The Solo Performances of Hasaan Ibn Ali Expand the History of Jazz – The New Yorker

The pianist and composer Hasaan Ibn Ali is an unduly elusive presence in the history of jazz. His first album, with a trio, was released in 1965; his second, with a quartet, recorded later that year, wasnt released until early in 2021. Both showed him to be a distinctive and original musician, but what they offered, above all, was the sound of possibility, of unfulfilled potential. The new release of Hasaans Retrospect In Retirement Of Delay: The Solo Recordings (Omnivore Recordings), which features him in privately recorded performances from 1962 to 1965, reveals his profundity, his overwhelming power, his mighty virtuosity. It does more than put him on the map of jazz historyit expands the map to include the vast expanse of his musical achievement.

Hasaan was something of a legend in Philadelphia, but played little elsewhere. His solo recordings were made by David Shrier and Alan Sukoenig, two jazz-aficionado undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania whod befriended him. He visited them at the university and allowed them to record him playing pianos in dormitory and student-union lounges as well as in Shriers apartment and in a New York apartment to which Hasaan summoned Sukoenig and his tape recorder. Those circumstances sound ripe for music of modest intimacy; instead, what Hasaan played is torrential. (The sense of short-term urgency is reflected in the amazing fact that nine of the tracks, including the four longest of them, were all recorded on the same dayOctober 25, 1964at three different venues.) The albums twenty piano performances emerge like contents under pressure, like furies of musical imagination that had been building up within Hasaan for a long time, as if he knew that he was playing on the biggest stage of all: the stage of eternity.

Born in Philadelphia in 1931, and performing originally as William Langford, a modified version of his given name (his parents spelled the family name Lankford), Hasaan gigged there in the late forties and early fifties with the citys rising young musicians, including John Coltrane, four years his senior, who is said to have studied with Hasaan. (Later, Hasaan reportedly claimed that Coltrane had stolen his ideas.) In other words, as a teen-ager Hasaan was already an artist among artists and, in his early twenties, was a recognized innovator. His approach to music was so unusual that, despite the place of honor he won among the citys greats (including Philly Joe Jones, Benny Golson, Jimmy Heath, and the brothers Bill and Kenny Barron), his professional and commercial opportunities were limited. Hasaan lived his entire life in Philadelphia and did much of his performing, according to the saxophonist Odean Pope, in private: At night, after he got dressed, there were three or four houses he would visit, where they had pianos. The people would serve him coffee or cake, give him a few cigarettes or maybe a couple of dollars from time to time. In the early sixties, at a time when his musical peers were already famous and already amply recorded, Hasaanin his thirtieswas being recorded by students with amateur equipment. (His first album, The Max Roach Trio Featuring the Legendary Hasaan, was recorded in December, 1964; the long-unissued quartet album, Metaphysics, is also an Omnivore Recordings release.)

Whats most miraculous about the preservation of Hasaans solo performances and the survival of the tapes is the artistry displayed in the performances themselves. The astonishments of the new album begin with the very first notes of the first track, the standard Falling In Love With Love, which Hasaan begins with a jaunty, tango-like bass riff that recurs throughout like a one-hand big-band accompaniment. That percussive figure maintains a rhythmic foundation that prompts Hasaan to cut loose with crystalline, florid barrages of high notes in shifting forms and meters that cascade and swirl and swarm in ever more daringly chromatic and far-reaching harmonies. Hasaan had worked out, a decade earlier, a so-called system by which hed use substitute chords that both vastly varied yet recognizably retained the compositions original framework. This is what Coltrane is believed to have derived from their time together, and the wild profusion of notes unleashed by Hasaans right hand, like a skyful of brilliant stars scattered by the fistful, is indeed reminiscent of what the critic Ira Gitler famously termed Coltranes sheets of sound.

With tacit but manifest audacity, Hasaan appears to be self-consciously claiming his place in the history of jazz, picking up gauntlets thrown by the greatsplaying a thirteen-minute version of Body and Soul, which Coleman Hawkins made the culminating solo of the swing era in 1939; a ten-minute version of Cherokee, the tune that first brought Charlie Parker fame and that is identified with the birth of bebop; selections from Miles Daviss repertory (On Green Dolphin Street and It Could Happen to You); and Thelonious Monks Off Minor. Hasaan introduces Body and Soul with a new countermelody of his own that helps him break up the familiar tune so surprisingly that, twenty seconds in, the interpretation is already historic. He turns the Rodgers and Hart waltz Lover into a fifteen-minute up-tempo romp with a syncopation of its melody that becomes the dominant stomping figure of his bass line while his right hand throws off barrages of rapid-fire scintillations that subdivides measures into infinitesimals. In a thirteen-minute expatiation on the harmonically complex ballad It Could Happen to You, Hasaan turns the clichs of melodramatic tremolos into a percussively thunderous rumble; amid shimmering storms of high notes, he returns to the melody with a sudden stop-and-fragment-and-restart thats both breathtakingly dramatic and side-shakingly funny.

The outpouring of physical energy and display of intellectual stamina in these extended performances is matched by Hasaans inexhaustible inventiveness and far-ranging inspiration. The succession within each song of so many differently shaped, differently toned, sharply etched, flamboyantly characterized figures suggests a musical imagination of seemingly infinite variety, which is all the more astounding for its blend of uninhibited freedom and meticulous tethering to the melodies and structures of the compositions themselves. Hasaans hands are nearly quicker than the earsthe astounding speed of his playing is balanced only by the crystalline precision that makes each note stand out with a gem-like gleam. The experience of listening to these twenty extended solos is relentless, emotionally overwhelming, nearly vicariously exhausting in the experience of feeling a musician tap so deeply into himself and unleash such mighty forces. (Touchingly, one brief supplementary track features Hasaan singing one of his own compositions.)

It seems to me no mere happenstance that Hasaans mighty, mural-like musical self-portrait in real time comes in the form of solo piano. In his trio and quartet recordings, the accompaniment of bass and drums seems to inhibit him, to channel his solos into forms that would accommodate the musicians interpretations (however splendid) of the essentials of rhythm and harmony that he generated for himself, copiously and ingeniously, with his own two hands. His musical concept comes off as comprehensive, mercurial, eruptivenot that of a chamber musician but that of a one-person orchestra. He provides more than the intimate image of a musical mind at work; he conveys the galvanic sense of a heroically physical musical battle against time.

Hasaans career went from decrescendo to catastrophe. Disheartened by his truncated recording career, Sukoenig writes in his richly informative liner notes, Hasaan became withdrawn. He was living with his parents when their house caught fire, killing his mother, leaving his father incapacitated, consuming Hasaans compositions, and leaving him mentally debilitated. He was housed in a group home, was in drug treatment, had a devastating stroke, and died in 1980, at the age of forty-nine. In a 1978 interview that Sukoenig quotes, Roach (who died in 2007) said that he made home recordings of Hasaan when the pianist visited him: I have hours of him playing solo piano thats unbelievable. Sukoenig says, however, that no other recordings, commercial or private, of Hasaan have surfaced. In any case, Retrospect In Retirement Of Delay proves that Hasaan was no might-have-beenhe was, he is among the handful of greats.

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The Solo Performances of Hasaan Ibn Ali Expand the History of Jazz - The New Yorker