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Seven Steps to Piano Heaven: The Artistry of Sir Roland Hanna
by Mark Tucker
My favorite living jazz pianist is Sir Roland Hanna. I don’t understand why that’s not so for everybody. He has all the requisite qualities: swing, technique, sound, taste, imagination, heart, soul. Somehow, though, Hanna has never run away with critical laurels, or developed into a high-profile player even though he is respected among musicians and knowledgeable fans. True, he is no progressive innovator like Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Cecil Taylor, or Keith Jarrett. But even among solid, mainstream pianists—including such veterans as Hank Jones, Tommy Flanagan, Dave McKenna, Marian McPartland, Kenny Barron—Hanna doesn’t occupy a front-rank position. His recording history confirms this: lacking a major-label contract, or even affiliation with one of the leading jazz independents, Hanna has turned to one company after another over the past thirty years. Of the thirteen discs surveyed in this article, each was released by a different label. Without a publicity machine grinding away for him, Hanna has forged ahead on his own. He has formed his own company, Rahanna Music Inc., to publish his compositions and issue recordings. Meanwhile, he has sustained himself and kept growing over the years, an outstanding if underrated jazz artist.
My aim in this article is to sing the praises of Roland Hanna. I’m not going to play the role of judicious critic, weighing this and that, splitting hairs, making judgment calls. No, I just want to enthuse about an extraordinary musician. I already know he won’t be to everyone’s taste. He has two tendencies that some jazz piano fans don’t relish: a preference for thick, full-bodied textures and a profound influence from Romantic and early twentieth-century concert-music composers (e.g., Chopin, Brahms, Debussy, Ravel). But as you will see, he also has other stylistic modes that make up his keyboard identity.
Born in 1932, son of a preacher in the black sanctified church, Hanna was part of the efflorescence of talented pianists whose careers began in Detroit in the later 1940s and 1950s. “I came up amongst so many fantastic piano players,” he told Marian McPartland on a Piano Jazz radio appearance. “Detroit was just rife with brilliant people: Tommy Flanagan, Barry Harris, Hank Jones, Terry Pollard, Ted Sheely, Abe Woodley, even ‘Bags’ [vibraphonist Milt Jackson] played piano back in those days.” Hanna shared with some of these pianists—notably Flanagan, Harris, and Jones—certain traits that might define a post-war Detroit “school” of keyboard players: advanced harmonic knowledge, a strong relationship with bebop, a percussively accented touch, economy, elegance, and unfailing swing. But unlike these others, Hanna was also drawn to studying and playing the classical repertory, and later attended both the Eastman School of Music and Juilliard.
After brief associations with Benny Goodman (1958), Charles Mingus (1959), Sarah Vaughan (1960), and Carmen McRae (1965), Hanna landed his first long-term job with the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis orchestra, holding down the piano chair in that adventurous ensemble from 1966 to 1974. Hanna served an important apprenticeship there, finding ways to accommodate a fully formed solo style to the challenges of fellow Michigander Thad Jones’s tricky charts. Hanna’s later mastery of shifting textures must have developed during this stint. Though he made his first recording as a leader in 1959, Hanna’s independent career didn’t begin to take off until 1971, when he formed the New York Jazz Quartet, a cooperative ensemble that gigged into the 1980s. After a benefit tour of Liberia in 1969, he was knighted by the country’s president William Tubman and has worn the honorific “Sir” proudly ever since.
In recent decades Hanna has become involved with jazz repertory both through playing in the Broadway show Black and Blue and with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. He has also settled into teaching in the jazz program at the Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College, CUNY. Still active as a performer both at home and abroad, he has maintained a busy recording schedule, both with his own projects and on dates led by others.
Though I think it’s fair to place Hanna in the post-war Detroit school mentioned above, he also has traits that set him apart from that group. One is a predilection for thick chordal textures that make the piano ring out like an orchestra, as it did in the 1920s and 1930s. Many modern pianists (since Bud Powell, really) tend to favor single-note lines in the right hand and spare, clipped chords in the left; Hanna uses this approach in combos but never for long stretches of time, preferring to introduce richer, more deep-reaching textures for variety. Hanna also loves to construct arrangements for everything he plays—there is consistently a composer’s touch in his performances, whether those of his own originals or familiar tunes by Gershwin or Monk. A third signature of Hanna is a rhapsodic, classically influenced persona that flavors just about everything he does. His arrangement of “Fascinating Rhythm,” for example (on the Maybeck Recital Hall disc), takes the main motive of the tune and relates it to Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, a clever bit of transcultural signifying. Finally there is Hanna’s vast stylistic range. Critic Grover Sales has come up with a helpful list: “the sanctified church, rhythm ’n’ blues, classic piano literature, the grand Romantic tradition of the nineteenth century, French Impressionism, ragtime, Harlem stride, Tatum, bebop, Garner, the blues, funk, avant-garde, and the explosion of songwriting genius that blessed America in the Twenties and Thirties.”
As a window on the artistry of Roland Hanna, I’ve selected seven essential recordings that add up to a rich composite portrait of the pianist. My personal preference for hearing Hanna is in a solo context, so choices are weighted in that direction.
1. Sir Roland Hanna: Maybeck Recital Hall Series, vol. 32 (Concord CCD-4604, 1994). This solo recital shows Hanna at a peak, with heroic technique, imaginative arrangements devised for pop songs, and love of the lyrical line. It’s a set devoted mostly to Gershwin, a composer for whom Hanna has a special affinity. Sonny Rollins’s “Oleo”—based on Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm”—is a flagwaving tour de force, taken at a breakneck speed and featuring audacious runs, motoric patches of stride, and unfailingly crisp execution. Another high point is Hanna’s reading of Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life,” an oasis of calm that shimmers with antique harmonies recalling Debussy and Satie. Recorded live, this set also reveals Hanna as bold risk-taker, willing to embrace technical challenges that push him into territory avoided by lesser pianists.
2. Roland Hanna and George Mraz Play for Monk (Musical Heritage Society MHS 512192H, [1978] 1988). A jazz repertory player long before the movement became widespread, Hanna has made a number of discs devoted to individual artists. This Monk tribute stands out as one of the finest, partly because of the chemistry between the pianist and bassist Mraz but also due to the way Hanna retains his own identity in the interpretations, avoiding the temptation to emulate Monk’s sound and style. Highlights include the playful wit of “Rhythm-A-Ning,” the steamrolling drive of “In Walked Bud,” the tender and not-so-melancholy reading of “Ruby, My Dear,” and the gently rocking version of Monk’s ballad “Reflections.” Throughout Hanna treats Monk’s pieces as frameworks for new arrangements and as vehicles for soloing—he is not intimidated by the reputation of these works as compositions.
3. Roland Hanna: Bird Tracks, Remembering Charlie Parker (Progressive Records PCD-7031, [1978] 1989). Another tribute album recorded the same year as the Monk set. Despite the slightly inferior recording quality, Hanna’s takes on tunes written by and associated with Parker are fresh and memorable. Once again Hanna makes no attempt to emulate Parker’s signature traits—his brilliant single-note runs, for example, or formidable speed. Nor does he borrow from Parker’s distinctive vocabulary of licks and arpeggiated figures, but features his own embellishing patterns derived from a European school of virtuosity. He turns the Latin-styled “Barbados” into a stately pavane. “Dear Old Stockholm” becomes a pensive study in blue, and he wraps “Pastel” in lush textures that conjure up wistful images of 1940s urban romance.
4. Roland Hanna: Perugia Live at Montreux ’74 (Arista-Freedom 1010, LP, 1975). Now you’re ready for the more robust, expansive, concert-hall version of Hanna. From the opening “Take the ‘A’ Train” Hanna brings all his musical energies to the foreground, ignited by an aggressive spark in this live performance before a European jazz festival audience. The title tune, “Perugia,” gives the sense of embarking on a journey at the outset, then a sinuous cantabile melody appears out of the anticipation, pedal points undergird patches of ambiguous tonality, and the piece takes on a processional quality. There is also an expansive version of Thad Jones’s “A Child is Born,” one of Hanna’s feature pieces when he was with the Jones-Lewis orchestra. Hanna’s virtuosic technique is evident throughout, as he suddenly flies into miniature Tatum-like cadenzas, unleashes strings of ornate Chopinesque runs, or moves into a melodious block-chord style.
5. Sir Roland Hanna: Round Midnight (Town Crier TCD 513, 1987). This is possibly the most classically oriented and least improvised-sounding of all Hanna’s discs. Despite the album’s title, all but three of the eleven compositions are his own, and most tend toward large-scale, ruminating statements cloaked in thick, chordal textures and featuring rhapsodic sections of passage work. Monk’s “Round Midnight,” for example, is awash in heavy pedal, closer in spirit to a Chopin nocturne than to the familiar jazz anthem. Hanna’s “Century Rag” is a good-humored update of that old form, conjuring up all at once Scott Joplin, Kurt Weill, William Bolcom, and Brahms. For more straightlaced jazz listeners this album will prove a stretch, but it contains some gorgeous performances and the piano sound is warm and embracing.
6. Roland Hanna Plays the Music of Alec Wilder (Inner City IC 1072, LP, 1980). Now we arrive at the zenith of Hanna’s musical art, and I’m only sorry that this disc and the next have yet to be reissued on compact disc. The Hanna-Wilder pairing is a natural, with both men straddling the popular-classical divide and drawn to emotional territory that touches on the world of gentle regrets, lost childhood, whispered intimacies, and tender affirmation. Beyond these links, Hanna apparently discovered that “Wilder used some of the same compositional devices I have employed in my own writing.”
As a long-time Wilder admirer, I find Hanna’s set of song interpretations perfection itself. For each, he crafts an individual setting or arrangement that sets it apart from the rest. He is particularly effective with the children’s songs “The Starlighter” and “The Star Wish,” which convey a sense of comfort and security even as they kindle a spirit of magic that points to the unknown. What comes across powerfully on this album is Hanna’s deep love and profound understanding of Wilder’s music. It’s as though he has found a way to transfer these vocal pieces to the keyboard idiom and turn them into luminous works intended for that instrument alone.
7. Sir Roland Hanna: A Gift from the Magi (West 54 WLW 8003, LP, 1979). Hanna’s masterpiece, a solo piano set of eight original compositions (plus one by Charlie Haden), which takes on the character of a suite. Steeped in French Impressionism and nineteenth-century Romanticism, Hanna finds a seamless way to integrate such keyboard styles with the vocabulary of mid-century jazz. He accomplishes a new fusion in which classical idioms and jazz morph into one another rather than standing apart to announce their differences. As he acknowledges his roots on the album’s liner notes, “Chopin is my favorite composer and there’s Scriabin and Bartók but while growing up I was crazy about Satie and Debussy. I heard Ravel later. The music I can really express myself in most easily is the French. It’s the third relation harmonic progression . . . more than perfect fourths and fifths or chromaticism.”
The titles of individual numbers—“Treasures Lost,” “My Secret Wish,” “Silence,” “Afterglow”—evoke the quiet, lyrical atmosphere that pervades the album. Unfortunately the disc’s sound quality doesn’t do Hanna justice—but his voice and spirit come through, nonetheless. This recording is a refreshing tonic. I am grateful to Bob O’Meally for first introducing it to me; he in turn learned of it from Rae Linda Brown.
These seven albums provide a view of Roland Hanna in the round. After sampling them, be sure to continue exploring the rest of his discography, a portion of which is annotated below.
If this is your first voyage with Hanna, welcome to a pleasant and sensuous listening journey. His music brims with life and soul, and you will find yourself expanded and enriched in getting to know it.
Other Roland Hanna Recordings
LP: Roland Hanna: Sir Elf (Choice CRS 1003, 1973). Despite a somewhat harsh piano sound, this first solo album is worth acquiring, mixing more straightforward jazz treatments (“You Took Advantage of Me,” “Walkin’”) with classically influenced excursions (“Morning”) . . . . CDs: The Piano of Roland Hanna: Easy to Love (Koch Jazz CD 8529, [1963] 1999). His second album finds Hanna in a trio setting with tight, proficient performances. Some of Hanna’s influences—Tommy Flanagan, Wynton Kelly, Ahmad Jamal, George Shearing, Errol Garner, Art Tatum (i.e., the introduction to “Yesterdays”)—emerge clearly here, but on “It Never Entered My Mind” you can also hear the crisp touch he developed early on and the signature trait of thick, keyboard-spanning chords. . . . The Complete Solid State Recordings of the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra (Mosaic 151, [1966-1970] 1994). The best way to sample Hanna with the Jones-Lewis organization. Listen to his delicate, spare, two-handed unison solo on “Consummation” from 1970, also to the sweet lyricism he brings to Thad Jones’s lovely ballad “A Child is Born.” . . . Sir Roland Hanna: Duke Ellington Piano Solos (MusicMasters 5045-2-C, 1991). Strangely unsatisfying and oddly subdued, as though he felt weighted down by the material rather than liberated by it. There are a few welcome exceptions (the laconic “Portrait of Bert Williams” and poetic “Isfahan”), but overall this disc shows neither Hanna nor Ellington in their best lights. . . . Sir Roland Hanna Quartet Plays Gershwin (LaserLight, 1993). A straightahead program of Gershwin standards in which Hanna shares soloing honors with saxophonist Bill Easley. . . . Sir Roland Hanna Presents Yoshio Aomori with Chris Roselli: I Love Bebop (Rahanna Music Inc. RMI 901, 1998). Hanna teams up with two much younger players (bassist Aomori and drummer Roselli) for a high-spirited, at times downright exuberant set of tunes by some of the chief figures in Hanna’s musical orbit: Thad Jones, Jimmy Heath, Billy Strayhorn, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell.
For more information on Roland Hanna, please visit www.rahannamusic.com.
–College of William & Mary