Hank's photography graced the facade of the AMFAR pavillion, Cap D'Atibes France, May 20, 2010 C-Span July 2010 —The American Association of University Professors, features The Ghosts Of Harlem American Edition as one of it's choices for The "Best of The Best" University Editions. "The Best of The Bests" Program program, offers librarians the opportunity to share advice and recommendations with their colleagues, and recognizes the valuable contribution that university press books can make to both public and secondary school libraries. (note:The Ghosts of Harlem feature begins at 11:40 and ends at 14:40) :Please Have a look at the video here: http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/294474-1 Jazz Times Interview June 2010 — Hank O’Neal: Chasing Ghosts ArtNews Article, March 2010, Friendships In Focus - Berenice Abbott, PDF Hank O'Neal's Lower East Side Project Featured On Swiss T.V. Seventh Man Magazine - "Richard Hambleton — New York" in Milan Featured Artist on Valmorbida.com Artists We Love, Featured Photographs of Richard Hambleton Street Art Swide, Hank O'Neal's Portraits of Richard Hambleton, showing in Milan oneartworld.com - Featuring Hank O'Neal's Richard Hambleton Related Prints for Sale Abitare - Richard Hambleton in Milan featuring a portrait by Hank O'Neal

Jay McShann, aboard the S/S Norway at sea, December 19, 1991

The average piano keyboard is about four feet wide. When he was sitting at one, Hootie’s smile was usually about as wide. For a guy who was supposed to play the blues, he was as cheerful and optimistic as anyone I’ve ever met, in any walk of life. No exceptions. I always thought to myself, maybe when he goes home to Kansas City and draws the blinds, he’s unhappy and miserable. But I knew better than that.

This is what I mean by cheerful and optimistic. One day in 1989 Hootie was playing duets with Ralph Sutton, accompanied by Milt Hinton and Gus Johnson. It was a recording session at Rudy Van Gelder’s legendary studio. The date was going very well and it came time for a lunch break. Orders were taken, and I asked Hootie what he wanted. He said something like, Well, I’ve got a little sugar going so I’d gotta be careful. Which meant a diet soda instead of anything stronger. He was smiling broadly when he said it. No “look at poor me” kind of attitude and, of course, there was a time when a diet anything, or any kind of soft drink would have been out of the question. There was a reason his nickname was Hootie and it didn’t have to do with swooping down on mice in a barn.

I don’t know why it took until 1985 for our paths to cross. He wasn’t that active in New York during the 1960s and 70s, one of the few people of his generation that didn’t come by Downtown Sound to make a recording for one of the many independent labels that used my studio, so I really just knew him from recordings.

They were great recordings that dated back to 1940, when guys like Charlie Parker were part of his Kansas City-based big band. There were also records from the early fifties and then in the late 1960s European labels like Black and Blue in France and Black Lion in the UK produced some fine records. John Norris produced the best, for Sackville in Canada, recordings that are now available on CD and document a very important part of Hootie’s career. I’ve often wondered what happened between the years 1956 and 1966, when there are no recordings, but my guess is Hootie was flying pretty high in those years and there’s little to document it. Maybe it will come out in a book someday.

In 1985 I had an opportunity to feature Hootie at a Floating Jazz Festival, and from that time on, if he was available, he was part of our festivals, a couple of which were recorded. One year we even featured him at the First Rhythm and Blues Cruise on the S/S Norway, and used his hands for the festival poster. His hands are immediately recognizable, not because they are massive and elegant, but because they are not.

The hardest thing for any jazz musician to achieve is a recognizable style and sound. With Hootie, this seemed to have come as easily as breathing. There is no mistaking the sound of his piano or voice, whether as a soloist, part of a small group, or in his big band. A couple of notes, and his nasal voice, even at the age of ninety, were immediately recognizable, just as was his smiles and sunny disposition. Ira Gershwin wrote the words to Sunny Disposition in 1926, when Hootie was ten or so and they could have been about him.

Hootie didn’t like to read music. I don’t know if this was a reaction to some difficulties he had with his big band in the 1940’s or just because his ear was so good, but he didn’t want to bother with the printed page. I know his ear was phenomenal, based on first hand experience. His description of his first piano lessons, which were “stolen”, while secretly listening to his sister’s lessons, also attests to his remarkable skill. Long before he could read a note, he obtained his first professional job by simply listening to a band rehearse and then playing his parts from memory. These stories can be heard from the man himself on the Jazzspeak portions at the conclusion of his Chiaroscuro CDs.

One story that isn’t on those recordings deals with something that happened in the mid-1990s. Hootie had been told by one of his doctors that he needed to walk and exercise a little. When he came on the S/S Norway for a week at sea he told me about these instructions. I suggested he could walk on deck, or if that wasn’t of interest, he could always go to the ship gymnasium, where there was a treadmill. I took him by the gym, but he didn’t seem very enthusiastic.

A few days later I asked Hootie how the exercise was going and he said he’d been walking on the treadmill and planned to do it again that afternoon. I made it a point to go by and see how he was doing. When I arrived, He was on the treadmill, dressed in the same blue suit he wore for performance later that evening. He was wearing shiny patent leather shoes, blissfully walking his way across the Caribbean, surrounded by dozens of sweating kids lifting weights and working on other machines. He hadn’t broken a sweat.

Hootie may have submitted to the treadmill, I never saw him submit to a piece of sheet music. On one of our recording sessions at sea, I suggested a couple of new tunes, things I’d never heard him play. With misgivings, I’d even brought along sheet music. He said he couldn’t read it, even with reading glasses. I went to the copy machine and enlarged the music three or four times. The notes were the size of dimes. I left it with him to “study”. He didn’t; he just didn’t want to work on new material. It reminded me of the statement made by Artur Rubinstein when he was in his nineties. He was going blind, but could still play. He said the poor eyesight only prevented him from learning new pieces.

The recording we made in 1997, when he was allegedly seventy-nine and when he didn’t want to learn any new songs, was a revelation. He didn’t need to learn anything. He took some old standards and some of his compositions and we added Phil Woods, David “Fathead” Newman and Flip Phillips to the mix and the old songs were as good as new, possibly better. I didn’t plan for so many guests, but when you have sixty great musicians in a room and one of them who’s making a live record suggests he wants to play Yardbird Suite and Phil Woods overhears him and says, I want to be on that, well, it just happens. I think it happened like that with Hootie for many years.

The book said he turned ninety in 2006. Maybe. The last time I spoke with him he sounded pretty good and he was still playing. I thought he might catch up with Eubie Blake, but he didn’t. In late November 2006, he entered a hospital in Kansas City. A friend called and told me about it and said it seemed likely this would be his last stay. It turned out to be true.

The newspapers said he was ninety; they also said he might have been ninety-seven. The number didn’t matter, except to statisticians. He lived a lot of good years right up to the very end and made a lot of people very happy along the way.

Willie The Lion Smith, Manassas, Virginia, February 20, 1971

In 1967, when I first met Willie The Lion, he was he last of the legendary stride pianists who’d made Harlem the jazz piano capitol of the world in the 1920s and 1930s. He was a guy who battled regularly with the likes of with James P. Johnson, Fats Waller, Lucky Roberts and others, and emerged victorious as often as not, sometimes just by the sheer force of his personality. At the time, the only Harlem old-timer I’d heard was Cliff Jackson, a fine pianist, but not quite up to the standards of James P. and Fats. Or Willie The Lion.

Don Ewell made the introduction; it was easy to do because he was playing duets with The Lion nightly at The Village Gate. It was an enlightening experience; the two pianists couldn’t have been more different, which is perhaps why they made such a fine duo. Don was quiet, introspective and delicate; Willie was boisterous, exuberant and rarely delicate, even when playing Echoes of Spring. During those nights at The Village Gate, I got to known him a little, but not very well. It was difficult to cut through the bluster. Later, however, we were able to work together a great deal and had a good time doing so.

It turned out Sherman Fairchild had known Willie since the 1920s. In the first (and only) record we produced together, he made some wonderful comments about Willie in his notes.

I met Willie The Lion Smith longer ago than either of us care to remember. Gene Austin, with whom I was in the music publishing business, took me to hear him at a smoky, one-room speakeasy called Pod’s and Jerry’s on 133rd Street. I used to go there on many a night and Willie was always ready to play my favorites, Sneakway, Echoes of Spring and Rippling Waters. Later, I remember hearing him play duets with James P. Johnson at the Pied Piper in Greenwich Village, and I continued to be fascinated with his marvelous technique and rich harmonic invention. My being such a fan of Willie’s started a friend ship that has gone on through the years.

Willie played at my home many times. I recall a memorable New Year’s Eve party in the thirties when he and Fats Waller joined their talents at two grand pianos, and Fred Astaire got into the act as well, playing piano-accordion. We didn’t have the convenience of tape or even adequate disc recording equipment then, or we would have put down a never-to-be-repeated jam session for posterity.

Sherman and Willie went back many years, and were comfortable around one another. Willie was a frequent guest at 17 East 65th Street, Sherman’s home in New York City, and Sherman made it clear one of the first projects we should undertake with our fledgling record company was to record Willie. This recording, however, was a tough one. To this day I don’t understand all the problems we encountered. At the time Willie was playing very well, had boundless energy and enthusiasm, and was eager to make a good record.

We began recording in January or February 1970, but nothing worked out. We used up reels and reels of tape, but had no satisfactory takes. I could hear it, Willie could hear it, and even worse, Sherman could hear it. For whatever reason, Willie was nervous. As soon as the tape recorder was turned on, he got the jitters, and nothing seemed to make any difference. I didn’t have much experience in dealing with nervous artists; in fact, I had no experience at all. All I could think of was it might make sense to get Willie into a live situation, where he had a friendly audience, and could concentrate on pleasing them.

An engagement was arranged at Blues Alley in June. Willie had three days to get used to the place and I made plans to bring my modest collection of remote gear to Washington, D.C. to record on Friday and Saturday night. I’m sure I grabbed microphones from Sherman’s studio.

As usual, the room was crowded and noisy, but that didn’t bother Willie. In fact, it may have helped. The recording was not exactly a piece of cake, but after two nights, Willie and I were both pleased with the results, and knew there was plenty of first rate material for a fine LP. There was, however, a problem no one had anticipated.

After much listening, we selected a dozen tunes, and sandwiched them in between short performances of Relaxin’, Willie’s theme song. The album was programmed like it was two short sets. I went to the mastering studio to cut master lacquers, and it was then that I discovered the recording was horribly out of phase, the first and only time this ever happened to me. The mastering engineer said it was impossible to cut a disc; instead of cutting a horizontal groove, the out of phase tape would create a vertical groove, similar to the old hill and dale Edison recordings of the 1920s. He added that the phasing problems was very unusual, because it was not electrical in nature, it was acoustic. There was something about the way the piano had been situated in the room and its relationship to the microphones. He’d never seen anything like it.

I reported the bad news to Sherman and Marian McPartland, but far from dismay, Sherman said I should call Bob Fine; he seemed to remember Bob had built a piece of gear that handled phasing problems. In those years, Bob Fine was as legendary a recording engineer as Rudy Van Gelder, but Bob’s specialization wasn’t jazz. He’d been in partnership with Sherman in the 1950s, and the two had been responsible for many innovations in the recording industry, not the least of which was the variable pitch groove. Prior to this, the grooves of all LPs were the same width, which meant grooves with loud passages wore out first. Bob  was also responsible for the incredible live recordings in the Mercury Living Presence series, which his wife, Wilma, produced. The earliest records even have a credit line for “Fine-Fairchild” technology.

Bob looked on the tape as a challenge. He ran it through an oscilloscope, saw the phasing problems, and even though the device he’d built was for electric phasing problems, he was able to adapt it, and solve our acoustic disaster. The record was released and we were all relieved, but less than six months later, I was back at Blues Alley, recording Willie once more. In 1977, I wrote about the circumstances.

In January 1971, Sherman thought it might be worthwhile to undertake some new recordings with Willie and plans were made to once again do them at Blues Alley. Willie had a two-week run set for February and Blues Alley was only too happy to have another record issued with the club’s name prominently featured. But then, a problem crept up on all of us. In mid-January, shortly after we decided to do the date, Sherman entered Roosevelt Hospital for a routine examination and because of many problems, far too complicated to explain her, he never came out. He died a few months later of complications caused by a minor operation. He was, however, able to have selected visitors during the entire time, and one of the things that made him feel better immediately was listening to tapes of his favorite pianists. He told me he wanted tapes of Ralph Sutton and Horst Jankowski, an unlikely combination, to be played at all hours. He also wanted to hear Willie The Lion.

I made new recordings at Blues Alley. Willie was still spirited, but was moving a little slower, and for this engagement, he’d hired a drummer, Dude Brown, to play quietly in the background. Once again, we recorded on Friday and Saturday nights. At the time, I wasn’t even thinking about releasing the tapes, I was only making tapes to play for Sherman at the hospital, which was just as well, because Willie tired after the first set.

The next day, I drove Willie to Manassas, Virginia, where he made a quintet recording for Johnson McRee. Once again, the Osborn High School auditorium and its fine Steinway was the location. It was an acceptable album of ten traditional jazz standards. No Willie originals.

But Willie was an original, and in his prime a larger than life figure, almost Jelly Roll Morton-like. He bragged about this and that, and then pulled it off. The songs he wrote were uniquely his own and charming. Even the titles of his compositions were wonderful and very unlike those of his contemporaries. Echoes of Spring, Passionette, Fading Star, and Sneakaway. Other pianists played them, but not like him. It would have been fun to have known him when he was in top form, but most of the time when I knew him, he could still deliver the goods. He was also a nice man, fun to visit at his apartment on St. Nicholas Avenue in Harlem.

In 1977 I issued a second album of Willie’s recordings, drawn from both the 1970 and 1971 dates. At the end of the notes I said,

As I type these notes I look up every once in a while and glance at the George Wettling painting that hangs behind my desk. Stuck in the corner of the frame is a small, faded piece of paper that says, “Hank  AU3-3960  Willie The Lion called” I don’t know what he wanted, I was away at the time and when I got back he’d already entered the hospital and was gone. Maybe next time.

Or maybe not.

Kenny Davern and Bob Wilber were among the finest musicians on their instruments and had been for years when I first met them in the early 1970s. In those days they were doubling, tripling or quadrupling on any and all instruments that used reeds and on at least two of the many each played, they were a good as anyone in the business. As exceptional as they were, however, when they performed together they rose to new heights.

 I don’t recall when they first joined forces, sometime in the early 1970s at a Dick Gibson jazz party, but from the moment Kenny and Bob got together, sparks flew. They sensed they might be able to cash in on this excitement and Soprano Summit was born. They played more instruments than just soprano saxophones; clarinets, and all kinds of other saxophones often turned up, but when they were both on soprano at the same time it was the most exciting.

The group was a perfect example of the sum being so much greater than its combined parts. As individuals, the guys were great but put them together and they reached greater heights, sometimes much greater heights, every time they appeared in concert or recorded. Soprano Summit was, along with the Ruby Braff/George Barnes Quartet, the best mainstream jazz band of the 1970s. I was fortunate enough to record them on three occasions and take a few photographs along the way.

One of the reasons the band was so good was because offstage there was a good deal of tension between Kenny and Bob. Each man was very different in temperament, musically and personally, and this sometimes led to conflict, onstage and off. Then, in the early 1980s, Kenny decided to concentrate all of his energies on the clarinet, abandoned the soprano saxophone, and this shut down the group for good.

In 1990 I managed to assemble all six original members of the band to make a recording that we decided to call Summit Reunion since Kenny only played clarinet. Sparks flew once again, and it wasn’t just when the recording was taking place. There were six all star musicians in the room and at least five serious egos on hand, but for the most part we had a good time. When there was a problem, as often as not Milt Hinton was the mediator and somehow it all worked out. The new recordings were remarkable and exceeded those from the 1970s on many levels.

The CD was distributed and the word got out that Kenny and Bob were together again and European festival producers began to clamor for them. They were usually too cheap to hire the whole band, but in the summer of 1991 I managed to get all six members together and took them to the Oslo Jazz Festival, where they were a big hit. It was first time all of them had performed before an audience in a couple of decades and they enjoyed the adulation. Later, I took Kenny and Bob to Frogner Park to look at the Vigeland sculptures and to photograph them looking. It was a relaxed afternoon, much like the old days at Downtown Sound. It is perhaps prophetic that the best picture turned out to be the one with their backs to one another.

Bob Wilber and Kenny Davern, Frogner Park, Oslo Norway, August 10, 1991

Earlier today (26 April 2008) I came upon an obituary for Jimmy Giuffre, a marvelous musician who I’ve enjoyed for fifty years. I wasn’t surprised. It had been a long time coming. I may have heard a record earlier, but my first memory of him is at the beginning of the film, Jazz On A Summer’s Day, where, with Bob Brookmeyer and Jim Hall, he’s playing The Train and The River. It’s a terrific performance; the camera rarely moves, it is almost stationary, but Jimmy moves in and out of the frame. It’s dramatic filmmaking and a great way to begin the film. I also saw him perform the song on The Sound a Jazz a year or so earlier, but it was on a small screen, in black and white with bad sound. It didn’t make the same impression.

The paper said he was born in Dallas in 1921 and went to North Texas State Teachers College. I knew that and may have even been in Denton, Texas, when he was there. I was little more than a baby in 1942, but my uncle, Roy Will, taught theory at North Texas State in those years, and with my father away in the Pacific, we sometimes lived with my uncle and his wife. When I asked Roy about it in the 1990s, he remembered Jimmy very clearly, and said he was a wonderful student. I’d asked Jimmy the same thing in 1991, and he remembered my uncle, so I guess it was true. Perhaps my Uncle Roy had a tiny effect on him; he certainly had a firm understanding of music theory.

I remained a fan and in April 1973 I had the opportunity of presenting Jimmy in concert at my Jazz Ramble series at The New School in New York City. He was working with a trio in those days, usually bass and drums, and he presented an evening of original compositions. His instruments of choice were flute and clarinet. Nearly twenty years later he was part of the 1991 edition of The Floating Jazz Festival. He graduated to a quartet, but Randy Kaye, the drummer he’d used in 1973, was still with him.

It seemed to me that Jimmy wasn’t nearly as robust as I remembered him; in 1991 he was only seventy. He played beautifully on clarinet and a variety of flutes and was, of course, one of the few groups on the ship that wasn’t mainstream. He’d been mainstream once upon a time, but he’d outgrown the Four Brothers decades earlier. His concerts weren’t crammed and I tried to sneak in as often as I could. I also managed to grab a couple of photographs in Club Internationale and during the Saxophone Spectacular in the theater, but none were very good. There was no easy way to take one, with all the music stands and electronic keyboards or shooting from the balcony. I should have tried to arrange for a special photo shoot, but I ran out of time and, besides, there would always be another year.

But there wasn’t. I asked Jimmy a couple of times; he was busy the first time and by the time I tried again, he was already in the grip of the disease that claimed him a couple of days ago. He was a terrific, innovative musician, a good guy, and perhaps the first great talent to come out of that sleepy little teacher’s college in Denton, Texas where legions of great musicians have followed in his footsteps.

 Jimmy Giuffre, Saga Theater aboard the S/S Norway at sea, October 30, 1991

Dill Jones, Sherman Fairchild Studio, 17 East 65th Street New York City, October 1970

I first encountered Dill Jones in Washington, D.C. in the mid-1960s. I don’t remember the exact circumstances, but it had something to do with Pee Wee Russell.  I remember Dill was trying to get a job in Washington, and the only way the union would let him was if he could prove he could play a legitimate score no one else could play. He wasn’t a US citizen in those days and maybe he never became one, I really don’t know, but even if he did he was from Wales and was forever Welsh. His real name was Dillwyn Owen Jones, he could really play the piano, and as I recall, he proved it to the guys at the union, and got the job.

Dill was one of the first people I encountered when I moved to New York City in 1967. The circumstances are a bit obscure but there’s a picture to document the occasion, taken at The Riverboat, in June of that year. It shows Dill, along with Charlie Shavers, Jimmy McPartland and some unknown ruffians. I kept in touch with him and whenever possible, threw work, introductions or whatever I could in his direction because I liked the way he played.

In those years Dill was pretty much categorized as a traditional pianist, and was most often found in Dixieland or swing ensembles. He worked with Tony Parenti, Peanuts Hucko, Gene Krupa, Roy Eldridge and a host of others in the 1960s and 1970s. He also worked a great deal with the JPJ Quartet, which was nominally led by Budd Johnson. There were three guys in the band with “J” in their last name; Budd, Oliver Jackson and Dill Jones. My guess is that Dill was the “J” that was missing. The “P” was for Bill Pemberton.

The first time I worked with Dill was with this group. He told me Budd wanted to record some tracks and had no money to pay for it, so I led them to Sherman Fairchild’s 65th Street townhouse. It was a terrific band, and it was good to hear Dill in a mainstream context. This was the first time I heard him play anything other than tunes that would have pleased Willie The Lion Smith. The same year I recorded Dill with Willie at Sherman’s studio, and it was a terrific encounter, one that was included on the two CD set we devoted to Dill and his music in 2004.

In April 1972, Dill was part of a concert I produced that also featured Eubie Blake, Teddy Wilson and Claude Hopkins. He more than held his own, playing a couple of standards, and a terrific original he dedicated to Willie the Lion, Sign Of The Lion. Around that time I suggested to him it might make sense to produce a solo recording, one that would show he was something more than a guy who could hold down the piano chair with the Dukes of Dixieland.

Some years earlier, Beale, usually known as Bill, Riddle, a now long forgotten, but once respected music authority and bon vivant in the Washington-Baltimore area, suggested to me that Dill would be an ideal pianist to record the compositions of Bix Beiderbecke. My guess is he probably heard Dill playing with Pee Wee in Washington, and something clicked. I remembered what Bill said, expanded the concept slightly to include songs on which Bix was a piano soloist, or were associated with him in some way, because there are only five real, honest-to-goodness Bix compositions, hardly enough to fill up an LP. Dill was game, providing he could throw in an original and a couple of non-dixieland tunes that he really liked to tear apart, like Little Rock Getaway.

It wasn’t an easy project. Ralph Sutton and Jess Stacy had set the standard for most of Bix’s tunes, but Dill jumped right in and produced a terrific album we called Davenport Blues. The most revelatory selection on the album, however, didn’t have anything associated with Bix’s compositions in the 1920s, but just might have had a great deal to do with him, had he lived past the age of twenty-eight. The song was called Celtic Twilight, an original composition by Dill. As soon as I heard him play it, along with quiet Beiderbecke tunes like Candlelights and In The Dark, I figured out what Dill was all about. He had the same kind of feelings and temperament as his countryman, the poet Dylan Thomas. They had much more in common than a Welsh heritage and a love of strong drink.

Dill was much better when he played quietly, and let the piano sing. He had all the technique to play a romping Little Rock Getaway or any stride standard, but the beautiful chords and silken runs he used to produce the finest version of Davenport Blues, was utterly unique. And I told him so, but he said, sadly, that no one wanted to hear him play things like that. I asked if he had any other songs like Celtic Twilight and he said he did, but rarely played them. It was as if Dylan Thomas had been reduced to writing dirty limericks for a living.

I made a deal with Dill. We would start working on another solo album whenever he wanted to, but I wanted it to be crammed full of originals. Since I owned the studio, it wasn’t hard to find time for recording. All he had to do was call, we’d find a time, and he could lay down a new tune. He could take as long as he wanted, as many takes as were necessary.

Downtown Sound shut its doors in December 1980 and the record wasn’t completed to everyone’s satisfaction. There was enough recorded material, all the equal of or superior to Davenport Blues, but I wanted more originals, and they didn’t come quickly. The album already had a title, and in 1978, I’d even journeyed to Cardiff, Wales, to take a photograph of the infamous Tiger Bay for an album cover. The unfinished record was scheduled to be called, There Are No Flowers In Tiger Bay, the title of a beautiful, impressionist composition by Dill. There were no flowers in Tiger Bay that day, in fact, there wasn’t even water. I arrived at low tide and the scene was simply a big mud puddle, as far as the eye could see.

When the studio closed down, the project was put on hold. This would turn out to be a bad idea, but I was in the process of launching a new record company with John Hammond and John Moore, Hammond felt that nine originals and two standards was a good mix and he was pleased it would be one of the first releases in a series to be called John Hammond’s World Of Jazz. He was also impressed with Dill’s compositions, songs named Welsh Pearl, Someone Remembered and New Quay News. He was as surprised as anyone that Dill had these kind of tunes in his head and under his fingers.

Dill and I had already selected the best takes of the eleven performances that would make up the LP. We made a sequence, the tape was sent to CBS for mastering, and sometime in late 1982 we had a test pressing in hand. Unhappily, that is all we ever got in hand. By that time, Hammond Music Enterprises was having problems and trying to find a way to pay the telephone bill took precedent over issuing a record that had plenty of artistry but no commercial legs at all. In 1982, the last thing under consideration was to release a recording by any jazz artist, let alone one featuring nine original compositions by an obscure Welsh-American pianist. I recently looked at a Hammond promotional booklet I produced at the time. In it, I said:

Dill Jones is an exceptionally fine Welsh-born pianist who has lived in the US the past fifteen years. To our ears he is at his best when he plays material that is strongly influenced by his Welsh traditions. It is almost unique in jazz; Dylan Thomas at the piano. Six cuts on this remarkable solo LP fall into this category.

All true, but the record never came out and when Dill died in 1984, all he had was a test pressing. Twenty years later, we released the best of Dill’s performances on two CDs, but I must confess, I wonder who will listen to them. There are still a handful of people who remember, but last year I was told a story about a fine young pianist who was asked to perform at a function on Long Island in Dill’s memory. He was happy to have the job, but he confessed that he had no idea who Dill Jones was, or why there might be a concert in his memory. One of the selections on the CD was Dill’s composition, Someone Remembered. I don’t know who he was remembering when he wrote it, but I’m afraid in 2010 he isn’t someone anyone is remembering very often.