Twofer Tuesday #6

Twofer Tommy Flanagan, the great Detroit pianist

Welcome to Twofer Tuesdays, a special for subscribers wherein I discuss two albums in conjunction. (Or back-to-back, in classic rock radio DJ parlance). Sometimes random, sometimes aligned, sometimes old, sometimes new, sometimes a deep dive, but maybe also super-shallow, sometimes in dialogue with each other, sometimes just because their covers kinda look alike, or whatever criteria I deem appropriate/ inappropriate. Today I discuss an under-appreciated yet ubiquitous Detroit pianist who was the paramount of cool.

I conducted well over 50 interviews for this upcoming book on Alice Coltrane. Amid hundreds of hours of tape and transcripts, when a voice from it pops into my head, invariably it’s the gravelly baritone of Detroit pianist Kirk Lightsey. He’s calling from Paris, which has been his home for over thirty years. And the line that I always hear in my head goes: “Tommy Flanagan was my guy.”

One of the little things I learned along the way is that while we tend to think of Thelonious Monk as the definitive bebop pianist of the era. If you can only name one guy, that’s who it would be. But on the ground, it was a much different story. If you were playing jazz, enamored by the sound of the hot new thing, the only way to learn this music was to pull it off of 78s or to go hang out with the local cats who themselves had already pulled it off of those records, adding their own flair and personality to it.

Almost everyone I spoke with idolized Bud Powell. Alice above all revered Bud, as did most of the other pianists and players from that particular era of Detroit jazz. Surya Botofasina, who long studied with his guru, said there wasn’t a day that went by wherein she didn’t mention Bud Powell in her teachings.