The Guide to Classic Recorded Jazz (76 page)

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Authors: Tom Piazza

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BOOK: The Guide to Classic Recorded Jazz
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Johnson. Johnson was thought of as the father of the stride piano; he was a prolific composer of classical pieces and popular songs as well (he wrote "Charleston" and "If I Could Be with You One Hour Tonight"). Unfortunately, much of Johnson's best recorded work is only spottily available.
Snowy Morning Blues
(Decca/GRP GRD-604) is the best collection currently in print; it contains one of his most exciting stride performances, the irresistible 1930 ''Jingles," as well as several other 1930 solos and a slew of 1944 performances on which he is accompanied by a drummer. He is not in peak form on the 1944 tracks, eight of which are Fats Waller tunes recorded as a tribute after his protégé's death the previous year, but some of them are excellent anyway, especially the Johnson classics "Keep Off the Grass" and "Carolina Shout," and the thrilling "Over the Bars." In general, though, Johnson's mighty left hand isn't as prominently displayed on the 1944 cuts as one might wish.
You can also hear Johnson sounding good on a number of solo sides included on
The Complete Edmond Hall/James P. Johnson/Sidney De Paris/Vic Dickenson Blue Note Sessions
(Mosaic MR6-109); the two best, from a stride point of view, are probably the arrogantly swinging "Mule Walk" and the impossibly up-tempo fingerbuster "Caprice Rag." Johnson was a master at varying his left-hand patterns, suggesting all kinds of polyrhythms and counter-melodies. His technique was awesome, and his swing overpowering. He also plays a couple of boogie-woogie numbers here; this is surprising because some schooled musicians (which Johnson certainly was) tended to look down on the relatively simple, blues-based boogie-woogie form (more on this in a while).
Willie "The Lion" Smith, like Johnson, a hero of Duke Ellington's (both Johnson and Smith had befriended the young Ellington when he arrived in New York City in the mid-1920s), was a flamboyant, colorful personality and a strong, florid stride pianist. His unique style can be heard at length in his album
Piano Solos
(Commodore CCD-7012), a collection spotlighting his lyric side as well as his stomping side. He is also in fine form on six 1958 tracks on
Luckey and The Lion - Harlem Piano Solos by Luckey Roberts and Willie "The Lion" Smith
(Good Time Jazz 10035), a lovely set that he splits with one of his few peers, Charles Luckeyeth Roberts. Duke Ellington's 1965 solo piano tribute to Smith, called "The Second Portrait of The Lion," full of canny appropriations of The Lion's style, may be heard on
Duke Ellington: Solos, Duets, and Trios
(RCA/Bluebird 2178-2-RB). Both Smith and James P. Johnson may be heard in late-1930s small bands in the set
Swing Is Here: Small Band Swing 1935-1939
(RCA/Bluebird 2180-2-RB).
The stride style became part of a complete pianist's bag of tricks for many years, even if he or she spent most of the time playing in a very different style.
 
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Pianists as different as Earl Hines, Art Tatum, and Thelonious Monk have used stride as an integral part of their styles (Monk's version of "Nice Work If You Can Get It," included on
Standards
[Columbia CK 45148], is a good, humorous example of his way of handling it). Even Count Basie, who was known for making a few notes say a lot, can be heard in 1932 playing some ferocious stride on "Toby," "Lafayette," and "Milenburg Joys" on
Bennie Moten's Kansas City Orchestra (1929-1932): Basie Beginnings
(RCA/Bluebird 9768-2-RB). For a stunning example of Duke Ellington's ability to play two-handed stride, listen to the 1932 ''Lots O' Fingers" on the album
Duke Ellington: Solos, Duets, and Trios
(RCA/Bluebird 2178-2-RB).
Boogie
Like stride, boogie-woogie piano gets its effects by combining a regular pattern in the left hand with a series of riff-based variations in the right. Boogie-woogie, which is almost always based on blues progressions and forms, is much easier to play than stride, and it was a staple of unschooled pianists who played for dances and parties in the South and Southwest of the 1920s and 1930s. At its best, it is a wildly exciting style, too, and some thoroughly trained pianists have found it fascinating. In the late 1930s and early 1940s it became a popular musical fad through the success of boogie-woogie tunes like Mary Lou Williams's "Roll 'Em" and, later, novelties such as "Beat Me, Daddy, Eight to the Bar" and "The Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B."
Boogie-woogie was sometimes called eight-to-the-bar because of its characteristic accenting, a rocking rhythm that accented what musicians call the back beat, or the "and" half of every beat (in a four-beat measure, if you count the beats "one and two and three and four," the "ands" would get the emphasis). This pattern is hammered home, in boogie-woogie, by the pianist's left hand, which plays a repeated bass line or pulsating chords over simple blues progressions while the right hand plays riffs against the pattern. It is a fairly simple principle, but a skilled player can make almost endless variations using this technique.
A classic boogie-woogie performance, and a perfect capsule summary of the style, is Meade Lux Lewis's "Honky Tonk Train Blues," included on the essential boogie-woogie anthology
Barrelhouse Boogie
(RCA/Bluebird 8334-2-RB). Against a steady, rocking chordal boogie pattern in his left hand, Lewis sets a procession of ingenious, shifting right-hand riffs that are exhilarating in the way they set up expectations and then shift them. This collection also includes ten cuts by the Chicago master Jimmy Yancey and nine by the two-piano team of Pete Johnson and Albert Ammons. Yancey's approach was in many ways the most basic of all boogie-woogie players'; he usually used only single-note,
 
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broken bass lines in the left hand and single-note melodies in the right hand, as opposed to the rolling basses and chordal work of some other pianists. He tended to be at his best on slower blues pieces, of which there are several here.
Johnson and Ammons were, individually, probably the greatest boogie-woogie pianists who ever lived; when they played together, as they do here, the swing they generated could be overwhelming. Anyone who has tried to play piano duets knows how hard it is to keep things from getting muddy; unless the two players know each other very well, musically, bass parts can cancel each other out, chords can lead in different directions, and melody lines can send out mixed messages. But Johnson and Ammons speak the same language and know how to complement each other, handing the lead back and forth like basketball players moving a ball down the court. A performance like "Boogie Woogie Man" shows each of them digging way down into their bags of tricks.
Lewis, Johnson, and Ammons recorded quite a bit on their own. Some of the most important recordings Lewis made are included in
The Complete Edmond Hall/James P. Johnson/Sidney De Paris/Vic Dickenson Blue Note Sessions
(Mosaic MR6-109); he is featured not on piano but on the high-pitched celeste with the Edmond Hall Celeste Quartet, a small group led by one of jazz's best clarinetists and including Charlie Christian on acoustic guitar as well as bassist Israel Crosby. Of the four tunes they recorded (five, if you count the extra take of "Profoundly Blue"), all of which are blues, "Celestial Express" has the highest boogie quotient. You can hear Lewis backing Hall's clarinet with celeste riffs that sound like the trumpet section of a big band.
The Blues Piano Artistry of Meade Lux Lewis
(Riverside/OJC-1759) is a disappointment, containing only one full-fledged boogie out of ten selections. Unfortunately, the fantastic
The Complete Blue Note Recordings of Albert Ammons and Meade Lux Lewis
(Mosaic MR3-103), a limited edition, like almost all of Mosaic's sets, has sold out and will not be reprinted.
Pete Johnson is pretty well represented on records. He has six tracks to himself on
The Pete Johnson/Earl Hines/Teddy Bunn Blue Note Sessions
(Mosaic MR1-119), among which are two powerhouse boogies, "Holler Stomp" and "Barrelhouse Breakdown." The probably hard-to-find collection
All Star Swing Groups: Pete Johnson, Cozy Cole
(Savoy SJL 2218) has two full sides of Johnson, mostly at the helm of a 1946 session spotlighting a different musician on each title; the musicians include trumpeter Hot Lips Page and tenor saxophonist Ben Webster. ''1280 Stomp," made at a different 1946 session, with Hot Lips Page and Budd Johnson, builds up a good head of boogie-woogie steam.
 
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Johnson is best known for his collaborations with blues shouter Big Joe Turner. Against Turner's loud, tough, jubilant vocals, Johnson's left hand kept a steady rocking rhythm and from his right pealed ringing treble riffs. Some of the best of these pairings, including their classic duet "Roll 'Em Pete," are either unavailable or hard to find. Two exceptional 1939 tracks, "Cherry Red" and "Baby, Look at You," may be found on the fine four-LP boxed set
Swing Street
(Columbia Special Products JSN 6042); these are quintessential Kansas City boogie-woogie, with Turner cutting loose over a Johnson-led band including Hot Lips Page and alto legend Buster Smith, Charlie Parker's early inspiration. One 1940 track featuring Turner, Johnson, and Page, the spellbinding ''Piney Brown Blues," shows up on
Joe Turner Volume 1: I've Been to Kansas City
(Decca/MCD MCAD-42351); Johnson's piano fills here are 151-proof Kansas City blues.
The Kansas City pianist and bandleader Jay McShann was, and is, capable of serving up a great mess of blues and boogie-woogie. The collection
Jay McShann Orchestra: Blues from Kansas City
(Decca/GRP GRD-614) has him at the helm of his early-1940s band, which included alto saxophonist Charlie Parker. McShann's playing on cuts like "Vine Street Boogie," "Confessin' the Blues" (with its Walter Brown vocal), and "One Woman's Man" are definitive of the Kansas City approach to blues and boogie-woogie piano.
Mary Lou Williams, who made her name playing with the Kansas City big band of Andy Kirk, is sadly underrepresented on compact disc. One can hear her fine piano with the late-1930s Kirk band on
Andy Kirk and Mary Lou Williams: Mary's Idea
(Decca/GRP GRD-622), which includes a number of her imaginative and advanced arrangements for the band, including the classic "Walkin' and Swingin'." Williams only got better as she grew older, and she was active well into the 1980s. Fantasy/OJC should really reissue her fantastic Pablo album,
My Mama Pinned a Rose on Me
, from the late 1970s, on which she performs an all-blues program, showing her ability to play in all idioms of jazz while keeping the taproot of the blues intact.
Stepping Out
Stride piano and boogie-woogie both require the pianist to keep time with his or her left hand and to play riff-based variations in the right. Both styles show how jazz piano is percussive in its nature, the contrast between the right- and the left-hand rhythms producing complicated effects. By the late 1920S, though, some pianists were learning that the rhythm didn't always have to be spelled out by the left hand, that it could be implied, and that the right hand could
 
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play melodies that were freer, more like improvised trumpet solos, say, than the intricate riffs used by earlier players.
The pioneer of this thinking was Earl "Fatha" Hines, a Chicago pianist who came to prominence with Louis Armstrong in the late 1920s. Hines had deep roots in stride and often used it in his performances, but it was more characteristic of him to break up the left-hand's rhythm, to insert a series of stabbing, off-the-beat left-hand chords or a jabbed, held bass note or a slurred left-hand run against a right hand that was playing not riffs but loud, trumpetlike melodies, often voiced in octaves. His style was, in fact, called trumpet-style piano. The independence of Hines's two hands made it seem as if each were controlled by a separate brain that could read the other's mind.
Louis Armstrong, Volume 4: Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines
(Columbia CK 45142) is a document of the year 1928, when Hines turned the piano world upside down. Matched here with the greatest instrumental genius jazz has ever known, Hines redefines the possibilities of his own instrument in terms that still have the power to shock. Only Hines would have jumped into the medium-tempo waters of "Savoyagers' Stomp" with those off-the-beat triplets, followed them with such a willingness to leave space, ended his first eight bars with a splashing succession of descending chordal arpeggios, or even been able to conceive of what he does at the beginning of his second eight, the line that rises out of the bass, like a fish surfacing, to meet the spitting, jabbing series of right-hand notes for that harmonized phrase. Hines was a genius, no question about it. The fact is argued further on every track of this collection but nowhere more strongly than on "Weather Bird," one of the greatest jazz recordings ever made, an unaccompanied duet between Hines and Armstrong on a tune Armstrong used to play with King Oliver. The two trade the lead back and forth, Hines constantly changing the background for the trumpeter, providing a pulsating rhythmic base, although the rhythm is seldom directly spelled out.
Hines was an important bandleader in the 1930s and early 1940s as well as a major pianist. Five solo performances from 1939 through 1941, a trio track with Sidney Bechet, and a number of big-band performances are collected on
Piano Man: Earl Hines, His Piano and His Orchestra
(RCA/Bluebird 6750-2-RB), an introduction to Hines at the peak of his popularity; this set is discussed in more detail in the Ensembles section for its great band tracks. Of special pianistic interest among the band cuts are "Piano Man," an up-tempo tour de force for Hines, and "Boogie Woogie On 'St. Louis Blues,' " one of Hines's most popular recordings and one of his few in the boogie mode. The solo cuts show Hines's stride roots, his absolute rhythmic mastery, and his daring. Two

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