Pianist Frank Hewitt (1935–2002) grew up in Harlem, and was turned on to bebop by a chance encounter with a Charlie Parker recording. He set himself to school on the bop piano masters – Powell, Monk, Elmo Hope – and gigged around New York, playing with Coltrane, Billie Holiday and Dinah Washington among others; he was one of the many jazz musicians who participated in the Living Theater’s production of The Connection. Hewitt became a member of Barry Harris’s circle and a familiar figure at sessions around town; he had a regular gig at Mitch Borden’s Smalls jazz club during its nine years of existence. But he made no records, with the exception of a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance on Jazz Underground: Live at Smalls (Impulse, 1998).

We Loved You, recorded a year before Hewitt’s death and now posthumously released, beautifully showcases his lyrical stumbling-butterfly piano technique and startling “well why not?” harmonic sensibility. The disc is assembled from two sessions recorded a month apart. The first, with bassist Ari Roland and drummer Jimmy Lovelace, is largely ballads; the second, with Danny Rosenfeld in for Lovelace, is livelier, especially on a brisk reading of “Cherokee.” Hewitt doesn’t “play changes”: he spins notes out into broken-spiderweb strings, swirls them around, drops them like pennies. His lines are gestural – full of elisions, approximations and scribbly abstraction, like a signature after a lifetime of handwriting. Like a signature, too, they frequently end with a flourish: a sweep running up the piano till he runs out of keys. Like Bud Powell he favours dark, growly left-hand chords, sometimes stated with deliberate weight, at other times almost abstractedly. On ballads, he fans chords out like a hand of cards.

The disc has a couple minor flaws – the peculiar running-order places three ballads in a row, and Roland gets a scratchy Paul Chambersish arco solo on virtually every track – but neither detracts significantly from an important and enjoyable release. If like me you’re an addict of gorgeous, wrong-way piano jazz – if you’re always hunting out records by Mal Waldron, Chris Anderson, Elmo Hope, the Legendary Hasaan – then We Loved You is pure catnip.

Nate Dorward

Signal to Noise