November 16: Seven years after Tommy Flanagan

Today marks the seventh anniversary of the death of pianist Tommy Flanagan, a preeminent talent and true "jazz poet" who remained one of the most respected pianists in the world from the chaos and testosterone of the 1950's to the modern sounds and free improvisation of the 1990's. Throughout his career, Flanagan supported such singers as Tony Bennet and Ella Fitzgerald with grace and beauty, led his own series of piano trios and two-piano duets with subtle darkness and graceful soloing, and famously gaffed John Coltrane's "Giant Steps" when asked to sightread the tune's prohibitively complex changes on the record date. Performing extensively as a sideman and as a leader, Flanagan left an important mark on the jazz piano tradition, cooling off and calming down the frenetic bebop of Bud Powell while maintaining the elegant swing and sophisticated musicianship of Ellington and Tatum.

Says critic Peter Watrous of the pianist's influential style (New York Times, September 3, 1992):

Mr. Flanagan, a preternaturally graceful pianist and one of jazz's finest improvisers, arranges his material to extract the fullest meaning from accents, breaks, unison bass and piano lines and metrical changes.

And of a set from the pianist at Condon's in August of 1992, he says:

...the 62-year-old Mr. Flanagan showed why he is considered a dean of jazz piano. He has absorbed a lifetime of jazz's tools, and his soloing reveled in ease and relaxation, even at faster tempos. Underneath the veneer, something darker was occurring. Mr. Flanagan is a master at swing, and he would vary his approach, from legato phrases to a sharply attacked series of notes... he casually flicked off notes, then moved into a set of phrases that curled at the edges, like burning paper, and that drove the band on.

Critic Pete Kelly (Jelly, 1997) sums up the pianist's uniquely transformative quality, saying:

...the ideas flow, chorus after chorus, song after song. It’s like reading a good book. Each song has its own shape and logic, its own pace of unfolding, its distinctive tone and feeling. Flanagan is the jazz musician as raconteur, a virtuoso with wit and imagination, an intellectual who likes to entertain, a historian who tells great stories. Imagine Spaulding Gray with a piano.

And imagine this. Flanagan live in Germany in 1991, ten years before his death in 2001. Watch and listen: