We reconnected over the years and toured together last year in the Pacific Northwest, the highlight being appearances at the Earshot Jazz Festival in his home area of Seattle and at the Bing Crosby Theater in Spokane. The great trombonist Curtis Fuller, and top Bay Area-based musicians Jeff Chambers and Eddie Marshall, also a longtime friend of Hadley¹s, were with us.
Hadley¹s career had enjoyed well-deserved success in the last few years when the Seattle-based recording company Origin released three recordings for him, Gratitude, Reunion and Straight Ahead, the latter hit #2 on the national JazzWeek radio charts. It had been three decade since his last recording.
Last May, the Napa Valley Jazz Society was scheduled to feature him in a Dexter Gordon tribute that I helped organize, when he fell at the last minute and was unable to make the trip to Napa. Dexter Gordon¹s widow, Maxine Gordon, a jazz history scholar who is writing a book on Dexter, was interviewing Hadley about Dexter¹s early days. She had come to the Napa Valley tribute concert to be with Hadley and his most supportive and caring wife Linda Caliman, who accompanied him on many of his tours, particularly in the last two years of his illness.
Complete on >> http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/news.php?id=65050
“He’s a passionate exponent of what most people call straight-ahead jazz ... there is a consistently tasteful quality to his music that makes it very appealing to the ear. " – Leonard Maltin, Movie Crazy
“… he creates an earthy post-bop style of richly varied improvisational expression.” - Jazz Podium (Germany)
"... a pianist whose evocative touch and poetic (but unsentimental) sensibility convey the wisdom of deep musical life experience" – Thomas Conrad, Jazz Times
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