The Room You Shouldn't Be In:
Jamming With Edward
by Alissa Ordabai
This is a chapter from Alissa Ordabai's upcoming book on Nicky Hopkins, a full-length study of the pianist’s life, music, and the era that shaped him.
Jamming with Edward welcomes you — warm and golden — without announcements. Opens the door, and suddenly you are in a room you know you shouldn't be in, and this shock of intimacy tilts the world half a notch. You breathe in the air and it is thick with the luxury no money can buy — the stars' permission to overhear them. And they not only wave you in, but let you stay, handing you the voyeur's pass to hearing what was never set out for sale.
The opening track is titled "Boudoir Stomp," and it feels deliberate — a sly acknowledgement of the atmosphere seeping from the walls. There is no neat row of carefully groomed songs, no "product" with tags. This is the private thing, the messy opulence of a small circle at play, amusing themselves.
Of course there'd been maneuvering — the kind of chess that stands in for politics among men too famous to quarrel in public. The Jamming with Edward tapes, laid down at London's Olympic Studio on April 23, 1969, had gathered dust for almost three years, and their release in January 1972 wasn't simply a gift to collectors — it was a move. The Exile on Main St. tracking at Keith Richards' villa in the South of France had just been completed by October 1971, and showed the stamp of Keith all over — his vibe, his vision, his moods. So when Jamming with Edward got released, its spontaneity read as a correction from Jagger: musicians conjuring something out of air isn't dependent on Keith's villa, or even Keith himself. The spell can be cast elsewhere, anywhere, even without him. As in, "The music doesn't stop when you walk out the door."
The official version of events — relayed by Nicky Hopkins — was that in 1969, during the Let It Bleed sessions, Anita Pallenberg fell ill and Keith, devoted, had to be with her. As a result, the jam was recorded in his absence. What was really happening, nobody knows — or how much Ry Cooder, hanging about the studio, factored into Keith's sudden fade into the ether.
Cooder himself told Circus magazine in March 1972 that the Stones flew him in to do the Let It Bleed sessions and that "a lot of initial riffing and good-time practicing" went down. When asked about rumors that his riffs were used on the album without credit to him and without him actually playing them, he responded, "I'm not saying they stole them, and I'm not saying they didn't." Which tells you a lot about how the business of rock worked in the early 1970s — not the era of free-flowing brotherhood and shared creativity, but, rather, a place in time where everyone knew the currency of riffs and reputations, but also knew the cost of angering men who controlled them.
The thing to remember is that the Stones hadn't yet built that "Greatest rock'n'roll band in the world" fortress in 1972. The story wasn't shrink-wrapped: No multi-decade box sets, no coffee-table retrospectives positioning everything around the Jagger / Richards axis. In 1972, the whole thing still was volatile — open to detours, accidents, and outside players like Hopkins who could get a mention before the machine learned how to push their names aside. So putting out a studio jam such as Edward didn't feel like heresy. It looked bohemian, part of the sprawl. There was no need to "protect the catalog" yet — the catalog was still being written. The stakes, back then, ran lower. Even Cooder could grumble to the press about having his riffs taken, and the Stones — rather than swat him down — would send a check for "so much money I couldn't believe it," as he told the Houston Chronicle in January 1973. This was before the band decided it was above it all. The fact that in the following years his career — however admirable musically — lived outside the myth-making machine, outside of the "great men of rock" canon is another story.
***
The centerpiece of the album, "Edward's Thrump Up," begins with Nicky’s piano riff. Not a reheated blues scrap rock bands like to ride into the ground, but grown-up, declarative, and completely its own. You hear Nicky stating terms with his own music, and it's a masculine gesture which says: We begin here. And then it starts to expand at once, spinning into muscular, many-note inventions that don't sit on top of the phrase but grow directly out of it, like branches from a tree trunk. Ostinato phrases coil and recoil, the rhythm shifts underfoot, and on top of this foundation the right hand flares out, throwing off ideas that spiral into their own orbits. Hopkins is not jamming — what you hear is composition unfolding in the moment.
It’s intense and forward-driving — yes, aggressive, yes, insistent — but also lucid. What Hopkins is building is a living painting: laying color across a canvas that grows wider with every stroke, yet never buckles. You can hear his mind working, imagination in interplay with intention. But no matter how far the lines stretch, they circle back to the core, even at the furthest reaches. It isn't some blues cliché of call-and-response — it's root and bloom. The ostinato is the soil out of which the rest erupts skyward.
You catch a whiff of Brubeck in here — the metric playfulness, the clarity, the way a line runs clean — and the conservatory is right here too: fleet fingers, fluidity, the seamless control of voice-leading. But at times his playing gets looser, bends, gets a sway in it that has nothing to do with textbooks and sounds closer to the Baptist church than the practice room — that heavy-in-the-fingers feel from somewhere else entirely.
And that's the miracle: the ease with which Hopkins moves between conservatoire discipline and black sensibility, without borrowed affect. It's not a stitched-together hybrid — it's fluency. He can play with European discipline, shift to the looseness of black church rhythm, then go back again without even glancing at the borderlines. Nobody else of his time could sit in all three chairs at once, and Hopkins makes it sound as if they were never separate.
Meanwhile, the others are present in the way a coat rack is present in a good hallway. Jagger's harmonica hovers on the edge of parody — without intention to engage harmonically or melodically. Cooder doodles polite sketches in the margins. Neither he, nor Jagger know what this is, or how to step inside it. Hopkins opens doors, and Jagger and Cooder stand in the doorway, smiling faintly.
What you want is someone who can answer him — someone with the vocabulary to match him blow by blow, because what you're hearing isn't a jam — it's a proposal. But no one else in the room knows how to say yes. Hopkins keeps laying out paths — dozens of them, directions the piece could take. Every figure he throws out could become a second theme, a B-section, a modulation, a shift. He is designing futures, pointing ahead, sketching possibilities mid-air, daring someone to pick them up. Nobody does.
Back in the 1960s, jazz was the grown-up's game: technical mastery, harmonic sophistication, seriousness. At the same time rock positioned itself as the opposite — youth, simplicity, posture, proudly unlearned and unbothered. It didn't want to be jazz, and that was the point. In fact, it defined itself by not being jazz. And for a time, this gave rock its initial independence. But in cutting jazz out, it also amputated the route that might have carried it further forward, into real musical adulthood.
There was also incapacity — most of the key figures in rock didn't have the training or the ears. Even the Beatles — Lennon and McCartney had melodic gifts, but little harmonic daring. They could flirt with color (horns on a track, a modal scale here and there) but they could not think jazz. And by the time the virtuosos showed up in the 1980s — musicians such as Greg Howe or Tony MacAlpine who could shape rock into strange and thrilling shapes — the window had closed. Rock as a mass culture had already decided it did not want depth.
This has always been the bruise, the soft spot under the leather: jazz never nodded to rock as an equal. Neither did classical music or the avant-garde. And rock, for all its record sales and messianic moments, knew it. You can feel this pain in the ones who tried to bridge the gap — Keith Emerson thrashing through Mussorgsky, Fripp mapping fractals, Steve Vai smuggling in Stravinsky. But the institutions — the academies, the composers, the conservatoires — have mostly kept polite silence. Because what they were tuned to hear wasn't exotic chords or eccentric time signatures but real harmonic imagination, real rhythmic invention, the motif that transforms across harmony and regenerates itself as a living organism. And rock, even at its most sophisticated, never quite offered that.
The fans feel it too, and many cover the gap with exaggerations. When they shout "genius" the second Jimmy Page's name comes up, or call McCartney a master composer, it's often compensation — another symptom of the wound. Because everyone, deep down, knows what genius really looks like. In jazz it's Coltrane. In classical music it's Mozart. And in rock... you have to squint.
The revealing thing about rock, perhaps its most consistent truth, is that whenever one of its own tried to steer it toward seriousness, the entire ecosystem — fans, labels, critics, even the musicians' own peer culture — instinctively pushed back. Robert Fripp had already discovered this by 1972, and Nicky Hopkins, who was playing rock at conservatoire's standard of imagination — found out when the Rolling Stones fans shrugged at Jamming with Edward. A few years later, Jerry Garcia's circle quietly moved him aside for the same reason. With Garcia he played with harmonic depth, real development, the logic of Chopin. And they did not want that.
What strikes you about Jamming with Edward is not that Hopkins seems insistent or overbearing — it's the opposite. "Edward's Thrump Up" is not about domination — it's sudden elevation. It isn't icy, or rarefied, in the way of high modernism — it feels more like a door opening onto a different chamber of experience. Hopkins doesn't dominate the scene, he animates it. And in doing so he lifts the entire room to a different register of time. You don't know if it's 1969 or last week. All that’s certain is the sense of having stepped for a moment outside the ordinary run of the world. You find yourself, unaccountably, inside the miracle — and it is not a place with general admission.
***
Jamming with Edward never caught on because in 1969 the average Stones fan — mostly young, mostly male — wasn't tuning in for musical nuance. They were looking for Jagger — not Hopkins — to hand them a blueprint for being a man in the wreckage of the postwar world. A way to break free from their dads' world without joining a commune or learning how to spell "dialectic," a way to dodge the suffocating idea of adulthood without ending up dead. What they wanted was permission: to toss off the old father-provider routine, to feel free, to be reckless and come out alive. They wanted Jagger to embody the risk, wrap it in glamor, and make it look survivable. Jagger was their get-out-of-jail card: anti-authority without the bother of politics. To young guys staring down careers they didn't want and futures that felt like prisons, that was priceless. Every strut was a license, every sneer a hall pass.
And Hopkins? What could he show them? That greatness takes years of grind and discipline? That becoming a professional means solitary hours, months, years with no guarantee of reward? That depth requires loneliness, and even then it doesn’t buy you anything certain and you might get eclipsed by someone flashier and pushier? Nobody in their twenties wanted that sermon in 1969.
Jagger was showing them the opposite: that you could rise without a huge investment in craft, without theory, without compositional or instrumental skill, without years of study. You didn't need to master the tools — you just needed presence, command of the stage, the lens, the pulse of the moment. Confidence could replace compositional thought. Theater could be musical enough. That was the real revelation of rock.
Edward didn't fail because the music was weak — Hopkins is incandescent here. It failed because Stones fans didn't come for that. They came for Jagger to give them the sexual sneer, the swagger, the posture. Instead on this record they got Jagger out of his depth, half-mumbling, half-mocking, stripped of his mask, and Hopkins' unadorned seriousness. Hopkins gave them art. Jagger didn't deliver the act. And so the fans walked.
So in that way, Jamming with Edward became a litmus test of what rock culture valued. Hopkins' role proves that there was another kind of masculinity available — the one rooted in multi-genre creation — and, though a few recognized it (“I'll trade you two Zeppelins and a Grand Funk for that Edward,” Robert Murphy wrote in the Daily Breeze in February 1972), it remained invisible within rock's larger economy of spectacle.
***
Hopkins, however, wasn't the lone grown-up in that room: Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman carry the old-style masculinity here too — the one built on discipline. While Wyman and Watts are holding form, Hopkins is the axis. Listen closely and the hierarchy becomes absolute, audible: they accompany, he creates.
On "Highland Fling" you finally hear it: Watts locking into Hopkins' jazz streak like he's been waiting for this for years. Hopkins stretches out, expansive and lush, and suddenly Watts isn't just the metronome behind the Stones — he is refined, sweeping, adult. It's a glimpse of the sophistication he kept chained up all those years, and you can't help but start fantasizing: what if they had cut a whole record together? Two men leaning toward jazz, serious, both smart enough to see where the Stones hit the wall, both itching for a real musical conversation. For a second you can almost hear it — the album that never got cut.
What Watts lays down here is as sensitive as you'll ever hear him — touch shifting, swing bending, shuffle easing in and out, accents flickering like he is breathing the same air as Hopkins. He is not trying to own the thing — he is reacting, letting the piano set the terms. And Wyman's bass? Forget heavy groove. He is relational, sculpting around Hopkins' movement, staying lean so that the others can breathe. He is not "locked in." He is aware. And sonically just beautiful.
The other piece of the record's grown-up weight is, of course, Cooder. Yes, he ducks out on "Edward’s Thrump Up" (anybody would under the tidal wave of Hopkins composing in real time) but on "Blow with Ry" he is there with a haunted, elegant sophistication. It is one of the album's gems, or would have been — if Hopkins hadn't been buried in the mix. You can almost hear the conversation between the guitar and the piano fighting to break through, Hopkins and Ry trading lines, and you curse the faders. Cooder's blues is sharp, clean, poetic — miles away from Richards' rough-and-ready slash.
In 1969 Ry Cooder was just 22, but already one of those "musician's musicians," immersed in American folk and blues since he was a teenager, co-founding the Rising Sons with Taj Mahal back in the mid-1960s when most kids his age were still fumbling barre chords. By then he was drifting into every corner of Los Angeles as a session guitarist — playing Captain Beefheart's Safe as Milk, backing Randy Newman, sliding into soundtrack gigs with Jack Nitzsche. Young, but already carrying the air of somebody twice his age, the kind of player other players called when they wanted the real thing.
With Brian Jones — the master slide guitarist, Britain's pioneer — on the way out of the band, Cooder comes in with the same ultra‑serious, authentic slide sound — only more polished than Jones', more nuanced, more ethereally serious. His guitar on this album adds a hyper‑polished, hyper‑elegant dimension against Hopkins' authoritative, structural seriousness. And here is the flip: in this session the top shimmering layer — the decorative glaze — isn't Hopkins's piano — it's the guitar.
***
From the vantage point of 2025, Jamming with Edward sounds like two planes overlapping. On one, you have the rock game of 1960s — the loosening the form, the play-acting of cool. On the other, you have Nicky Hopkins hauling centuries of music into a room which can't even lift it: Chopin, Rachmaninoff, Bill Evans, all of it flowing through his fingers as lived history. He’s not playing a career move, not signaling "counterculture” — he is translating history itself into motion.
You hear Hopkins playing as if he doesn't live in 1969 — he is wired to a frequency that comes before it and will keep ringing after it's gone. Jagger and Cooder are of their time, and Hopkins plays outside it. Which is why when you spin Edward in 2025 it doesn't stale the way the Stones' "classics" inevitably do. What Hopkins puts down has no posture, it is completely non-symbolic — and as a result, completely timeless. In that sense, this record is a document not of 1969 but of the difference between performance and expression, between two ways of being.
***
Edward was supposed to be Nicky's spotlight, his name on the cover at last — and instead it wasn't, because the name itself got yanked away, swapped for a half-joke. "Edward": the nickname the Stones saddled him with, half-affection, half put-down. In 1971 he told Andrew Tyler in a big feature in Disc and Music Echo that it was Brian Jones who shouted across the studio, "Give us an E for Edward!" and the tag stuck. Later he said it was Keith Richards.
At this point we will never know: Brian is long gone and the truth is lost. What we do know is that Nicky was never the type to cozy up to power to obtain some kind of benefit. He's had plenty of chances to do so — more than most — and walked away from them.
The thing about memory is that it isn't static, even for those who value history. It mutates, sometimes just bent by the weight of other people's narratives. Did Brian Jones call him "Edward" first? It's very possible — more than possible. Did Keith say it too? Most certainly, later, or in his own way. But over the years there is a pressure, gentle but insistent, to make the story simpler, to smooth the rough edges of ego and rivalry. It seeps in like atmosphere, the air of rock industry where alliances alter and silence often feels safer than resistance. You breathe that air long enough and it shapes how you tell the tale.
Nicky, in fact, resisted that air. He was the only true A-list figure — incontestable calibre — who said the quiet part aloud about Brian Jones. In 1977, speaking to Expreso Imaginario in Buenos Aires, he didn't varnish it when asked whether the Stones had lost something after Brian's death: "Yes. That's when things started to get very monotonous. All their albums after Their Satanic Majesties, up to and including Let It Bleed, were quite different from each other. A direct, strong kind of thing. ... He was the core of the band: the frontman. Then Mick, because he was the focal point live, started to grow and challenge the leadership within the group. Brian then felt his contributions weren't being appreciated. ... I think after Brian's death they lost their musical direction, if they had any."
Expreso Imaginario was an Argentinian counterculture magazine, operating under a dictatorship. Their outward posture was "Let's look like a music magazine," and this allowed them to smuggle in other stuff: indigenous cosmologies, Eastern mysticism, science, technology, literature. Not quite samizdat, but not nothing either. Fernando Basarbu, a music writer turning producer, the one who spoke to Nicky on that August morning a luxury Buenos Aeros hotel, when Nicky as a member of Joe Cocker's band was passing through the city. And there is a funny bitter paradox here: in a country where speech was surveilled and censored, a British session legend could speak more freely — and more truthfully — than in any of the supposedly free organs of Anglo-American rock.
In the English-speaking world Jones, by comparison, is still spoken about cautiously, sotto voce. Jimmy Page, in his 2020 photo-memoir, approaches the subject like a man backing slowly into a locked room. On the Degree of Murder soundtrack — done with Brian and Nicky — Page offers only this: "He was a master musician. He was superb." When addressing the missing tapes: "It is so sad because those tapes would have shown everyone what Brian Jones could actually do as opposed to what they said he couldn't do." "They," of course, being Jagger and Richards -- not named.
And then Dylan, 2009, Rolling Stone. Talking about Jones with that sideways reverence: "The only other guy back then who could play like that was Mike Bloomfield." Context: like a Black musician, pure country blues style. Meaning: it was his language.
So the clearest post-mortem on Brian Jones didn't appear in the British press or the American press. It appeared in a breakfast interview, in translation, under dictatorship, spoken by Nicky Hopkins. "After Brian's death they lost their musical direction, if they had any." That level of clarity — of risk — is not something you hear from many of the others. Not the A-list. Not on the record.
***
Another thing was in the way the record was sent into the world: unpromoted, saddled with a dismissive note from Jagger, the whole package shouting, Do not take this seriously. Jagger called it "a nice little piece of bullshit," but only because his own contributions on this record were bullshit. With Hopkins incandescent and himself mumbling in the corner, what else could he do but wave it off?
That low-stakes packaging allowed it to fly under the radar — no threat to brand. Just a curio. A wink to the faithful. And that's precisely why it was possible. In 1972, the Stones didn't yet guard their material as a corporation, they weren't yet a global merchandising empire. They could afford to admit that brilliance sometimes came from the margins, from people not named Jagger or Richards. But Jamming with Edward is the one official artifact that cracks the shell. It says: "This was never just a duo. And when the ego sat down, the sound went somewhere higher."
***
Nicky drew his own cracked-mirror image all over the sleeve (half in jest and half in confession) with a series of cartoons that start out straight enough — just a guy, a face — Edward, his alter ego. But then frame by frame his smile begins to crawl wider and wider, until the whole skull just splits in half like an overripe melon and the lower jaw clatters off onto the floor. That’s Edward, that’s Nicky, that’s the whole joke and tragedy at once — Hopkins, with his delicate cruelty of perception, had turned the quirk of his own face into a fable. He knew well how his mouth, a tight and thoughtful circle in moments of concentration, could transform into a grin so huge it seemed to stretch the limits of his face. He knew it, and he drew it, because sometimes that smile was camouflage — what he gave to the room, to the Stones, to the whole circus. That's what's really on the cover: the picture of a man literally cracking himself in half to keep it all going.
Flip the record over and you can see Hopkins' handwriting: “They keep me down in the fucking basement.” That’s not just some tossed-off gag for those who know history. During Exile on Main St. sessions at Villa Nellcôte, he indeed spent most of the working time in the sweaty basement, laying down the sonic foundation of the album. The celebrated photo records show hundreds of shots of everybody else sprawled across the decadent interiors like aristocracy: drinking, eating, posing in sun-drenched salons and voluptuous rooms immortalized for cameras. And Hopkins? We have one grainy picture of his entire time at Nellcôte. One photograph of him at the piano upstairs. That is not an oversight. That is erasure. Suppression of the musician whose playing gave the whole record its spine. The man who built the backbone, it's rolling bloodstream, pushed down into the basement, and cropped out of the frame.
***
Jamming with Edward sounds now as a slip in the machine — the one time the Stones gave Nicky Hopkins top billing. They were still young and had not yet mastered the vigilance with which later they would curate their own archive and control their myth. They still didn't know how obsessive fans can get with credits, documentations, scraps of information. Once they understood that, they never again permitted such an aperture, such a lapse in control to leave the brand exposed like this. But in 1972, for one strange moment, they did. And this record haunts the later totality of their managed history.
