Neither Tardo Hammer nor Charles Davis can explain their success in jazz.
Hammer, who has been called “the best jazz pianist you’ve never heard,”
said he never planned on a music career when he was starting out in the
late 1970s.
“To me it was ridiculous to think of a career,” he said in a
phone interview this week. “There wasn’t a lot of work, and jazz was
really not popular. ... You hardly saw an upright bass player, and
almost every piano player had to get a Fender Rhodes. If you played
‘Straight Ahead,’ that was considered something that was just about to
vanish off the planet, holding onto something that was ready to expire.
“I was thinking, ‘I’ll do this now because this is what I love
to do. I’ll go where this is and see what happens. I’ll worry about
tomorrow tomorrow.’”
Nearly 30 years later, Hammer has stumbled into that jazz
career, performing regularly with singer Annie Ross and also releasing
three discs as a bandleader. He’ll be playing in a quartet with the
venerable saxophonist Davis at the Figge Art Museum later this week.
(The pair will be joined by drummer Jimmy Wormworth and bassist Lee
Hudson.)
