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Hampton Hawes, west coast pianist, compatriot to Monk, Miles and Lady Day, bandstand and studio partner to Mingus, Bird, Art Pepper, Jim Hall, and many, many more, has been gone nearly a quarter century. Gone, and too likely largely forgotten. But the deserved reissuing of his tumultuous biography, a work drawn from telling conversations between Hawes and collaborator/interviewer Don Asher, restores both his standing as a musician and a text remarkable for its depictions of the agonies and the ecstasies of both jazz creation and heroin addiction.
Beginning with an unstructured, almost off-putting opening chapter, a series of fractured, disordered memories of childhood, "Raise Up Off Me: A Portrait of Hampton Hawes" then emerges into a coherent telling of a life where a love of music intertwined with a dependence on drugs that repeatedly derailed the former. As a portrait of the addicted artist the book is more powerful than Art Pepper’s "Straight Life" and careens through the heroin user’s never-ending stress to cop the next bundle. Race, and its impact on opportunity, creativity, and daily existence, also commands the story-teller and the reader.
As a musician’s biography this text is slightly less potent, probably because the telling of events is more prominent than the explaining of musical development and ideas. We really don’t learn about jazz stylings here, or the design and inspiration of solos. But there is plenty of the ‘jazz life,’ and Hawes is an articulate storyteller. An especially poignant excerpt is the telling of how, convicted for drug use, Hawes sought and obtained a presidential pardon from John Kennedy. So too are his tellings of events when a soldier in Korea, and his discovering of and partnering with pianist Toshiko Akiyoshi.
One comes away from this book, as from an overpowering jazz solo, in both shock and awe. And that is testament enough. Although more musician’s life than music, the two are ultimately inseparable. So dig this book, and then dig out your old Hampton Hawes LPs (or find some CD reissues) and dig a musician who Miles and Lady Day both cherished.
— Jules Epstein, January 2002
Release Date: 13 November 2001
Raise Up Off Me: A Portrait of Hampton Hawes (Thunder's Mouth Press)
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last update 12 February 2002