P.E. Hewitt Jazz Ensemble - Winter Winds

• March 16, 2009

An exclusive from Now-Again for the Stones Throw store:

P.E. Hewitt Jazz Ensemble Winter Winds (Japanese Import)
Recording date circa 1971-72, South Bay Area, CA.
Produced by P.E. Hewit
 
P.E. Hewitt’s Winter Winds is one of the rarest damn-good 70s jazz albums you could ever hope to come across. That’s a subtle, but important distinction. There are many rare jazz albums in every imaginable subgenre – funk, free, fusion... But Hewitt, a composer, arranger, vibraphonist, pianist and pilot, helmed a crack group of musicians and recorded a damn-good album ... Without ever taking the time out to name his record company. His three albums – pressed in a maximum run of one hundred pieces per album – recently surfaced after Bay Area collector Chris Veltri re-discovered an old find and sent music detectives on the hunt. You see, Hewitt’s “Winter Winds” album so damn-good that neither a micro press nor forty years of silence could suppress its reemergence.
 
Hewitt was only sixteen when he recorded his first album Jawbones in the auditorium of the Community School of Music and Arts in Moutain View, California, where he was an artist in residence. Part of his mission involved using music as a healing tool for those with degenerative neurological conditions. Another part, no less personal: the incessant need to document the songs and ideas welling up in his own young brain. Jawbones, pressed at Custom-Fidelity Records in Hollywood, California in a run of fifty pieces, paved the way for a second album, Since Washington, so named because the band had traveled to Washington, DC, to play for Richard Nixon. For his sophomore album, Hewitt pressed one hundred pieces.
 
Winter Winds, his third album, is the most “accessible” of the three Hewitt records. This is not to say that his previous albums are esoteric, just to say that this album appeals to those who might want to dance while having their consciousness expanded. Of the series of 4/4 numbers contained within, “Bada Que Bash,” a modal piece in a latin-tinged bag, stands out. Vocalists Sonia Valledeparas and Nina Scheller seem as if they’re speaking in an exotic language, amidst the band’s cavernous roar.  “This is actually organized scan singing,” Hewitt clarifies. “Instead of incessant, skittly “do wap du bop,” I provided rhythmic words that sounded like a language.” Hewitt was not yet twenty when “Winter Winds” saw its small press run disappear into the ether, awaiting rediscovery decades to come.

“Bada Que Bash” will appear on Now-Again’s forthcoming partnership-release with Jazzman Records – the expanded version of the label’s Spiritual Jazz anthology. Now-Again’s comprehensive P.E. Hewitt anthology, which will contain all of the music from his three albums, will see release in summer 2009. In the meantime, Now-Again has reissued Winter Winds on CD – but only in Japan. So we’re making a small quantity of the CDs available here, on our site, and are selling the album digitally.

Personnel: P.E. Hewitt (leader, vibes), Riley McLaughlin (piano), Charley Forsberg (alto sax), Richard Zemlin (trumpet, flugelhorn), Sonia Valledeparas (lead vocal - soprano), Nina Scheller  (vocal - alto), Dennis Gardino (bass), Rick Hearns (drums).

IN THE STORE:
P.E. Hewitt Jazz Ensemble Winter Winds (Japanese Import)