Hampton Hawes: Four! (Acoustic Sounds Vinyl 180g)

Contents

1. Yardbird Suite
2. There Will Never Be Another You
3. Bow Jest
4. Sweet Sue
5. Up Blues
6. Like Someone In Love
7. Love Is Around The Corner

Although Hampton Hawes experimented with electronic keyboards and fusion music later in his career, he was a bebopper at heart, as this session makes abundantly clear. With material like Charlie Parker’s “Yardbird Suite,” his own “Up Blues,” and Red Mitchell’s “Bow Jest” (on which Mitchell plays his first recorded string solo), Hawes is at a creative peak here. Barney Kessel, who performed on this concert, praised Hawes’ “inexhaustible ideas about the blues . . no one else in modern jazz plays the blues better.” And no one could hold a rhythm section together better than Shelly Manne, the fourth in the lineup of this energetic “Four!”