite your attention. Although " 'Round Midnight" was originally recorded by Cootie Williams's big band and Hall Overton successfully adapted Monk's own harmonies for an ensemble with seven winds, Monk is not often heard in orchestral arrangements (a notable exception is Ellington's 1962 "Monk's Dream"). The trick is to love Monk's music without attempting to replicate his style, which is matchless. Only Holman's "Bemsha Swing" disappoints, because his dated boogaloo beat pales next to Monk's geometric rhythms, and even here the secondary themes punch up the action to the point of near-euphoria. Elsewhere, the euphoria is fully realized—enhanced by JVC's audiophile mastering.” ….

Autumn in New York: Hank Jones’s late-flowering mastery - Gary Giddins

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

Often associated with the Detroit school of pianists which included Tommy Flanagan [1930-2001], Barry Harris [1929-2021] and Roland Hanna [1932-2002], Hank Jones [1918-2010] was a central piano figure on the world scene for well-over half a century.

As Leonard Feather comments in his notes to Hank Jones: Live at Maybeck Recital Hall, Volume Sixteen [Concord CD-4502]: ”Hank, like most other pianists of the day, was strongly impressed by Bud Powell, but like Tommy Flanagan and others from the Detroit area, he transcended the bop idiom to become an eclectic interpreter of everything from time-proof ballads to swing and bop standards.”

The following appeared in the June 4, 2007 edition of The New Yorker. It will also be included in my forthcoming Jazz Piano A Reader Volume 2.

“Jones’s casual authority has an effect not unlike Fred Astaire’s dancing; he makes it look easy, not simple, and you want it to go on all night.”

- Gary Giddins 

© Copyright ® Gary Giddins, copyright protected, all rights reserved, used with the author permission.

“In mid-May, Hank Jones, slim and dapper, accepted a hand-up to the stage at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola and approached the piano with regal but nimble bearing. His first chords, close and luminous, were reassuring, and, in the circumstances, this was welcome. Jones had initially been scheduled to play three nights of duets with the saxophonist Joe Lovano, but shortly before the event they announced that Jones would limit himself to half a set, with Lovano’s nonet rounding out the hour. Eleven weeks earlier, Jones had undergone a quadruple bypass after a massive heart attack. No big deal, according to Jones, who remarked, before going on, that performing helps him maintain muscular control in his hands and arms. In July, he will celebrate his eighty-ninth birthday. 

Jones is perhaps the most venerated of contemporary jazz pianists, and not just because he has outlived so much of the competition. Jazz taste oscillates between decorum and expression, usually favoring the latter. In the years when jazz piano was dominated by obdurate, percussive modernists like Thelonious Monk and Cecil Taylor, Jones was often perceived as a genteel professional, and admired more for the reliability of his technique than for his wit. In today’s more ecumenical musical climate, in which pianists like Bill Charlap and Jason Moran tend to mediate percussive dynamics with lyricism, Jones’s approach seems almost prophetic.

In truth, Jones’s playing isn’t all that genteel: mannerly, yes, but at the core resolute and spare. As his most intricate phrases skitter over the keyboard, he barely seems to depress the keys, yet each note is cleanly articulated. His touch has always been unmistakable, but it has never felt quite as personal as in recent years, and his sound has taken on a soft, steady glow, like a candle with a small wick. His variations burn with infallible confidence and precision, and he can afford to hold much of his technique in reserve. Although many sides that Jones cut with Charlie Parker, Cannonball Adderley, and Ella Fitzgerald during the forties and fifties are rightly regarded as landmarks, his most bewitching performances have emerged during the past decade and a half.

Jones’s extraordinarily supple time — the rhythmic sensibility that generates swing and equilibrium — reflects his apprenticeship. He began performing near his home, in Pontiac, Michigan, at the age of thirteen, in 1931, a time when jazz piano was by no means a settled practice. In the twenties, ragtime habits had given way to the free-spirited, resilient rhythms of the Harlem stride masters, chiefly James P. Johnson and Fats Waller, and their style was given further impetus by the improvisational bravura of Earl Hines. Jones chose Hines and Waller as models, and soon added the most adventurous pianists of the early thirties: Teddy Wilson and Art Tatum. Tatum, whose virtuosity galvanized a generation of musicians in and out of jazz, told Jones that everyone makes mistakes, but that quick resolutions cover them up. Jones didn’t believe that Tatum really made mistakes, and he doesn’t make many, either; the economy of his style, for all the polish and cunning, is too transparent to allow them.

In 1944, Jones came to New York. Within months, he was working with the jazz élite. He was also soaking up innovations of the new jazz, called bebop, pioneered by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. Few established swing stars could make the leap into its harmonic complexity and rhythmic volatility, but Jones grasped it immediately. He didn’t trade in his old style but, rather, modified what he already knew. By the mid-fifties, he had developed an ingenuity that appealed to musicians but escaped the notice of many fans and critics. Its defining characteristic is an aversion to cliché. He is fond of transforming material usually neglected by jazz improvisers, from “We Shall Overcome” to one of his longtime signature pieces, a melancholy meditation on “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’.” When playing well-worn standards, like “My Funny Valentine,” he recharges them with substitute chords and melodic inversions. His improvisations start on familiar ground, flirt with the listener’s expectations, and then lead somewhere entirely unanticipated. In a recent recording of “The Shadow of Your Smile,” he undermines the expected Latin rhythm, ends the theme with a sudden discord, and, in the course of his improvisation, nods at other tunes —“Pretty Baby,” “Volga Boatmen,” “Hot House”— without quite acknowledging them. These are not the standard jazz quotations, jimmied into a solo, but ideas weighed, rejected, and alchemized.

From the late fifties into the seventies, Jones was on the staff of CBS, appearing on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and many other programs. He made good money and was in the vanguard of integration at the networks, but, musically, he slipped from view. Then, in 1976, he started making up for lost time. Within two years, there were eight new albums, and the tide has yet to ebb. In 1978, he appeared on Broadway as the onstage pianist in the Fats Waller revue “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” and he later recorded an album, “Handful of Keys,” that subjects Waller’s antic themes to ruminative treatments. Jones’s versatility has given rise to a  fascinating spread of collaborations with other artists. He seems equally comfortable recording a hushed, prayerful album of hymns and spirituals with the bassist Charlie Haden (“Steal Away”) and playing alongside the West African musician Cheick-Tidiane Seck (“Sarala”), whose sound-world, rife with overblown flute and exotic percussion, spurs Jones to invent rhythmic aphorisms and so uncover another facet of his art. He has also recorded with his youngest brother, Elvin, who radicalized jazz percussion as a member of the John Coltrane Quartet and might therefore seem to be the opposite of his brother. But Jones negotiates Elvin’s pounding polyrhythms with equanimity, especially on the album “Upon Reflection: The Music of Thad Jones.” Thad, the middle brother, was a trumpet player, composer, and bandleader who revived big-band music in the nineteen-sixties. (Hank, the eldest, is the only survivor.) All in all, Hank Jones can be said to have had the most impressive second act in jazz history.

At Dizzy’s, Jones and Lovano opened with “Lady Luck,” written by Thad Jones and Frank Wess when they were members of Count Basie’s band. Based on the harmonies of “Taking a Chance on Love,” but with an initial melodic phrase that recalls “You Took Advantage of Me,” the piece goes its own way, as did this performance, motored by Jones’s plush stride and Lovano’s fuzzy,

Ben Webster-in-spired timbre. Jones’s casual authority has an effect not unlike Fred Astaire’s dancing; he makes it look easy, not simple, and you want it to go on all night. Lovano is an ideal match for him. At fifty-four, he has synthesized the music of his generation in an almost Jonesian way, combining big-band apprenticeship with avant-garde curiosity. Since he and Jones began playing together, in 2003, they’ve made three CDs. The first two are quartet albums: “I’m All for You,” in 2004, was widely acclaimed, but the follow-up, “Joyous Encounter,” in 2005, demonstrates a deeper symbiosis; its version of “Autumn in New York” has the spacious commitment of a weathered classic.

With the new duet album, “Kids,” the Jones-Lovano partnership ascends to a new level, and the record will surely make many of the year’s best-of lists. Shorn of the rhythmic support of bass and percussion — Jones is, in effect, the rhythm section — the piano and tenor take on a conversational immediacy. In Thelonious Monk’s “Four in One,” the speed and precision of the playing all but meld piano and saxophone into a single instrument, recalling some of Monk’s own collaborations. Other highlights include Lovano’s portrait of Charlie Parker (“Charlie Chan,” a pseudonym that Parker once used); Jones’s harmonically challenging “Lullaby”; a wistful “Lazy Afternoon”; and a sensational reprise of Jones’s solo-piano arrangement of “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’.” At Dizzy’s, they also played Monk’s “Monk’s Mood”: Lovano pulled away from the final chorus of his solo after an intense and convoluted flurry of eighth notes. Jones, with impeccable protocol, looked up before starting his own solo to make certain Lovano was done. Lovano nodded, and Jones’s right hand instantly shot into an eloquent distillation of the chords, reshaping the melody. Lovano looked at him for a moment, and then admiringly shook his head.”

Richard Twardzik - The Jack Chambers Biography [From the Archives]

© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“The Eisenhower years, so Miltown-ized on much of the home front, were turbulent times for jazz. The revolutionaries of the early 1950s were themselves ushered aside by a new avant-garde before the close of the decade. Jazz was like one of those newspaper chess problems: move from bop to free in ten moves. Change was the byword, and it proved to be a cruel taskmaster. Even jazz stars who had perfected wondrous styles—Miles and Coltrane serving as the preeminent examples here—soon felt compelled to throw them overboard in pursuit of the next (and in itself transitory) new thing.

Yet the personal lives of the jazz elite were often even more tumultuous than the music itself. Critics and historians have danced around the issue of jazz and substance abuse, whitewashing and demonizing by turns, but a simple perusal of the names and dates on the tombstones tells you that something was seriously wrong with the masters of the art form during this era. Not everyone was a casualty, but even those who survived, often paid a price in other ways: time in prison, broken families, potential unrealized, financial security traded for a string of fixes.

In the midst of this, it is easy to lose track of Richard Twardzik. This pianist, dead at age 24, never lived to see the release of his first leader date on the Pacific label. It was almost a miracle that this material was issued at all. Pacific only had 22 minutes of Twardzik's music on hand, and needed to package it with trio sides by pianist Russ Freeman in order to fill up an LP album. Over the years, other recordings of Twardzik's music have become available, usually featuring him in a sideman role; but none of these projects is well known outside an inner circle of jazz devotees.

It would thus be all too easy to forget Richard Twardzik. . . except that his music is anything but forgettable….

Now Jack Chambers, a jazz critic best known for his two-volume biography of Miles Davis, has written the first full-length biography of the pianist, Bouncin' With Bartok: The Incomplete Works of Richard Twardzik, published by The Mercury Press. Chambers, who first heard Twardzik on record back as a high school student in 1956, has taken this mysterious figure from a bygone jazz era and brought him fully to life in the pages of this remarkable book.”

- Ted Gioia writing on www.Jazz.com

I’ve now studied with Jack Chambers on two, different occasions, which is no mean feat considering the fact that he is a Linguistics Professor at the University of Toronto and I live in Southern California.

Of course, in this era of online education, one could assume that the geographical gap between us could easily be bridged by the Internet.

But that would be an incorrect assumption as both of my tutorials with Professor Chambers involved reading books he has authored, one of which was written over thirty years ago.

Please let me explain.

After a long absence from Jazz due, in part, to the usual personal and professional reasons that find all of us otherwise preoccupied and away from the passions of our youth during “the middle years,” I reconnected with the music in a big way when the compact disc era that began in the 1980s provided easy access to much of the recorded history of Jazz.

At some point in this reawakening, I realized how little I knew about Miles Davis’ music before his now classic records on Columbia [Sony] such as Miles Ahead, Kind of Blue and Porgy and Bess.

During one of my Saturday pilgrimages to the Borders Bookstore at the corner of Post and Powell Streets in San Francisco [just north of the St. Francis Hotel], I came across a copy of Milestones: The Music and Times of Miles Davis [New York: William Morrow, 1989].

Its author was Jack Chambers.

I had never heard of Jack, but after thumbing through the book, I gathered that the work had originally been published as two, separate books with 1960 as the dividing line, a year that would have roughly coincided to when I began to listen to Miles in earnest.

I bought a copy, found it so fascinatingly full of information on Miles that I couldn’t put it down.

I carried it with me everywhere including on my business travels of which there were many in those days. I’d make notes about Jack observations of Miles’ early recordings on labels such as Savoy, Prestige and Blue Note.

And then, upon returning home, I’d seek out the CD reissues of these Miles recordings at the Tower Records Store on Columbus in the Russian Hill section of San Francisco which had a room set-off from the rest of the store that was totally devoted to Jazz [Can you imagine?].

Armed with my newly acquired digital Miles treasures and Jack’s book on Miles, I would relate one to the other while listening to the music on my portable CD player during subsequent business flights and the accompanying [and seemingly interminable] hotel stays.

Jack became my mentor on everything-Miles before 1960 [and after 1960, too, when I read Part II of his definitive work].

Milestones: The Music and Times of Miles Davis has assumed an honored place on my Jazz books shelf.

Aside from the odd reference search every now and again, there the matter rested until I began to “study with” Jack almost 20 years later on a completely different Jazz topic.

Please let me further explain.

While doing some research for a blog feature on the music of Richard Twardzik, a rather obscure Jazz pianist who had an all-too-brief career in the early 1950s before succumbing to a heroin overdose in 1955, I came across an essay that Ted Gioia wrote for jazz.com.

At the time of its writing, Ted’s Twardzik essay was essentially based on a review of a new biography about the pianist entitled - Bouncin’ with Bud: The Incomplete Works of Richard Twardzik [Toronto: The Mercury Press, 2008].

The author of the Twardzik biography was - you guessed it - Jack Chambers!

I wrote to Ted concerning his Twardzik essay and he sent me Jack’s e-mail address and suggested that I get in touch with him.

In the meantime, I had written to a friend who is probably THE leading authority on all aspects of Pacific Jazz Records - the label that thankfully recorded Twardzik performing some of his music before his sudden death - and asked him if I could borrow his copy of Jack’s biography [I just assumed he’d have a copy because he has just about everything and anything ever written about Dick Bock’s Pacific Jazz label].

I was right, he did have the book and he offered to bring it along with him when we next met for one of our Jazz-and-coffee-get-togethers.

Since Jack’s book was forthcoming as a loan from my Jazz buddy, I never did get around to writing to Jack, per Ted’s suggestion.

I didn’t have to because he wrote to me!

It seems that my friend who is expert in all-things-Pacific-Jazz and Jack Chambers had been corresponding for quite some time.

As a result of their friendship, Jack sent along my very own copy of Bouncin’ with Bud: The Incomplete Works of Richard Twardzik and inscribed it with a personal greeting!

After reading Jack’s book, it soon became apparent to me that any blog posting that I might prepare on Richard Twardzik had to incorporate Jack’s knowledge and perspective on the subject.

So I wrote to him, thanked him for his generosity and asked:

“Jack:

As a starting point for my planned feature on Richard Twardzik and his music, I don't think I can do much better than the introductory chapter to Bouncin' with Bartok - A Crutch for the Crab.

May I have your permission to use it in its entirety? ...

Although the album in question would no doubt be different, I'm sure that many Jazz fans can relate to your anecdote about happening upon Twardzik's music, being intrigued by it and then going on a quest to find out more about it.

Thanks for considering this request.

Kind regards,

Steve”

Jack sent back the following reply:

“Steve— I am pleased to give permission for you to reprint Chap. 1 with the acknowledgments and links you list below. Yes, I am sure most music lovers have an experience like mine on first hearing a magnificent piece of music. After I put a note about it on my website, I discovered that many others had their experience with "A Crutch for the Crab."

One person wrote and said, ‘Until I read your article, I thought Richard Twardzik was a figment of my imagination.’

Best wishes,

Jack”

© Jack Chambers and The Mercury Press. Used with the author’s permission;, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

1. A Crutch for the Crab

“I first heard a recording of Richard Twardzik playing piano in 1956, when I was a high-school student. The tune was called A Crutch for the Crab, and it was one of the tracks on a promotional LP put out by Pacific Jazz, a sampler called Assorted Flavors of Pacific Jazz (LIFS-1). It cost $1.98 brand-new; and that was the kind of bargain you couldn't pass up if you were a jazz-struck, underachieving, underage smoker with a pompadour and black horn-rims who made five dollars on Saturdays squeegeeing the windows of Welsh's Butcher Shop and three other stores on King Street in a town called Stoney Creek on the Canadian side of the Niagara border.

Side One of Assorted Flavors strung together a lot of excerpts from the Pacific Jazz catalogue while a man with a radio voice told a kind of company history of West Coast jazz, starting with Gerry Mulligan's piano-less quartet at the Haig in 1952.The radio man sounded like he gargled with Coppertone. His voice-over commentary obscured the beginning of A Crutch for the Crab, and the ending disintegrated in a fade-out. The excerpt, counting the commentary, was less than two minutes long. It was, you would have thought, the worst way to hear any kind of music.

In fact it was sensational. Twardzik's piano playing was fluent and eccentric and painfully beautiful. His tune—a composition, really, when we finally got to hear all of it—was full of jagged turns and crisp releases. Somehow it came out sounding exactly right for its wild title, crabbily fluid with sudden lurches. It was like nothing else in the world. It was a revelation.

What the narrator said, oozing cool, was also a revelation. He said:

'When Chet Baker went to Europe in September of 1955, he took with him a startling new pianist from Boston named Richard Twardzik. Twardzik died in Paris a few months later, depriving us all of the great ability that was his. Here's the late Richard Twardzik as he sounded in 1954 playing his own composition, A Crutch for the Crab.'

It was the only time I ever heard a news item on an LP.

I tracked down the source LP, partly fearing that I had been bamboozled—that Richard Twardzik would turn out to be an ordinary piano player who had been cleverly edited to make a few brilliant minutes on a promotional record. I had to wait a long time to find out. Twardzik's LP was a new release, copyright 1956, the same as the sampler. I had to order it at the record store, as an import. "It's gonna cost you, son," said the man at the record shop, "and it's gonna take six weeks at least."

The LP was called Trio (Pacific Jazz 1212). Just looking at it, holding it in my hand still swathed in its protective plastic sheath, took my breath away. The cover was the print of an oil painting in shades of brown, with three solid figures, guys built like cairns, tossing boulders around as if they were helium balloons. The credit line said "west coast artists series/Edmund Kohn" and the back cover carried a profile and a small picture of old Edmund, a round man with a handlebar mustache and a kerchief knotted around his neck, looking like the street musician with the dancing monkey you see in cartoons. It also told about Edmund's success as an illustrator and about the awards he had won at the Sacramento State Fair and other lesser places. Since then I have read testimonials by very serious people about how their lives were changed forever when they saw Picasso's Guernica or Botticelli's Primavera. For me, it will always be Edmund Kohn's unnamed cover painting for Trio.

The billing on the cover indicated that Twardzik shared the LP with another piano player, Russ Freeman. In fact, it gave Twardzik second billing on the cover, but on the actual disk the six tracks by Twardzik's trio filled the first side. The second side was given over to Freeman, and I already knew7 something about him. He was the dean of West Coast piano players by dint of appearing on nearly every jazz record that came from California.

The back cover was packed with information: besides the box about Edmund Kohn, there were six column inches about Russ Freeman, another six column inches by Freeman about Richard Twardzik, and two black & white 3.5" x 4" portraits. One of the portraits was of Freeman by the famous California photographer William Claxton showing Freeman with a pencil mustache and dark suit, looking more like a used car salesman than was surely intended. The other portrait was of "The Late Richard Twardzik" (as the caption portentously put it),and it showed Twardzik against a dark background, hollow-cheeked, staring into the distant gloom. It was (and is) brilliantly evocative, and for many years it was the only known portrait of Twardzik.

The liner credited the portrait to "Nick Dean, Boston," not a name that registered any recognition. Years later, I spoke to numerous Boston contemporaries of Richard Twardzik, and none could place Nick Dean, the photographer. But some 45 years later, I discovered more photographs by Nick Dean, as we shall see, some of them the equal of the back-cover portrait. His old business address is stamped on the back of one of the portraits: "Photograph by/ Nick Dean/41 Charles Street/Boston 14, Mass./CA 7-8440." And finally, with the help of Richard Twardzik's second cousin who was born long after Richard had died but came to maturity in the internet era, I would find Dean himself.

Freeman was credited as producer of Twardzik's recording session. In his liner notes about Twardzik's music. Freeman praises Twardzik's "really original concept," and tells how he came across him in Boston and was struck by his music, "fresh and very uninhibited, especially harmonically" Freeman said that the recordings by Twardzik came about because he phoned Richard Bock, the owner and producer of Pacific Jazz Records in Los Angeles, to tell him about this hot young player, and Bock gave him permission to record Twardzik for the label.

Freeman says the recording took place "late in 1954," but the exact date— 27 October 1954 —was only fixed 35 years later with the kind of sleuthing (as we will see later) that jazz discographers revel in. The recording was made in Rudy Van Gelder's parlor in Hackensack, New Jersey, the now-legendary recording studio that was just beginning to earn its reputation when Freeman took Twardzik and the other musicians there. Accompanying Twardzik were Carson Smith, Chet Baker's regular bassist, a Californian who was young, only 23, but already well known for playing in Mulligan's Quartet as well as Baker's, and a young, unknown Boston drummer, Peter Littman. (Complete details for these and all other recordings by Twardzik are listed in the discography at the end.)

Freeman's endorsement sounds like an understatement on the evidence of Twardzik's music. The original Pacific Jazz release included three standards, Bess You Is My Woman Now, 'Round About Midnight and I’ll Remember April, and three originals, Albuquerque Social Swim, Yellow Tango and, of course, A Crutch for the Crab.

The standards were fresher then than we can imagine today. Twardzik's recording of Bess You Is My Woman Now pre-dates by four full years the Porgy and Bess boom that came with its movie version in 1959 and brought with it jazz versions of its score by Miles Davis and Gil Evans, Mundell Lowe, Bill Potts, Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, and others. Gershwin's opera had been revived in 1952 for an international tour starring soprano Leontyne Price, but that was a more operatic version than the film would be, and it hardly caught the attention of jazz musicians, except for Twardzik. Although several George Gershwin songs ranked high in the standard jazz repertoire, the ones from Porgy and Bess were not common among them except for Summertime, and that by virtue not of the opera but of a seminal 1939 jazz recording by Sidney Bechet. When Twardzik recorded Bess You Is My Woman Now in 1954, it was completely unknown as a jazz vehicle.

More surprisingly, so was 'Round About Midnight. Thelonious Monk had made his original studio recording of his song in 1947 and, apart from an obscure solo recording he made of it in Paris in 1954, he did not record it again for a decade, until 1957. By then, it had been widely discovered as a jazz vehicle and Monk's interpretation of his own ballad was one of dozens, albeit primus inter pares. It was destined to become one of the two or three most recorded jazz compositions of all time. But Twardzik's pensive, almost introverted, take on it in 1954 caught it on its rise into the standard repertoire, and surely it was one that caught the ear of many other piano players.

Refreshing as the ballads were, Twardzik's original compositions were positively brilliant. Yellow Tango is a confection based on a mannerly Latin beat sustained by bass and drums while Twardzik teases the genre with high-note filigrees in the manner of then little-known Ahmad Jamal. Albuquerque Social Swim is tougher, its oblique melodies played staccato with sudden, unexpected stops. The improvised choruses burst into rock-steady 4/4 time, and after the stutters of the theme they come as a blessed relief. The device of inexplicable stops released into flowing melodies dominates Albuquerque Social Swim and animates it by creating knots of tension and unraveling them in flowing melody. In A Crutch for the Crab the stop-and-release is just one of several devices.

If Twardzik's side of the original LP had a flaw, it was in programming. A Crutch for the Crab and Albuquerque Social Swim were set together at the beginning, as tracks one and two, where their similarities somehow tempered their stunning differences.

A Crutch for the Crab, heard in its entirety, is a 3-minute symphony. Its structure is ambiguous: the opening exposition takes 24 bars but the final reprise takes only 20, having lost the first four bars. Those first four bars open the piece as a kind of cadence; they might be a prelude. The second four bars are syncopated, with the piano playing on one and three while the drums accent two and four. The effect is unforgettable, and sets up a repeated figure in the 17th and 23rd bars where the piano fills the second and fourth accents with its own out-of-tempo syncopations. The same figure comes back at points in the improvisation, and so do references to other melodic figures, always modulated in some way. The performance is rich with nuance. It ends too soon from one vantage point, but from another it entices you to go back to it time and again, as real art always does.

In my mind's eye, the syncopation caught the crab's motion of the title with unimaginable perfection, seemingly lurching, almost awkward, but at the same time fluid and swift. Try to catch it and it darts through your hands. It is edgy and slightly frightening, and just when you think you have it cornered, it is gone.

Twardzik offered an alternate explanation for the title in the liner notes. It came, he said, "from watching the hands of the Polish pianist, Jan Smeterlin, as they scurried crab-like into the keys." But that came too late for me. By then, I had my own objective correlative for the title embedded in the music, and it could not be shaken. Besides, there was good reason for not taking Twardzik literally. Another explanation that he put forward was obviously intended to give the finger to the unwary. Yellow Tango, he said, "was written as incidental music for a Shake-dance." Oh sure.

The recordings by Richard Twardzik on the Trio LP last 21 minutes and 44 seconds. (A mistake on the timings printed on the cover made it seem even less by more than a minute, but Yellow Tango is over five minutes, not 4:18.) Of the six tracks, the three ballads arid three originals, all but Yellow Tango are around the three-minute mark, the industry standard length in the era of brittle old 78 rpm shellac records and one that was imprinted so forcibly onto the psyches of musicians and producers that it was still the industry standard length in 1954, two years after jazz recordings invariably came out on unbreakable vinyl at 33 rpm.

Twardzik's Trio recording was easy to miss, even for vigilant jazz fans. It was, after all, just half a record by an unknown piano player with too many consonants in his name. His music held up to repeated listenings, in fact endlessly, but there was still too little of it. You never got tired of it. You never got enough of it.

From the start I knew there was more recorded music by Richard Twardzik, because Russ Freeman, in his liner note, wrote, "He recorded with Serge [Chaloff] and Charlie Mariano," who I knew about as two Boston jazz musicians with national reputations. Freeman added, "He also had an original, The Fable of Mabel, recorded by Serge for Storyville Records."

Those were tantalizing clues, and they cost me many frustrating hours. The man at the record shop could find no listings for either Chaloff or Mariano as leaders, and nobody I knew with a jazz collection had ever heard of these particular records. Even Joe Rico, the jazz jockey on Buffalo radio who seemed, in my teenage pantheon, to know everything worth knowing not only about jazz but about life, when I finally got a friend of a friend's friend to make an inquiry, just shrugged.

In 1956, channels of communication were sluggish. It was years before I realized that those other records Twardzik had played on had had mainly local distribution around Boston, and that the Mariano record was out of print even before I had started making inquiries about it. Probably the Chaloff record was too. In 1963, when I found a discography of Richard Twardzik's recordings in an English jazz magazine called Jazz Monthly (Morgan 1963), I finally learned more of the details—labels, titles, recording dates, personnel, instruments, compositions. It turned out there were two Mariano records with Twardzik on them, and not only did Chaloff record Twardzik's composition The Fable of Mabel, but Twardzik played on it too. I wrote the titles of all three records on the list of collectibles I carry in my wallet. Over the years, dozens of items on that list came and went, but those Boston LPs took on a frustrating permanence. As jazz buffs do, I watched for the records to come up in delete bins and record auctions. As my travels broadened, first in my college days when I found myself across the river from Detroit and then as my professional pursuits took me to conferences all over North America and eventually Europe, I spent hours pawing through dusty stacks of vinyl in far-flung cities on two continents.

To this day, I have never found those records, any of them, in the LP format. I finally got to hear them when the commercial boom brought on by the new CD technology at the tail-end of the 1980s led record companies to sweep out their vaults.

Freeman's liner note also offered the news that Twardzik's "professional career began at the age of fourteen," and that "he worked with Tommy Reynolds, Charlie Barnet, Lionel Hampton, Charlie Parker, Serge Chaloff, Charlie Mariano, Sonny Stitt and Chet Baker." With that background, somewhere there had to be live performances on acetate or tape reels, and, sure enough, a few years later a single track surfaced of Charlie Parker with a pick-up band in a Boston nightclub. Twardzik's piano was largely inaudible, but he was there, and the very existence of the performance held the promise of more, and over the decades more performances have slowly accumulated, never out of regard for Twardzik himself but usually triggered by lingering sentiments for the leaders of the bands he happened to be playing in—Parker, Chaloff, or Chet Baker. There is quite a bit more to come, I now know; and come it will if the growing sentiments for Twardzik, or at least curiosity about him, gather a little momentum.

With only the twenty-odd minutes of the trio recordings, it might have been impossible for me and for other jazz fans to sustain interest in the ill-fated piano player for the next half-century or so. But there was more. Pacific Jazz Records released a new recording with Twardzik on it the same year as the trio record, and the second recording was a small treasure of beguiling, open-minded, cool music that provided a whole new view of Twardzik's brilliance, and solidified his singular ability in case there were any doubts.

The records were made in a Paris studio by the Chet Baker Quartet in two sessions. The date of the second session was exactly one week before Twardzik died. The LP that was issued in North America was called Chet Baker in Europe (Pacific Jazz 1218), and it carried the grandiose subtitle A Jazz Tour of the NATO Countries. The tracks with Twardzik consisted of six pieces of extraordinary delicacy, almost like chamber music. Once again, they amounted to only half a record. They filled the second side, all 25 minutes of it. There were also five tracks on the first side, fillers in my mind, by Baker with European musicians recorded after Twardzik's death.

My copy of the Pacific Jazz LP has disappeared, as things tend to do in four decades or more. It was a rare one. It has never been reissued in the original format and I now realize that its rarity has nothing to do with the tastes of the company executives, about whom I harbored resentment for years, assuming they did not know they were hiding a masterpiece in their vaults. I now realize that the music never belonged to the American distributor, Pacific Jazz, but had to be leased by them from Barclay Records in Paris, the original producer and owner.

That explained why the LP came with strangely impersonal packaging, with a cover photo focusing on the tail of a Pan American airliner instead of the customary romantic pose of Chet Baker, who was not only the best-selling jazz musician of the moment but also a highly photogenic boyish hipster. I now know that Baker was still in Europe when Pacific Jazz leased this music and packaged it in an effort to keep alive the American fin interest in their hottest musician. The cover photo shows a young couple embracing in the shadow of the airliner, but it isn't even Baker, although the male figure obscured by the woman shows a Chet-like pompadour.

Baker's cover poses, except for this one, had a certain cachet. In fact, they have proven to have something close to the lasting power of art. Years later they were collected in coffee-table format in Young Chet (Claxton 1993). So at the time of its release, the cover of Chet Baker in Europe seemed a bit weird, with make-believe Chet hidden behind the young woman hugging him on his supposed return to American soil. Equally weird were all those strange foreign names of the musicians on the filler tracks. But come to think of it, they were no stranger than the names of what had been, until Twardzik's sudden death, Baker's working quartet.

Baker's young sidemen were so unknown beyond their own hometowns that advertising them by name would have stirred no expectations abroad and almost none at home.

What set Chet Baker in Europe apart was the music. The brilliance of the recordings Baker made in the Paris studio with Twardzik would turn out to be due in part to an invisible fifth member of the new quartet. Baker's group recorded nothing but original compositions in the Paris studio, a very unusual situation for Baker, whose reputation rested on ballads and jazz standards before this and, it would turn out, forever after. Of those original compositions, one was written by Twardzik, and the other five were written, according to the composer credit on the label, by "Bob Zieff." There were actually three more Zieff compositions recorded at these sessions but it would be several years before we knew that, except for the few fans who had access to the original French issue on Barclay Records.

Bob Zieff was another mystery man, arid the mystery was hardly solved by Baker's identification of him in the liner note (1956) as "the young Boston writer that Dick Twardzik, my pianist, brought to my attention." His music was mysterious too. There were no funny valentines, no lilting Mulliganesque ditties, no harmon-muted bleeding sentiments—in other words, none of the hallmarks on which Baker's popularity was based.

Baker was well aware of the differences. His liner note added, "The originality and freshness of Zieff’s line and chordal structure is going to please a lot of people, I think—at least musicians and other serious listeners." That statement seemed like an attempt at preparing Baker's regular fans for the kind of departure that Zieff's music represented. It was, above all, cerebral music. (You can dance to it, in the bop mockery of the hopelessly passe Swing Era, but only if you work out your steps very very carefully.) Each composition is an intricate little gem. Each note seems deliberately laid into its position in the composition. Each composition sounds more difficult to play than the last one, no matter what order you listen to them in, but the rewards of mastering their difficulties are obvious in the subtle swing and the melodic surprises.

Playing Zieff's compositions obviously requires discipline and control, the aspect that gives the pieces the chamber-like feel, but that should not imply that the quartet's performances of these pieces are subdued or in any way timid. Baker and Twardzik, the principal soloists, range freely through key changes and tempo shifts with what seems uncanny ease.

Baker was praised from the beginning of his career for his spontaneity He had a knack for inventing attractive phrases on the spot. In jazz, spontaneous invention is essential, and most jazz musicians rely on rote devices to relieve them of the burden of constant invention. Baker needed fewer of them than many others. When it came to spinning lines of disarmingly simple and lyrically attractive variations, he had few peers. All that was widely recognized, but in his career he received scant notice for the beauty of his tone or the fullness of his range on the trumpet, perhaps because he displayed them so infrequently, sticking almost exclusively to the middle register. There was no way he could do that in Zieff's music. It required him to move briskly over the scale, especially on the tunes called Rondette and Re-Search, and to play rapid exercise-like sequences in Mid-Forte and Piece Caprice, sometimes requiring octave leaps. Baker carried it off with total control. He made it sound easy. His technical skills were seldom so evident, before or after. And through it all his lyrical bent, the heart of his talent, never flagged for a second.

Zieff's music sets Baker into brooding moods on Sad Walk, Just Duo and Brash, and winsome melodies with minor drags on Rondette, Sad Walk and Pomp. The ingenious harmonies draw out Baker's sensitivity, seeming to extract it without pretense or posing as he traces fresh melodic lines over the layered harmonies. These recordings may represent the apogee of Baker's talents as a pure musician.

The only other composition recorded by the young quartet in Paris was composed by Twardzik himself, called The Girl from Greenland. If I had never heard A Crutch for the Crab and Albuquerque Social Swim (and, eventually, The Fable of Mabel, Twardzik's other remarkable composition) it would be tempting to credit Zieff with it rather than Twardzik. The kindred feelings in the music of Twardzik and Zieff were no coincidence, I would discover 20 years later, when I accidentally sat down beside Robert L. Zieff at a conference in Oldham, Lancashire, on the music of Duke Ellington.

Twardzik's Girl from Greenland is a ballad (A A'B A') built on a lilting rhythm. Baker's statement of the ascending scale of the melody is countered by Twardzik's trills at the top of the piano. When Baker and Twardzik break free of the melody in their solo choruses, they sustain the contrasting moods of their melodic motifs. Baker emphasizes the minor mood, brooding over it quietly. Twardzik mocks the mood, teasing it by spreading four bars of melody over eight and inverting phrases. Baker is involved and Twardzik is aloof. Baker is romantic and Twardzik is cynical. It is an ingenious arrangement, perfectly executed. Both musicians play their parts brilliantly, but it is the interaction of the parts that raises the music to a higher level.

And when the last note of The Girl from Greenland faded, there would be no more music from Richard Twardzik. Or so it seemed. As the man with the Coppertone voice on the Pacific Jazz sampler said, "Twardzik died m Paris a few months later, depriving us all of the great ability that was his." Now, to add to that, we had the eyewitness testimony of Chet Baker. In his liner notes for Chet Baker in Europe (1956),Baker included this diary entry in his account of his tour of the NATO countries (with the elisions in the original):

‘OCT. 21 —Today here in Paris, alone in his room, Dick Twardzik died suddenly at 24, cheating all of us of his very real genius.... His conception was so completely original; the way he played with meter was uncanny, turning it around and around, never goofing, always there. He leaves behind far too fewer examples of the genius he possessed. My association with him has enriched my life greatly and I'm thankful for that. We are all deeply saddened.... a wonderful person and a brilliant musician.’

There did indeed seem to be too few examples of his genius. The Baker quartet tracks from Paris, on the Pacific Jazz release, amounted to 24 minutes and 29 seconds. Add to that the 21:44 of the piano trio recordings and you get the grand total: 46 minutes and 13 seconds. Enough to establish a reputation, but hardly enough to sustain it, by any reasonable standards. There would be, miraculously, another 15 minutes of Bob Zieff's music by Baker and Twardzik in Paris, and when it is added on it brings the grand total to 61:12, one hour and one minute and a few seconds. Eventually more music by Twardzik would be found, a fair amount really, considering the brevity of his life, some of it excellent, but the very best of it is here, in the hour from these two studio recordings.

Over the years, I have returned to this music often, and always with the fear that I would find its pleasures gone flat. As I left behind the horn-rimmed teenager I had been when I first heard Richard Twardzik playing A Crutch for the Crab, I feared that I might find out that my feelings for it were based on nothing more than adolescent brooding for a doomed young artist. I was afraid something inside me would say, Snap out of it, for god's sake.

It hasn't happened.”

For the following video tribute to Richard Twardzik, I selected his interpretation of Bess, You Is My Woman Now because as Ted Gioia explains:

His interpretation of "Bess, You Is My Woman" is a case study in the jazz-ballad-as-art-song. This latter performance is worth hearing for the pedaling alone—and how often can you say that about a jazz track? But even more striking is his splashes of sound color—the term "voicings" hardly does justice to what Twardzik