Music: The Secret Life of B. Hammer

The Secret Lif of B.Hammer

“Hammer plays with both hands and has the elements of a vital blues attack in either of them . . .” So Down Beat, one of the most influential critical voices in jazz saluted a recent Hanover album entitled The Discovery of Buck Hammer.

Drawing on the album’s conscientious liner notes, Down Beat explained that the late Pianist Hammer was a shy fellow from Glen Springs, Ala., who committed his art to posterity only once, at a recording session in Nashville, Tenn. in 1956. Another glowing Hammer review appeared in the New York World-Telegram & Sun: “His recent death was a tragic loss . . . A great album.” Then San Francisco Chronicle Columnist Ralph J. Gleason played the record, found that Buck had an advantage over other pianists —he was apparently born with three hands. Last week the perpetrator of the hoax confessed that he and Hammer were one. His name: Steve Allen.

Pianist Allen got the idea for the album when he heard Alto Saxophonist Julian (“Cannonball”) Adderley insist on TV one evening that jazz criticism is “a joke.” Allen scribbled several funky tunes (Hackensack Train, Fink’s Mules, Too Fat Boogie) and recorded them as the work of Pianist-Composer Hammer. He tricked up some of the tracks by recording first the bass, then the upper register and gluing them together. Under a second assumed name — Ralph Goldman — he wrote some typically pretentious liner notes: “Like Peck Kelly of Texas and Joe Abernathy of New York, Hammer has become a legendary figure . . .”

Does the hoax prove that Cannonball was right about criticism? Says Gagster Allen with magnificent restraint: “It’s a rather difficult form of expression.”