Originally released 1958
Reissued July 22, 2022
Contemporary Records
1xLP
Like discovering buried treasure, or experiencing a stroke of good fortune, Craft Recordings has blessed us with a stunning rerelease of Hampton Hawes’ 1958 Four!. His eighth release on the Contemporary label in the 1950s, Hawes and his accompanying trio, his first collaboration with Barney Kessel and Shelley Manne, complemented by bassist Red Mitchell, rollicks through an electric session of classic bop, swing and blues. One of the earlier recordings to utilize stereo channel technology, Hawes’ piano pops out of the left side while the trio is contained to the right, giving the album a sharp sense of space and room for Hawes’ dancing solos to really take flight. Barney Kessel, hot off his Poll Winner’s sessions, provides his typically crisp melodies that can’t stop listeners from bobbing along. A real shame then, that shortly after the release of Four!, while Hawes was at the height of his talents, he would be arrested and sentenced to ten years for heroin possession, only to be pardoned by JFK in August 1963, some three months before he would drive his motorcade into Dealey Plaza. Readers interested in jazz history might also be interested in Hawes’ acclaimed 1974 autobiography, Raise Up Off Me, one of the first jazz memoirs published by a musician themselves.