Mr. Klinkenborg and Mr. Hahn
A great album, once all but lost, is back from the dead (no, not that Dead!)
Not long ago, for some reason, a memory wormed its way out of my subconscious: a New York Times op-ed piece by the essayist Verlyn Klinkenborg, whose long-running Times column, “The Rural Life,” was about just that. Usually. This piece, which ran on August 19th, 2006, was about music. Doubly surprisingly, the essay, “Caught in the Limbo of Vinyl: The Case of the Jerry Hahn Brotherhood,” was about a jazz-rock band whose one, eponymous, album had been a particular favorite of mine in my days as a teenaged music fan.
One afternoon, no doubt hoeing his cabbage patch, Verlyn found himself humming a song, or parts of one: “Just a few up-tempo instrumental phrases—guitar, bass, drums and a Hammond B-3 organ,” he wrote. “I knew instantly what it was, though I hadn’t heard it in at least 20 years. It was a passing moment from ‘Martha’s Madman,’ the first song on the first side of an LP called The Jerry Hahn Brotherhood. I bought the record when it was released in 1970. I was a freshman at Berkeley. [It] was a sunny mixture of straight-up jazz with a blues spine, a music that wants the latter-day word ‘fusion’ [the term was already in use in 1970], though that word does so little good.
Above all,” Klinkenborg continued, “[the album] was a reminder of the eclecticism of the time. Audiences that would soon diverge found themselves packed in a hall together all night long, like one October weekend at Fillmore West when the Jerry Hahn Brotherhood shared the bill with Van Morrison and Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band.”
Klinkenborg went looking for the song on the iTunes Store, didn’t find it, checked Amazon, and struck out (though it’s there now, at prices ranging from $33.47 to $128.00). He checked neither YouTube nor Spotify; then in their infancy, they were easy to overlook. (Today “Martha’s Madman” is on both sites, along with the rest of The Jerry Hahn Brotherhood.)1 I currently subscribe to Tidal, where the album is findable with a few keystrokes.
More or less for the hell of it (he’d gotten rid of his turntable), Klinkenborg went looking for, and found, the album in his barn, where he kept all his old vinyl. “Nearly every album in those boxes in the barn was converted to CD long ago. But not The Jerry Hahn Brotherhood.” All that remained of Klinkenborg’s beloved record “was an orphaned vinyl LP.” He did find the album as an MP3 on a file-sharing platform, but it was a crappy, overcompressed version.
Trained journalist that he was, Klinkenborg found Jerry Hahn’s phone number and gave him a ring. Hahn was living in his hometown of Wichita, Kansas, a 65-year-old grandfather who made his living teaching jazz guitar. Hahn remained immensely proud of what the Brotherhood had achieved in the short time allotted it. “‘You should have heard us,’” he said. The story of the band, as Hahn related it, was, Klinkenborg wrote, “the all-too-familiar [tale of] the inevitable clash between the artistic and business sides of the recording industry. The band fell apart disputing the honesty of its manager.” (Whom Klinkenborg also looked for, unsuccessfully: “I’d like to hear his side of the story.”)
Hahn, whom I found a few years ago on Facebook, is now 83 and lives in Merriam, Kansas. His performing days, I would think, are over (though I know at least one other 83-year-old who’s still out there). Klinkenborg, whom I googled and Wikipedia’d, is 72, left the Times in 2013, and teaches creative writing at Yale.
But there’s more to Jerry Hahn’s story than Verlyn Klinkenborg evidently knew. Before the Brotherhood, Hahn was a well-known, or at least known, straight-ahead jazz guitarist, and a superb one. I owned a 1966 album by the alto saxophonist and bandleader John Handy, with whom Hahn cut two albums. My hands-down favorite moment in Hahn’s entire career, including the Brotherhood, is the track “Blues for a High-Strung Guitar” on The 2nd John Handy Album. Handy wrote “High-Strung Guitar” as a showpiece for Hahn, only 26 but already a stone guitar genius. Do not fail to listen to it, below. For the first three minutes, while violinist Michael White and Handy solo, Hahn comps with passion, nimbleness, and urgency, challenging the others to play as well as he is. He starts his solo at 2:59, and owns the song for the duration (it clocks in at 6:11), playing runs that aren’t merely speedy, but endlessly inventive. You can’t help but laugh, they’re so good, from Far Eastern drones to Memphis chicken-pickin’, textbook examples of spur-of-the-moment composition: the definition, that is, of skilled improvisation, which is what makes jazz jazz. I had every note of that solo memorized 55 years ago, and can still play the whole thing in my head.
Verlyn Klinkenborg is a fine prose stylist, but his story needed augmenting. I may or may not tap his shoulder; he’s got a substantial online presence. If I were to, I would suggest that he click his cursor on Tidal, or wherever, and listen down to a) his beloved old album, now eminently available, and b) even more satisfying evidence of the wonders that Jerry Hahn wrought. Happy retirement, Jerry; you earned it and then some.2
The Jerry Hahn Brotherhood album recorded and released more music than is on that lone album. Check this great Hank Williams cover, by, as they called themselves on it, The Brotherhood:
The Jerry Hahn Brotherhood’s lead singer and Hammond B-3 master, Mike Finnigan (at lower right on the Brotherhood’s album cover) went on to—had in fact already begun—an even more illustrious, or at least prolific, career than Hahn’s. Two years before the Brotherhood album, a 23-year-old Finnigan played the funky B-3 parts to “Rainy Day, Dream Away” and “Still Raining, Still Dreaming” on Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland. After accompanying many stellar acts, from Hendrix to Taj Mahal to Peter Frampton to Cher to Tracy Chapman to—well, see below—and cutting two fine solo albums, Finnigan joined Bonnie Raitt’s band for 2012’s Slipstream and 2016’s Dig in Deep. Sadly, he died of cancer, aged 76, after playing on just one song, “Here Comes Love,” on Raitt’s 2022 Just Like That. Here’s Bonnie on Finnigan, from an interview I conducted with her for the June 2022 issue of Stereophile:
“Mike was a legend in musician circles since he came out of Lawrence, Kansas. He was in so many bands where he blew it away. He was in Etta James's band and Joe Cocker's band, and he was 27 years with Crosby, Stills & Nash, so everybody that ever came to CSN shows was knocked out—a lot of times, Mike was featured. I met him when he was in Maria Muldaur's band in the mid-'70s. Fantastic band, Earl Palmer on drums and Amos Garrett on guitar. And Mike made some great solo albums. He was one of the great white soul singers, one of the greatest soul singers, ever, of any race. And he's considered one of the masters of the B3.”