ROLAND HANNA

Piano preferences

Without dynamics, you have no music
The two-handed pianist
The magic of the piano
Piano preferences
Talking to Les Tomkins in 1980

On the question of being able to accept music that seems outlandish, or being turned off by it—you can relate this to many great musicians, for hundreds of years.

When Beethoven’s First Symphony was performed, just to hear a dominant seventh chord turned everybody off, and people stormed out of the concert-hall, leaving him there with twenty people in the audience. They couldn’t imagine somebody beginning a concert that way. So, if we intend to remain as primitive as that, it’ll take another hundred years for people to accept Cecil Taylor.

People who listen only to Dixieland, or to mainstream blues, or pop and rock, or country ‘n’ Western music, or yodelling music, or people who love trumpet music as opposed to saxophone music, or piano music as opposed to orchestral music—they have to think about what they’re doing; they’re closing off a part of themselves. The important thing is to be able to hear all these variations, and to see what can be gleaned from everything—to make yourself a much more complete human being.

After all, the only reason for spending your time here is to add to life—how can you do that if you close off aspects of it? Of course, you come up against barriers—areas of music you just cannot accept. If I’m going to be absolutely honest with you, that’s happened to me. I don’t know how many times. But I keep making an effort—I keep going back to something about which I’ve said: “I can’t listen to that,” and trying to listen, because I know there must be something to it. If so many millions of people are crazy about this or that, it must have qualities in it, to make them want to hear it. I have to find out what that is—that’s my curiosity. Even when I know I can’t stand something.

Well, I have to say . . . one of the main reasons I left the Thad Jones band was because they began to play rock–oriented music, with electronic instruments and all that, and I just couldn’t take that. But I’ve changed now; I still don’t play electric instruments, but at least I can listen to them, and I can understand why they want to do it. I can go out and hear someone who’s playing that, and get something out of it now. It’s a matter of growth, of becoming aware of yourself, and knowing that you’ve got to keep growing—otherwise you stop. And when you stop, that’s it.

When a good musician plays beneath himself, Though—that’s another part of the story. I don’t know whether I want to look at that or not. I know that many, many American musicians have been confronted with that in the past few years—I’ve even been approached about it myself several times. Record companies are so big and so powerful now, and it’s like the greyhound and the rabbit. In this way, the musician’s love of his art has been hampered with and prodded. Freddie Hubbard went that direction, and he found that it didn’t work for him, though he made good money. He’s making an attempt now to come back and play music; he’s stopped recording the cross-over thing. Miles Davis, who also spent several years in that crossover area, has finally stopped making music at all; he has made a statement that he won’t play any more, because he’s heartbroken that he% become a millionire playing the so–called pop music—all the years he spent playing jazz, he couldn’t make a dime.

Even Herbie Hancock, who has been so succcessful in the pop field, has been making an effort to come back and play decent music, with his “V.S.O.P.” and the duo piano concerts and recordings with Chick Corea—even though that hasn’t been quite as successful as it should be. For some reason or other, it is not going in the direction that I think it should; it’s become far more commercial than it should have done.

They’re both excellent pianists, and when they’re really playing, it’s very good music.

Myself, I prefer to hear such musicians as Hank Jones. Tommy Flanagan, John Lewis,

Mary Lou Williams. I really enjoy listening to Marian McPartland, when she’s playing with a trio or solo—she’s completely involved in the piano. I hear fresh ideas from each of those people, that makes me go and practise a little more, and try to get more out of myself. That commercial, put–together piano style of just rattling off a lot of technique doesn’t mean very much to me. I would much rather hear a pianist make all kinds of blunders, musical statement, than to hear somebody rattle off perfect scales and arpeggios and have it be meaningless.

Dave Brubeck? I must admit that, over the years, since Paul Desmond, I didn’t listen to Dave much, until recently, when we were put together on several concerts—first in New York and then in Nice. And after listening to him play with his sons, I was very impressed. Dave Brubeck has been rejuvenated by his own young children; they’re playing so well themselves that he’s forced to play. That’s a good thing that’s happened to him. He’s no baby any more, and it’s just nice to hear somebody come up with another approach to playing, after all these years, I guess what’s happened to me is that I’ve begun to listen to much younger people. Like Fred Hirsch, who is a pianist that probably nobody knows about here—he’s about twenty-two years old. I like to listen to young Jill McManus, who was born here originally, and lives in the States now. And Joanne Brackeen—she’s not such a youngster, but still young in terms of development, which has been evident in the last two or three years. I love to hear those people play; they help me to think of new ways of playing as well.

I still make it a habit to read as much music as I can, whenever there’s an opportunity to be around a piano and I have my music there. I read a lot of Scriabin, Debussy, Ravel and other composers, just to find out what they’ve done. So much music has been written, and it’s impossible to get through all of it—so I make that a point. In addition to that, when I’m improvising, I make a conscientious effort to try not to repeat things that I’ve said, unless it’s absolutely called for. Sequence is one of the pitfalls that musicians can fall into—handy little devices that you can do in another key or another situation. One of the main rules in composition is: if you can avoid sequence, avoid it at all costs. But we do have a tendency to fall into those kinds of traps.

Oscar Petersonr is a fine pianist, yes, but, like many other people, has fallen into the trap of thinking that technique is the most important thing. Yes—technique is extremely important; without technique, one never arrives at being a complete musician. But I’ve heard pianists that I admire very much indeed, who had one tenth of the technique that Oscar Peterson has. For instance, I loved the way Willie “The Lion” Smith played—it was one of the most joyful experiences in the world, to me, to hear him and Claude Hopkins play duo piano together. I guess it may not have been that way, had I not been around when James ,P. Johnson, Albert Ammons and Meade “Lux” Lewis played together from time to time, I happened to hear some of those recordings when I was a kid.

All of the clichés that Oscar could pIay couldn’t amount to a hill of beans compared to the music that comes from the kind of technique that was in Willie “The Lion” Smith’s seventy-five-year-old fingers.

When you look at piano music from the days of Jelly Roll and Pinetop up to the present day, you realise that in the middle of it there was probably the greatest jazz pianist who ever lived. He came and he went, and the people still don’t know how great he was—Art Tatum I’m talking about.

It doesn’t matter how much technique Oscar or anybody else has—they can never get as much as he had. The technique that he had was so ingrained that it was impossible to separate that from the music.

I love to hear people like Earl Hines and Teddy Wilson—they arrived at some special little sparkle that they have. When I hear Teddy Wilson play, I know from one octave that it’s him; Earl Hines the same thing—he touches the piano in such a way, you know it’s his voice coming out there. That is what’s important.

It’s too bad about Phineas Newborn, that his musical life was shortened by a nervous breakdown. Of course, he’s better now, and back playing, but he’s only a shadow of what he once was. Fate is sometimes very cruel, because there’s no way to know what he might have developed to be if he’d been allowed to just grow in that direction that he was going. As a twenty-three-year–old kid, he was so brilliant; he was certainly able to play Art Tatum, or anybody he wanted to play. He seemed to have all of the equipment there—not just technique, but he was tremendously musical. Unfortunately, it didn’t stay with him; I don’t know what the reason was—no one will ever know. I’m just glad that he was there; it proves to the rest of the world that, okay, Art Tatuan was the greatest, but there could have been someone who would have been even greater.

Well, we have that in every area of music; I guess the competition is what keeps it growing and getting better. In their days Franz Liszt and Frederic Chopin used to have their little piano parties in Paris. Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms used to have their little get-togethers—and Brahms never became known as a great pianist, even though he accompanied a lot of fine violinists.

But he used to play so much piano that he forced Schumann back to practising, and he hurt his fingers as a result. You always have a situation where competition forces one to do more than he, or she, thinks he can do.

In my case, I go out to hear Tommy Flanagan or Billy Taylor play. Whenever I get a chance, I go hear Mary Lou Williams—who is a beautiful player. In all the years that I’ve heard her, Mary Lou has never yet failed to amaze me in the dimensions she covers. It’s not just variety—she plays Beethoven in her music; she has an incredible concept. Sometimes she plays stronger and faster than any man I know; maybe her ability to sum up strength is just because she’s a woman. Women have a way of dealing with pain that men don’t have, you know. I’ve heard her when I didn’t believe what she played.

The thing that keeps me fighting and searching is that every time I turn around there’s some new person with another approach to playing the piano. It just never stops: you think you’ve heard everything there is, and somebody you’ve never heard of comes up, and there’s another sound that they’ve got out of the instrument, and you wonder how they got that.

The piano, I guess, is the invention of the millennium. If every human being who might possibly play the piano could play it, and if we were all isolated, we would have that many individual sounds from that instrument. And it’s not the case with other instruments; you really have to spend some time with somebody to recognise a saxophone player’s sound.

With the piano, almost anyone who sits down to play, even when they have no technique, no musical ability at all, they touch the keys a certain way and they get an individual sound. There’s just something about the way the instrument is made—what is inside you goes directly to the sound that is produced.

 Copyright © 1980 Les Tomkins. All Rights Reserved.