Who was Al Haig? Well, nothing less than one of the great, formative pianists of bebop and modern jazz. As Tommy Flanagan said to me “he was the first to play bebop with that ‘singing’ sound.” What Tommy meant was that Haig, early on, offered an alternative to the Bud Powell approach which was, to be fair, inimitable. Bud was so dominant and unique that it is not surprising that contemporary pianists felt like they had to look elsewhere for inspiration. Tommy was referring to the idea of chord voicing; whereas Powell played with a blunt, percussive swing and used a lot of internalized dissonance in his chord voicings, Haig used brighter intervals that clashed less and sounded brighter. I know that Haig was also friends with Hank Jones, and they must have listened closely to each other during the great fermenting years of early bebop (not to mention, of course, the pervasive influence of Teddy Wilson and Nat Cole, who were both prime players in the pre-bop era).
Powell was Haig’s idol; I got to know Al when I was barely in my 20s. He was playing at a club on 63 Street and First Avenue in Manhattan, called Gregory’s. When I just happened to wander by one night and see his name on the sign outside, I was amazed. To me Al was not quite real, but more just a name (a great name, to be sure) on some old jazz records and bootlegged broadcasts. I wandered in and stood by the door at first to listen. Gregory’s was very small, and the piano was just opposite that door; when people came in it often stayed ajar, letting cold air. Haig looked at me the first time and I closed it. From then on I was his official door-closer, at least for that night.
We talked a bit; I came back frequently and a friendship developed. I loved listening to him play (with Chuck Wayne on guitar and Jamil Nasser on bass). I later felt that, though Haig played beautifully, some of the old bebop fire had gone out of his hands. But it didn’t really matter. He played those beautiful, shifting chords, smart inversions and block unisons, and had a touch that was completely unique.
I found out quickly that Al did not want to be asked about the old bebop days, and one of the reasons we got on so well was that I never pressed him about Bird or 52nd Street, though sometimes the subjects came up naturally. As I found out later Al had been through a hellish period of alcoholism and – yes – a murder trial. He and his on wife had been blackout drunks, and one night she fell down a flight of stairs and died. Al was arrested for murder and acquitted at trial; the coroner had determined that the fall was accidental. Years later I met Al’s defense lawyer, Flo Kennedy, who was a civil rights advocate and militant feminist. Al was dead by this time, but when I mentioned his name she gave me a hard stare and said “he should never even have been tried for that death. They went after him because he was a white man.” And Flo, an amazing and flamboyant figure who was black, added “I call it the nig###ization of a white man.”
I was relieved to hear this; Flo would not abide abusers, and she was politically committed, and I felt that if she believed this then it must be true.
Haig and I became good friends. He had remarried, to a wonderful lady named Joanne. I also spent a lot of time with his bassist Jamil Nasser, who loved Al and later told me that Al was about the only white man he had ever known who did not try and use his whiteness for social or professional advantage.
There’s a lot that should be known about Al Haig. Bill Crow, the great bassist who also recorded with Al in the 1950s, told me that Haig was one of the key pianists who helped to codify the new jazz standard repertoire, which was expanding in the realm of the American song book. Haig, he said, was one of the major players in establishing the chord changes for these tunes, a major accomplishment for which he has never received credit.
There was a well known, recorded interview, in which Bud Powell, Al’s idol, called Haig as “a perfect pianist.” When I played this for Al (over the phone) he was flabbergasted and was left, literally, speechless. He had told me how he and fellow pianist Bill Triglia used to follow Bud around from club to club, though of course it was Al’s association with Charlie Parker, who loved his playing, which put him on the musical map. Like so many players he was completely dedicated to Parker’s genius; “I would play in a toilet to work with Bird” he told me, and this was something I heard, in similar terms, from other Parker sidemen. Bird was not easy to work with because of his personal problems, but everyone wanted to be with him because he was simply one of the great geniuses of jazz history.
As pianist Dick Katz said to me after Al’s funeral (at which I spoke), there should have been a line of piano players out the door to pay tribute. Still, Barry Harris played Stars Fell on Alabama (one of Haig’s earliest solo recordings) and there was a nice feeling in the crowd. I was in a state of shock; Al was 60 when he dropped dead suddenly of a heart attack, collapsing in his apartment on East End Avenue.
The performance here is of Just one of Those Things, with Bill Crow on bass and Lee Abrams on drums, from March 15, 1954. This may have been Al’s greatest period, before the pall of alcohol and post-Bird wandering set in, in a way that changed him permanently in many ways. I asked Barry Harris about what he thought happened to Haig in those days and Barry, a great human being and a fount of compassion and wisdom, said:
“You have to realize that when Charlie Parker died a lot of musicians didn’t know what to do next. Bird was such a beacon of light, and when he was gone a lot of players drifted and fell apart.”
(The picture with this post is one I took of Haig in the 1970s, though I do not remember where or when).
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