William N. Law Blog: Hod O'Brien (1936-2016)

Sunday, November 27, 2016

Hod O'Brien (1936-2016)

Hod O'Brien, a ruggedly handsome and soft-spoken bebop pianist who came to jazz in the late 1950s, left jazz for 10 years in the 1960s and early 1970s, only to return to the music, becoming one of the most highly regarded and tasteful pianists of his generation, died on Nov. 20. He was 80.

Born in Chicago in 1936, Walter "Hod" O'Brien was deeply influenced by boogie-woogie at age 8. Lessons followed from a teacher at his grade school. Fortunately for O'Brien, his teacher was well versed in boogie-woogie and promised to teach him if he also worked hard at scales and other classical basics. Unfortunately, the boogie-woogie lessons turned out to be sheet music.

But O'Brien's parents had friends who could improvise while playing boogie-woogie, which inspired O'Brien to stick with the piano. Between ages 8 and 18, O'Brien took lessons on and off, and he picked up swing, Dixieland and bebop jazz styles starting at age 15 after hearing Jazz at the Philharmonic recordings.

When O'Brien was 18, he began playing professionally while attending the Hotchkiss School, the Oberlin Conservatory (for three months before illness forced him to be hospitalized) and at the Manhattan School of Music (above, today) between 1956 and '57. He didn't complete his degree there either, largely because of his growing workload at clubs.

One of his earliest steady gigs in New York was with bassist Oscar Pettiford (above) in a quintet that featured trumpeter Red Rodney, Sahib Shihab on alto and baritone saxes, and drummer Earl "Buster" Smith. Featured on Piano Jazz with Marian McPartland in 2008, O'Brien credited the jazz-loft scene in New York in the late 1950s with giving him an opportunity to play and jam with leading musicians. "A lot of us got discovered in lofts by some of the working musicians who would come by after gigs," he told McPartland.

One day, while visiting The Pad, a jazz club on Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village, O'Brien was asked by vibraphonist Teddy Charles to sit in. Hal Stein, a friend of O'Brien, was playing in the group. After the gig, Charles, who was scouting for Prestige Records at the time, invited O'Brien to record on a session he was lining up with trumpeters Donald Byrd, Art Farmer and Idrees Sulieman. The 1957 album would be called Three Trumpets and it put O'Brien on the map.

I
n the early 1960s, O'Brien played with Phil Woods, Freddie Hubbard, Charlie Rouse and Lee Konitz. He also played regularly with his trio at New York's Five Spot, the Jazz Gallery and Cork and Bib, where he was the house intermission pianist. By 1964, as work slowed with the rise of pop rock and soul, O'Brien enrolled at Columbia University, where he studied mathematics, a subject he found "fascinating." Before long, math proved to be over his head and he switched his major to psychology.

After he graduated, O'Brien worked in computer programming at New York University between 1969 and '74. O'Brien later regretted leaving the music scene for 10 years, telling McPartland that in retrospect, he lost momentum. By the mid-1970s, O'Brien returned to jazz, playing and recording regularly with older jazz artists clinging to the acoustic form during the commercially viable fusion decade.

O'Brien continued to record and teach, eventually marrying vocalist Stephanie Nakasian, with whom he recorded a stunning album, Dedicated to Lee Wiley (2009). In the 2000s, O'Brien battled cancer and continued to perform even while undergoing treatment.

As we can hear in virtually everything O'Brien recorded, taste isn't something that just arrives but is a credo that artists must be passionate about as they make song and chord-voicing choices. O'Brien was a sensitive soul who was often at his best as a sideman, particularly when accompanying guitarists such as Rene Thomas, Joe Puma and Doug Raney, with whom he performed extensively while in Denmark in November 1988.

O'Brien was often likened to bop-piano forefather Bud Powell, but to my ear, his ability to shift effortlessly between bop and a lusher, romantic style was probably closer to pianist Sonny Clark.