Listening to Hampton Hawes in a San Francisco club during the last year of his life. I heard a fellow pianist say. 'There's smoke coming off the hammers."
He was a sweet and modest man who played in a fiery way. On medium and up-tempo tunes he could scorch the keyboard and in the next breath render a ballad with romantic tenderness and an incomparable lilt Of his ballads, he liked to say. "I want to make music so beautiful it's like hugging in the forest at night."
He was a deeply honest and daring player who took inordinate risks in his life and his music; there was in his playing an uncanny urgency, a sense of continually working the edge. "When you play." he said, "you got to go all the way to the wall and never look back." At the same time he was a true melodist, a lover of the lyrical line. On the standards "Sunny" and “Fly Me to the Moon." backed by the superb San Francisco bassist Mario Suraci. he returns from crackling high-voltage excursions, fashioned by the crisp attack and articulation which are his signature, to pay homage to the melody, infusing it with a sweetness and melancholy in stunning contrast to the explosions that have preceded.
The melancholy is a distinguishing trait. The long solo original. "The Status of Maceo." evokes an Andalusian sorrow and fervor, the resilient structure capriciously shot through with Gatling-gun bursts of funk and bop. The stately recurring major theme, borne on a Spanish flavored cadence, has about it the mood of a matador stepping into the ring on a doomed, too-bright day. (The composition's title intrigues. The version I’m familiar with involves one brother phoning another to ask, "What's the status of Maceo?" The other replies. “Man. he's right here sitting on the sofa waiting for you." Let the reader bring to this whatever interpretation he wishes.)
Hawes was self-taught and earned his diploma "in the University of the Streets of Los Angeles and New York, listening, picking up. hanging out. nervous, getting busted." Of those formative years, he recalled, "We were pilgrims, the freaks of the Forties and Fifties; our rebellion was a lonely thing. The kids rebelling with their music today got a whole Woodstock nation behind them."
His forebears were Charlie Parker and Bud Powell. But when asked the inevitable question all artists of stature get asked—What were your roots, who inspired you?—he'd answer. "It's not important, everybody came out of somebody else. What's important is that the truth goes marching on."
DON ASHER
Like many of his brothers he went out too early; six years ago at age 48. The music exacts a terrible physical toll from its practitioners for reasons that would keep a task force of sociologists and psychologists busy for the rest of their days. But he went out blazing to the end. with a wild head of hair, an immense heart, and a pair of dazzling hands. And the truth goes marching on.
__________________ О нас думают плохо лишь те, кто хуже нас. А те, кто лучше нас, им просто не до нас. --Омар Хайям
Обновления по запросу — на Я.Ди. «Мэйл-облако» для тех, кто помогает нашему интернет-проекту, и для тех, кто хотел бы это делать, но пока не знает, как.
Помогая форуму ВТО, вы прежде всего помогаете себе! А не делаете что-то абстрактное для «других», совершенно незнакомых и безразличных вам людей.
[24/192] Hampton Hawes - Recorded Live At The Great American Music Hall - 1983 [lossless]
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