IBN ALI, HASAAN (6 May 1931–1980), American experimental jazz pianist and composer. Born William Lankford Jr., Ali started playing piano at a young age and toured with the Joe Morris R&B band as a teenager. He came of age as a musician in the same Philadelphia milieu as John Coltrane, whom he would later accuse of imitating his style. By his twenties he had honed his innovative, rapid-fire playing style, deploying unconventional melodies and creating wild, raining profusions of sound.
A musician’s musician, Hasaan was admired by fellow jazz artists like Benny Colson, Jimmy Heath, and Philly Joe Jones but enjoyed limited commercial success. He rarely played outside Philadelphia and often stuck to the same few venues, playing for tips, cigarettes, and free coffee. He was known as eccentric and cantankerous, sometimes evicting fellow bandmates from the stage mid-performance. If a tie was required he would wear it so that it hung only halfway down his shirt.
While many of his peers were cutting records and gaining national recognition, Hasaan did not feature on a recording until he was in his thirties. His first and, as it turned out, only album to be released during his lifetime was The Max Roach Trio Featuring the Legendary Hasaan (1965), in which he played alongside drummer Max Roach and bassist Art Davis. Atlantic Records, which released the album, was sufficiently impressed to commission Hasaan to record a quartet session, but the release was shelved after he was convicted on a narcotics charge.
The master tapes from these sessions were destroyed in a warehouse fire in New Jersey in 1978 and the album was thought lost until 2017, when a copy of the recording was discovered. These recordings became Hasaan’s second album, the posthumous Metaphysics: The Lost Atlantic Album (2021). The release of Metaphysics quickly transformed Hasaan’s position in jazz history from obscure to legendary.
Following this revitalization of interest in Hasaan’s career, more tapes were discovered. In the early 1960s he had befriended Alan Sukoenig and saxophonist David Shrier, who at the time were undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania. From 1962 to 1965 Hasaan allowed the two students to record him playing solo piano in their dormitory lounge and in Shrier’s apartment. In late 2021 a selection of these tapes was released as the album Retrospect in Retirement of Delay: The Solo Recordings.
Hasaan’s life ended in a series of tragedies. He was living with his parents in 1980 when their house caught fire, killing his mother and disabling Hasaan and his father. He moved into a group home that same year, suffered a stroke, and died at the age of forty-nine.