Jeffrey Hammond

Jeffrey Hammond (born 30 July 1946), also known by his former stage name Jeffrey Hammond-Hammond, is an English artist and musician who was the bassist of progressive rock band Jethro Tull from 1971 to 1975. Hammond played on some of the band's most successful albums, including Aqualung (1971) and Thick as a Brick (1972).

Hammond adopted the name "Hammond-Hammond" as a joke, since both his father's surname and mother's maiden name were the same. He also joked in interviews that his mother defiantly chose to keep her maiden name, just like Eleanor Roosevelt.

Hammond met Ian Anderson in grammar school and formed a band with him and future Jethro Tull members John Evan and Barriemore Barlow. After school, he gave up music he went to study painting. Meanwhile, Anderson formed Jethro Tull and wrote several songs about his friend's idiosyncrasies, such as "A Song for Jeffrey" (on the album This Was), "Jeffrey Goes to Leicester Square" (Stand Up) and "For Michael Collins, Jeffrey and Me" (Benefit). Hammond is also mentioned in the lyrics of the Benefit track "Inside". In January 1971, when Glenn Cornick left the band, Anderson talked Hammond into joining Jethro Tull.

According to Anderson, it was Hammond who came up with a name for the "claghorn", a hybrid instrument Anderson made by attaching the mouthpiece from a saxophone and the bell of a toy trumpet to the body of a bamboo flute. The instrument can be heard on the track "Dharma for One" on the album This Was. According to Anderson, "clag" was a term Hammond used for feces, "so 'claghorn' presumably because it sounded shit!"

In addition to playing bass, he narrated the surreal piece "The Story of the Hare Who Lost His Spectacles" on the album A Passion Play. He also received credit, along with Anderson and Evan, for writing the piece. In a similar vein, he wrote and performed the words for "Sealion II", an alternate version of the WarChild song recorded during the same sessions as the album, which was first released on Nightcap in 1993 and later included on the 40th anniversary edition of WarChild.

Biography summary from English Wikipedia, photograph via Wikimedia Commons.