He was a mess of contradictions; the son of a Presbyterian minister, he was a heroin addict most of his life, so strung out at one point that given his choice of prostitutes in an Asian whorehouse, he chose the cleaning woman whose arms “looked like the Penn Central switchyards” because he knew she could score him some smack.

Hampton Hawes

A lifelong rebel, he had the chance to avoid military service but didn’t; he’d always admired the armed forces and what he called their “Terry and the Pirates” (an old comic strip) regalia.

A black man who suffered all the disabilities that come from membership in that race in America, he refused to use it as a crutch and dismissed soul/funk keyboardists as easy-listening shuck-and-jiving. He had higher standards, those being set by jazz piano colossi Art Tatum and Oscar Peterson, both of whom praised his playing.

At the same time, he experimented (to his early fans’ dismay) with new sounds, spending too much time doodling around on an electric piano during the period of his career that produced his least satisfying work.

His name was Hampton Hawes, one of the great jazz pianists of the twentieth century and surely the only one ever to receive a presidential pardon.

Hawes was born in Los Angeles in 1928 and played with notables such as Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray on Central Avenue on his way up in the 1940s. He became enamored of bebop when it was still something of a cult, and observed that many of the players who wanted to become anointed by contact with Charlie Parker, the Dionysiac figure at its head, imitated his madness–particularly the heroin habit–without producing anything of comparable value.

Dexter Gordon

He took at least part of that lesson to heart. Parker was a mad genius, but while madness may be a necessary condition of creativity, it is not a sufficient one. Hawes was largely self-taught, but he was a demon for practice; he had perhaps learned his lesson growing up when his father forbade him to play the blues on the family piano, locking the keyboard when he left the house. Hampton discovered where the key was and began to skip church, come home and whale away at his music. The experience must have inculcated in him the sense that practice time was precious.

He was ecumenical in his musical tastes, staying in touch with the blues but nonetheless attracted to lush movie themes and romantic chestnuts such as “Stella by Starlight” that he viewed not as outmoded fashions but as garments he could make anew.

Convicted on a heroin charge, he was given the opportunity to inform on others for favorable treatment; he declined, even though he barely knew some of the other people involved, they being nothing more than dealers, not friends. For his honor-among-thieves impulse, he was given a ten-year sentence, twice what he would have otherwise received. He made some great music in jail, but after seeing President Kennedy on television, he decided to seek a pardon. A president who thought of himself as a swinger (although not the musical kind), Kennedy incredibly responded and pardoned Hawes on the “fourteenth day of August in the year of our Lord One Thousand Nine Hundred and Sixty-Three,” in the biblical tones in which such things are written.

Hawes’ memoirs, “Raise Up off Me” (with novelist Don Asher) are a great read, but his music is even better.