EARLY YEARS

Hampton Hawes cut his musical teeth in the bebop stampede on the West Coast, learning his craft in the clubs around LA's Central Avenue, even playing alongside Parker in a group led by Howard McGhee in 1947. Full of promise and aspiration he was a jewel in the Californian crown, but commercially the 1950s were to herald a false dawn for Hawes. Wider recognition came only in 1955, held back partly through his own reluctance to move centre-stage and his disastrous call-up for national service. A visit to Minton's Playhouse in New York during 1947 had left Hawes feeling musically inhibited, and concluding that he "wasn't quite ready… no point in selling tickets if you don't have a show," he joined Wild Bill Moore's band for a spell on the road. Returning to Los Angeles he plied his trade along Central Avenue, and with Wardell Gray, Dexter Gordon, Teddy Edwards and others forged an impressive local reputation. Lester Koenig resolved to sign Hawes to Contemporary Records after hearing him first in 1953 in a group led by Shorty Rogers, and, following his tempestuous spell in the army, a series of six albums recorded in 1955 and 1956 formed the backbone of critical acclaim that put him on the national jazz map. He scored highly in successive magazine polls until 1958, but behind the scenes his personal life was in free fall as drug use cast its shadow, and a narcotics charge in November 1958 - albeit unjust in this instance - took Hawes to prison. Kennedy granted him a presidential pardon that released him mid-sentence in 1963, but his golden years had passed. He remained on the West Coast, clean and, if not financially replete, in occasional demand locally and active at a time when piano jazz was in its heyday. There were opportunities to record, often more readily forthcoming on his occasional forays abroad, but few highlights: the dictates of fashion and his often inappropriate attempts to track them offer feeble documentation to his abilities. Hawes died of a stroke in 1977 aged just forty-eight.

Hawes was born in November 1928 with six fingers on each hand, corrected surgically after three days. Not all aspects of his life could be so conveniently clipped and his childhood reveals traits that were to surface throughout his career: scepticism, keen social observation and an unforgiving individualism, euphemisms perhaps for disdain, a suppressed rancour and downright disobedience. His father was a Presbyterian minister in the infamous Watts quarter of Los Angeles. The ghetto culture Hampton describes in his book seems to have framed the young man's view of his father's church, whose members were "too scared to move past the middle of the bus." The church as social narcotic offered safety from the real world but at a price: "I've never seen so many people… messed up, and disillusioned…," he wrote, and if Hampton was at odds with his father's inward vision of the world, so too his father was unable to bless the music and lifestyle that his son was to adopt. For the Reverend Hawes, jazz was an exotic dish served in areas of ill repute; for Hampton, the jungle music sounded a clarion call to freedom and his ambitions and endeavours would go hand in hand with this "heavy sin." Hawes cites George Washington Carver rather than Duke Ellington as a hero best served to represent social aspiration for the black community centred on 35th and Budlong, his father's parish. The estimable George Washington Carver (who eschewed his own musical development to pursue agriculture and rural economic improvement) and the elegant Ellington (who eschewed his formal music lessons to sneak in to Frank Holliday's poolroom) are dichotomous heroes and represent the polar positions of father and son. It would appear to have been an uneasy filial relationship with little emotional engagement and no musical encouragement. "I think I must have first turned to the piano out of boredom and loneliness," he wrote. Certainly it seems odd that whilst his elder sister was tutored seriously in the classics, Hawes, who as an infant sitting on his pianist mother's lap had shown a precocious ear for music, never had formal music lessons. He was the youngest child (of seven) and of course the money may have run out; but even in later years his parents neither heard him play nor, so Hawes claimed, listened to his recordings - although they did frame his album covers.

THE INFLUENCE OF BIRD

It was Earl Hines' rendition of Boogie-Woogie on St. Louis Blues that Hampton encountered first on his road to Damascus, and his youthful energies were to be devoted in turn to the boogie-woogie of Albert Ammons, the stride patterns of James P. Johnson, and the sophisticated swing of Nat Cole and Teddy Wilson; Waller and Tatum, too, featured in his listening. Having courted his mother's sympathy, Hampton was excused church attendance when nine and chose instead to indulge in clandestine (and forbidden) boogie-woogie recitals at home. With his school friend Sonny Criss, Hawes formed a band when in his teens and started to play professionally with saxophonist Jay McNeely. He mixed with those who comprised a desultory music class around Lloyd Reese, a former member of Les Hite's Orchestra whose rehearsal band schooled many a West Coast musician from Buddy Collette to Charles Mingus. McNeely spoke of Hawes at that time as sounding like Nat Cole, but his musical direction changed when Eric Dolphy, another childhood friend, introduced him to the Savoy recordings of Gillespie and Parker, whom he heard in person at Billy Berg's Hollywood club in 1945. Hawes writes of the cataclysmic effect that Parker in particular was to have on musicians who heard him and how fantastically novel he would have sounded at that time: his playing could be "dissonant and harsh on the ears if you weren't accustomed to the sound." Some were unable to comprehend the music and shied away; others, like McNeely, may have thought this was a musical fad to be exploited but soon fell by the wayside, unable to come to terms with bebop's inherent complexity. But it was more than simply chasing Parker's musical logic, however compelling that may have been; after all Tatum was exploring the chord structures that grounded bebop a full decade before Parker and Gillespie recorded first together. And it was more than a reaction to the overblown and restrictive big band arrangements, which would have meant little to young and inexperienced musical hopefuls. This was a primitive response, artistically, socially, and above all emotionally. To Hawes, Parker's music spoke volumes; if flattened fifths and chord extensions were the dialect, its vocabulary was ambition, the same ambition that drove dissatisfied members of the regimented swing bands to embrace this new musical etiquette. Unlike his parents, who "didn't understand where I was coming from," Hampton was looking to expand his horizon, to make his place in the world at large and not retreat inwards in to the protective blanket that, for his family at least, the Church provided. Hawes termed it "rebellion," which he equated with survival; the alternative was to "get your hair gassed, brothers, put on your bow ties and a funny smile and play pretty for the rich white folks." Hawes' self-portrait can at times be awkward at the edges and too self-consciously aware of belonging to a downtrodden minority, however true; so too the self-indulgent claim of belonging to the first generation of rebellion grates as false and familiar. But Hawes is able to articulate what many would have felt, that Parker had shown them the way to the Promised Land, that, in short, he had "fucked up all our minds."

BEBOP AND THE PIANO

Hawes spoke often of the impact Parker had on his playing: he "influenced me more than anybody, even more than piano players." Parker's unfettered imagination, drive, invention, technical brilliance and mythic God-like status engulfed those around him and were not restricted to fellow saxophonists: he came not only to dominate the musical world he inhabited but also to set its parameters. The best players, of course, found their own voice; but one of the interesting features of the 1940s jazz revolution was the manner in which pianists responded to the challenges of the bebop style. It was as if Parker had disrupted the natural evolution of jazz piano and encouraged a performance that was, in fact, against the natural grain of some of its practitioners, even, indeed, against the grain of the instrument itself. Central to this was the spell cast on contemporary and successive pianists by Bud Powell, and it may be that many found it easier to assimilate his stylistic blueprint than follow their own intuition. Elmo Hope, Walter Bishop and Duke Jordan, pianists who helped to lay bebop's bedrock, all came from New York and shared similar cultural and musical influences (so too Monk, although his take on bebop was more individual); they shared, too, an authentic and distinctive approach to the piano, with Powell as their high priest. Not so Hawes, whose early years in California spent apart from the bebop hub that was New York proffered a sound schooling and an independent ear: the language of Parker and Powell had been grafted on to his own rootstock but had not swamped it.

As bebop and its vocabulary expanded, and genuine two-handed pianists like Bill Evans and Wynton Kelly came to the fore, many of bop's core practitioners who were able once to find work and an audience on 52nd Street in the late-1940s found their limited piano language exposed. Those who were able enough returned to a more natural and graceful keyboard language. The elegant Al Haig possessed a tidy and urbane style, and the recordings he made in the 1950s suggest that, despite his success with Parker in the previous decade, he had aped Powell for a brief period rather than use his example as a springboard for his own development: he was never a cloned bop disciple and his playing came to resemble an adventurous swing style coloured by bop attitude. The enigmatic Dodo Marmarosa also was too romantic and episodic to have drunk from the same well as Powell and was closer in his musical stance to Teddy Wilson. Both Haig and Marmarosa, highly skilled pianists both, were never at total ease within the bop idiom, I would suggest. In contrast, Hawes never felt constrained by its limits and its language was never foreign to him; he was a genuine convert, but if Parker's gospel was its Authorized Version, Hawes possessed the scope and brio to craft his own revision.

THE RECORDINGS

The first recordings Hawes made for Lester Koenig announced a pianist firmly entrenched in the bebop idiom but with much to add to its execution. His forceful two-handed style - crisp right hand lines delivered with deft and well-timed execution, left-hand chords and offbeat accents driving the music forward - kicked like a stallion. Variation and subtlety offered relief to his improvisation: block chord passages, occasional hints of a Garneresque left-hand (although without Garner's effortless and conflicting right-hand rubato), right-hand octaves highlighting focal points or notes, phrases closed with ascending thirds (one of his trademarks), were some of the stylish tics that comprised his varied arsenal. Two trio albums were recorded in 1955 with bassist Red Mitchell (with whom Hawes was to record sporadically throughout his career) and drummer Chuck Thompson: Hampton Hawes Trio Volume One and Trio Volume Two. Both contain typical Hawes repertoire: standard tunes, bop classics and a smattering of blues, mostly self-composed. Clearly Hawes is indebted to Bud Powell, and his long, sweeping solo lines that cut across bar lines and phrases are vintage bebop piano. Added to Powell's dynamism is a more lyrical, even soulful, expression, and it easy to see why critic John Mehegan (incorrectly) classed Hawes as belonging to the "rhythmic (funky) school of jazz piano" derived from Powell and expressed best at the time by Horace Silver [Down Beat, July 1957]. Imagination and care is given to head arrangements, with use of dynamics, counterpoint and invention, and Hawes' telling ability to compile an album and arrange his material with cohesive solidity is evident. Too many albums at this time were patched together seemingly in haphazard fashion, the result of hurried or ill-conceived overnight sessions with a "you hum it, I'll play it" attitude. Hawes clearly had an ear for posterity and, as Koenig was well known for giving his artists a free hand, must have possessed for himself an intuitive grasp in crafting rounded architectural statements. Compared to his playing from earlier years - material gleaned from live air shots or club dates made available more recently - his style had developed and grown more confident, but he remained faithful to the original bop gospel and impervious to the more refined strands of West Coast piano jazz as represented by Brubeck or the classically briefed Andre Previn (who in his own bestselling albums of the mid- and late-1950s came to sound remarkably like Hawes), or even the burgeoning hard bop sound. After all Hawes had been cocooned for the previous two years in Japan - mostly in a military stockade - and had been sheltered from the more current sounds disseminating from the United States.

Recording dates with Lennie Niehaus, Bill Perkins and Barney Kessel followed, and the next year Hawes recorded Everybody Likes Hampton Hawes and, in one long evening in November, the three albums that comprised The All Night Sessions with Mitchell, Bruz Freeman and guitarist Jim Hall. Many consider this trilogy to be Hampton's finest discographic hour and Koenig, anxious to highlight the session's spontaneous feel, pressed the albums in recorded order.