Stanley Cowell — A Toledo Inheritance

by Fritz Byers

In 1992, I sat in the Toledo Peristyle, rapt and awestruck, along with the rest of the full house, listening to the Toledo Symphony Orchestra play a new piece by a Toledo native, a piano concerto written in honor of another Toledo native.  At the piano was the composer, Stanley Cowell. The pianist being honored, Art Tatum, had been dead for thirty-five years.

I have a recording of the performance, and I’ve listened to it now and again over the nearly thirty-five years — a symmetrical thirty-five years, now that I think about it — since that memorable night. Stanley said that he never wanted to play like Tatum, and, matters of personal taste aside, one can understand the urge for flight from that imposing shadow. But his performance that night is an astonishing tour de force of pianism and musical doppelgänger empathy. Throughout, he channeled Art in the most respectful ways, spicing his Piano Concerto No. 1 with stride passages, powerful forte spikes, and complex runs across the whole keyboard, played at impossible speed. It was as though he were saying, “I can play like Art. I just choose not to.” We were all dazzled, and you could sense in the hall the collective belief that Stanley had invoked Art in a way that both honored and brought forward his legacy. (You can hear a piano-trio version of the three-part Concerto on Stanley’s 1993 SteepleChase release, Bright Passion.)

The bond between the two wasn’t just their shared hometown. They’d met in the living room of Stanley’s boyhood home. Stanley’s parents ran businesses, among them a motel that was one of the few places in town where touring Black musicians could get a room. Many of those musicians became family friends; one was Art Tatum.

When Stanley was six, already two years into piano lessons, Art visited the Cowell home. Can you picture it: Art sat down at the family upright and played “You Took Advantage of Me.” Stanley would recall years later that he wasn’t quite sure the piano would survive Art’s famously torrential playing.

Twenty-two years later, recording his first album as a leader, Stanley included a solo stride romp on that same tune. He said later that the song surfaced as he was considering the program for the record, and only afterward did he realize where it had come from. The track opens this week’s Jazz Spectrum Saturday. 

But, despite his early exposure to Art’s music and his uncanny ability to play it with deep fidelity, Stanley went his own way. He did not become a Tatum imitator; to my ear, his early records owe more to Bud Powell, Phineas Newborn, and McCoy Tyner. He trained at Oberlin and Michigan, played with Rahsaan Roland Kirk along the way, and, after arriving in New York in 1966, aged 25, he worked with the avant-garde alto saxophonist (and musicologist) Marion Brown, the master drummer Max Roach, and the vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson. Tatum’s style didn’t shape Stanley’s playing, but he adhered to Art’s hallmark standards: two-handed completeness, harmonic curiosity, and the insistence that on any tune the whole keyboard is always in play.

Working with Max Roach, Stanley met the trumpeter Charles Tolliver. (They’re on Max’s fascinating 1968 recording, Members, Don’t Git Weary, which is experiencing a rebirth due to the drummer Tyshawn Sorey’s new release, Members...Don’t!, a bracing reinterpretation of Max’s powerful message of fortitude in times of trouble.)  Stanley and Charles plainly dug each other’s playing, and then they did something rarer than bonding over music: they launched their own record label. Max and Mingus had tried it decades earlier with Debut Records. Stanley and Charles made it work.

Strata-East’s premise was simple and radical — artists own their music, and the money it makes belongs to them. The label took only a modest cut to cover manufacturing and distribution. The pair began Strata-East as a way to release their own big band record, Music Inc. (1971). And over the following decade the label produced one of the great catalogues of the 70s, which included Clifford Jordan’s Glass Bead Games, Billy Harper’s Capra Black, Pharaoh Sanders’s Izipho Zam, and, improbably, a genuine hit in Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson’s Winter in America.

Stanley’s own Strata-East records hold up beautifully. The place to start is Musa: Ancestral Streams (1974), solo keyboards and kalimba, a work of remarkable breadth and ambition, delivered with an appealing intimacy. You’ll hear “Departure No. 1,” “Emil Danenberg” (a tribute to Stanley’s Oberlin piano teacher), and “Prayer for Peace” Saturday night.

Stanley then spent a decade or so with the Heath Brothers, and in 1981 he turned toward teaching, first at Lehman College and then for many years at Rutgers. That turn is part of why larger audiences lost track of Stanley. But musicians never did, nor did we Toledoans, who know a piano genius when we hear it.  

The folks at SteepleChase Records knew as well. The series of recordings Stanley made on that label runs from the trio date Sienna (1989) through his final recording, made slightly more than a year before his passing in December 2020, Live at Keystone Korner Baltimore, which documents an October 2019 quintet concert. It is an enduring testament to Stanley’s mastery — from infectious stride to lofty modernism to meditative lyricism, and every place in between.

Toledo has a proud and rich history of jazz pianists. When Stanley was six, he heard the progenitor of that tradition. What’s remarkable isn’t that he was drawn into the tradition by Tatum’s brilliance, but that, having felt its pull, he moved it forward, impelled by his own muses to shape it in new and enduring ways.   

Last month, with the support of generous donors, we began a monthly focus, the first hour of the first Saturday of every month, on Toledo jazz. We began, of course, with Art Tatum. This month, it’s the boy who listened, as we celebrate Stanley Cowell’s Toledo piano legacy. You can find the Jazz Spectrum Friday and Saturday playlists here and here.