If you’ve seen a jazz concert in the Bay Area over the last few decades, there’s a good chance you’ve witnessed Tammy Lynne Hall lording over the piano, coaxing melodies rooted in gospel, jazz, classical and the ether, as one of the area’s foremost composers and side musicians.
It’s been that way since she was a kid growing up in Dallas — Hall and 88 keys.
“I was 4 years old,” Hall said, appropriately leaning on a vintage Steinway in a friend’s San Francisco apartment. “I have lived at the piano since.”
Hall has tickled the ivories on stages around the world — backing up the likes of jazz stalwarts Kim Nalley, Denise Perrier and Holly Near. She has composed and served as musical director for musical theater productions and regularly teaches and performs at SF Jazz.
Music was coursing through her even before she knew where to find a C note on the keyboard.
“Before the notes were on the page, I was hearing them," Hall said. "They were in me.”
Hall’s mother died a year and a half after she was born. Hall believes she was just 18 years old. She has no pictures of her mother but learned she was studying to be a classical pianist. Somewhere in their brief time together, the music was handed off.
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Hall would hear music on the radio and could immediately find the melodies on the keys – everything from classical to "Bugs Bunny" cartoon music. Her grandmother sent her to lessons at the age of 4, and the education continued at home, where her grandfather would show her movies about jazz legends Fats Waller, Count Basie and Duke Ellington.
She furthered her musical education playing piano and organ in churches and alongside choirs — immersing herself in the tradition of Black gospel music.
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She also learned that just like the keys of the piano, the world was sometimes separated into black and white. It came to her one day as she and her grandmother walked past the historic Adolphus Hotel in Dallas. She saw a white man playing the hotel’s famous piano.
“I wanted to go in and play the piano and she said we can’t go in,” Hall recalled.
It brought her satisfaction years later in the 10th grade when she was asked to play a friend’s wedding reception in the Adolphus and Hall got to play the same piano.
Hall proved herself a gifted musician, playing recitals and going on to win numerous competitions. She earned acceptance into Dallas’ Hockaday all-women’s college prep school. But the pull to leave Dallas was strong. Two days after her graduation in 1979, she was on a plane for California. She landed in Oakland and enrolled in Mills College's cutting-edge music programs where she spent two years.
She began to play improvisational jazz in nightclubs and started her own group, Different Touch. When a friend invited her to Brussels, Hall stayed there for two years, playing solo gigs and honing her chops with a variety of top shelf musicians. When she returned to the Bay Area in 1989, her musical career fully bloomed.
In addition to her busy schedule as a first-call side musician, she’s played on the Grammy-winning recording "A Colorful World" by Falu Shah and was recognized in 2019 by the San Francisco Chapter of the Human Rights Commission.
She is regularly associated with the genre of jazz, though she doesn’t really like the word.
“I want to use the word Black music,” Hall said. “Because that really is what it is.”
Hall has spent her life chasing the notes in her head, pursuing art and spirituality within the mix of genres she infuses into everything she’s called to play. Her newest album, "Heart Flow," is a two-plus-hour piece of solo improvised music fusing all the varied notes of her life.
“We’re just about establishing beauty and opening people’s hearts or giving people a space to be healed or just to feel better or feel good to get up and dance," she said of musicians.
It’s as if the notes were always there, and she is merely channeling them.
“I’d like to think I’ve been chosen and that my mother gave me this wonderful gift,” Hall said. “I’ve been chosen to give a gift through music, and that’s all I want to be about.”
