The Hampton Hawes album Spanish Steps was recorded in 1968 with Jimmy Woode on bass and Art Taylor on drums. Only a few years earlier Hawes had been an inmate of a federal prison in Fort Worth Texas where he had been sentenced to ten years imprisonment for possession of heroin. Whilst in the prison hospital he saw President Kennedy's inaugral speech on television, thought he looked liked a decent person and petitioned for Executive Clemency. He was successful and was released

On the evening of November 12th 1956 Hampton Hawes went into the studios of Contemporary Records in Los Angeles along with his regular bass player Red Mitchell, guitarist Jim Hall and drummer Eldridge Freeman. For the next few hours they recorded tunes almost as if they were playing a gig, with no retakes. The session ended sometime in the early hours of November 13th and had produced enough music for three albums. They were released over subsequent years as All Night Session

Back in the dark days of the pandemic, like many others I found myself with more time on my hands than usual, so decided to do some transcribing. I'd transcribed a lot when I was a student both as a way of working on my aural skills and also developing my vocabulary, and although I often still work out individual phrases from solos, I hadn't transcribed complete solos for quite a while. For the 2-5-1 jazz podcast I present with Simon Whiteside we had planned to do an in-depth