Scott Hamilton

Around Christmas, I picked up a copy of Scott Hamilton's My Romance. It is apparently out of print, but last I checked, Daedalus Books and Music still had copies and was selling them for $6.

Scott Hamilton's story is well-known. When he arrived on the scene in the mid-1970s, Wynton Marsalis was still half a decade away, and acoustic jazz was at the lowest point of popularity and respect it would ever reach. If that wasn't enough, Hamilton dared to play in the style not of the fifties and sixties, but of the thirties and forties, taking his inspiration directly from players like Ben Webster and Coleman Hawkins. To him, it was as if bebop had never happened. What makes Hamilton great for me, however, is not just his style of playing but his attitude. He simply doesn't care. His music is not cerebral. None of that America's Classical Music stuff. It is not simplistic – it does demand to be listened to – but it does not need, or want, to be analyzed, critiqued, and written about. It is there to be enjoyed. He plays for people who go to a jazz club to have a drink and unwind after a long week at work, to have a good time, maybe to romance their honey. That quality, and his utter lack of concern with progress and innovation, does give most his recordings a certain kind of uniformity. But on My Romance at least, the quality of playing is so consistently high that it manages to avoid stagnation entirely.

A little personal digression. Things in acoustic jazz were never as bad as the naysayers would have us believe. Hamilton may have been the youngest to play that kind of stuff when he started out, but he certainly wasn't the only one. His, however, was the first jazz I heard live. I was about sixteen, and one day out of the blue, my father said, “Let's go to a jazz club.” As with many other aspects of American culture, he has always held a very romantic image of the jazz club in his mind; to him it was one of the symbols of the life he strove for so long to achieve for himself and his family. He has been listening to the big names his whole life, of course, and even I was starting to know Duke Ellington and Count Basie, if not quite Miles Davis and John Coltrane yet, but we were both completely ignorant of the local jazz scene in New York, so we opened up the paper, called around and asked a few question about who was playing – we wanted to make sure we were getting the real thing, not smooth jazz, blues, or rock. We ended up at the now- defunct Fat Tuesday's on the East Side (low 20s, if memory serves). Hamilton's quintet was the act, and we could not have asked for better luck.

My father was in heaven – this was exactly the kind of music he was craving to hear – and even I, though I didn't understand the music then, was captivated. Hamilton being who he is, my lack of a firm grasp of the melodic and harmonic aspects of jazz did not kill the show for me – far from it. There was still the sound of his tenor sax – rich, husky and effortless – and the easy, understated swing of his group, who played with quiet nonchalance but grooved like nobody's business. Hamilton's guitarist of those years, Chris Flory, particularly fascinated me. I had been dabbling on guitar for a year or two by then, and knew something (though very little) about the instrument, so I naturally approached what I was hearing through his playing. In contrast to the rest of the band, he looked very young, younger than even Hamilton himself, who was probably about as old then as I am now. He was dressed in a dark suit and had an intense, penetrating look in his eyes. At the end of the set, he didn't leave, but unlike Hamilton, who chatted with customers and signed autographs, Flory stood in the corner, smoking (you could do that indoors back then) with a don't-bother-me expression on his face. He played, pardon the cliché, like a god. A quiet and very self-confident god. Here was a musician who could speak volumes through his instrument without the distortion, speed and histrionics of rock-n-roll. I could dig that, even at sixteen.

Then there was the club. A quintessential old-school New York jazz club – dimly lit, simultaneously inviting and forbidding, and covered with a decades-old patina of old Manhattan. I made it back twice since then – once with my father again (to hear Hank Crawford) and once with a girl I knew in New York in those days that I attempted to date, unsuccessfully of course, whenever I was back from school. The club closed sometime in the 1990s, while I was living out West.

Anyway, back to My Romance. I've been spinning it non-stop since the beginning of the year, but I finally got around to sitting down and listening to it properly. Spectacular record. It features a different band than the one Hamilton had when I heard him live, but it is excellent. The pianist Norman Simmons, in particular, shines. He is almost a co-leader, contributing two originals, the opening “Abundance” and the Latin-tinged “Jan,” and soloing strongly throughout. His touch is confident but not overbearing, a less ethereal Tommy Flanagan maybe, and his comping is spot-on.

The surprise of the record is the trombone of Joe Helleny. I had not heard Hamilton with a trombonist before, and mostly it works. Helleny's solos are the only disappointment of the album – he tends to rush through his phrases and smears too many notes for my taste (though on “Abundance” he grabs you with the first note and holds you firmly for the entire solo) – but his doubled lines with Hamilton are pure magic. Another surprise is the fact that My Romance is not all standards. Hamilton has been so prolific over the years yet so married to the American songbook that he had had to reach for some obscure material (“Poor Butterfly” by John Golden from 1916, anyone?), but here he not only records two of Simmons' tunes, but actually contributes one of his own – a simple but effective blues called “Sugarchile.”

The rest of the album is vintage Hamilton. Confident, relaxed, with a tone to die for, floating merrily over the rhythm section and playfully foiling Helleny's trombone. Jazz ballads frequently bore me, but the title track is a gem – talk about perfect music for romancing your honey. It has been a long time since I enjoyed an album so completely. Grab a copy while you still can, especially since it's only six bucks.