Modesty's Rewards

No cult follows Tommy Flanagan. In almost perfect secret, he has played with all the jazz giants for a half-dozen years, cheerfully accepting their styles, ingeniously enriching them with his own. But with his name still an italic footnote to somebody else's accomplishment, he has developed into one of the best jazz pianists now playing.

The secret to Flanagan's successful obscurity is an immense modesty that makes him the most retiring man since Li'l Abner. "I play the way I do," he says quietly, "by listening to other pianists. I suppose I'm playing differently now than I did a few years ago--but that's just because I don't practice as much as I used to." Such fondness for the shadows makes him the perfect sideman; last year he made 25 jazz albums, none of which listed him as leader. Among new recordings, three of the best have one thing in common: Flanagan's uplifting presence. On Moodsville's Make Someone Happy, he is the artful tailor who sews up the holes in Coleman Hawkins' aged zoot suit; on Columbia's "Jem," he makes lyric corsages and pins them all on Gerry Mulligan; and on Riverside's new adventure with the

Milt Jackson sextet, Flanagan's piano is the voice of reassurance.

Father Flanagan. But Flanagan is often heard playing well beyond the range of the virtuosos he accompanies. His touch is perhaps the most melodic in jazz, and in improvisation a beguilingly simple rhythmic sense keeps his left hand engaged with the housework while his right hand goes downtown. In recording studios, where he is fondly known as "Father Flanagan," engineers preen on his performances because his easy handling of the piano avoids the percussive exaggerations that mar most jazz piano recordings.

Flanagan, at 32, has been earning his living as a musician for 17 years. He grew up in jazz in Detroit with Milt Jackson, Billy Mitchell, Kenny Burrell and the Jones brothers. And he still prefers playing with his old townsmen, who now form something like a private labor union inside modern jazz. Hank Jones remains his idea of a really good pianist, and for the trio he hopes to form eventually, he would like Hank's brother Elvin on drums and Detroit's Major Holley on bass.

Take Time. He lives quietly in Manhattan and arranges his appearances strictly within the limits of his wish to stay in the city. Behind his Tartar mustache, he builds resolutions to work harder that he rarely keeps, then goes out to play the piano so well that almost no one else around can touch him. "Some day," he says, mustering up another resolution, "I'd like to do a little writing--I think I could, maybe. And I'd like to play well enough to do a single like Art Tatum. I'm just going to take the time and do that."

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