Tribute: Gregory Hickman-Williams

Last night I finished up work on a short feature on Gregory Hickman-Williams that will air on KCUR tomorrow and this weekend on KC Currents. Once it airs I'll post the link here. [Update: Here's the link. Many, many thanks to radio goddess Laura Ziegler for producing.]

A heart attack landed Gregory in the hospital in March 2006, just as his debut recording Passages was about to be released. He never made it out of the hospital and died five months later at the age of 49. It's ironic that Gregory's physical heart should have given out because it's his heart, that metaphorical center of magnanimity, is the thing that people close to him most remember. That, and his one-in-billion voice.

The feature condenses the story quite a bit in the interest of time, but I hope that it gives a sense of the person that Gregory was, his talent and what he went through.

If you want to hear more (and you happen to be in Kansas City) there will be a tribute to Gregory at Jardine's Jazz Club this Sunday night with live performances by many of the musicians who played on Passages, including Stan Kessler, Pamela Baskin-Watson, and Gerald Spaits. Millie Edwards and David Basse will also sing some of the songs that Gregory planned to sing on future albums. I'll be making the trip to KC for the event and plan to play selections from some of the interviews I've done.

The tribute also serves as a kind of re-release for Passages, the album that Gregory and Jon Bauer spent more than a year producing, but which was largely set aside. Jon has recently hired a promoter for the disc, so it may yet reach a wider audience.

----
Note: As mentioned previously in this space, I've been working for just over a year now on an increasingly lengthy radio documentary about Gregory. The Pitch's Charles Ferruzza was kind enough to mention the doc in his preview of Sunday's tribute, saying that it asks the question "Why wasn't this man famous?"

Actually, that question originally came from our pal over at Plasticsax and the answer turns out to be fairly disappointing. Fame, as it turns out, is fickle and performers do well to spend more time thinking about their craft.

Among the more profitable questions I hope the doc will ask are:

• Who can tell the singer from the song?
• What is this thing called love?
• Good morning, heartache. What's new?
  

Remembering Gregory

The evening after last Sunday's raucous celebration for Charlie Parker, I stopped by a smaller memorial for another Kansas City artist who passed on, the singer Gregory Hickman-Williams.

Gregory passed last year on August 26th after 23 weeks in the hospital, awaiting a heart transplant. He entered the hospital a week before a release party for his CD "Passages."

"Passages" is a remarkable document of an incredibly talented artist. Here is a great natural voice that received excellent training (both in the U.S. and Europe) yet never lost the pure joy of singing. Here was a trained singer who could "get off the page" and improvise the blues. The CD shows off Gregory's mastery of not only straight-ahead jazz singing but also Latin and spirituals.

The selections are also full of telling references to the heart. Jon Bauer, Gregory's partner and the album's producer, says that ironically the repertoire was picked out two years earlier, before they had any hint of Gregory's condition.

Here's one of my favorite cuts from the CD, a beautiful and spare treatment of Luis Bonfa's Manha De Carnaval, backed by Danny Embrey on guitar and Stan Kessler on trumpet.



"Passages" is available through iTunes or at CD Baby.

I first heard about Gregory through the tireless enterprise of His Bagness at There Stands the Glass. A few months later I started to work on what I thought would be a short radio feature, but has since grown into a documentary. More news on that front as it develops.