Passin’ Thru (1963)
The New Amazing Chico Hamilton Quintet

  1. Passin’ Thru (Charles Lloyd)
  2. The Second Time Around (Sammy Cahn/Jimmy Van Heusen)
  3. El Toro (Chico Hamilton/Charles Lloyd/Gabor Szabo)
  4. Transfusion (Charles Lloyd)
  5. Lady Gabor (Gabor Szabo)
  6. Lonesome Child (Charles Lloyd)

Charles Lloyd – tenor sax, flute
George Bohannon – trombone
Gabor Szabo – guitar
Al Stinson – bass
Chico Hamilton – drums

Produced by Bob Thiele
Engineered by Rudy Van Gelder

Recorded September 18 (1-4) and 20 (5-6), 1962, at Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey

1 to 5 issued on LP in 1963 as Impulse A(S)-29

Note: (1) Lloyd re-recorded “Passin’ Thru” for a 2017 album of that name. He also adapted “Passin’ Thru” for “Harvest,” a song from his 1972 album Waves. (2) “Lady Gabor” also covered by Charles Lloyd (1966 – issued 1971, 1967 – issued 2019, and 2021) and Nels Cline (2016). (3) Szabo adapted elements of “Lady Gabor” for later recordings of “Gypsy ‘66” (1965) and “First Tune in the Morning” (1978). (3) “El Toro” sampled by Dangerman for “Good Friend” (1999), with Chico Hamilton erroneously credited as Slide Hampton.

In the May 2025 issue of DownBeat, Ted Panken conducted a Blindfold Test with drummer Bill Goodwin. The drummer, who was three days shy of turning 83 at the time, and by then, had enjoyed a 65-year career that launched with a 1959 engagement with Charles Lloyd in Los Angeles. One of the songs Panken played for Goodwin was the title song to this Chico Hamilton album. Here is Goodwin’s response:

“It started with a message. Morse code. I don’t recognize the guitar player. Oh, is that Charles Lloyd with Chico Hamilton? I hear the Coltrane influence. We go back a long time. Is Gabor the guitarist? His sound is so clean. He’d dirtied it up by the time I worked with him.1 I recommended Albert Stinson for this gig. I saw this group a lot. Chico had a drum setup like Jo Jones, two tom-toms on the floor, and then he sat over them, positioned in front of the band. Very graceful. He took the bottom heads off his drums, or had them made that way, so they’d have a certain shallow sound, more contemporary then — being a purist, I didn’t like it, of course. I never loved Chico’s swing playing; there wasn’t much swing in it.”

  1. Goodwin is the drummer in the Gabor Szabo Quintet on the July 1, 1967, performance Live at the Newport Jazz Festival, available to hear at Wolfgang’s. ↩︎