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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, tadalafil 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, tadalafil. 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 tadalafil and Phil Woods overhears him and says, tadalafil. 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. |
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