Just Hawk: Coleman Hawkins in Denmark

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Someone opened that bloody book again this morning and Witney Balliett's words echoed in the room:

"Improvisation, the seat of jazz, is a remorseless art that demands of the performer no less than this: that, night after night, he spontaneously invent original music by balancing emotion and intelligence, form and content, and tone and attack, all of which must both charge and entertain the spirit of the listener. Improvisation comes in various hues and weights... Great improvisation is rare; bad improvisation, which is really not improvisation at all but a rerun or imitation of old ideas, is common. No art is more precarious or domineering. Thus, such consummate veteran improvisers as Armstrong, [Vic] Dickenson, Hawkins, Buck Clayton, and Monk are, in addition to be master craftsmen, remarkable endurance runners. One of the hardiest of these is Hawkins.

Remembering Paul Weeden

From right: Paul Weeden, Don Patterson, Billy James [source]

Last week I had lengthy sessions with the music of Don Patterson, one of the post-Jimmy Smith Hammond B3 players who, more or less, followed the pattern of early Smith trios with guitar and drums. Nevertheless, he is more of a funky/groovy player for whom Smith was only an starting point from which he saw the possibilities of the organ, as a swinging (and also good-selling) instrument in jazz. So naturally, compared to early recordings of Smith (which in my opinion are among his most powerful), Patterson lacks that rich bebop vocabulary. However, Patterson, like many jazz musicians who pursued a career somewhere between the center to the margins of jazz world, has his own special merits, quite sufficient to enable the listener to stay with his music for a period of time, in my case, as long as a weekend.

Of course, one can argue that his output with Sonny Stitt are his classics, which I neither accept or dismiss. But you might have heard of a certain Paul Weeden who played guitar in Don Patterson Verve recordings of the early 1960s. If not, in a nutshell, his was a Tiny-Grimes sounding, bluesy guitarist which deserves more attention.