P.E. Hewitt

P.E. Hewitt’s self-released trilogy are some of the rarest damn-good late 60s and early 70s jazz albums you could ever hope to come across. That’s a subtle, but important distinction. There are many rare jazz albums in every imaginable subgenre – funk, free, fusion… – of the late 60s and early 70s. But there are few damn-good jazz albums. Jazz was a phoenix, then, rising from the ashes to become something different and beautiful. Hewitt, was a late-teenager, then. Already a composer, arranger, vibraphonist, pianist and pilot, he helmed a crack group of musicians and recorded a damn-good series of albums – without ever taking the time out to name his record company. His vision was so pure, so immediate, that the most obvious thought of any entrepreneur – a name for his fledgling enterprise – took a back seat to his incessant desire to create, and document, the ideas flowing through his head and into the able hands of his peers.

His three albums – pressed in a maximum run of one hundred pieces per album – recently surfaced after Bay Area collector Chris Veltri re-discovered an old find and sent music detectives on the hunt. You see, Hewitt’s Winter Winds album – his third – was so damn-good that neither a micro press nor forty years of silence could suppress its reemergence.

And now, as the winds blow in the direction of the authentic, the spiritual, the deep, the personal and the human once again in jazz music, Hewitt bestows upon us these three damn-good albums and we wonder – where were you our entire lives, P.E. Hewitt? Why did it take so long to discover the magical music you and your ensemble recorded? Why do we still feel lucky – privileged even – to have discovered it now?

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