Piano | 1930-2001

Tommy Flanagan grew up in Detroit's Conant Gardens neighbourhood, the youngest of six children in a family that kept a piano in the house. He learned to read music on the clarinet his parents gave him as a child before gravitating to the keyboard, eventually working his way into the Blue Bird Inn as a teenager alongside peers who included Kenny Burrell and Thad Jones. He moved to New York in 1956 and within a year had appeared on "Saxophone Colossus" with Sonny Rollins and "Giant Steps" with John Coltrane, his piano solo on the title track of the latter becoming one of the most discussed moments in jazz history because the harmonic territory Coltrane had mapped was so new that even exceptional musicians had to navigate it in real time. His debut album as a leader, "Overseas" (Prestige, 1957), recorded in Stockholm with Wilbur Little and Elvin Jones while touring with J.J. Johnson's band, introduced a piano trio approach characterised by harmonic sophistication, a light touch and genuine swing that set the template for much of what followed. He spent much of the 1960s and 1970s as Ella Fitzgerald's pianist and musical director before launching a sustained solo career from 1980 that produced a series of Enja recordings widely regarded among the finest piano trio work of the era. Flanagan died on 16 November 2001 in New York City, aged 71.