CHICO HAMILTON

It’s 1957, and I’m a freshman in college, and just discovering jazz for the first time. I buy a John Coltrane album, with the Red Garland Trio. I buy the King Pleasure/Annie Ross album, and then I buy Mose Allison’s Back Country Suite. Next, I buy the Gerry Mulligan Quartet on World Pacific, the one with the abstract expressionist painting on the front cover, the one with “Frenesi,” and “Lullabye of the Leaves,” and “Nights at the Turntable.” At this same time, I also buy my first good record player -- a hi-fi, as they were called in those days (stereo came later.) The first thing I put on the hi-fi was my new Gerry Mulligan album, and wow! -- for the first time, I could hear everything. Not just Mulligan and Chet Baker. I could hear the bass player and the drummer; I could hear the intricacies of the rhythmic exchanges between them, that delicate but swinging interplay that meant jazz, and that was changing the rhythm of my soul. It drew me to sit down and listen closer, and listen over and over to the complexity, the tonality, and the swing of that drummer whom I could really hear for the first time.

            The  drummer was Chico Hamilton.

            It’s 1997, forty years later, and Chico Hamilton is bringing his quartet to the Kleinert-James Arts Center in Woodstock this Saturday, and this is a man who has not stood still. From the bebop era where I first heard him, and the swing era before that, Hamilton has touched every aspect of jazz, starting with his high school days in the 1930s, when he formed a group with his classmates, including Charles Mingus, Illinois Jacquet, Buddy Collette, and Dexter Gordon.

            In the big band era of the 30s and 40s, Hamilton played with Lionel Hampton, Lester Young, and Duke Ellington, as well as working gigs with Count Basie, Nat “King” Cole, Billy Eckstine and Billie Holiday. Then, in 1948, he joined Lena Horne for an extended stay, that took him through 1955.

            At that point, a down-on-his-luck composer, arranger and sax player moved from New York out to Los Angeles.  “I’d been playing with Charlie Barnet,” Hamilton recalls, “because Lena had gone off for an extended tour of Europe, and I decided to stay back in L.A. Gerry came into town, and he was kinda down and out. He spent a lot of time over at my place -- I used to have him over for meals all the time, or just to hang out and talk about music, and one day he suddenly said, ‘Let’s start this new group!’ So we put it together, right there in my living room.”

            The Mulligan sound caused a sensation as a brand new sound -- the first modern jazz group that didn’t use a piano.  “I read a lot about the Mulligan sound of that seminal 50s group,” Hamilton says now, “But almost all of it is about Mulligan and Chet Baker - they don’t seem to talk much about the contribution of Chico Hamilton and Bob Whitlock. After Gerry died, at the memorial service, [jazz critic] Gary Giddins stood up and talked about the contributions of Dave Bailey and the others who followed me in the group, and never mentioned a word about me. Since I was there, at the service, this  was a little embarrassing. But Gerry said, in an interview he gave for a documentary about me, that after I left the quartet was never the same.”

            The pianoless quartet would not have worked without the melodic shadings of Hamilton’s drums. “I was the keyboard player in that group, on the drums.  It meant my playing had to be very melodic. There is a range of sounds you have on a drum set, and I know all of them - five drums, eight cymbals, and a range of sounds in each of them, and it’s my job to get all of those sounds out. And you need to approach the drums lovingly to get them to give up those sounds. You caress the drums. You don’t beat them, you caress them … just like a woman. I learned a lot about melody from accompanying singers.”

            The Mulligan Quartet was also the center of one of those controversies that make being a music aficionado so interesting. Whereas today we have the controversy between East  and West Coast rappers, back then it was East and West Coast jazzers. Not as violent, but just as heated. As Hamilton recalls it, a lot of the discussion started when “I came east to open up a jazz club called Basin Street East…the club set up a battle of the drummers, with my group and Max Roach’s group both booked – that was the beginning of the East Coast jazz vs. West Coast jazz controversy.”

It must, one imagines, have been something to hear those two drum greats, representing such different approaches, on the same bandstand. Hamilton remembers those days well. “I played on the bandstand with Max Roach, Art Blakey, Gene Krupa, Buddy Rich - those guys were all great drummers, and to play alongside them, you had to be as creative as possible. I might not have had the technique they had, so I had to make up for it with imagination and creativity.”

After Mulligan, Hamilton launched his own career as a leader, with a series of groups which included such future stars as Eric Dolphy, Charles Lloyd, Ron Carter, and Arthur Blythe. He introduced the cello to jazz in his first quintets, and continued the development of the cool West Coast sound. From there, he moved dramatically to a gutsy, bluesy style, and, after moving to New York in the mid-sixties, with new musicians, he had a hand in every major movement from from free jazz to fusion to acid jazz.

He also began his career as a composer, which has evolved into music and TV scores as well as a substantial catalog of original tunes. “When I’m composing, I always start with melody,” he says. “I believe that rhythm is at the center of all music, but I have a strong feeling for melody, too -- I’m into melodies, into lines …lines of music become very poetic to me.”

His favorite film score? “Roman Polanski’s Repulsion. They shot the movie in London. I was on the set every day, watching the filming, and I was working with Lena all night – then partying after that. It was a wild time. Then when I got down to composing, Polanski gave me complete freedom, he trusted me completely - where to put the music cues, what kind of music to write, what instrumentation…everything.”

Hamilton has seen virtually every change, movement and revolution in the history of jazz, but to sum it up, he insists, “Jazz hasn’t changed – the people have. The center of jazz is always rhythm. It has to be. Rhythm is at the heart of what people listen to. People don’t necessarily know much about music - no one knows what an “A” is except a trained musician, and a lot of them don’t really know, either -but everyone can feel rhythm. It’s the heartbeat - rhythm is what we’re all about.

            “The people…yeah, they change.  And you miss your mentors and the people you liked, but ... I don’t look back. Those who have gone on…well, they’ve probably got a hell of a band up there. They gave all they had to give, and some of them received very little in return, but music is human emotions, and those are always renewing themselves. The guys who are around today --  group I’m working with now, and have been working with for several years - these aren’t the young giants any more, these are the giants. They’re what jazz is now.”

            Hamilton’s current group includes saxophonist Eric Person, bassist Matthew Garrison, and guitarist Cary DeNigris. They’ll be at the Kleinert-James on Saturday, November 15^th at 9 PM. Tickets are $20; for reservations, call (914)679-5154. I suppose this is as good a place as any to mention that Chico’s given first name is Foreststorn.