Hugh Lawson (March 12, 1935 – March 11, 1997), was an American jazz pianist, composer and arranger from Detroit who worked with Yusef Lateef for more than 10 years.
In the vocabulary of the world of jazz music and it’s musicians, there is a word which is used to describe those musicians whose talents are well known among their contemporaries, but who are virtually unknown to the public. The word is “underrated”. But in Hugh Lawson’s case a more accurate term should be “under-exposed”.
Lawson first performed from 1956 and recorded as a member of quartets and quintets led by Yusef Lateef, first in Detroit, and from the late 1950s to 1960 in New York, where he later recorded as as a sideman with Harry “Sweets” Edison (1962), and Roy Brooks (1963, 1970), and again with Lateef (1966,1968) and Kenny Burrell (1971). He has also performed with Dinah Washington, Roy Eldridge, Stanley Turrentine and Sonny Stitt among others.
Here’s “The Duke Ellington Sound of Love” from above album
He was a founding member in 1972 of the Piano Choir, a group of seven pianists for which he wrote compositions (including Ballad for the Beast from Bali Bali, recorded on the album Handscapes 2, in 1974) and arrangements. He toured Europe with Charles Mingus in the autumn of 1975, and, under the sponsorship of the U.S. State Department, Eastern Europe with Mingus in 1977 and the Middle East in 1981-2; he also recorded with Charlie Rouse (1977), and his own trio (1977,1983), and two of Mingus’s former sidemen, George Adams and Dannie Richmond in Milan (1980, 1983)
Lawson has taught composition and jazz improvisations at the Henry Street Settlement in New York. He had a formidable technique and a style reminiscent of that of Bud Powell.
Lawson died of colon cancer in White Plains, NY, March 11, 1997, at the age of 61.
(Scant information edited from New Grove Dictionary of Jazz & Liner notes)
