Jan Hammer and Sarah Vaughan

[Mark Stryker]

Hidden History

Here's Sarah Vaughan in 1970 swinging the hell out of "I'll Remember April" at a racehorse tempo with a 22-year-old Jan Hammer, just out of Berklee, playing his ass off on piano. Gene Perla, who got Hammer on the gig, is on bass, Jimmy Cobb plays drums. Have mercy! Gene tells me that the source of the tape is a Vancouver television appearance. There's a second tune that he sent me from the same show -- the Beatles "And I Love Him" (sic). As near as I can tell, Hammer was with Sassy for the better part of a year.

This reminds me of the remarkable bootleg tape of Sarah a couple of years earlier with Chick Corea in the band. What a shame that neither Chick nor Jan recorded with her, but their tenures coincided with a tough time in the recording business for Sarah. After her Mercury contract ran out in 1967, she wouldn't sign another deal with a label until Mainstream in 1971.

One more amusing Hammer story: Apparently, about a year after he left Sarah's group, he got called to sub one night for her ailing pianist at the Rainbow Room in NY. By then, Hammer was playing with the Mahavishnu Orchestra. Imagine playing synthesizers in a rock venue with Mahavishnu one night, wearing blue jeans and surrounded by amplifiers 10-stories high, for an audience of stoned teenagers and college students; and then the next night putting on a tux to accompany Sarah Vaughan on a Steinway at the Rainbow Room for a bunch of swells drinking Manhattans and Whisky Sours.

It's a living.

In a similar vein, Chick left Sarah to join Miles' quintet with Wayne, Ron, and Tony. A few years earlier, at the same time Bob James was touring with Sarah, he also recorded an avant-garde date for ESP and the challenging post-bop material that appears on "Once Upon a Time," the new Resonance Records release of previously unissued 1965 material. (I wrote the liner note for the Resonance release.) The point is that history often comes down to us in reductive form, with the demarcations between eras and genres drawn in bold lines and musicians' careers seemingly laid out in clear, linear fashion. The truth is that things on the ground in real time were generally a lot blurrier, if not downright messy.