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.”