Maybe So – Elmo Hope
Like many of Elmo Hope's compositions, this medium swing has a melody that adeptly weaves and twirls through the changes. Lead sheets, second parts and concert condensed score available.
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- Recording: Elmo Hope - New Faces-New Sounds: Elmo Hope Quintet, vol.2
- Recorded on: May 9, 1954
- Label: Blue Note (BLP 5044 10" LP)
- Concert Key: E-flat
- Style: Swing (medium)
- Trumpet - Freeman Lee
- Tenor Sax - Frank Foster
- Piano - Elmo Hope
- Bass - Percy Heath
- Drums - Art Blakey
- Bertha Hope recalls some of Elmo's ideas on improvising.
Elmo Hope was a classically trained pianist with technique rivaling that of his childhood friend Bud Powell and a composer of music whose inventiveness and complexity approaches that of Thelonious Monk. In fact, Elmo, Thelonious and Bud used to hang out so much together they became known as "The Three Musketeers."
Video: After a rehearsal, Bertha Hope, Jerry Dodgion, and Putter Smith stayed in the jazzleadsheets.com studio to talk about the great Elmo Hope. Bertha was married to Elmo until his passing in 1967. She's an accomplished pianist herself, who studied with Richie Powell (Bud's brother) in Los Angeles. Jerry Dodgion, saxophonist, knew Elmo during the time they were both living in California. Putter Smith has been an in demand bass player in Los Angeles since he was a teenager. He played with Elmo for a six week residency in Los Angeles when he was 17 years old.
Elmo revisited this composition in 1961, recording it in a trio format with bassist Butch Warren and drummer Granville T. Hogan.
You can read about and listen to more of the music from this quintet session: see Chips, Later For You and Crazy.
For more details about Elmo Hope's recordings, check out the Elmo Hope Discography on Noal Cohen's Jazz History website.
Elmo Hope
Jun 27, 1923 – May 19, 1967
An imaginative pianist who valued subtlety over virtuosity in the landscape of bebop, Elmo Hope never achieved the fame that his close friends did, perhaps because he so rejected stylistic norms of the time. Elmo was a classically trained pianist with technique rivaling that of his childhood friend Bud Powell and a composer of music whose inventiveness and complexity approaches that of Thelonious Monk. In fact, Elmo, Thelonious and Bud used to hang out so much together in the late 1940s they became known as "The Three Musketeers." Powell, in Francis Paudras' book "Dance of the Infidels" is quoted as saying, "You gotta hear Elmo. He's fabulous. His stuff is very hard. He does some things that even I have trouble playing." Read more...