Storyville to Reissue Solo Tommy Flanagan

courtesy of Naxos of America

It would not be an exaggeration to describe Tommy Flanagan as the (italics intended) jazz pianist of the second half of the twentieth century. His Wikipedia discography page summarizes as follows:

His appearances on record date from 1956 to 2001 and include more than 30 albums under his own name and more than 200 as a sideman.

That page also has the following cautionary remark as an introduction:

This is an incomplete list, which will never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness as it excludes bootlegs, mix tapes and other minor records by independent labels.

His sideman credentials include working with Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane (through whom I first became aware of him), and an extended gig as Ella Fitzgerald’s full-time accompanist.

It that context it is worth noting that tomorrow sales will begin for the reissue of Flanagan’s Solo Piano on the Danish Storyville label. For those that want to jump the gun, Amazon.com is processing pre-orders (as they usually do). This album was recorded in Zürich, Switzerland, on February 25, 1974; but it was not initially released (by Storyville) until 2005.

The breaks separating the tracks are so short that it would not surprise me to learn that the Zürich engineers simply started a tape recorder and let it run until Flanagan stopped. On a CD there was no problem with just marking where each new track began without adding any additional pause. There is a similar flow on the seventh track, labeled Strayhorn Medley, which links Billy Strayhorn’s “Passion Flower,” “Chelsea Bridge,” “Pretty Girl,” and “U.M.M.G.” (Upper Manhattan Medical Group) into a smooth flow without interruption.

I was fortunate enough to be able to listen to Flanagan in performance at Birdland when a business trip took me to Manhattan. This probably took place in the late Nineties, when he was leading a trio with Peter Washington on bass and Lewis Nash on drums, both decidedly younger than Flanagan (and myself, for that matter) and clearly enjoying jamming with the master. To be fair, however, at that time I was still ramping up my skills as a jazz listener. As a result, what I remember most from that performance was the extended talk Flanagan gave, during which he confessed that he was talking at length while trying to remember the next tune the trio was going to play!

What strikes me most on this solo album is the clarity Flanagan brings to each of the tunes. The more “cerebral” jazz artists often begin an account of a tune with a “variation” resulting from thick embellishment of the melody itself and/or the rhythm of that melody. Flanagan consistently begins by honoring his “source material,” after which he unfolds no shortage of embellishments involving the tune, its rhythms, and the underlying chord progressions. This was the “bread-and-butter” approach to jazz improvisation during the second half of the twentieth century; and, as such, the album is not only an account of bravura solo piano work but also a first-rate introduction to cultivating the skills of listening to jazz.