Hell-bound alchemist of bop and assorted varieties of modern music left this world much too soon, leaving a concise but charged legacy of jazz piano. 

For a talent like Dick Twardzik, a footprint of one solo record is rather scant. And then only released eight years after his passing, well tough luck.

Of course, this is not an unlikely scenario for someone who dies from an overdose in a Parisian hotel room at the age of 24.

Part of the deal. For many, in those days. Nothing to mythologize, as we jazz fans are wont. Plain misery. Rotten teeth. Sick like an oil-poisoned turtle. Skin as dry as sandpaper, infected with hideous purple marks. Eyes like death. Emphatic powers below zero in Siberia.

Reportedly, Twardzik believed that his playing benefited from the needle. True or not, Boston-born Twardzik (1931) was somewhat a prodigy who befriended baritone saxophonist Serge Chaloff and was taught a lot of classical stuff by Chaloff’s mother. He played with Charlie Parker. An original mind that sought ways to add to the innovations of Bud Powell, akin in some ways to Lennie Tristano and Herbie Nichols.

A crazy bird that temporarily ended up in California, hooked up with Chet Baker., quite literally as well. While on tour in Europe and France (the hotel room, the heroine overdose, the death), he was featured on Chet Baker’s sublime Chet Baker Quartette, which showcased the compositions of Bob Zieff. Take a listen to that album, to Baker and Twardzik. If it would’ve been Bill Evans playing on it, everybody would go about singing halleluja.

Only eight years after his passing, well good luck, it is said above. Well, not completely true. The session from October 11, 1955 with bassist Carson Smith and drummer Peter Littman was released in 1956 on the A-side of Trio on Pacific Jazz, which featured fellow pianist and Baker associate Russ Freeman on side B. Fine, but a weird idea.

Freeman moved on, Twardzik stepped on a rainbow. Then, in 1962, owner of Pacific Jazz, Richard Bock, put out The Last Set and included two bonus tracks (one with Chet Baker), a sincere homage to Twardzik though another weird idea in an era of new jazz innovations and fads. How many copies did Bock expected to sell?

Glad he was willing to stick his neck out, though. Seemingly essential Twardzik. His piano is a bit out of tune, sounds spooky, slightly woolly, appropriate counterpoint to  the scrawny fellow’s stuttering crescendos, percussive bombs, oddball dissonant little phrases, long, intense lines that boil like green peas on a blackened pit.

Quirky, beautiful tunes. A Crutch For The Crab, which oozes the freedom within constraints of veterans like Teddy Wilson and Earl Hines, who were able to make notes quiver like radio waves, tempos slide by like cruising Cadillacs on the boulevard. Yellow Tango, tango indeed, tinged with the weight of the macrocosmos. Twardzik’s take on Bess, You Is My Woman is a bittersweet dream. The fast-paced Just One Of This Things finds him in the mood of a Bebop Bach.

Certainly an if-only-guy that needs to be checked out and kept in the limelight.