Collection: Tommy Flanagan

Tommy Flanagan arrived in New York from Detroit in 1956 and within a year had played piano on two of the most important jazz records of the decade. He was on "Saxophone Colossus" with Sonny Rollins and on "Giant Steps" with John Coltrane, the latter a session famous partly because the material Coltrane had written was so harmonically advanced that it caught even the most prepared musicians off-guard. Flanagan's solo on the title track is one of the most discussed piano solos in jazz for that reason, not because it fails, but because it documents the moment when jazz moved somewhere new and even great players had to scramble to follow. He had come up playing clarinet as a child before switching to piano, working through Detroit's Blue Bird Inn in his teens alongside peers who included Kenny Burrell and Thad Jones, and in 1957, while touring Europe with J.J. Johnson's band, he recorded his debut album in Stockholm in a single session with Wilbur Little on bass and Elvin Jones on drums. "Overseas" (Prestige, 1957) remains the record most associated with his name as a leader: nine pieces, six of them Flanagan originals, recorded with an ease and clarity that made it a touchstone for piano trio playing for decades after. He then spent much of the 1960s and 1970s as Ella Fitzgerald's pianist and musical director, which kept his own recording output thin until he pursued a solo career in earnest from 1980. The Enja albums he made through the 1980s, "Thelonica" in particular, consolidated a late reputation that matched anything on his session credits. He died in New York on 16 November 2001, aged 71.