Black Forest

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 in 1964. All of this is detailed in Hawes's compelling autobiography 'Raise Up Off Me'. After release Hawes continued his playing career until his early death in 1977.

Hawes piano style developed over time, and in the 60's and 70's he began to take on board some of the innovations of the new generation of pianists including figures like McCoy Tyner and Herbie Hancock. His solo on Black Forest marks something of a transition phase for Hawes, with his playing still rooted in bebop but beginning to incorporate some of the influences he was absorbing from the music around him. Below is the track, followed by my transcription of the solo, followed by a short analysis.

Two of the stylistic innovations introduced into jazz piano in the 1960's were increased use of pentatonic scales and the employment of quartal harmony and 4th intervals in improvising. Both of these were to some extent responses by musicians to the modal jazz style which became prominent from the late 50's through the 60's. Perhaps most important of the new generation of pianists was McCoy Tyner. Tyner started off as a fairly conventional (if brilliant) bebop inspired pianist but from the early sixties onwards, and especially during his time with the John Coltrane Quartet he developed an original style which made extensive use of pentatonic scales and chords built in 4ths rather than the more traditional 3rds. Other important figures in this development were Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea, both of whom were experimenting in similar ways.

Most pianists in the sixties were influenced to some extent by the discoveries of these players and Hawes was no exception. In fact his style continued to evolve throughout the late sixties and early seventies, and he even experimented with some 'free jazz' forms later on.

In this solo his playing is still heavily influenced by his bebop roots, but there are passages where you can hear him incorporating some of these new ideas into his playing. Perhaps the most obvious example of this is the section starting at bar 37. At the beginning of this chorus Hawes plays an ascending phrase using the Ab or (Fm) pentatonic scale ( Ab Bb C Eb F) and he supports this with quartal voicings in his left hand drawn from the F mixolydian mode, giving this section a strong 'modal' flavour. A similar passage occurs beginning at the end of bar 60, here though Hawes is drawing more on the Eb pentatonic scale (Eb F G Bb C) and over the Bb7 chord he switches to using the Ab pentatonic sclae again. This section shows to me that Hawes is thinking in a more 'modal' way here, (although it should be said that the 'blues scale' itself is a type of mode, so this way of thinking about musical material was not particularly unusual).

It seems to me there are often two general types of artist. One type fairly early on discovers a characteristic style which they then spend the rest of their life exporing and refining, the other type is always absorbing new influences and styles and constantly reinventing themselves. An example of the first type in jazz might be someone like Charlie Parker whose style didn't really change or develop in the ten years from his emergence in the early fourties to his death in the 1955. A good example of the second type is someone like John Coltrane who's playing style in 1955 was very different to his style in 1965. These two examples are quite extreme and most artists fall on a spectrum somewhere between these. Hampton Hawes was definitely nearer to the second type - an artist who continually absorbed new ideas and influences into his playing.