{"title":"Al Haig","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003eAl Haig was working a cocktail gig around Boston in the early 1940s when he heard Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie on a late-night radio broadcast from New York and changed his plans entirely. He served in the Coast Guard from 1942 to 1944, moved to New York, and within months was inside bebop's founding sessions: he played on the Gillespie quintet's 1945 Guild Records 78s, four sides widely regarded as the first recordings to demonstrate all elements of the mature bebop style. He was Parker's pianist from 1948 to 1950, performing at the Three Deuces on 52nd Street alongside Gillespie, Max Roach and Tommy Potter, and was the pianist on Miles Davis's \"Birth of the Cool\" nonet sessions in 1949. Stan Getz hired him from 1949 to 1951. That is a résumé that would sustain a career indefinitely, and it didn't. Haig spent most of the 1950s and 1960s playing cocktail gigs for the society set, in part because of legal difficulties that left him personally marginalised from the jazz world without formally ending his career. The critic Max Harrison wrote that Haig was \"a definite influence on Hank Jones and, through him, on other men, such as Tommy Flanagan,\" which locates him precisely in the bebop piano lineage, influential enough to shape the musicians who shaped the generation after. His rediscovery came in 1974 when Tony Williams, owner of Spotlite Records in the UK, invited him to tour Europe. He recorded \"Invitation\" for Spotlite with bassist Bibi Rovère and drummer Kenny Clarke, and spent the next eight years building a late-career following in Europe and Japan before his death from a heart attack in November 1982.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"al-haig-trio-al-haig-trio-1990-japanese-diw-vinyl-lp","title":"Al Haig Trio - Al Haig Trio (1990 Japanese DIW Vinyl LP)","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eAl Haig Trio - \u003cem\u003eAl Haig Trio\u003c\/em\u003e | Vinyl LP - 1990 Japanese DIW Reissue (DIW-25035, originally Period SPL 1118)\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAl Haig was there at the birth of bebop and never quite got the credit. One of the very first pianists to absorb the new music alongside Bud Powell, he held the piano chair in Dizzy Gillespie's and Charlie Parker's groups in the mid-1940s, playing on some of the recordings that defined the style. By 1954, when this trio date was made, the first wave had passed, but Haig's playing had only grown more refined. The programme is mostly standards, \"Just One Of Those Things\", \"S'Wonderful\" and \"Just You, Just Me\", turned over with the clean, quick, harmonically alert touch that marked him out, alongside Parker's \"Yardbird Suite\" and a thoughtful \"'Round About Midnight\". Bill Crow, the bassist who would later write some of the best-loved books about jazz, is on bass, and Lee Abrahams on drums. It is bebop piano at its most elegant, unshowy and swinging, the work of a musician who helped invent the language and could now speak it in a whisper.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHaig's story is one of the odder ones in jazz. After the bebop years he drifted out of the music for a long stretch, working as a cocktail pianist and all but disappearing from the scene, before a rediscovery in the 1970s brought him back into the studios for a productive late run on European and Japanese labels. This 1954 Period session, cut when he was still close to the source, is one of the records that made the case for him when the reissue labels came calling.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis is the 1990 Japanese reissue on DIW, catalogue number DIW-25035, of the album originally issued as Period SPL 1118.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"DIW","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43905705967675,"sku":null,"price":30.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0630\/3203\/3339\/files\/IMG_8128.jpg?v=1785750659"}],"url":"https:\/\/lushliferecords.com.au\/collections\/al-haig.oembed","provider":"Lush Life Records","version":"1.0","type":"link"}