Pianist, composer and bandleader Hank Jones was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi on July 31, 1918. The family moved north to Pontiac, Michigan when Hank was still a boy. He had two older sisters that played the piano and two younger brothers who also went on to fame as jazz musicians: trumpeter and bandleader Thad Jones and drummer Elvin Jones, a member of John Coltrane’s groundbreaking group in the early 1960s.

Influenced by Fats Waller, Earl Hines and Art Tatum, Hank Jones was playing gigs in Michigan and Ohio by the age of 13 and with territory bands in the upper mid-west before he was out of his teens. Saxophonist Lucky Thompson heard him play and invited him to move to New York City in 1944 where he worked with “Hot Lips” Page at the Onyx Club on 52nd Street. While there, Jones became interested in the emerging bebop style and played with John Kirby, Billy Eckstein and Coleman Hawkins. In 1947 he joined up with Norman Granz’s Jazz at the Philharmonic Tour and then became Ella Fitzgerald’s accompanist for five years. He was also the pianist on a rare Charlie Parker quartet date in December of 1952 where the group recorded classics like The Song is You, Kim, and Cosmic Rays.

Later in the decade and into the 1960s Hank Jones was the house pianist at Savoy Records and played with Cannonball Adderley, Wes Montgomery and Lester Young. Jones was the staff pianist at CBS studios in New York from 1959 until 1975. Throughout those decades and those that followed Jones recorded prolifically, both as a leader and a sideman.

Hank Jones was awarded the NEA Jazz Masters Award in 1989 and received the National Medal of Arts in 2008. The following year he received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammys. Jones also received honorary doctorates from both the Berklee College of Music and the University of Hartford. Hank Jones passed away on May 16, 2010 at the age of 91.

Here is a link to a television appearance during which Hank Jones plays Oh! Look At Me Now:

"OH! LOOK AT ME NOW"