A musician’s musician if ever there was one, the late Dick Twardzik recorded all too few times during his brief life (he died in 1955, aged 24). Dragon’s excellent programme of Lars Gullin releases featured Twardzik live with Chet Baker and Gullin in parts of the 1982 The Great Lars Gullin Vol. One ’55/’56 (Dragon DRLP 36). More recently, Twardzik’s fine 1954 The Last Set recording was re-released, as part of the second box of the Pacific Jazz Collection (reviewed JJI October ’89).
And now Peter Morris has brought out some privately recorded tapes from 1954, believing that they constitute ‘one of the handful of great recordings of music of all time’. If these 40 or so minutes hardly justify such hyperbole, they certainly confirm the belief of many that had Twardzik lived he might have become one of the very best of post-bop pianists.
On the first seven tracks, one has to put up with a thoroughly out-of-tune piano – and yet this hardly seems to matter, given the pleasure one receives upon listening to a formidable musical mind, trying to find its own way beyond the daunting precedents of Monk and Powell. On Things Twardzik flirts with John Lewis-like touches of Bach, but elsewhere, the music is remarkable for its refreshing absence of fashionable packaging. Midnight, Happen, Bess and much of April reveal the poetic intensity and sense of space of Twardzik at his youthful best.
If the spirit of Powell hovers over much of the rest of the music, the lovely dynamic sense and touches of old-time walking bass figures in Original intimate the extent of unrealised potential in Twardzik – potential that continues to intrigue, some 35 years after his death.
Discography
Warming Up; Nice Work If You Can Get It; ’Round Midnight; Get Happy; It Could Happen To You; All The Things You Are; Yesterdays (*); Original (*); Our Love Is Here To Stay (*); I Get A Kick Out Of You (*); Bess You Is My Woman (*); I’ll Remember April (*) (41.09)
Dick Twardzik (p). (*) plus Peter Littman (d/pc). 1954.
(New Artists NA 1006 CD)
