[Dixielandjazz] Chico Hamilton RIP

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

Some very decent mainstreamy stuff mixed through Chico Hamilton's discography, some decent trombone work from Jimmy Cheatham and others on the 85th birthday set,  and quite apart from all that the very interesting Yank Lawson LP of long ago with what might not have been an added Latin rhythm -- which would have been a common way of putting the matter -- but a rhythmic interest edited out of jazz rather early and well worth restoring, especially to music in styles people have been playing for longer.  


another of the unusuals no longer here in body,

Robert R. Calder 


FROM TODAY'S GUARDIAN 


Chico Hamilton obituary
Highly individual American drummer, bandleader and jazz visionary who toured with Lena Horne in the 1950s
    
    * John Fordham 
    * theguardian.com, Tuesday 26 November 2013 18.34 GMT 
    * Jump to comments (2) 

A hundred years into its evolution, jazz incorporates ethnic and European classical instruments, drum machines and DJs spinning decks. A half-century or so ago, hardware habits were more cut and dried. A jazz big band had trumpets, trombones, saxes and a rhythm section. A small band had a rhythm section, a sax and trumpet, with maybe a guitar or a vibraphone. One that featured a (very quiet) guitarist, a flute or clarinet, a cellist, and a drummer who preferred mallets to sticks seemed like a strange beast in the jazz forest.
But the groups of the American drummer Chico Hamilton, who has died aged 92, did feature such instrumentation and, contrary to the jazz 
orthodoxies of the 1950s, they were for a time runaway successes. 

Hamilton led West Coast bands in that decade that came close to the popular acclaim of the area's biggest jazz stars, Chet Baker and Gerry Mulligan. He also provided opportunities for many newcomers who became formidable musicians, including the saxophonists Eric Dolphy, Charles Lloyd and 
Arthur Blythe, and the guitarists Jim Hall, Gábor Szabó, Larry Coryell and John Abercrombie.
Some listeners regarded Hamilton's attempts to adapt a musical formula to the marketplace as wasting the improvisational talents of his creative partners. His early work was rarely given its proper due and it was only relatively recently that he came to be recognised as a completely distinctive drum school all to himself – a superb instrumentalist with a highly individual sound, a talented bandleader and a jazz visionary who believed the music could tap a far broader range of resources than it usually did. Hamilton once described the drums as "very melodic … Very soft, graceful in motion as 
well as sound; a sensous, feminine instrument."
Hamilton played on the soundtrack to the film Sweet Smell of Success (1957); appeared in Bert Stern's famous 1958 Newport festival jazz documentary Jazz on a Summer's Day; and went on to work with musicians from many different backgrounds who had either studied with him or admired his achievements – including the former Spin Doctors guitarist Eric Schenkman and the Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts.
He was born Foreststorn Hamilton in Los Angeles and went to the city's Jefferson high school, where his contemporaries included the saxophonist Dexter Gordon. He rehearsed with many of the star pupils taught by the school's famous jazz teacher, Sam Browne.
Hamilton's models were the swing drummers Jo Jones and Sonny Greer, and when he left school he worked with the swing celebrities Lionel Hampton, Lester Young and Duke Ellington. But during the four years he then spent with the US army, jazz was turned on its head by the bebop 
revolution. The sound of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie might have dominated bop, but the underpinnings had radically changed too – jazz 
drumming was now more nervy, unpredictably accented, sometimes as busy as a permanent solo.
Hamilton avoided mimicking the brittle sound of the bop drummers, though he liked their rhythmic adventurousness. He began to evolve a personal style that gave a boppish edge to the four-square sound of swing drumming, without obliterating the subtle "talking" sonorities of drums. Discharged in 1946, Hamilton briefly joined Jimmy Mundy, but when his band fetched up, workless, in Salt Lake City, Hamilton went home to LA.
Already recognised as a fine big-band drummer, he worked for Charlie Barnet, briefly replaced Jones in Count Basie's orchestra and became the house drummer at Billy Berg's, one of the most celebrated West Coast clubs. But between 1948 and 1955, Hamilton's most regular assignment was accompanying the singer Lena Horne. In 1952, on leave from a Horne tour, Hamilton began playing in the first version of Mulligan's pianoless quartet with Baker. He also played drums in the Bob Hope/Bing Crosby movie Road to Bali (1952), worked with the saxophonists Gordon 
and Wardell Gray, and with the singers Billy Eckstine, Nat "King" Cole and Sammy Davis Jr. He played at Billie Holiday's Carnegie Hall concert 
and on her album Lady Sings the Blues (both in 1956), but also struck out on his own.
The 50s Chico Hamilton Quintets, immensely popular in their day, have received mixed reactions since. Their use of strings could veer toward restaurant-soundtrack blandness, and sometimes bogged down the improvisations of an A-list of frontline soloists (including 
the obliquely imaginative guitarist Hall and the underrated saxophonist Buddy Collette). But in their exploration of fresh compositional ideas, subtlety of percussion texture, unusual instrumentation and understated swing, they were in some ways more quintessential distillations of West Coast cool 
jazz than the music of Mulligan and Baker. Fred Katz, who had studied with Pablo Casals, became the quintet's cellist.
Hamilton toughened up the group's whispering sound in 1960, becoming bluesier and more vigorous, abandoning the cello and bringing in the trombonist Garnett Brown and a Coltranesque saxophonist, Lloyd. But by 1966 Hamilton was back to touring with Horne – though this time with a 
nucleus of his own band, including Szabó. He then formed Chico Hamilton Productions in among them one for Roman Polanski's Repulsion, and 
jingles for the advertising industry.
The rise of jazz-rock and fusion music in the 1970s led the constantly inquisitive Hamilton to investigate new sounds, with the saxophonist Arnie Lawrence remaining an anchor in the band while Hamilton brought in powerful newcomers such as Coryell. In 1975, he formed his Players band, including the soulful saxophonist Arthur Blythe and the trombonist Steve Turre.
Through the 1980s Hamilton stayed on the road, and the Players group became Euphoria in 1987, with the addition of the guitarist Cary DeNigris. In 
1994 Julian Benedikt made the documentary Chico Hamilton: Dancing to a Different Drummer and, in 2001, the indefatigable Hamilton brought back 
Blythe, Turre and others for a Euphoria reunion.
In 2001 Hamilton named a moving session – including Blythe, Turre and Watts – after his late son, Foreststorn. That year he played a packed Lincoln Centre with Euphoria in a show entitled My Funny Valentine: A Tribute to Chico Hamilton, and he sustained a stream of records throughout the decade. 
Four releases on the new Joyous Shout! label in 2006, to celebrate his 85th birthday, mixed fairly routine funky jazz with typical bursts of 
audacity (like his jazz account of the Who's The Kids Are Alright), and he composed for and played with an expanded ensemble for the Twelve 
Tones of Love session in 2009. The following year he began weekly rehearsals in his New York apartment with Euphoria for the album 
Revelation. The recording turned out to be a dynamic set for a jazz artist of any age, let alone a drummer of 90. It was an energetically 
affectionate reminder of the many styles he had mastered and transformed – from swing to sambas, bebop, rock and funk.
Hamilton is survived by his daughter, Denise, his brother Don, one granddaughter and two great-granddaughters. His wife, Helen, and his brother Bernie, an actor who starred in Starsky and Hutch, both died in 2008.
• Chico (Foreststorn) Hamilton, drummer, born 20 September 1921; died 25 November 2013