Music Box | Overlooked Albums | Hanna

Mike Newmark Columnist

Cursed with a hopelessly pedestrian moniker and a laughable album title (“Contemplating jazz”? Seriously?), Hanna (a.k.a. Warren Harris from Cleveland, Ohio, of all places) nevertheless hit a high point in his career and created one of the canonical jazz-house albums with this, his fourth LP. Or rather, it would have been canonical if anyone but the staunchest of beat-heads and crate-diggers had bothered to check it out. It’s not Hanna’s fault; he’s released dozens of recordings on dozens of labels, and all of them are at least good. Warm, inviting, soulful, as sturdy as a bank vault and landing smack in the middle of acid jazz’s heyday, Hanna’s best music is a clear example of how you can do everything right as an electronic musician and still get robbed.

Contemplating Jazz takes the ultra-smooth, ultra-tasteful house aesthetic of the Naked Music catalogue to a higher artistic plane, where both clubbers and cognoscenti could ostensibly find a lot to like. It helps that Hanna is a multi-instrumentalist (check the wicked slap-bass anchoring “My Own”) with a jazz musician’s ear for pleasant chord changes. On previous records—Severance (1999) in particular—Hanna had a rocky relationship with his sequencer, his beats fumbled over themselves as though they weren’t even chained to a metronomic grid, but here they’re solid and savvy, impressing without showboating. Like its constituent parts, Contemplating Jazzsplits the difference between workmanlike and low-maintenance to form something that’s surprisingly rare in electronica: highbrow dance music that you actually want to dance to.

Hanna may be as accomplished a techno artist as Theo Parrish and Glenn Underground (if not Kenny Dixon Jr.), but the most remarkable thing about him is that he’s consistent, almost terrifyingly so. That consistency applies to the quality of his vast catalogue, whether he’s dealing in house, drum ’n bass or hip-hop, as well as to the quality of individual songs; it’s pointless to mention standout tracks on Contemplating Jazz by name because they’re all so strong, without a single dud in the bunch. He’s even consistent in his song structures: Nearly all of them follow a pattern in which he lays down a theme at the start of the track, and every 16 bars or so a different instrument—be it a pad, a clipped diva vocal, a live vibraphone or upright bass—takes the stage and does its thing. It’s a modus operandi that looks dreadfully dull on paper, but Hanna milks the formula for all it’s worth and turns it into a signal attribute.

Nowadays it may seem as though Hanna fell off the face of the Earth, since Contemplating Jazz was his last LP in wide release, but he’s still keeping the torch aflame with seven-inch singles, digital-only albums and CD imports. I picked up a couple of his newest offerings, 2007’s Beautiful Mystery and 2008’s Portrait of Warren, and while each was solid in its own right, when comparing them to Contemplating Jazz I noticed a saddening droop in craftsmanship. The ear-pleasing samples and jazz fixations were still in place, but the beats didn’t always hit the target and the overall feeling was of an imitation of Hanna, rather than the real thing. It was probably the fecundity that did it; expecting Hanna to keep reaching his plateau with that kind of release schedule is cruel. I’m (reluctantly) inclined to say that jazz-house is one of the easier musical genres to pull off, but even in a dulcet, groovy and overcrowded arena, Contemplating Jazz was something special.