“Stealing Port” is simply a riff on the traditional blues. “I may steal something from here and something from there and put it together once in a while, but that’s about all.” Oddly enough, “Freego,” one of his better pieces, sounds more like early bebop than a Swing Era product. Probably because of his difficulties in reading and writing music, he has done very little composing. The answer: a very full life, composed largely of concerts and festivals in the summer club dates with the quintet he has kept together off and on for a decade (with fellow-Providence musicians Chris Flory on guitar, Phil Flanigan on bass and Chuck Riggs on drums, along with pianist John Bunch) other jobs with pianist-entrepreneur George Wein’s band and frequent record sessions with Rosemary Clooney, Buddy Tate, Flip Phillips, and whatever other like-minded musicians empathize with him. What sort of life in music is available to a jazzman who (a) can barely read music, (b) shies away from fusion, the avant-garde and other popular forms and (c) plays almost nothing but old standard songs? Manami Imura, a Tokyo-born classical pianist, came to New York to study music and met Hamilton, a neighbor, soon after. During your 20s you feel you can get away with anything, but when you get close to 30 you realize you can’t.”įans and fellow musicians who remember his pallid and bloated look of a few years ago are happy to see Hamilton today, completely adjusted and happily married. It took me about 50 tries and I finally stopped drinking and smoking. When I began losing jobs because of the drinking, I started to quit. But after a while your health begins to suffer and you can’t do it anymore. “For years I could do a gig and drink all I wanted to. Talking about it the other day between dates at Alfonse’s in Los Angeles, he said: “I just wasn’t ready for what I stepped into in New York. The sudden fame that enveloped him led to the sort of offstage behavior that bedeviled too many great artists from Bix Beiderbecke to Lester Young. That he is playing now better than ever may be related to an awakening in his personal life. Today he is firmly entrenched as a 33-year-old veteran of dozens of albums for Concord Jazz, of eight visits to Japan (“The best working conditions in the world!”), and so many to Europe that he has lost track (“I must have been to Sweden about 15 times”).
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