Al Haig Trio - Al Haig Trio (1990 Japanese DIW Vinyl LP)

Al Haig Trio - Al Haig Trio | Vinyl LP - 1990 Japanese DIW Reissue (DIW-25035, originally Period SPL 1118)

Al 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.

Haig'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.

This is the 1990 Japanese reissue on DIW, catalogue number DIW-25035, of the album originally issued as Period SPL 1118.