Tommy Flanagan starb am 16. November 2001, Roland Hanna am 13. November 2002. Im Juni 2002 nahm Hanna ein Flanagan-Programm auf – eine Hommage an seine zwei Jahre älteren alten Freund – das Stücke von Flanagan, Thad Jones, Tom McIntosh, Sir Charles Thompson, Mercer Ellingtons „Things Ain’t What They Used to Be“ sowie Standards von Gershwin, Porter und anderen umfasste.
Roland, however, was somewhat different. Originally, totally involved with classical music, he gravitated to jazz after hearing his high school mate Tommy Flanagan. Because of Roland’s extensive training at The Eastman School of Music and later at Juilliard, he developed a bravura technique that led him into areas where many jazz pianists don’t go. He learned how to integrate his classical background into much of what he composed and played.
Also, his exposure to church (his father was a Preacher) left its mark and imbued him with that very special kind of spirit that permeates much of the Afro-American religious culture. Even though Roland also learned how to spin melodic lines like his Detroit colleagues, he approached improvisation in a unique way. Most pianists, myself included, rely at least partly, on a predigested melodic, harmonic and rhythmic vocabulary which, like spoken language, can be used to improvise spontaneously on the material at hand.
However, Roland hat the rare gift of being able to truly improvise from scratch, letting his imagination take him almost anywhere on a given theme. He was not dependent on any specific style to tell his stories. Like Earl Fatha Hines and few others, he never played a piece the same way twice.
~ Dick Katz, New York, March 2003, Liner Notes zu „Tributaries“
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"Don't play what the public want. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you doin' -- even if it take them fifteen, twenty years." (Thelonious Monk) | Meine Sendungen auf Radio StoneFM: gypsy goes jazz, #164: Neuheiten aus dem Archiv, 10.6., 22:00 | Slow Drive to South Africa, #8: tba | No Problem Saloon, #30: tba