Sir Roland Hanna Colors From A Giants Kit Available Today

Sir Roland Hanna's "Colors From A Giants Kit" IPOCD 1020 sets street date of August 9, 2011

The Hickory House was the last of the legendary jazz clubs that lined 52nd Street in the two decades following World War II. In the mid-1960s the bandstand, which rose above the large, horseshoe-shaped bar that dominated the club, was occupied as often as not by a trio comprised of Billy Taylor, Chris White and Grady Tate. The club was still patronized by some of the musicians who immortalized the street in the previous decades, and for the odd 15-year-old whose interests ran more to Dameron than trigonometry, it was a place to hang out and an opportunity to meet (or at least interrupt the otherwise tranquil dinners being enjoyed by) Ella Fitzgerald, Milt Jackson and others who dropped by.

The trio typically closed its sets with a rollicking version of There Will Never Be Another You or How High The Moon that included an expansive, unaccompanied, two-fisted, polyphonic piano solo by Dr. Taylor. Carding was not a problem at the Hickory House and, carried away by such a tour de force performance, it would not be surprising had any of those odd 15 year olds who happened to be in the club decided to become a jazz pianist. Fortunately, Chris White was there to commemorate the event and to recommend his colleague in the Dizzy Gillespie Quintet, Kenny Barron, as someone who could show me the way.

Kenny was doing some teaching out of a small studio on the West Side. Relying on chops honed by a few years of obligatory grade school piano lessons and confident in my innate musicianship and good taste, I shared with Kenny a pastiche of bebop, funk and random atonality that had him transfixed for about ten minutes, and left him nearly speechless. As much enthusiasm as he obviously had for taking on a new protégé, he felt (upon recovering his power of speech) that his commitment to an upcoming Gillespie tour (which curiously both he and Chris White had neglected to mention before) would make it impossible to devote the time required to nurture such an unusual talent. He gave me Roland Hanna's number.

"I always learn something new when I play with Roland," said Benny Carter, quoted in the liner notes to his "In the Mood for Swing" album with Roland and Dizzy Gillespie on the Musicmasters label. Coming from Carter, an iconic figure for over seven decades who essentially created the art of jazz band writing, this is not a trivial statement.

Teaching played a large part in Roland's life, and he held firm opinions on music and many other subjects. When I first met him, he had a studio on West 73rd Street, where Broadway runs into Amsterdam Avenue, adjacent to the tiny trapezoid of grass that now appears on maps quaintly as "Verdi Square" but at the time was known more colorfully as "Needle Park." I used to drop in whenever I was in town visiting from college and grad school. Roland had an ancient Steinway that he tuned and maintained on his own. I once commented that it seemed to me the bass was disproportionately voiced. Roland, as always justifiably proud of his own work and quick to the defense of others, responded: "by the time you get to be eighty years old, your bass will be disproportionate too."

In the mid-late ‘60s Roland had two regular gigs that would be almost impossible to top - he held down the piano chair in the Thad Jones - Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra and was a regular accompanist for Coleman Hawkins. The Band was in its prime, with Thad producing fresh and innovative charts for a roster of players that was and still is beyond comparison. This was during one of the recurrent nosedives in the economics of the jazz world, of which there were nonetheless a few benefits. Players such as Joe Henderson, Pepper Adams, Eddie Daniels, Jimmy Owens, Bob Brookmeyer, Jimmy Knepper etc. were available to be part of a regularly performing band. On the other hand, people didn't always get paid with regularity. I once spent some time with Mel Lewis trying to mediate a disagreement with Roland, at a time when the Band's future was cloudy. Mel told me that, no matter what, he would always take great pride in having been part (along with Roland and Richard Davis) of the "best rhythm section in history."

The Jones-Lewis studio recordings don't come close to capturing Roland's importance in the Band. More often than not, arrangements were framed out with Roland's extended introductions and solos, and there were always uncanny exchanges between Roland and other featured soloists. Then, there were the moments when all the other players would silently descend from the bandstand in the middle of a set, leaving Roland alone at the piano for seven or eight minutes of an unaccompanied improvisation (typically as an introduction to "A Child Is Born") that embraced just about every musical style and technique imaginable. As Roland neared conclusion, the others would file back to their chairs and settle in for the B-flat seventh chord that marked the transition to Thad's arrangement. It was very cool.

Like Thad Jones, Coleman Hawkins had exemplary taste in pianists. His sessions featured some of the earliest recorded performances of Art Tatum, Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk. Starting with Hank Jones in the 1940s, playing for "Bean" became a rite of passage for the members of the "Detroit Piano School," including those who eventually followed Hank to New York: Tommy Flanagan, Barry Harris and Roland Hanna. They would often hang out at Bean's Upper West Side apartment; playing the piano for each other, listening to records and talking. Roland let me tag along to a couple of these get-togethers, where the subjects of conversation, as I recall, ranged from dining on pigs feet to the defining qualities of fine classical ‘cello playing (I don't recall the segue between those two subjects; perhaps the correct angle of the wrist). Then, in 1967, a great aunt died and left me $5,000. I was in college, and the only thing I spent money on was records, so I figured if this legacy were going to be converted to vinyl in any event, I might as well bypass the middlemen and do it in style. Roland had not at that time recorded his own compositions (which eventually grew to several hundred works and included, in addition to jazz pieces, works for violin, ‘cello, chamber ensemble and orchestra), so we organized a couple of sessions at the old A&R Studios in the West ‘40s - one session with talent drawn from the Band: Thad, Mel, Eddie Daniels and Richard Davis; another with Coleman Hawkins.

$5,000 obviously went a lot farther in those days, but not quite far enough, and mistakes were made. In the interest of economy, I booked the cheapest studio time available - with a 10:00AM start time - figuring that this wouldn't conflict with the musicians' other engagements and would enable them to focus their full concentration on the music, uncluttered by the intrusion of other concerns of the day. This must have been a particular novelty for Hawkins, whom I later came to realize had probably never before been awake at 10:00AM - or, if he had, it was most certainly at the end rather than the beginning of his day, when his capillaries were transporting more Hennessy than hemoglobin. I remember Roland and Eddie Locke carrying Bean into the studio and positioning him in front of the music stand. This held a composition that Roland had written for him called "After Paris," an evocative impressionist piece formally notated with a maze of accidentals and double sharps. I still can't imagine what the double sharps looked like to Hawkins under those circumstances, and in truth we couldn't salvage much from the session, except an indelible memory of the majestically beautiful tone he still produced.

Lacking further windfalls, it took another 35 years before the IPO label came into existence, initially with a solo album of Roland called "Everything I Love" and a set of Arlen tunes with Roland and Carrie Smith, "I've Got a Right to Sing the Blues." In between, anticipating at one time or another the start of the label, we recorded on a couple of occasions that produced the material included in this release. It took longer than expected for IPO to be up and running, and then it took a while to go through the old master tapes, and then Roland wasn't around to approve the final selections and order of the pieces, and ...well, the point is that, notwithstanding the lateness of their release, these performances are masterful, top-of-the-barrel, premier cru Roland Hanna, maybe even the best he ever recorded.

When Roland died in 2003, Stuart Isacoff, editor of Piano Today and an old student of Roland's, wrote an article in his magazine reflecting on their long friendship. "I wanted to make him proud, and still do," Stuart wrote. Learning from Roland Hanna, being inspired by him, and having him as a close friend for all those years was an experience for which I'm immensely grateful. And, I'm sure he would be proud of this recording.