Stanley "Stan the Man" Welch and Jesse Hameen II on Wednesday.
Living local jazz legend and accomplished drummer Jesse Hameen II started out his musical career at the old Winchester School with a humble pair of instruments: his own two hands, which he put to work in a “hambone” body-percussion performance in the first show of what would become a decades-long career of finding the rhythm in his home city.
Hameen recounted that first concert he ever played in during a Wednesday afternoon interview with Stanley “Stan the Man” Welch on his “Jazz Haven” program on WNHH-LP radio.
Hameen — a Dixwell native, celebrated jazz drummer, and longtime Neighborhood Music School teacher and summer jazz program director — came on “Jazz Haven” to talk about an upcoming performance by his band Jesse Hameen II & Elevation as part of Yale’s Ellington Jazz Series.
The band — with Hameen on drums, Rodney Jones on guitar, T.K. Blue on saxophone, Nat Reeves on bass, and Zaccai Curtis on piano — will perform at 7:30 p.m. on Friday at Morse Recital Hall at 470 College St. (Click here for more details.)
During his interview with Stan the Man, Hameen spoke about much more than just the upcoming concert. He and Welch also dove deep into New Haven jazz history, and the many clubs and bands and musicians and sounds that kept the Dixwell neighborhood pulsing when Hameen was growing up on Ashmun Street in the 1940s and 50s.
“New Haven was a university,” Hameen recalled. All the jazz musicians came through town since New Haven was on the so-called Chitlin’ Circuit.
There was the Monterey on Dixwell. The Playback on Winchester Avenue. There was the Recorder Club and the Democratic Club, the Musicians Club and the Golden Gate. Billie Holiday played in New Haven. So did Nat King Cole and Charlie “Bird” Parker and so many others.
“New Haven was in fact a mecca” for touring jazz musicians, Welch remembered.
Hameen’s musical career didn’t begin in any of those venues, however. It began at the old Winchester School, thanks to a supportive music teacher named Ms. McDonald.
“We learned how to dance the mambo, the cha cha, the merengue, the fox trot, the waltz, even square dancing,” Hameen remembered about that music class. That’s also where he and his classmates like fellow musician Billy Fitch learned to play “hambone,” using their hands and the rest of their body as one whole instrument.
“Our first performance was a hambone performance,” Hameen said about his very first band, called The Cuban Nights, formed when he was only 10 years old in 1951. (“We also bought some nice uniforms. The Cuban tuxedo shirts with ruffles on the sleeves. Bow ties. Patent leather shoes. Cummerbunds. We were sharp.”)
That first show was a hit, he said, and led the Cuban Nights to play at venues across town, starting out with Jewish and African American community centers and then moving up to bigger venues like Eagles Hall.
Another major musical influence on the young Hameen: the “polyrhythm sounds of the tambourine” that he heard played at his family’s church, Pitts Chapel. “Oh man, it just touched my heart,” he said about the rhythms that led him to take up the drums and the maracas in his decades-long career as a professional musician. “There was a groove in that church.”
Still more influences: Paul Huggins, “who knew all these traditional Afro Cuban rhythms” and taught them youngsters like Hameen and his friends in the late 40s.
Click here to buy tickets and learn more about Hameen’s upcoming performance on Friday, Feb. 3 at Morse Recital Hall as part of the Ellington Jazz Series. And click on the video below to watch his full interview on WNHH’s “Jazz Haven.”