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Armstrong, Lil Hardin Basie, Count Blake, Eubie Bloom, Rube Confrey, Zez Hines, Earl Johnson, James P. Joplin, Scott Lamb, Joseph Morton, Jelly Roll Roberts, Luckey Scott, James Smith, Willie "The Lion" Tatum, Art Waller, Fats Williams, Mary Lou Wilson, Teddy Joplin, Scott

(b nr Marshall, TX, or Shreveport, LA, 24 Nov 1868; d New York, 1 April 1917). American composer. The circumstances of his training and early career remain obscure, but by 1896 he had settled in Sedalia, Missouri. There, after studying at the George R. Smith College for Negroes to improve his musical technique, he began to issue, with the publisher John Stark, the numerous piano rags on which his reputation as the ‘king of ragtime’ largely rests. Ragtime had been a predominantly improvised folk genre, but Joplin wished to elevate it to ‘classical’ status – a goal he pursued energetically throughout his life – and the idea of a ragtime opera was an early obsession. Almost operatic is The Ragtime Dance of 1899, a six-minute display of ragtime dance steps with sung narration by a ‘caller’ (after the fashion of square dances) and an orchestral accompaniment.

In the wake of the success of Maple Leaf Rag (1899), Joplin married and moved (1901) to St Louis. There he composed A Guest of Honor (1903), a ‘ragtime opera’ in one act comprising 12 numbers, all rags. He formed the Scott Joplin Drama Company in April of that year, presenting a single performance of the opera in St Louis before taking it on tour. The renamed Scott Joplin Ragtime Opera Company, however, quickly collapsed, and the touring production was probably heard only in four small Midwestern towns. Stark proved reluctant to publish so ambitious a project, and the work is now lost. As late as 1950 there were still ‘many people’ who remembered the St Louis performance, but no reliable account of the opera’s plot or subject has survived, though the titles of two numbers are known.

Joplin led an itinerant life until 1907, when he moved to New York with the express purpose of publishing and producing his next opera, the three-act Treemonisha (1908–11, orchestrated 1915). Unable to find either publisher or backers, he brought out the piano score (New York, 1911) at his own expense (attracting a single, laudatory review), and likewise mounted a poorly received concert performance with piano accompaniment. Three numbers were revised and issued separately in 1913 and 1915. Treemonisha was

© Oxford University Press 2007, Side 1 af 48 Tidlige Jazz-Pianister not staged, however, until 28 January 1972, in Atlanta; it is published in The Complete Works of Scott Joplin (vol.ii, New York, 2/1981), but the original orchestration is lost.

Joplin refrained from labelling Treemonisha a ‘ragtime opera’. The style of both text (by the composer) and music is an uneasy but effective combination of ragtime and operetta. The identification of ragtime as a pop genre and Joplin as a ‘minority’ composer has tended to obscure the fact that Treemonisha is the earliest music ally significant opera by an American (apart from Gottschalk’s one-act Escenas campestres, 1860), and the earliest in an identifiably modern idiom.

In autumn 1916 Joplin, already seriously debilitated by his final illness, notified the New York Age that he had just completed a ‘music comedy drama’ entitled If; but this, if it existed, has vanished without trace.

See also TREEMONISHA.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

SouthernB ‘A Musical Novelty’, American Musician [New York], xxvii/12 (1911), 7–8 R. Blesh and H. Janis: They all Played Ragtime (New York, 1950, 4/1971) A. W. Reed: The Life and Works of Scott Joplin (diss., U. of North Carolina, 1973) T. Waldo: This is Ragtime (New York, 1976) J. Haskins and K. Benson: Scott Joplin (Garden City, NY, 1978) A. W. Reed: ‘Scott Joplin: Pioneer’, Ragtime: its History, Composers, and Music, ed. J. E. Hasse (New York, 1985), 117–36 E. A. Berlin: ‘On the Trail of A Guest of Honor: in Search of Scott Joplin’s Lost Opera’, A Celebration of American Music: Words and Music in Honor of H. Wiley Hitchcock (Ann Arbor, 1990), 51–65

ANDREW STILLER

Scott, James (Sylvester)

(b Neosho, MO, 12 Feb 1885; d Kansas City, KS, 30 Aug 1938). American ragtime composer and pianist. His parents had been slaves and had come from North Carolina to Neosho, where Scott took music lessons from John Coleman. After moving to Carthage, Missouri, about 1901, his father bought him a piano, and Scott honed his pianistic skills by ‘sitting in’ between dance sets at the Lakeside Amusement Park and by performing in local saloons. In 1902 he began working for the Dumars Music Company and was soon promoted to sales clerk and song demonstrator. The following year Dumars published two rags by Scott, A Summer Breeze and The Fascinator. In 1906 he reportedly journeyed to St Louis and met Scott Joplin, who is said to have introduced him to the publisher John Stark. That year Stark issued Frog Legs Rag, which proved popular, and thereafter his firm became almost the sole publisher of Scott’s works. During the 1910s Scott continued to write piano rags for Stark and to work for Dumars, and also travelled as far as Kansas City and St Louis to perform. By 1920 Scott had moved to Kansas City, Kansas, where he opened a teaching studio. He reportedly continued to compose, but his last rag was issued

© Oxford University Press 2007, Side 2 af 48 Tidlige Jazz-Pianister in 1922. In the 1920s he played for silent films and then with pit orchestras in Kansas City, Missouri; when sound films displaced the theatre orchestras, he formed a dance band and continued to play until shortly before his death.

Scott’s rags have a number of traits traditional to American music: pentatonicism, blue notes, call-and-response patterns and jazz-like breaks. They are generally structured around two-bar motifs, and demand greater virtuosity than the works of Joplin or Joseph Lamb. In Scott’s later rags his textures became richer and his bass lines more varied. He was not well known in his lifetime and his music had less circulation than Joplin’s: apparently none of Scott’s rags were recorded on discs before the 1920s, although a number were issued on piano rolls. In 1939 Jelly Roll Morton recorded his Climax Rag, and in the 1940s several of Scott’s other rags were recorded by dixieland jazz bands. A revival of interest in his works followed the publication in 1950 of Blesh and Janis’s They All Played Ragtime.

WORKS

(selective list) Pf rags: The Fascinator (1903); A Summer Breeze, march and two step (1903); On the Pike, march and two step (1904); Frog Legs Rag (1906); Kansas City Rag (1907); Grace and Beauty (1909); Great Scott Rag (1909); The Ragtime Betty (1909); Sunburst Rag (1909); Hilarity Rag (1910); Ophelia Rag (1910); Quality (A High Class Rag) (1911); Princess Rag (1911); Ragtime Oriole (1911); Climax Rag (1914); Evergreen Rag (1915); Honeymoon Rag (1916); Prosperity Rag (1916); Efficiency Rag (1917); Paramount Rag (1917); Dixie Dimples, ragtime fox trot (1918); Rag Sentimental (1918); New Era Rag (1919); Peace and Plenty Rag (1919); Troubadour Rag (1919); Modesty Rag (A Classic) (1920); Pegasus (A Classic Rag) (1920); Don’t Jazz Me (I’m Music) (1921); Victory Rag (1921); Broadway Rag (A Classic) (1922); Calliope Rag (1966) Other pf: Hearts Longing Waltzes (1910); Suffragette Waltz (1914); Springtime of Love Valse (1919) Songs: She’s my girl from Anaconda (Dumars) (1909); Sweetheart Time (Dumars) (1909); Take me out to Lakeside (I. Millet) (1914); The Shimmie Shake (C. Wilson) (1920)

Principal publishers: Dumars, Stark

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GroveA R. Blesh and H. Janis: They All Played Ragtime (New York, 1950, 4/1971) B. Wright and T.J. Tichenor: ‘James Scott and C.L. Johnson: an Unlikely Musical Kinship’, Ragtime Review, v/Jan (1966), 7–8; repr. in Rag Times, vi/5 (1972), 4 W.J. Schafer: ‘Grace and Beauty: the Case of James Scott’, Mississippi Rag, ii/10 (1975), 7–8 M.L. Van Gilder: ‘James Scott’, Ragtime: its History, Composers and Music, ed. J.E. Hasse (New York, 1985), 137–45

JOHN EDWARD HASSE

Morton, Jelly Roll [Lamothe, Ferdinand Joseph; Mouton, Ferdinand Joseph]

(b New Orleans, 20 Oct 1890; d Los Angeles, 10 July 1941). American composer and pianist.

1. Life. 2. Achievement. WORKS SELECTED RECORDINGS RECORDED COMPOSITIONS BIBLIOGRAPHY l

1. Life.

Gushee’s essays of the 1980s are the definitive studies of Morton’s early years. He was born Ferdinand Joseph Lamothe, the son of Edward J. Lamothe, but his baptismal certificate misspells the surname as Lemott; an incorrect variant spelling, La Mothe, has appeared in jazz literature, and another misspelling, La Menthe, is often found. His mother later married Willie Mouton, and later, upon entering show business, he anglicized the name to Morton. While his baptismal certificate gives his date of birth as 20 October 1890, Gushee suggests that Morton may have been born in September; Morton had claimed 1885 as the year of his birth and evidently adjusted some of his stories accordingly, and these events have been corrected in Gushee’s chronology.

Morton grew up in New Orleans, played guitar in string bands at around the age of seven, and started to learn piano when he was ten. By 1905 he was working in the bordellos of Storyville, performing ragtime, French quadrilles, and other popular dances and songs, as well as a few light (mostly operatic) classics. Nothing is known of his formal musical training, but his major youthful influence appears to have been Tony Jackson. Around 1907 Morton became an itinerant pianist, initially working mainly in Pensacola (Florida), Biloxi (Mississippi), and Mobile (Alabama). He was also apparently quite active as a gambler, pool player, and procurer, though music remained his first “line of business.” While retaining New Orleans as his base, he later extended his travels to St. Louis, Chicago, Jacksonville (Florida), and Memphis, frequently working for prolonged periods in minstrel shows; eventually he traveled as far east as New York (where James P. Johnson heard him play his Jelly Roll Blues in 1911), spent a period based in Texas (though still touring widely), and went west to Los Angeles, where he arrived in 1917. During these dozen years of travel Morton apparently fused a variety of black musical idioms – ragtime, vocal and instrumental blues, items from the minstrel show repertory, field and levee hollers, religious hymns, and spirituals – with Hispanic music from the Caribbean and white popular songs, creating a musical amalgam that bore a very close resemblance to the music then beginning to be called “jazz.”

Morton enjoyed such success in Los Angeles that he remained there for five years. In May 1923, however, he moved to Chicago, the new center of jazz activity. His first recordings were made there the following month: two performances with a sextet (Big Foot Ham and Muddy Water Blues) and a series of solo piano renditions of his own works. The compositional maturity and the advanced conception of the ensemble and solo writing

© Oxford University Press 2007, Side 4 af 48 Tidlige Jazz-Pianister revealed in these recordings suggest that Morton’s style must have crystallized many years previously. By 1926–7 he was recording with his RED HOT PEPPERS (see illustration), a seven- or eight-piece band organized for recording purposes and comprising colleagues well versed in the New Orleans style and familiar with Morton’s music. The resultant recordings were a triumphant fusion of composition and improvisation. Pieces such as Grandpa’s Spells, Black Bottom Stomp, and The Pearls are masterly examples of Morton’s creative talents, not only as a composer and arranger (see ARRANGEMENT, §2 and Table 1) but also as a pianist. These works were ingeniously conceived so as to yield a maximum variety of texture and timbre without sacrificing clarity of form (see ex.1); furthermore, unlike most jazz performances in those days, they were carefully rehearsed. Particularly noteworthy is the manner in which Morton provides opportunities for all the performers to contribute significant solos (usually climaxing in exultant two-bar breaks) without losing sight of overall structural unity and a balance between solo and ensemble. As a pianist Morton contributed not only some of his most inspired solos, such as those on Smoke- house Blues and Black Bottom Stomp (see ex.2), but also sensitive countermelodies that were without precedent in 1920s jazz; similar ideas were taken up only by Earl Hines and, some years later, Art Tatum.

In 1928 Morton moved to New York. There he continued to record such pieces (not necessarily his own) as Kansas City Stomp, Tank Town Bump, Low Gravy, and Blue Blood Blues. He gradually made use of such “modern” devices as homophonically harmonized ensembles and laid a greater emphasis on solo improvisation. However, he remained at heart true to the New Orleans spirit of collective improvisation and was never able to assimilate the new orchestral styles advanced in the late 1920s by Don Redman, Fletcher Henderson, and John Nesbitt. By 1930 Morton’s style, both as arranger and pianist, came to be regarded as antiquated. Ironically, some of his compositions, such as Wolverine Blues, Milenberg Joys, and, especially, King Porter Stomp, continued to be performed regularly, remaining as influential pieces in the repertory throughout the 1930s. Indeed, it was Benny Goodman’s performance of the last-named title, in Fletcher Henderson’s updated arrangement (1935), that was largely responsible for ushering in the swing era.

In the early 1930s Morton drifted into obscurity. He settled in Washington, DC, where he managed a jazz club and also played intermittently. In 1938 the folklorist Alan Lomax, later Morton’s biographer, recorded him in an extensive series of interviews held at the Library of Congress (issued on disc in 1948 and reissued in 1957). In this invaluable oral history Morton recalled in words and performances his early days in New Orleans, re-creating the styles of many of his turn-of-the-century contemporaries. His accounts, both verbal and pianistic, have the ring of authenticity and revealed Morton as jazz’s earliest musician- historian and a perceptive theorist and analyst of the music. The Library of Congress recordings rekindled public interest in Morton, eventually leading to further recording sessions in 1939–40 and, in tandem with the New Orleans revival, a renewed career; this was cut short in 1940, however, on account of his ill-health.

2. Achievement.

Morton was the first important jazz composer. His compositions, many written long before he began recording, represent a rich synthesis of African-American musical elements, particularly as embodied in the pure New Orleans collective style which he helped to develop to its finest expression. Paradoxically, his emphasis on composition and well- rehearsed, coordinated performances was unique and antithetical to the primarily extemporized, polyphonic New Orleans style. In his best ensemble work, especially with the Red Hot Peppers, Morton showed that composition and meticulously rehearsed arrangements were not incompatible with the spontaneity of improvised jazz but could in fact retain and enhance it. In this respect his achievement may be ranked with that of Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, and Gil Evans.

Morton’s sophisticated conception of jazz is all the more remarkable since the origins of his style lie primarily in classic midwestern ragtime and simple instrumental blues. His piano pieces (such as Grandpa’s Spells and Kansas City Stomp) strongly resemble ragtime in their form, but by elaborating these works with composed and improvised variation Morton was able to transcend ragtime’s formal conventions. Ultimately he freed ragtime from its narrow strictures by developing within it an ensemble style embracing homophony, improvised polyphony, solo improvisations, breaks, and a constant variation of texture and timbre.

A comprehensive edition of Morton’s unaccompanied piano recordings was transcribed and edited by James Dapogny as The Collected Piano Music of Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton (Washington, DC, 1982). Similar work on Morton’s piano rolls was undertaken by A. Wodehouse and published (in the series Artist Transcriptions Piano) as Jelly Roll Morton: the Piano Rolls (Milwaukee, WI, 1999); earlier, under this same title,Wodehouse had transferred 12 such rolls into digital form and thereby produced remarkable high- fidelity recordings of Morton “playing” his pieces on a modern grand piano (Nonesuch 79363, 1997).

Oral history material in DLC. See also BLUES, §5; FORMS, §§2 and 3; and PIANO, §1.

WORKS

(selective list; dates of composition are mostly conjectural) © date of copyright

New Orleans Blues, 1905, ©1925; Jelly Roll Blues, 1905, ©1915; King Porter Stomp, 1906, ©1924; Buffalo Blues, 1907, ©1928; Georgia Swing, 1907, ©1928; Frog-i-more Rag (Sweetheart o’ Mine), 1908, ©1918; The Crave, 1910–11, ©1939; Bert Williams, 1911, ©1948; Grandpa’s Spells, 1911, ©1923; Wolverine Blues, 1915–16, ©1923; Mamanita, 1917–22, ©1949; Kansas City Stomp, 1919, ©1923; The Pearls, 1919, ©1923; Big Foot Ham, 1923, ©1923; London Blues (Shoe Shiner’s Drag), 1923, ©1923; Mr. Jelly Lord, 1923, ©1923 Milenberg Joys, 1923, ©1925; Perfect Rag (Sporting House Rag), 1924, ©1939; Shreveport Stomp, 1924, ©1925; Black Bottom Stomp (Queen of Spades), 1925, ©1925; Dead Man Blues, 1926, ©1926; Fickle Fay Creep, 1926, ©1930; Hyena Stomp, 1927, ©1927; Jungle Blues, 1927, ©1927; Sweet Peter, 1929, ©1933

RECORDED COMPOSITIONS

(selective list) As unaccompanied soloist: King Porter Stomp/Wolverine Blues (1923, Gen. 5289); New Orleans Joys (New Orleans Blues) (1923, Gen. 5486); Grandpa’s Spells/Kansas City Stomp (1923, Gen. 5218); The Pearls (1923, Gen. 5323); Mamanita (1924, Para. 12216); Shreveport Stomp (1924, Gen. 5590); Jelly Roll Blues/Big Foot Ham (1924, Gen. 5552); Froggie Moore (Frog-i-more Rag) (1924, Para. 14032); Perfect Rag (1924, Gen. 5486); London Blues (Shoe Shiner’s Drag) (1924, Rialto [unnumbered]); Mr. Jelly Lord (1924, Vocal Style Song Roll 12973); Dead Man Blues (1926, QRS 3674); Fickle Fay Creep/Jungle Blues (1938, Cir. [USA] 32-46); Sweet Peter (1938, Cir. [USA] 73-69); Hyena Stomp (1938, Cir. [USA] 8-55); Bert Williams (1938, Cir. [USA] 45-71); The Crave (1938, Cir. [USA] 31) As leader: Big Foot Ham (1923, Para. 12050); London Blues (Shoe Shiner’s Drag) (1923, OK 8105); Mr. Jelly Lord (1923, Para. 20332); King Porter Stomp (1924, Aut. 617); Wolverine Blues (1925, Aut. 623); Black Bottom Stomp (1926, Vic. 20221); Dead Man Blues (1926, Vic. 20252); Grandpa’s Spells (1926, Vic. 20431); Original Jelly Roll Blues (1926, Vic. 20405); Hyena Stomp (1927, Vic. 20772); Jungle Blues (1927, Vic. 21345); The Pearls (1927, Vic. 20948); Georgia Swing (1928, Vic. 38024); Kansas City Stomps (1928, Vic. 38010); Shreveport (Stomp) (1928, Vic. 21658); Sweet Peter (1929, Vic. 23402); Fickle Fay Creep (1930, Vic. 23019)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. R. Morton: “I Created Jazz in 1902,” DB, v/8 (1938), 3 K. Hulsizer: “Jelly Roll Morton in Washington,” Jazz Music, ii/6–7 (1944), 109; repr. in This is Jazz, ed. K. Williamson (London, 1960), 202 J. R. Morton: “Fragment of an Autobiography,” Record Changer, iv (1944), March, 15; April, 27 C. E. Smith: “Oh, Mr. Jelly!,” Jazz Record, no.17 (1944), 8 O. Simeon: “Mostly about Morton,” Jazz Record, no.37 (1945), 5 P. E. Miller, ed.: Esquire’s 1946 Jazz Book (New York, 1946) R. J. Carew: “New Orleans Recollections,” Record Changer, vii (1948), Dec, 12 R. Blesh and H. Janis: They all Played Ragtime (New York, 1950, rev. 4/1971) A. Lomax: Mister Jelly Roll: the Fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton, New Orleans Creole and “Inventor of Jazz” (New York, 1950, 2/1973) R. Carew: “1211 U Street, Northwest,” JM, i/1 (1955), 8 ——: “Of This and That and Jelly Roll,” JJ, x/12 (1957), 10

M. Williams: Liner notes, Jelly Roll Morton: the Library of Congress Recordings (Riv. 9001- 12, 1957) R. Hadlock: “Morton’s Library of Congress Albums,” Jazz: a Quarterly of American Music, no.2 (1959), 133 W. Russell: “Morton and Frog-i-more Rag,” The Art of Jazz: Essays on the Nature and Development of Jazz, ed. M. Williams (New York, 1959/R1979) J. Butler and J. Poinsot: “Harlem en 1928,” BHcF, no.100 (1960), 4 D. Locke: “Jelly Roll Morton: the Library of Congress Recordings,” JJ, xiii/1 (1960), 15 K. Kramer: “Jelly Roll in Chicago (1927),” SL, xi (1961), nos.1–2, p.1; nos.3–4, p.19 G. Waterman: “Jelly Roll Morton,” Jazz Panorama, ed. M. Williams (New York and London, 1962/R1979), 31 M. Williams: Jelly Roll Morton (London, 1962); repr. in Kings of Jazz, ed. S. Green (South Brunswick, NJ, and New York, 1978) C. E. Smith: Liner notes, Stomps and Joys (RCA LPV508, 1964) K. Kramer: “Jelly Roll in Chicago: the Missing Chapter,” The Ragtimer, vi/1 (1967), 15 M. Williams: Jazz Masters of New Orleans (New York and London, 1967/R1978) J. R. T. Davies and L. Wright: Morton’s Music (London, 1968) J. R. Morton: “Final Years of Frustration (1939–41),” JJ, xxi (1968), no.11, p.2; no.12, p.8 [letters to R. Carew] G. Schuller: Early Jazz: its Roots and Musical Development (New York, 1968) B. Kumm and H. Smith: “The Strange Case of Jelly’s Will,” Sv, no.25 (1969), 8 M. Williams: The Jazz Tradition (New York, 1970, rev. 2/1983) M. A. Hood and H. N. Flint, eds.: “Jelly Roll” Morton: the Original Mr. Jazz (New York, 1975) M. Hill and E. Bryce: Jelly Roll Morton: a Microgroove Discography and Musical Analysis (Salisbury East, South Australia, 1977) L. Wright: Mr Jelly Lord (Chigwell, England, 1980) L. Gushee: “Would you Believe Ferman Mouton?,” Sv, no.95 (1981), 164; no.98 (1981–2), 56 W. Balliett: “Ferdinand La Menthe,” Jelly Roll, Jabbo and Fats (New York, and Oxford, England, 1983), 16; repr. in BalliettA (1986); BalliettA (1996) J. Dapogny: “Jelly Roll Morton and Ragtime,” Ragtime: its History, Composers, and Music, ed. J. E. Hasse (New York and London, 1985), 257 J. Jeckovich: “The forms and Orchestration of Five Jelly Roll Morton Piano Solos,” ARJS, iii (1985), 1 L. Gushee: “A Preliminary Chronology of the Early Career of Ferd ‘Jelly Roll’ Morton,” American Music, iii (1985), 389; repr. in Sv, no.127 (1986), 11 D. Barker: A Life in Jazz, ed. A. Shipton (London and New York, 1986) R. Stewart: “Memories of Jelly Roll Morton,” New Orleans Music, ii/6 (1991), 15 J. Dapogny: “Some Notes on Jelly Roll Morton,” Sv, no.151 (1992), 26 R. Kennedy: Jelly Roll, Bix, and Hoagy: Gennett Studios and the Birth of Recorded Jazz (Bloomington, IN, and Indianapolis, 1994) D. Hyman and J. Dapogny: “Two Views of Frog-i-More Rag,” Piano Today, xv/4 (1995), 38 F. Levin: “The Saga of Jelly Roll Morton’s Ill-fated Final Recording Date,” New Orleans Music, vii/2 (1997), 18 W. Russell, comp.: “Oh, Mister Jelly”: a Jelly Roll Morton Scrapbook (Copenhagen, 1999) M. Meddings: “Ferd ‘Jelly Roll’ Morton, 1890–1941: a Chronicle of Research,” (2000) H. Reich and W. Gaines: “Jelly Roll Morton,” (2000)

Hines, Earl (Kenneth) [Earl “Fatha,” Fatha]

(b Duquesne, PA, 28 Dec 1903; d Oakland, CA, 22 April 1983). American pianist and bandleader. He studied trumpet briefly with his father, and took his first piano lessons with his mother; later he continued in the European piano tradition with other teachers in Pittsburgh while playing organ in the Baptist church and teaching himself popular music as a pianist at parties. He first played professionally accompanying the singer Lois Deppe, probably in 1922, although both Hines and Deppe dated this activity one year earlier. In 1923 he toured with Deppe’s big band, with which he made his first recordings; his earnings allowed him to study with two local jazz pianists.

After leading bands, including one with Benny Carter in 1924, Hines transferred later that year from the Collins Inn in Pittsburgh to Harry Collins’s after-hours venue in Chicago, the Elite No.2. Accounts of his activities during the next few years are inconsistent. Evidently while still at the Elite in 1925 he joined Carroll Dickerson’s orchestra at the Entertainer’s Club. The orchestra toured to the West Coast and Canada into 1926 and then returned to the Sunset Café, where, with Hines, Louis Armstrong, and other important musicians, it soon became well known, influencing a generation of musicians. During this period Hines and Armstrong began doubling each evening as members of Erskine Tate’s Vendome Theater Orchestra. In February 1927, with Dickerson’s alcoholism having become out of control, Hines became the orchestra’s director under Armstrong’s nominal leadership. At about this same time he also worked as an accompanist to singers, including Ethel Waters and an unidentified individual with whom he first performed at the Apex Club – and thus found himself sitting in with Jimmie Noone’s group. After an unsuccessful attempt to manage their own club in 1927 Armstrong and Hines separated, Armstrong returning to Dickerson, and Hines joining Noone late that year. In 1928 Hines recorded several titles with Noone, notably Apex Blues, and made a series of influential recordings with Armstrong, among them the highly original trumpet and piano duet Weather Bird (for excerpts see Harmony (i), exx.3 and 14); he also recorded a group of solos for QRS.

On his 25th birthday Hines inaugurated his own band at the Grand Terrace in Chicago, where he played for ten years; the band became known through nationwide tours and, from 1932, radio broadcasts, in the course of which he acquired his nickname, when the announcer introduced him by saying, “Here comes Fatha Hines through the deep forest with his little children” (Deep Forest being the band’s theme song at the time). Among his featured soloists during the mid-1930s were Valaida Snow, Walter Fuller, George Dixon, Trummy Young, Omer Simeon, and Darnell Howard. Lawrence Dixon, Quinn Wilson, and Wallace Bishop filled out the rhythm section, and the tenor saxophonists Jimmy Mundy, Cecil Irwin, and (after Irwin’s death) Budd Johnson contributed arrangements. Scoops Carey, Alvin Burroughs, and Billy Eckstine joined at the end of the decade; most significantly, Eckstine gave the band two blues hits, Jelly Jelly and Stormy Monday Blues, but also defied racist stereotyping in enabling Hines’s group to become the first African- American big band allowed to première a romantic ballad, Skylark, recorded in 1942. Over the course of the next year the musicians were joined by Shadow Wilson and three important figures: Sarah Vaughan, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie.

In 1943, when these aspiring modern jazz musicians left Hines to join Eckstine’s new big band, Hines founded a rather unsuccessful expanded big band featuring a female string

© Oxford University Press 2007, Side 11 af 48 Tidlige Jazz-Pianister section and vocal group. He briefly took over Duke Ellington’s band during Ellington’s illness in 1944 and then resumed leading his own group until it disbanded in 1947. After a failed attempt to establish a nightclub Hines played from 1948 to 1951 with Armstrong’s All Stars, with whom he made two European tours. He recorded with Al McKibbon and J. C. Heard in a trio in 1950 and from 1952 to 1954 led small swing groups with Jonah Jones, Dickie Wells, and Art Blakey among his sidemen, but he also played briefly with dixieland bands at the Club Hangover in San Francisco in June 1952 and February 1954. From September 1955 this became his principal activity, as he led bands which included Muggsy Spanier, Howard, Jimmy Archey, and Pops Foster at the Hangover and then from 1961 to 1962 at the Black Sheep, also in San Francisco. He toured Britain as co-leader with Jack Teagarden in September 1957, and he left the dixieland environment temporarily to lead a swing group at the Embers in New York in 1959.

In 1964 Stanley Dance persuaded Hines to give a series of concerts at the Little Theater in New York as an unaccompanied soloist and the leader of a trio. Having performed for decades with a rhythm section Hines was reluctant to forego accompaniment, but he underestimated his ability. The concerts were by all accounts spectacular, as recorded documents from later years indicate. The consequent critical notice led to opportunities for Hines to tour regularly in the USA and throughout the world for the remainder of his life as a soloist and leader of a quartet, of which Johnson (later, Rudy Rutherford), Bill Pemberton, and Oliver Jackson were longstanding members. These travels, spanning five continents and too numerous to mention, are detailed in the chronological appendix to Dance’s anthology (1977).

One of a small number of pianists whose playing shaped the history of jazz, Hines was an ensemble pianist from the beginning of his career (unlike many earlier pianists, primarily soloists who adapted to ensemble playing). Many pianists of the time, particularly in the Midwest, had largely eliminated ragtime influence from their right-hand techniques, preferring a sparse linear approach to the thicker texture of ragtime and integrating the piano with the ensemble. Hines’s version of this, present in nascent form in his earliest recordings, is often called “trumpet style”: clearly articulated melody without ragtime figuration, often played in octaves, and tremolo approximating wind vibrato. The left-hand technique of the period was similar among pianists of otherwise widely divergent styles – a single note, octave, or 10th on the strong beats of the bar, with a chord, usually centered about c', on the weak beats; the result was an explicit statement of the pulse. Hines, using 10ths a great deal, took this common technique as a point of departure, interrupting its regularity to play off-beat accents and to contradict or all but dissolve the meter. These qualities were already apparent in his early performances with Armstrong, as shown by his famous break in Skip the Gutter. Into the 1930s he extended this device to produce solos of great textural variety; his playing was also characterized by the use of arpeggios through several octaves, intermittent silences, and constant attention to line – features impersonal enough, taken in isolation, to point out new directions to a generation of pianists.

Hines’s ability to change his style but retain his identity as a pianist undoubtedly conditioned his attitudes as a bandleader. Over two decades he led innovative jazz groups, and he was among the few musicians of his generation to appreciate the new features of bop, which he introduced into his band through the presence of bop musicians. Throughout these years he could match any jazz pianist in terms of technique and creativity, and yet the majority of his recorded output was somewhat unsatisfying: he seemed to be so loaded with ideas and so impetuous that the results were often overly

© Oxford University Press 2007, Side 12 af 48 Tidlige Jazz-Pianister busy and scattered. But by the mid-1960s, perhaps as a consequence of his having taken up unaccompanied performance, Hines had added to his great pianistic gifts a capacity for restraint and a much improved sense of direction. From this time onwards his solo albums, devoted largely to American popular song rather than the blues, consistently capture his mature style and together form one of the greatest bodies of jazz piano playing.

Oral history material in GBLnsa, NjR, and NNC. See also BLUES, §6 , and PIANO, §§1 , 5, and 6. SELECTED RECORDINGS Selected Films and Videos BIBLIOGRAPHY

JAMES DAPOGNY/BARRY KERNFELD

SELECTED RECORDINGS

As unaccompanied soloist: Blues in Thirds/Off Time Blues (1928, QRS 7036); Chicago High Life/A Monday Date (1928, QRS 7037); Caution Blues (1928, OK 8832); Fifty-seven Varieties (1928, OK 8653); The Father’s Getaway/Reminiscing at Blue Note (1939, BN 5); Child of a Disordered Brain (1940, Bb 10642); Spontaneous Explorations (1964, Contact 2); Paris Session (1965, Ducretet-Thomson 300V140), incl. Sweet Sue; Quintessential Recording Session (1970, Chi. 101); Earl Hines Plays Duke Ellington (1971, MJR 8114); Quintessential Recording Session Continued (1973, Chi. 120); Earl Hines in New Orleans (1977, Chi. 200); The Father of Modern Piano (1977, MF 203/5), incl. The one I love belongs to somebody else [boxed set, incl. tracks as leader] Duo with L. Armstrong: Weather Bird (1928, OK 41454) As leader: Beau Koo Jack (1929, Vic. 38043); Cavernism/Rosetta (1933, Bruns. 6541); That’s a Plenty/Sweet Georgia Brown (1933, Decca 182); Fat Babes (1934, Decca 218); Angry (1934, Decca 183); Pianology (1937, Voc. 3501); G. T. Stomp (1939, Bb 10391); Grand Terrace Shuffle (1939, Bb 10351); Father steps in (1939, Bb 10377); Boogie Woogie on St. Louis Blues (1940, Bb 10674); Deep Forest (1940, Bb 10727); Tantalizing a Cuban (1940, Bb 10792); Skylark (1942, Bb 11512); Second Balcony Jump/Stormy Monday Blues (1942, Bb 11567); Spooks Ball (1945, Jazz Selection 611); Throwing the Switch/Bamby (1946, Jazz Selection 618); You can depend on me (1950, Col. 39262) As sideman with L. Armstrong: Fireworks (1928, OK 8597); Skip the Gutter (1928, OK 8631); A Monday Date/Sugar Foot Strut (1928, OK 8609); Two Deuces/Squeeze me (1928, OK 8641); Save it pretty mama (1928, OK 8657) As sideman with others: J. Dodds: Wild Man Blues (1927, Bruns. 3567); J. Noone: Sweet Sue – Just You (1928, Voc. 1184); Four or Five Times/Every Evening (1928, Voc. 1185); C. Dickerson: Savoyagers’ Stomp (1928, Odeon 193329); J. Noone: Apex Blues/Sweet Lorraine (1928, Voc. 1207); A Monday Date/King Joe (1928, Voc. 1229); Oh sister! Ain’t that hot? (1928, Voc. 1215); S. Bechet: Blues in Thirds (1940, Vic. 27204)

Selected Films and Videos

Eddie Condon Floor Show (27 Aug and 3 Sept 1949); Louis Armstrong and his All Stars in France (1950); The Strip (1951); Botta e risposta (1951); The Steve Allen Show, no.123 (1959); Earl “Fatha” Hines (c1964); Jazz 625 (1965); Monterey Jazz Festival (1967); Nice USA Trio and Solo (n.d. [filmed 1968–70])

BIBLIOGRAPHY

McCarthyB; SchullerS B. Eckstine: “Crazy People like Me,” MM, xxx (14 Aug 1954), 3; (21 Aug 1954), 5; (28 Aug 1954), 13; repr. in M. Jones: Talking Jazz (London, 1987), 233 J. Aldam, “The Teagarden–Hines All Stars,” Music Mirror, iv/9 (1957), 6 S. Dance: “Earl ‘Fatha’ Hines in San Francisco,” JM, iii/6 (1957), 2; Fr. trans. in Jazz 57, no. 8 (1957), 3 R. Wilson: “Bringing up ‘Fatha’,” DB, xxx/13 (1963), 18 W. F. Mellers: Music in a New Found Land: Themes and Developments in the History of American Music (London, 1964/R1975), 375 R. Hadlock: Jazz Masters of the Twenties (New York, 1965/R1985) D. Morgenstern: “Today’s Life with Fatha Hines,” DB, xxxii/18 (1965), 25 H. P[anassié]: “La carrière d’Earl ‘Fatha’ Hines,” BHcF, no.146 (1965), 5 M. Mezzrow: “Earl ‘Fatha’ Hines,” BHcF, no.157 (1966), 3 G. Schuller: Early Jazz: its Roots and Musical Development (New York, 1968), 120 M. J[ones]: “Father Knows Best,” MM (12 Dec 1970), 20 S. H. Mohr: “Earl Fatha Hines Recalls his Innovative Years with Louis Armstrong,” Coda, ix/10 (1970), 11 S. Traill: “Earl Hines and Marva Josie,” JJ, xxiv/3 (1971), 2 J. R. T. Davies: “The Alternate Earl Hines,” Sv, no.40 (1972), 127 M. Jones: “Hines: Stretching out a Little,” MM (7 Dec 1974), 56 L. Wright: “Earl Hines: Genius at Work and Play,” Sv, no.63 (1976), 84 W. Balliett: “Sunshine always Opens out,” Improvising: Sixteen Jazz Musicians and their Art (New York, 1977), 33; repr. in BalliettA (1986), 80; BalliettA (1996), 86 S. Dance: The World of Earl Hines (New York, 1977) K. Hazen: “A Talk with ‘Fatha’,” MR, iv/7 (1977), 10 L. Moxhet: A Discography of Earl Hines, 1923–1977 (Paris, 1978) D. Keller: “Earl Hines: Fatha on Down the Road,” DB, xlvi/10 (1979), 14 E. Southern: “‘Mr. B’ of Ballad and Bop,” Black Perspective in Music, vii (1979), 182; viii (1980), 54 S. Dance: “Layin’ on Mellow: the Earl Hines Big Band, 1945–1946,” BHcF, no. 312 (1983), 11 Obituary, San Francisco Chronicle (23 April 1983) D. Travis: An Autobiography of Black Jazz (Chicago, 1983) J. J. Taylor: “Earl Hines’s Piano Style in the 1920s: a Historical and Analytical Perspective,” Black Music Research Journal, xii/1 (1992), 57 ——: Earl Hines and Black Jazz Piano in Chicago: 1923–1928 (diss., U. of Michigan, 1993) B. Kernfeld: What to Listen for in Jazz (New Haven, CT, and London, 1995) [incl. transcr.] F. Krieger: “Jazz-Solopiano: zum Stilwandel am Beispiel ausgewaehlter Body and Soul: Aufnehmen von 1938–1992,” Jf, xxvii (1995), 5 [incl. transcrs.]

Armstrong [née Hardin], Lil(lian)

(b Memphis, 3 Feb 1898 or 1902; d Chicago, 27 Aug 1971). Pianist, singer, and composer. Her year of birth has been published as 1898, but in the social security death index it appears as 1902. After studying music at Fisk University she moved to Chicago (1917), where she worked as a song plugger. She performed with Freddie Keppard, joined King Oliver and Sidney Bechet in Lawrence Duhé’s band at the Dreamland Café (1918), and worked with Oliver at Dreamland (1920), where she also led her own band (c1920). In 1921 she went to the West Coast as a member of Oliver’s band but that autumn returned to Chicago. In autumn the following year she rejoined Oliver as a member of his Creole Jazz Band; she remained with the group until late September 1924 and took part in all of its pioneering recordings. She also recorded with the RED ONION JAZZ BABIES in 1924. While with Oliver’s band she met Louis Armstrong, whom she married in February 1924 and whom she encouraged to leave Oliver for Fletcher Henderson; in 1925 Armstrong joined the group that his wife was by then leading in Chicago. Lil Armstrong’s encouragement made an important contribution to the development of Louis’s career. She wrote songs for his recording groups the Hot Five (which also recorded as Lil’s Hot Shots) and Hot Seven and played and sang in many of the sessions (1925–7). In 1926 she organized the NEW ORLEANS WANDERERS, a recording group for Columbia. Thereafter she resumed her studies and was awarded a teacher’s diploma from the Chicago Musical College (1928) and a postgraduate degree from the New York College of Music (1929); during the same period she toured with Freddie Keppard (c1928) and recorded with Johnny Dodds (1927, 1929).

In the 1930s Armstrong led several bands in New York and Chicago, among them an all- female group, and she appeared as a soloist in two revues. She parted from her husband in 1931 and they were eventually divorced in 1938. As a session pianist for Decca in New York (1939–40) she recorded with various musicians, among them Alberta Hunter and Blue Lu Barker (both 1939), Frankie “Half Pint” Jaxon (1939–40), the blues singer Peetie Wheatstraw, Henry “Red” Allen, and Zutty Singleton (1940). After returning to Chicago in the 1940s she continued to perform, record, and write music, and she held residencies in local clubs as well as, for a period, at the East Town Bar in Milwaukee. She made a number of tours, and from at least November 1952 until July 1953 she was resident at Métro Jazz in Paris, except that she appeared in concert in Britain in January 1953; she may be seen performing with Peanuts Holland and the band led by Michel Attenoux in the French short film Sous-sol (1953). She was in the USA for six months in 1954, then returned to Paris in September. She died while playing at a concert in memory of Louis Armstrong in Chicago. Lil Armstrong was remarkable for her insight, ambition, and talent for organization, which helped Louis Armstrong to launch his career and thus exercised no small influence on the development of jazz. Her playing is noted for its strong rhythmic force, which supports and drives on the ensemble. A scrapbook which belonged to her is held at the William Ransom Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane University in New Orleans (see LIBRARIES AND ARCHIVES, §2).

For illustrations see Armstrong, louis, fig.1, and Oliver, king.

SELECTED RECORDINGS

As leader: Drop that Sack (1926, Voc. 1037); of New Orleans Wanderers: Gate Mouth (1926, Col. 698D); Harlem on Saturday Night (1938, Decca 2234); Lil Hardin Armstrong and her Orchestra (1961, Riv. 9401) As sideman: Red Onion Jazz Babies: Of all the wrongs you done to me (1924, Gen. 5627); Louis Armstrong: You’re Next (1926, OK 8299); J. Dodds: Indigo Stomp (1929, Vic. 23396); H. Allen: Canal Street Blues (1940, Decca 18092)

RECORDED COMPOSITIONS

(selective list) Recorded by Louis Armstrong: Jazz Lips/Skid-dat-de-dat (1926, OK 8436) Recorded by J. Dodds: Heah me Talkin’ (1929, Vic. 38541)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ChiltonW P. Jackson: “Lillian (Lil) Armstrong,” Jh, no.30 (1939), 12 [parallel Fr. and Eng. text] M. Jones: “Lil Armstrong: Royalties and the Old Songs,” MM (8 April 1967), 8 M. Jones and J. Chilton: Louis: the Louis Armstrong Story, 1900–1971 (London, 1971), 67 Obituaries: Fn, iii/1 (1971), 10; SL, xxiii (1971), autumn, 33 S. Placksin: American Women in Jazz, 1900 to the Present: their Words, Lives, and Music (New York, 1982, London, 1985, as Jazzwomen, 1900 to the Present: their Words, Lives, and Music), 58 J. L. Collier: Louis Armstrong: an American Genius (New York, 1983, London, 1984, as Louis Armstrong: a Biography), 111 M. Unterbrink: Jazz Women at the Keyboard (Jefferson, NC, and London, 1983), 22 L. Dahl: Stormy Weather: the Music and Lives of a Century of Jazzwomen (London, Melbourne, Australia, and New York, 1984)

MIKE HAZELDINE/BARRY KERNFELD

Roberts, Luckey [Charles Luckey(e)th]

(b Philadelphia, 7 Aug 1893; d New York, 5 Feb 1968). American pianist and composer. Sampson (1980), who corrects and supplements numerous published details of Roberts’s career, asserts that he was born in 1893, not 1887, as has frequently been given; Roberts himself wrote 1893 in his application for a social security card. He toured with an African- American troupe while still an infant and became a child singer, dancer, juggler, and acrobat. Around 1900 he taught himself to play the piano. By about 1910 he had settled in New York, where in 1913 his first published composition, Junk Man Rag, appeared, and by the middle of the decade he was regarded by his colleagues James P. Johnson, Eubie Blake, and Willie “the Lion” Smith as perhaps the greatest of the Harlem pianists. While performing at Baron Wilkins’s club he studied music and became involved in writing for music theater in collaboration with the lyricist Alex Rogers. In 1917 their musical comedy, My People, was produced in New York. A number of further comedies, none terribly

© Oxford University Press 2007, Side 16 af 48 Tidlige Jazz-Pianister distinguished, followed. From the 1920s Roberts was a popular bandleader at exclusive social functions on the East Coast, and then from 1940 to 1954 he ran a Harlem bar, Luckey’s Rendezvous. He composed works for piano and orchestra which were presented in concerts at Carnegie Hall in 1939 and Town Hall in 1941. In 1946, for Rudi Blesh’s Circle label, he recorded Junk Man Rag, and other piano compositions – Pork and Beans (1913), Music Box Rag (1914), Railroad Blues, and Ripples of the Nile; this last title had already been popularized by Glenn Miller as Moonlight Cocktail in 1941. Early in 1947 Roberts played in a traditional-jazz group for the first two programs in Blesh’s radio series “This is Jazz.”

By reputation Roberts was the most technically gifted member of the post-ragtime stride school, although he left the least trace of his work. He recorded some piano rolls in 1919 and 1923, but made only a few phonograph recordings, as an accompanist to vaudevillians early in the 1920s, and as an unaccompanied soloist late in his career; evidently the society jobs he undertook were so lucrative that he had no need to seek recording dates.

SELECTED RECORDINGS

As unaccompanied soloist: Railroad Blues (1946, Cir. [USA] 1026); Pork and Beans (1946, Cir. [USA] 1027); Ripples of the Nile/Shy and Sly (1946, Cir. [USA] 1028); Harlem Piano Solos (1958, GTJ 12035), incl. Nothin’

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ChiltonW R. Blesh and H. Janis: They All Played Ragtime (New York, 1950, rev. 4/1971) L. Feather: The New Yearbook of Jazz (New York, 1958), 145 T. Davin, “Conversations with James P. Johnson: 1912–1914,” Jazz Review, ii/6 (July 1959): 12; repr. in J. E. Hasse, ed.: Ragtime: its History, Composers, and Music (New York and London, 1985) M. Montgomery: “Luckey Roberts Rollography,” Record Research, no.30 (1960), 2 G. Hoefer: “Luckey Roberts,” JJ, xvi/3 (1963), 7 W. Smith and G. Hoefer: Music on my Mind: the Memoirs of an American Pianist (Garden City, NY, 1964/R1975), 33 D. Jones: “August in New York: Birdland, Charles Luckyeth ‘Lucky’ [sic] Roberts,” JB, ii/9 (1965), 14 B. Kumm: “Charles Luckeyeth Roberts: Discovery of a Disc,” Sv, no.14 (1967–8), 30 J. Bradley: “Luckey Roberts,” BHcF, no.176 (1968), 4 Obituaries: B. Kumm, Sv, no.17 (1968), 1; New York Times (7 Feb 1968) T. Vinding: “Forgotten People,” SL, xxiii (1970), May–June, 329 S. Dance: The World of Swing (New York, 1974), 32 W. J. Schafer: “Fizz Water: Ragtime by Eubie Blake, Luckey Roberts and James P. Johnson,” MR, iii/2 (1975), 1 A. Rose: Eubie Blake (New York, 1979) E. A. Berlin: Ragtime: a Musical and Cultural History (Berkeley, CA, Los Angeles, and London, 1980/R1984 with addns) H. T. Sampson: Blacks in Blackface: a Source Book on Early Black Musical Shows (Metuchen, NJ, 1980) J. R. TAYLOR/BARRY KERNFELD

Smith, Willie “the Lion” [Bertholoff, William Henry Joseph Bonaparte]

(b Goshen, NY, 25 Nov 1897; d New York, 18 April 1973). American pianist and composer. Born Bertholoff, he took the surname Smith from his stepfather. He grew up in Newark, New Jersey, where his mother’s keyboard playing in the African-American Baptist church sparked his early interest in music; independently, and for non-musical reasons, he adopted Judaism in his youth and later served as a cantor in Harlem. He started playing piano at the age of six. After a largely informal music education he began to work professionally in Atlantic City and New York while still in his teens, and soon became one of the most illustrious and influential proponents of the stride or Harlem ragtime style. By one of his several accounts, he earned his nickname “the Lion” during World War I through his heroism at the front. On his discharge from the army in 1919 he established himself in the forefront of New York’s stride pianists. The friendship and mutual admiration he enjoyed with Duke Ellington during these early years were musically documented in Ellington’s Portrait of the Lion (1939) and Smith’s Portrait of the Duke (1957).

Smith performed at Leroy’s in Harlem in 1919–20 and in the latter year recorded Mamie Smith’s pioneering Crazy Blues. After touring in obscure shows he returned to Harlem, where he played with Bubber Miley and Jimmy Harrison (c1923) and worked with Sidney Bechet at the Rhythm Club; when Bechet left in the spring of 1925 he took over the band and brought in Johnny Hodges. He continued at this venue, renamed the Hoofers Club, with the jam-session format giving way to a quartet including Benny Carter. He played in another little-known show, performed at countless Harlem rent parties with his friends Fats Waller and James P. Johnson, and in the early 1930s held a long engagement at Pods’ and Jerry’s (which had taken over the Hoofers Club premises), where Bechet and the young Artie Shaw sat in. Smith then transferred to the emerging scene on 52nd Street, working at the Onyx and the Famous Door (1934–5), at which time he recorded and broadcast with Clarence Williams and Eva Taylor. But he remained virtually unknown to the general public until 1935, when Decca issued a series of his recordings with groups. His solo recordings for Commodore in 1939, however, best illustrate the full maturity of his style. The eight original pieces recorded during this session clearly reveal his acknowledged interest in classical music and stand as masterpieces of stride piano literature, comparable with earlier works by Johnson and Waller. Of particular interest are the counterpoint in Passionette and the impressionistic qualities in Echoes of Spring, inspired by images of clouds, trees, and morning in a New York park.

Smith played in Bechet’s trio and then recorded twice (1939, 1941). In between he accompanied Joe Turner (ii) in an awkward duo blues session (1940), Smith’s refinement and Turner’s rawness being fundamentally incompatible. During the 1940s his popularity grew as Artie Shaw and Tommy Dorsey performed arrangements of his compositions. He worked regularly in New York – most notably in 1944 at the Pied Piper as a member of Max Kaminsky’s band and in individual stride “battles” with Johnson – and in Toronto. The success of a tour of Europe and North Africa from December 1949 to February 1950 was representative of the increased recognition and respect that he enjoyed in his final years. In the 1950s he played regularly at the Central Plaza. He continued to perform at festivals during the 1960s and the early 1970s, and also made two further tours of Europe (1965, 1966). Smith’s flamboyant behavior as an entertainer, and his dashing appearance, with derby hat and fat cigar, became almost legendary. His blending of ragtime, impressionism, and counterpoint, coupled with his ability to contrast delicate and subtle melodic lines with

© Oxford University Press 2007, Side 18 af 48 Tidlige Jazz-Pianister passages of intense swing, constituted a unique contribution to the jazz tradition. Some of his recorded solos, transcribed and annotated by R. Scivales, appear in Harlem Stride Piano Solos (Katonah, NY, c1990).

Oral history material in NjR.

SELECTED RECORDINGS

As unaccompanied soloist: Echoes of Spring/Fading Star (1939, Com. 521); Rippling Waters/Finger Buster (1939, Com. 522); Morning Air/Passionette (1939, Com. 523); Concentrating/Sneakaway (1939, Com. 524); Willie “The Lion” Smith (1949, Collection Hugues Panassié 004/005); Reminiscing the Piano Greats (1950, Vogue LD008) [oral history]; Memoirs (1967, RCA LSP6016) [oral history] As leader: The Lion Roars (1957, Dot 3094), incl. Portrait of the Duke As sideman: M. Smith (1920, OK/Phonola 4169); Alabama Jug Band [Clarence Williams]: Somebody Stole my Gal (1934, Decca 7041)

Selected films and videos

Jazz Dance (1954); The Subject is Jazz: Ragtime (1958); Jazz 625 (1965); L’aventure du jazz (1970)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Shaw: The Trouble with Cinderella: an Outline of Identity (New York, 1952/R1992), 223 W. Smith and G. Hoefer: Music on my Mind: the Memoirs of an American Pianist (Garden City, NY, 1964/R1975) H. Panassié: “Willie Smith ‘le Lion’,” BHcF, no.152 (1965), 3 J. Simmen: “Some Piano Compositions of Willie ‘the Lion’ Smith Played by other Musicians,” Sv, no.44 (1972-3), 44; no.45 (1973), 98 Obituary, New York Times (19 April 1973) L. Feather: “Piano Giants of Jazz: Willie ‘the Lion’ Smith,” CK, iii/10 (1977), 55 M. G[autier] P[anassié]: “Une visite au Lion,” BHcF, no.289 (1981), 3 J. Chilton: Sidney Bechet: the Wizard of Jazz (London and New York, 1987/R1996) J. Collinson: “Willie ‘the Lion’ Smith,” Sv, no.132 (1987), 211; no.133 (1988), 27; no.134 (1988), 63; no.135 (1988), 94; no.136 (1988), 147; no.137 (1989), 192; no.138, (1989), 205 [discography]

BILL DOBBINS/BARRY KERNFELD Johnson, James P(rice)

(b New Brunswick, NJ, 1 Feb 1894; d New York, 17 Nov 1955). American pianist and composer. He first learned music from his mother, singing songs at the piano. In 1908 the family settled in New York, where Johnson was exposed to ragtime, blues, show music, and the classical piano virtuosos of the day. He took classical piano lessons with Bruto Giannini from 1913 to 1916, and also learned from such contemporary ragtime pianists as Abba Labba (Richard McLean), Luckey Roberts, and Eubie Blake, who stimulated him to develop an orchestral approach to the keyboard. By 1913 he had begun to work at clubs in

© Oxford University Press 2007, Side 19 af 48 Tidlige Jazz-Pianister the black section of Hell’s Kitchen in New York known as “The Jungles,” where laborers from the South danced most of the night to the accompaniment of solo piano. It was in these dance halls that Johnson developed many of the rhythmically driving shout pieces for which he later became famous. He recorded his earliest piano rolls in 1916, and in 1917 published the first of some 200 songs, Mama’s Blues and Stop it, Joe.

In the 1920s Johnson’s career flourished – as did that of his young student, Fats Waller. He recorded a series of inspired solo performances of his own compositions, beginning in 1921 with The Harlem Strut, Carolina Shout (his best-known work for piano), and Keep off the Grass, and culminating in 1930 with Jingles and You’ve Got to be Modernistic. It was virtuoso pieces of this sort that he played in competitive cutting contests with his contemporaries, and he soon came to be regarded as the best of the Harlem pianists. A number of these pianists (including Waller, Duke Ellington, and Claude Hopkins) later explicitly recalled the experience of copying Carolina Shout note for note as an essential event in their musical training.

In 1923 Johnson wrote his first Broadway musical, Runnin’ Wild, which ran for 213 performances; its score included the successful songs Old Fashioned Love and The Charleston. He continued, with mixed success, to write for the Broadway stage throughout his career, producing more than a dozen scores. At the same time he began composing large-scale orchestral works based loosely on classical models and incorporating elements of jazz. The first of these, Yamekraw, a piano rhapsody, was orchestrated by William Grant Still, performed in Carnegie Hall in 1927 with Waller as soloist, and later made into a short film (1930). In 1928 Waller and Johnson collaborated on the revue Keep Shufflin’, each man composing different songs. They also performed on two pianos for the show and during its intervals, and subsequently recorded as the Louisiana Sugar Babes (with Jabbo Smith and Garvin Bushell from the pit band), Waller playing organ in contrast to Johnson’s piano. Johnson recorded with many blues and vaudeville singers of the day, notably Bessie Smith (from 1927) and Ethel Waters (1928), and in 1929 accompanied Bessie Smith in the movie St. Louis Blues.

During the Depression Johnson turned his attention increasingly to the composition of large-scale works. He wrote his Harlem Symphony in 1932, followed by a piano concerto, Jassamine, in 1934 and Symphony in Brown in 1935; De Organizer, a one-act “blues opera” with a libretto by Langston Hughes, received one performance at Carnegie Hall in 1940. A true assessment of this music is hampered by the loss of many of the scores, but some commentators have questioned the success of Johnson’s orchestral compositions.

With the revival of traditional jazz in the late 1930s and 1940s, Johnson began again to appear frequently in clubs and concerts and to take part in recording sessions. He starred in both of the “Spirituals to Swing” concerts held at Carnegie Hall in late December 1938 and 1939, and recorded with Mezz Mezzrow, Pee Wee Russell (both 1938), and Frankie Newton (1939), as well as under his own name. In June 1940 he took a band into Café Society downtown, but in August he suffered the first of a series of eight minor strokes and was obliged to retire. He returned to performance as a member of Wild Bill Davison’s band in 1943, then led his own band and worked as a freelance. After Waller’s death in December 1943 he participated in a series of tribute concerts organized by Eddie Condon at Town Hall. In 1944 he was the intermission pianist at the Pied Piper in Greenwich Village, where he engaged in cutting contests with Smith, who was at this same venue as a member of Max Kaminsky’s band; illness brought this job to an end in December. Early the next year Johnson played with Louis Armstrong and performed in another concert in

© Oxford University Press 2007, Side 20 af 48 Tidlige Jazz-Pianister memory of Waller. During this period he made many further recordings as a leader and as a sideman with Condon, Edmond Hall, Rod Cless, Yank Lawson, Sidney De Paris, and Kaminsky. Despite further bouts of illness he performed in the radio series “This is Jazz” in 1947 and was heard in jam sessions at the Stuyvesant Casino and Central Plaza between June 1948 and February 1949. A major stroke in 1951 left him incapacitated until his death.

Despite Johnson’s great versatility, his main contribution was as a jazz pianist. He perfected the style known as stride piano, which infused the midwestern ragtime of Scott Joplin and his contemporaries with elements of jazz, blues, and popular song, as well as greatly increasing the demands on the pianist. Johnson’s stride pieces share with ragtime a more or less composed, multistrain format and an oom-pah bass figure. However, he often makes use of broken 10ths and other deviations in the left hand, while his right-hand patterns depart from the stereotyped syncopations and broken chord melodies of ragtime (both of these features are evident in Carolina Shout, ex.1). Furthermore, he never repeats strains without varying them. Perhaps most importantly, the rhythmic feel of his style is more relaxed and closer to the swing of jazz than to the even eighth-notes of ragtime. At the same time he generates more rhythmic intensity by using shifts of register, riffs, and blues-like clusters in the treble to imitate the call-and-response patterns of black church music. It is this rhythmicization of his musical ideas that, by allowing for variation and improvisation, lies at the heart of the new freedom of his style. Thus, like his New Orleans contemporary Jelly Roll Morton, Johnson developed a viable jazz piano style by fusing the diverse musical influences of his youth. He exercised a major influence on succeeding generations of jazz pianists, from his friend and pupil Fats Waller through Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Art Tatum, and Teddy Wilson to players such as Erroll Garner, Jaki Byard, and Thelonious Monk. Johnson’s private collection was donated by his family to Fisk University; see LIBRARIES AND ARCHIVES, §2. Some of his recorded solos, transcribed and annotated by R. Scivales, appear in Harlem Stride Piano Solos (Katonah, NY, c1990).

For illustrations see Foster, pops, and Mezzrow, Mezz. WORKS SELECTED RECORDINGS BIBLIOGRAPHY WILLA ROUDER

Blake, Eubie [James Hubert]

(b Baltimore, 7 Feb 1883; d New York, 12 Feb 1983). American pianist and composer. When he was six years old his parents, who had been slaves, purchased a home organ and arranged for him to have lessons. Later he studied music theory with a local musician, Llewelyn Wilson. Blake began to play professionally in a nightclub in Baltimore at the age of 15, and in 1899 wrote his first piano rag, Sounds of Africa (later titled Charleston Rag). In 1915 he formed a songwriting partnership with Noble Sissle, and the two men had an immediate success with It’s all your fault, performed by Sophie Tucker. Blake and Sissle then went to New York and joined James Reese Europe’s Society Orchestra, and after World War I they formed the Dixie Duo, a vaudeville act. In 1921 they produced an extremely successful musical, Shuffle Along, which ran for more than 14 months on Broadway and subsequently went on tour. Blake continued to collaborate with Sissle (see illustration), presenting their show In Bamville (soon renamed The Chocolate Dandies) in the USA (1924) and performing in Europe, mainly in London (1925–6), but also in Dublin; he then worked into the 1930s with other lyricists, writing for shows. Many of his more than 300 songs are infused with the syncopated ragtime rhythms that swept Tin Pan Alley between 1900 and 1920. During World War II he toured as music director for USO productions, but in 1946 he retired and returned to the study of composition, completing the Schillinger system of courses at New York University three years later. Thereafter he spent much time notating many of his works.

Blake made his first recordings in 1917, and continued to record as a soloist (making piano rolls as well as phonograph records) and with his orchestra into the 1930s. A ragtime revival in the 1950s focused attention on him as the foremost rag pianist in the USA and launched him on a new career as a touring artist and lecturer, and he resumed recording in 1969 with the album The Eighty-six Years of Eubie Blake. His playing demonstrates strikingly the interconnections among brass-band music, ragtime, and jazz; his own ragtime piano pieces have prominent “oom-pah” rhythms in the left hand and a syncopated interpretation of the melody in the right, but he also introduces a compelling sense of swing and virtuoso improvised breaks into his performances, reflecting the influence of jazz. His works, along with others written in the 1920s by such composers as Fats Waller and James P. Johnson, had a direct influence on the development of the Harlem stride- piano school.

In 1972 Blake established his own publishing and record company, Eubie Blake Music, and the following year he cut some piano rolls, this time for the QRS company. He became a legendary figure, performing constantly on television and at jazz festivals in the USA and elsewhere. He received many awards from the music and theater industries and from civic and professional organizations, notably the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1981), and honorary degrees from Brooklyn College (1973), Dartmouth College, Rutgers, and the New England Conservatory (all 1974), and the University of Maryland (1979). His life was celebrated in documentary films and on Broadway in the show Eubie (1978). The Eubie Blake Cultural Center in Baltimore and the Maryland Historical Society hold collections of his music, papers, and memorabilia.

Oral history material in CtY, NN-Sc (HBc), and TNF.

SELECTED RECORDINGS

* composed by Blake † composed by Sissle and Blake As unaccompanied soloist: †Baltimore Buzz/†Bandana Days (1921, Vic. 18791); †Baltimore Buzz/*Sounds of Africa (1921, Emerson 10434); Ma (1921, Emerson 10450); The Eighty-six Years of Eubie Blake (1969, Col. C2S847) As leader: The Wizard of Ragtime Piano (1958, 20CF 3003), incl. *Eubie’s Boogie Rag, *I’m just wild about Harry

Selected films and videos

Eubie Blake Plays (c1922); Snappy Tunes (1923); Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake (1927); Pie, Pie, Blackbird (1932); Jazz USA, episode 10 (1960); Scott Joplin (1976); The Great Rocky Mountain Jazz Party (1977)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

R. Blesh and H. Janis: They all Played Ragtime (New York, 1950, rev. 4/1971) W. Smith and G. Hoefer: Music on my Mind: the Memoirs of an American Pianist (Garden City, NY, 1964/R1975), 39 J. R. T. Davies: “Eubie Blake: his Life and Times,” Sv, i/6 (1966), 19; contd as “Blake and Noble Sissle,” ii/7 (1966), 12 R. Blesh: “Little Hubie,” Combo, USA: Eight Lives in Jazz (Philadelphia and London, 1971), 187 E. Southern: The Music of Black Americans: a History (New York and London, 1971, rev. 3/1997) P. Bailey: “A Love Song to Eubie,” Ebony, xxviii/9 (1973), 94 R. Kimball and W. Bolcom: Reminiscing with Sissle and Blake (New York, 1973) [incl. work-list, discography] E. Southern and B. King: “Conversation with Eubie Blake,” Black Perspective in Music, i (1973), 50, 151 M. Montgomery, comp.: “Piano Roll Notes: Eubie Blake Piano Rollography,” Record Research, nos.159–60 (1978), 4 L. T. Carter: Eubie Blake: Keys of Memory (Detroit, 1979) A. Rose: Eubie Blake (New York, 1979) E. A. Berlin: Ragtime: a Musical and Cultural History (Berkeley, CA, Los Angeles, and London, 1980/R1984 with addns) B. Doerschuk: “The Eubie Blake Story: a Century of American Music,” Keyboard, viii/12 (1982), 52 E. Southern: Biographical Dictionary of Afro-American and African Musicians (Westport, CT, 1982) D. Jasen: “Eubie at 100,” Sv, no.105 (1983), 84 M. Jones: “Britain Salutes: Eubie Blake, 100,” Jazz Express, no.39 (1983), 1 L. Norment: “Farewell to Ragtime’s Apostle of Happiness,” Ebony, xxxviii/7 (1983), 27 H. Rye: “Visiting Firemen 7: Eubie Blake & Noble Sissle,” Sv, no.105 (1983), 88 L. A. George: The Early Piano Rags (1899–1916) of James Hubert (Eubie) Blake: a Stylistic Study and Annotated Edition (diss., University of Maryland, Baltimore County, 1995) M. Tucker: “In Search of Will Vodery,” Black Music Research Journal, xvi/1 (1996), 123 EILEEN SOUTHERN

Waller, Fats [Thomas Wright]

(b New York, 21 May 1904; d Kansas City, MO, 15 Dec 1943). American pianist, organist, singer, bandleader, and composer.

1. Life. 2. Works and style. WORKS stage instrumental songs SELECTED RECORDINGS selected films BIBLIOGRAPHY

ALYN SHIPTON (1), BILL DOBBINS/ALYN SHIPTON (2)1. Life.

His father, Edward Waller, a baptist lay preacher, conducted open-air religious services in Harlem, at which as a child Fats Waller played reed organ. He played piano at his public school and at the age of 15 became organist at the Lincoln Theatre on 135th Street. His father hoped that Waller would follow a religious calling rather than a career in jazz, but after the death of his mother, Adeline Waller, in 1920 he moved in with the family of the pianist Russell Brooks. Through Brooks, Waller met James P. Johnson, under whose tutelage he developed as a pianist, and through whose influence he came to make piano rolls, starting in 1922 with Got to cool my doggies now. There is scant evidence to support Waller’s claims that during his formative years as a pianist he studied with Leopold Godowsky or that he studied composition with Carl Bohm at the Institute for Musical Art.

In October 1922 Waller made his recording début as a soloist for Okeh with Muscle Shoals Blues and Birmingham Blues. He began a series of recordings the same year as accompanist for several blues singers, including Sara Martin, Alberta Hunter, and Maude Mills. In 1923 a collaboration with Clarence Williams led to the publication of Waller’s Wild Cat Blues, which Williams recorded with his Blue Five, including Sidney Bechet (July 1923). Another composition, Squeeze Me, was published the same year, and these began to establish Waller’s reputation as a composer of material performed and recorded by other artists. 1923 also saw his broadcasting début for a local Newark station, followed by regular engagements on WHN, New York. Waller went on to broadcast as a singer and soloist to the end of his life. During the early 1920s he continued as organist at the Lincoln and Lafayette theaters, New York.

In 1927 Waller recorded his own composition Whiteman Stomp with Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra; Henderson also made use of other works by Waller, including Crazy ’bout my baby and Stealin’ Apples. Waller’s other work as a composer with the lyricists Edgar Dowell, J. C. Johnson, Andy Razaf, and Spencer Williams produced such songs as Honeysuckle Rose and Black and Blue. With Razaf he worked on much of the music for the African-American Broadway musical Keep Shufflin’ (1928). Their later collaborations for the stage included the shows Load of Coal and Hot Chocolates (which opened in May 1929 and transferred on to Broadway on 20 June; it incorporated the song Ain’t Misbehavin’ as a vehicle first for Cab Calloway and later Louis Armstrong). Waller’s

Carnegie Hall début was on 27 April 1928, when he was piano soloist in a version of Johnson’s fantasy Yamekraw for piano and orchestra.

In 1926 Waller began his recording association with Victor, his principal record company for the rest of his life, with the organ solos St. Louis Blues and his own Lenox Avenue Blues. Although he recorded with various groups, including Morris’s Hot Babes (1927), Fats Waller’s Buddies (1929) (one of the earliest interracial groups to record), and McKinney’s Cotton Pickers (1929), his most important contribution to the Harlem stride piano tradition was a series of solo recordings of his own compositions: Handful of Keys, Smashing Thirds, Numb Fumblin’, and Valentine Stomp (1929). After sessions with Ted Lewis (1930), Jack Teagarden (1931), and Billy Banks’s Rhythmakers (1932), performances in Otto Hardwick’s big band at the Hot Feet Club in Greenwich Village (1931) and with Les Hite’s band on the West Coast at Frank Sebastian’s New Cotton Club, and broadcasts in Cincinnati from 1932 on his long-running show “Fats Waller’s Rhythm Club” and “Moon River” (on which he played organ), he began in May 1934 the voluminous series of recordings with a small band known as Fats Waller and his Rhythm. This six-piece group usually included Herman Autrey (sometimes replaced by Bill Coleman or John “Bugs” Hamilton), Gene Sedric or Rudy Powell, and Al Casey.

Waller appeared in two films while in Hollywood in 1935: Hooray for Love! and King of Burlesque (see FILMS, §II, 1). For tours and recordings he often led his own big band. This began as an expanded version of the band led by his bass player (Charlie Turner’s Arcadians), and in 1935, with most members of the Rhythm (as well as Don Redman, among others), it made its first recording.

In 1938 Waller undertook a European tour, recording in London with his Continental Rhythm as well as making solo pipe-organ recordings for HMV. His second European tour in 1939 was terminated by the outbreak of war, but while in Britain he recorded his London Suite, an extended series of six related pieces for solo piano: “Piccadilly,” “Chelsea,” “Soho,” “Bond Street,” “Limehouse,” and “Whitechapel.” It is Waller’s longest composition and represents something of his aspirations to be a serious composer rather than just the author of a string of hit songs.

The last few years of Waller’s life involved frequent recordings and extensive tours of the USA. In early 1943 he returned to Hollywood to make the film Stormy Weather with Lena Horne and Bill Robinson, in which he led an all-star band which included Benny Carter and Zutty Singleton. He undertook an exceptionally heavy touring load in that year, as well as collaborating with the lyricist George Marion, Jr., on the score for the stage show Early to Bed (which opened in Boston on 24 May 1943). The touring, constant abuse of his system through overeating and overdrinking, and the nervous strain of many years of legal trouble over alimony payments all took their toll, and his health began to break down. He was taken ill during a return visit to the West Coast as solo pianist at the Zanzibar Room, Hollywood, and died of pneumonia while traveling back to New York by train with his manager Ed Kirkeby.

2. Works and style.

Waller’s greatest importance lies in his several contributions to jazz piano. His original stride pieces in the Johnson tradition (Handful of Keys, Smashing Thirds, Numb Fumblin’, Valentine Stomp, Viper’s Drag, Alligator Crawl, and Clothes Line Ballet), composed and recorded between 1929 and 1934, clearly illustrate his imaginative and broadly expressive

© Oxford University Press 2007, Side 25 af 48 Tidlige Jazz-Pianister style. The fullness and variety of his tone are still unsurpassed, and he used a wide dynamic range to great expressive and dramatic effect. Harmonically, he sometimes added inner pitches to the customary octaves or 10ths in the left hand, producing richly voiced three-note chords; his chromatic alterations and passing tones undoubtedly influenced Art Tatum. His melodies were perhaps even more tuneful than those of his mentor Johnson. Initially, Waller’s use of rhythm as an unaccompanied soloist is in the classic stride tradition, its characteristics including occasional three-beat cross-rhythms in the left hand. All of these features were present in his playing by 1929, as is made clear by My feelin’s are hurt (ex.1), which was recorded in that year, but by 1934 he began to incorporate left-hand ostinatos (Viper’s Drag) and boogie-woogie patterns (Alligator Crawl) into his style, despite a contractual stipulation that he would not play boogie-woogie on his concert or club appearances. His late solos (all 1941) draw on a much wider stylistic vocabulary, which he applied both to his own compositions and pieces by others, from classical pastiche (Honeysuckle Rose) to variations in tempo (Georgia on my Mind) to explorations of dynamic range and pedal effects (Ring Dem Bells).

With his group Fats Waller and his Rhythm, Waller produced many musically rewarding sessions for Victor during the 1930s. These were characterized by a bustling, energetic style of small-group swing, exemplified by Dinah (1935), I’ve got my fingers crossed (1935), S’posin’ (1936), and ’Tain’t Good (1936). Occasionally Waller’s exuberant vocals threatened to blow apart his band’s cohesion and swing (12th Street Rag, 1935) and, as he became famous for his comic as well as his musical talents, he was frequently called upon to lampoon otherwise unsaleable songs (Us on a Bus, 1936, or I love to whistle, 1938). Nevertheless he was not without a tender, lyrical side, and his recordings with Bill Coleman from 1934–5 include some of his most sensitive band work, notably his atmospheric organ playing behind Coleman’s trumpet on Night Wind. His most popular recordings, in particular the song My very good friend the milkman, were not his jazziest, and his most effective ensemble jazz recordings were his two 12-inch 78 rpm sides of instrumental versions of Blue, turning grey over you and Honeysuckle Rose (1937), where the extra playing time coaxed more relaxed and interestingly structured performances from his band.

In a big-band context, Waller’s solo and rhythmic gifts were less obvious, although his recording of I got rhythm (1935) preserves his stage “cutting contest” with his fellow pianist Hank Duncan. His later big bands were unexceptional save for his use of his “Rhythm” as an integral part of every performance, rather than following the usual “band-within-a-band” format of the swing era. There are signs that he was genuinely exploring new ground towards the end of his career with the big-band arrangement of The Jitterbug Waltz (1942).

Waller was the first significant jazz organist (for a discussion of his style see ORGAN). During the mid-1930s he was one of the first musicians to employ the CELESTA in jazz and frequently played the instrument in combination with the piano.

Waller’s successful popular songs Ain’t Misbehavin’ (1928) and Honeysuckle Rose (1929) are among the best known of a voluminous catalogue of compositions; on account of his vicarious life style he may also have written dozens more that are not definitely attributed to him. Some, but by no means all, of his songs were in a comic vein. However, his own comic and satirical talents as a performer brought him a following as an entertainer rivaling that of Louis Armstrong. Because of this, the serious side of his musical personality was little appreciated during his lifetime and remained largely underdeveloped. As a singer he could give creditable jazz renditions of songs which he considered to have real musical merit. His vocal style, clearly in the tradition established by Armstrong, showed a tasteful and highly personal use of vibrato. On his own novelty songs, such as Your feet’s too big, his use of comic effects and spoken or shouted asides showed at times a genuine sense of comedy; more often, however, he used his wit to draw subtle but unmistakable attention to the vapidity of the material he was expected to record. Unfortunately, Waller’s public often demanded more of his exaggerated stage personality than of his unique creative gifts. Some of his recorded solos, transcribed and annotated by R. Scivales, appear in Harlem Stride Piano Solos (Katonah, NY, c1990). About 630 discs (variously 78 r.p.m. commercial recordings, transcriptions, test pressings, and acetates) are held as the Fats Waller Collection at the World Music Archives of Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut (see LIBRARIES AND ARCHIVES, §2).

Oral history material in LNT.

WORKS

Selective list; complete listing in L. Wright, “Fats” in Fact (Chigwell, England, 1992), 422. Dates of stage shows are those of first performance; other dates are those of copyright as recorded in the Library of Congress. stage

Keep Shufflin’ (A. Razaf), 27 Feb 1928; Connie’s Hot Chocolates (H. Brooks, Razaf), May 1929; Fireworks of 1930 (with J. P. Johnson), 28 June 1930; Hello 1931! (with A. Hill), 29 Dec 1930; Early to Bed (G. Marion, Jr.), 17 June 1943 instrumental

Organ: Soothin’ Syrup Stomp, 1927; Sloppy Water Blues, 1927; Messin’ Around with the Blues, 1927; Lenox Avenue Blues, 1927; Fats Waller Stomp, 1927

Pf: Hog Maw Stomp, 1924; Alligator Crawl, 1925 (as House Party Stomp, renamed 1927); Old Folks Shuffle (with C. Williams), 1926; The Digah’s Stomp, 1928; Gladyse, 1929; Valentine Stomp, 1929; Viper’s Drag, 1930; Handful of Keys, 1930; Numb Fumblin’, 1930; Smashing Thirds, 1931; African Ripples, 1931; Clothes Line Ballet, 1934; Functionizin’, 1935; Paswonky, 1936; Black Raspberry Jam, 1936; Bach up to Me, 1936; Fractious Fingering, 1936; Lounging at the Waldorf, 1936; London Suite, 1939; Jitterbug Waltz, 1942 Orch: Whiteman Stomp (with J. Trent), 1927 songs

Wild Cat Blues (with C. Williams), 1923; In Harlem’s Araby (J. Trent), 1924; Anybody here want to try my cabbage (A. Razaf), 1924; Squeeze Me (Razaf), 1925; Georgia Bo-Bo (J. Trent), 1926; I’m goin’ huntin’ (with J. C. Johnson), 1927; Come on and stomp, stomp, stomp (C. Smith, I. Mills), 1927; Ain’t Misbehavin’ (Razaf), 1929; Sweet Savannah Sue (H. Brooks, Razaf), 1929; What did I do to be so black and blue (with Brooks) (Razaf), 1929; Zonky (Razaf), 1929; Honeysuckle Rose (Razaf), 1929; My fate is in your hands (Razaf), 1929; Blue, turning grey over you (Razaf), 1929; I’m crazy ’bout my baby and my baby’s crazy ’bout me (A. Hill), 1931; My feelin’s are hurt (Razaf), 1931; How can you face me (Razaf), 1932; Keepin’ out of mischief now (Razaf), 1932; Strange as it seems (Razaf), 1932; You’re breakin’ my heart (S. Williams), 1933; Ain’t cha glad (Razaf), 1933; Stealin’ Apples (Razaf), 1936; Joint is jumpin’ (Razaf), 1938; Hold my Hand (Johnson), 1938; Yacht Club Swing (with H. Autrey and Johnson), 1938; Spider and the Fly (Razaf, Johnson), 1938; You can’t have your cake and eat it (S. Williams), 1939; Old Grand Dad, 1940; All that meat and no potatoes (E. Kirkeby), 1941; Slightly Less than Wonderful (G. Marion, Jr.), 1943 Principal Publishers: Joe Davis, Mills, Southern Music, Williams.

SELECTED RECORDINGS

(recorded for Victor unless otherwise indicated) as unaccompanied soloist

Piano: Got to cool my doggies now (1922, QRS 2149) [piano roll]; Muscle Shoals Blues/Birmingham Blues (1922, OK 4757); Handful of Keys/Numb Fumblin’ (1929, 38508); Ain’t Misbehavin’ (1929, 22092); Sweet Savannah Sue (1929, 22108); Valentine Stomp (1929, 38554); My feelin’s are hurt/Smashing Thirds (1929, 38613); African Ripples/Alligator Crawl (1934, 24830); Clothes Line Ballet/Viper’s Drag (1934, 25015); I ain’t got nobody (1937, 25631); Piccadilly/Chelsea (1939, HMV B10059); Soho/Bond Street (1939, HMV B10060); Limehouse/Whitechapel (1939, HMV B10061); Georgia on my Mind (1941, 27765); Carolina Shout/Ring Dem Bells (1941, 27563); Honeysuckle Rose (1941, 20-1580) Organ: St. Louis Blues/Lenox Avenue Blues (1926, 20357); Messin’ Around with the Blues/Stompin’ the Bug (1927, 20655); Rusty Pail (1927, 20492); Swing low, sweet chariot (1938, HMV B8818); Go down, Moses/Deep River (1938, HMV B8816); Lonesome Road (1938, HMV B8845); That Old Feeling (1938, HMV B8849) [duo with Adelaide Hall]; Fats Waller at the Organ (1939, Riv. 1021), incl. Go down, Moses, Hallelujah! I’m a bum, Hand me down my walkin’ cane, Swing low, sweet chariot [Hammond organ]

Small group: The Minor Drag (1929, 38050); Honeysuckle Rose (1934, 24826); Night Wind (1935, 24853); Dinah (1935, 25471); My very good friend the milkman (1935, 25075); 12th Street Rag (1935, 25087); I’ve got my fingers crossed (1935, 25211); Us on a Bus (1936, 25295); It’s a sin to tell a lie (1936, 25342); Fractious Fingering (1936, 25652); S’posin’ (1936, 25415); ’Tain’t Good (1936, 25478); Swingin’ them jingle bells (1936, 25483); Honeysuckle Rose/Blue, turning grey over you (1937, 36206); I love to whistle (1938, 25806); Yacht Club Swing (1938, Bb 10035); Fats Waller “Live at the Yacht Club” (1938, Giants of Jazz 1029); Squeeze Me (1939, Bb 10405); Your feet’s too big (1939, Bb 10500) Big band: I got rhythm (1935, HMV HE2902); In the gloaming (1938, 25847); Let’s break the good news (1938, 25830); Chant of the Groove (1941, Bb 11262); The Jitterbug Waltz (1942, Bb 11518) as sideman

F. Henderson: The Chant (1926, Col. 817D) [organ]; Whiteman Stomp (1927, Col. 1059D); McKinney’s Cotton Pickers: Plain Dirt/Gee, ain’t I good to you (1929, 38097); T. Lewis: Dallas Blues/Royal Garden Blues (1931, Col. 2527D); J. Teagarden: You rascal, you (1931, Col. 2558D); B. Banks: Mean Old Bed Bug Blues (1932, Ban. 32502) selected films

Hooray for Love (1935); King of Burlesque (1935); Honeysuckle Rose (1941); Your Feet’s Too Big (1941); The Joint is Jumping (1941); Ain’t Misbehavin’ (1941); Stormy Weather (1943)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

L. G. Feather: “… And his Rhythm: a Discological Survey of ‘Fats’ Waller,” Swing Music, i/8 [recte 9] (1936), 244 D. E. Dexter: “Immortals of Jazz,” DB, viii/2 (1941), 10 ——: “Thomas Waller of Concert Stage isn’t the Mellow Fats of Backroom Jazz,” DB, ix/3 (1942), 3 K. Bright and I. Cavanaugh: “That Harmful Little Armful: Fats Waller in his Formative Years,” The Crisis, li (1944), 109 H. Panassié: Douze anneés de jazz (1927–1938): souvenirs (Paris, 1946), 79 M. Gautier: “A Night with Fats Waller,” JJ, ii/6 (1949), 11 R. Cooke: “The Genius of Thomas ‘Fats’ Waller,” JJ, v/5 (1952), 13 M. Mezzrow: “Fats Waller,” BHcF, no.18 (1952), 3; Eng. orig. pubd JJ, vi/5 (1953), 21, as “Memories of ‘Fats’” J. R. T. Davies: The Music of Thomas “Fats” Waller (London, 1953); rev. in Sv, nos.2–12 (1965–7) [discography] G. Sedric: “Sedric vous parle de Fats Waller,” BHcF, no.28 (1953), 3; Eng. orig. pubd JJ, vii/5 (1954), as “Talking about ‘Fats’ Waller” H. Smith: “Walleresque,” Record Research, i/5 (1955), 8 N. Shapiro and N. Hentoff, eds.: The Jazz Makers (New York, 1957/R1979 as The Jazz Makers: Essays on the Greats of Jazz)

C. Fox: Fats Waller (London, 1960); repr. in Kings of Jazz, ed. S. Green (South Brunswick, NJ, and New York, 1978) S. B. Charters and L. Kunstadt: Jazz: a History of the New York Scene (Garden City, NY, 1962/R1981) Coda, v/10 (1963) [special issue devoted to Waller] R. Hadlock: Jazz Masters of the Twenties (New York, 1965/R1985) M. Harrison: “Fats Waller,” JM, xi/10 (1965), 21 B. Kumm: “Reflections on Fats,” Sv, i/2 (1965), 2; i/6 (1966), 4 E. Kirkeby, D. P. Schiedt, and S. Traill: Ain’t Misbehavin’: the Story of Fats Waller (London and New York, 1966/R1978) [incl. rev. version of discography in Sv] H. Panassié: “Destruction of a Theme: an Analysis of some Fats Waller Piano Solos,” JJ, xix/7 (1966), 27 M. Williams: “The Comic Mask of Fats Waller,” JJ, xix/6 (1966), 5 B. Kumm: “Further Facets of Fats,” Sv, no.23 (1969), 179 H. Panassié: “Fats Waller in Paris,” Sv, no.40 (1972), 140 M. Berger: “Fats Waller: the Outside Insider,” JJS, i/1 (1973), 3 T. Magnusson: “Fats Waller with Gene Austin on the Record,” JJS, iv/1 (1976), 75 L. Feather: “Piano Giants of Jazz: Fats Waller,” CK, iii/2 (1977), 41 J. Vance: Fats Waller: his Life and Times (Chicago, 1977/R1992) M. Waller and A. Calabrese: Fats Waller (New York and London, 1977/R1997) [incl. discography and list of compositions] W. Balliett: “Jazz: Fats,” New Yorker, liv (10 April 1978), 110 H. Rye: “Fats Waller in Britain: Some Native Reactions,” Sv, no.81 (1979), 83 H. Rye and J. Beaton: “Fats Waller’s British Diary,” Sv, no.81 (1979), 85 M. Gautier-Panassié: “Fats Waller,” BHcF, no.286 (1981), 3; no.287 (1981), 3 H. Lyttelton: The Best of Jazz, ii: Enter the Giants, 1931–1944 (London, 1981), 30 W. Balliett: “Fats,” Jelly Roll, Jabbo and Fats (New York, and Oxford, England, 1983), 85 H. Dial: All this Jazz about Jazz (Chigwell, England, 1984), 55 P. S. Machlin: Stride: the Music of Fats Waller (Boston and London, 1985) P. Malham: “Fats Waller: the Broadcasts,” Collectors Items, no.33 (1985), 12 J. Simmen: “Herman Autrey [suite] une parenthèse: les autres trompettes de Fats,” BHcF, no.336 (1986), 8 A. Shipton: Fats Waller (Tunbridge Wells, England, and New York, 1988) B. Singer: Black and Blue: the Life and Lyrics of Andy Razaf (New York and Toronto, 1992) L. Wright: “Fats” in Fact (Chigwell, England, 1992) H. Rye: “Fats” in Fact: the Reissues (Chigwell, England, 1993) L. Wright, comp.: “Corrections and Additions to ‘Fats’ in Fact,” Sv, no.153 (1993), 104; no.162 (1995), 215 P. S. Machlin: “Fats Waller Composes: the Sketches, Drafts, and Lead Sheets in the Institute of Jazz Studies Collection,” ARJS, vii (1994–5), 1 L. Wright, comp.: “‘Fats’ in Fact: a Further Up-date,” Storyville 1996/7 (Chigwell, England, 1997) [colln of essays], 168 S. Budiansky: “Resurrecting Fats,” Atlantic Monthly, cclxxxv (2000), March, 100

Tatum, Art(hur, Jr.)

(b Toledo, OH, 13 Oct 1909; d Los Angeles, 5 Nov 1956). American pianist.

1. Life. 2. Musical style. SELECTED RECORDINGS transcriptions BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Life.

As he had seriously impaired vision (he was blind in one eye and had only partial sight in the other), Tatum attended special classes at the Jefferson School (a local elementary school), the School for the Blind in Columbus, Ohio (1924), and the Toledo School of Music. He studied piano in Toledo with Overton G. Rainey, and learned to read music with the aid of glasses as well as by the Braille method. Violin, guitar, and accordion are variously mentioned as additional instruments in his early musical development. He was gifted with superb rententive powers and an infallible sense of pitch, and learned from piano rolls, phonograph recordings, radio broadcasts, local musicians, and the touring ensembles he encountered in the area around Toledo and Cleveland. Playing for drinks, tips, and free meals, Tatum and his friends spent weekends frequenting local night spots during the Prohibition years. His ability to go without sleep was remarkable even to the stalwarts who accompanied him then, and this ceaseless energy would remain characteristic throughout his life: professional engagements were followed by excursions to after-hours spots for the challenges of cutting competitions and all-night sessions. He was playing professionally in Toledo by 1926 and in 1929 had his own 15-minute live radio program at WSPD, broadcast on the NBC Blue radio network.

Tatum named Fats Waller as his primary inspiration, with the popular radio pianist Lee Sims, whose interpretations were rich in harmony and filigree, as an important secondary influence. In 1932 he traveled to New York as part of a two-piano team, with Francis Carter, accompanying Adelaide Hall, and recorded with her in August. In March 1933 he made his first unaccompanied solo recordings, for Brunswick, and these were major successes. After leaving Hall he worked in Cleveland (1934–5), performed at the Three Deuces, Chicago (1935), and spent a considerable time in Hollywood (1936–7) working in various clubs and playing for private parties. He made his only overseas tour, to England, in March 1938, and in the late 1930s and early 1940s appeared regularly in New York and Los Angeles. With Nat “King” Cole’s successful jazz trio as a model, Tatum founded his own influential trio with Slam Stewart (double bass) and Tiny Grimes (electric guitar) at the Streets of Paris in Hollywood in 1943 (see illustration). Grimes left the following year, but Tatum continually returned to this format, using Everett Barksdale regularly in the 1950s.

In the early 1940s Tatum performed in a variety of settings with many of the great musicians of his era, and in 1947 he made a cameo appearance in the film The Fabulous Dorseys. He held extended engagements in New York at the Three Deuces (1944, 1945) and the Downbeat Club (1945, 1946, 1947), in Los Angeles at Billy Berg’s (1946), again in New York at the Famous Door (1947) and the downtown location of Café Society (1949– 50), and at the Surf, Los Angeles (1950), and the Embers, New York (1951). In 1953 he

© Oxford University Press 2007, Side 31 af 48 Tidlige Jazz-Pianister gave an unaccompanied solo concert at Brandeis University. That year he began an association with the record producer Norman Granz that led to a number of outstanding small-group recordings with such prominent musicians as Benny Carter, Roy Eldridge, Lionel Hampton, Ben Webster, and Jo Jones. Also, from 1953 to 1956 Granz recorded Tatum in a long series of more than 120 unaccompanied performances which reveal the state of his musical maturity and his extraordinary imagination. Tatum remained active, touring just weeks before his death from kidney failure.

2. Musical style.

Tatum transported the art of jazz piano improvisation beyond the real and imagined confines of his day. His first professional solo recordings in 1933 were seen as a challenge to his own and future generations of jazz and popular pianists. His technical abilities, lightness of touch, and control of the full range of the instrument were unprecedented among popular pianists. He had an unerring sense of rhythm and swing, a seemingly unlimited capacity to expand and enrich a melody, and a profound and continually evolving grasp of substitute harmonies. The thematic element was as strategic as the harmonic structure to the architecture of Tatum’s recorded improvisations; extended departures from audible melodic references points, as heard in his solo on Exactly like You (1944), are rare. Ex.1 shows several variations of the opening melodic notes of After You’ve Gone (1934), including (1c) rhythmic and harmonic intensification, and (1a) extension and variation of the melody; (1d) new melodic material involving harmonic variety and a different manner of syncopation; (1e) a slashing scalar figure in each hand (bar 55) and then a return to the melody (bar 56); and (1f) double-time stride in the left hand.

Most often Tatum chose models from the standard popular repertory, though he also interpreted the blues and sometimes performed parodies on light classical pieces. Only occasionally did he play original works. He was often described as having two distinct musical personalities: in his professional appearances he was thoroughly business-like, obliging audiences with almost literal repetitions of his recorded performances, seldom taking encores, and, in a studio, rarely recording more than one take of a performance. Among friends he was inclined to play (and sing) the blues, to improvise for hours on a given chord sequence, and to depart radically and dramatically from the original tune. His performances are preserved on more than 600 recordings (as unaccompanied soloist, with his trios, and with other ensembles), which provide ample evidence of his uncommonly creative genius as an improviser.

Tatum integrated the practices and characteristic gestures of the stride and swing keyboard traditions, at the same time transforming them through his virtuosity. His early impact on his contemporaries was enormous, memorable, and the stuff of legends: people did not believe their ears, and, when they saw him perform, they did not believe their eyes. With hands that seemed to glide horizontally across the keyboard, he played the piano with an uncommon ease and grace, shielding in simplicity his tremendous strength, technical agility, and control of nuance even in the finest details. Simple decorative techniques became complex harmonic sweeps of color; traditional repetitive patterns were expanded and intensified; rhythmic-melodic ideas were introduced with unpredictable and ever-changing combinations of notes per beat even in the most rapid passages. In ex.2, a six-bar excerpt from Aunt Hagar’s Blues (1949), melodic rhythms are so subtly controlled that the melodic line seems to be propelled by its own internal dynamic: tossed upwards from a turning figure, the line loses speed as it climbs to its highest point; the two-bar descent seems to contain the most delicate application of brakes as it returns to its starting-point.

Later generations of jazz musicians were impressed by Tatum’s elaboration of the original harmonies of a tune, particularly his use of complex passing harmonies and voicings, and by the textural variety of his work, which frequently led to contrapuntal relationships among lines in different registers. He could apply different variation techniques simultaneously, and used subtle rhythmic intensification and relaxation to give clear identity and shape to his phrases. Tatum’s creativity and flexibility stood on a foundation characterized by his intimate understanding of the traditions of jazz piano performance, superb technical skills, rhythmic solidity and security, an orchestral embrace of the full range of the keyboard, impeccable delivery, affection for his material, and joy in performance. He remains a

See also PIANO, §2, and fig.1 .

SELECTED RECORDINGS

As unaccompanied soloist: Tea for Two (1933, Bruns. 6553); Tiger Rag (1933, Bruns. 6543); After You’ve Gone (1934, Bruns. 01862); Liza [take A] (1934, Decca 1373); Liza [take D] (1934, also Decca 1373); Gone with the Wind/Stormy Weather (1937, Decca 1603); Elegie (1940, Decca 18049); Sweet Lorraine/Get Happy (1940, Decca 18050); St. Louis Blues (1940, Decca 8550); Begin the Beguine/Rosetta (1940, Decca 8502); California Melodies (1940, Memphis Archives 7007), incl. Get Happy, The Shout, I got rhythm; Hallelujah/Memories of You (1945, American Recording Artists 4501); Yesterdays (1949, Just Jazz 69); Willow Weep for Me/Aunt Hagar’s Blues (1949, Cap. 15520); Nice work if you can get it/Dancing in the Dark (1949, Cap. 15519); Sweet Lorraine (1949, Cap. 15713) Piano Music (1949, Cap. H216), incl. Blue Skies; Art Tatum Piano Discoveries (1950, 1955, 20CF 3033), incl. Mr. Freddie Blues (1950), I cover the waterfront (1955); The Genius of Art Tatum, ii (1953, Clef 613), incl. Makin’ Whoopee, Memories of You; The Genius of Art Tatum, iii (1953, Clef 614), incl. Embraceable You, Come Rain or Come Shine; The Genius of Art Tatum, vi (1953, Clef 657), incl. Jitterbug Waltz, Night and Day; The Genius of Art Tatum, v (1953, Clef 618), incl. Stompin’ at the Savoy; The Genius of Art Tatum, viii (1953, Clef 659), incl. Ain’t misbehavin’, All the Things you are; The Genius of Art Tatum, x (1953, Clef 661), incl. Too marvelous for words As leader: With Plenty of Money and You (1937, Decca 1198); Pieces of Eight (1939–55, Smithsonian 029), incl. Exactly like You; Stompin’ at the Savoy/Last Goodbye Blues (1941, Decca 8536); Corinne, Corinna/Lonesome Graveyard Blues (1941, Decca 8563); I got rhythm/I ain’t got nobody (1944, World Jam Session 32); Dark Eyes (1944, Comet 1); Body and Soul (1944, Comet 2); Flying Home (1944, Comet 3); Boogie (1944, Asch 4521); with B. Carter and L. Bellson: The Art Tatum–Benny Carter–Louis Bellson Trio (1954, Clef 643), incl. Idaho, Blues in B Flat with L. Hampton and B. Rich: The Lionel Hampton–Art Tatum–Buddy Rich Trio (1955, Clef 709), incl. More than you know; The Art Tatum Trio (1956, Verve 8118), incl. Trio Blues; with B. Webster: The Art Tatum–Ben Webster Quartet (1956, Verve 8220), incl. All the things you are, Night and Day, Where or When; with E. Barksdale and S. Stewart: The Art Tatum Trio (1955–6, Jazz Anthology 5138), incl. I Cover the Waterfront, Soft Winds As sideman: A. Hall: This Time It’s Love (1932, Bruns. 6362); L. Feather: Esquire Bounce/Esquire Blues (1943, Com. 547); My Ideal (1943, Com. 548); B. Bigard: Please don’t talk about me when I’m gone (1945, Black & White 14); Blues for Art’s Sake (1945, Black & White 13); L. Hampton: Lionel Hampton and his Giants (1955, Norg. 1080), incl. Verve Blues transcriptions

The Famous Style Piano Solo Album (London, 1939); selections repr. in C. Bolton, ed.: Art Tatum – Piano Solos (London, 1980) M. Feldman, ed. and transcr.: Art Tatum Improvisations, i–ii (New York, 1939, 1946); selections repr. in C. Bolton, ed.: Art Tatum – Piano Solos (London, 1980), and in The

Genius of Art Tatum – Piano Solos (New York, 1981) F. Paparelli, ed. and transcr.: 5 Jazz Piano Solos by Art Tatum (New York, 1944) J. Distler: Art Tatum (New York, 1981) B. Edstrom, transcr., and R. Schiff: The Art Tatum Collection (Milwaukee, 1996) Art Tatum Solo Book (Milwaukee, 1998)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

SchullerS A. Duckett: “Art Tatum: What a Blind Man,” New York Age Defender (5 May 1954) W. Balliett: “Art and Tatum,” Saturday Review, xxxvii (24 Oct 1955), 44; repr. in BalliettA (1986), BalliettA (1996) A. Hodeir: “Art Tatum: a French Critic Evaluates the Music of a Great Pianist,” DB, xxii/17 (1955), 9 B. Taylor: “Billy Taylor Replies to Art Tatum Critic,” DB, xxii/19 (1955), 17 O. Keepnews: “Art Tatum,” The Jazz Makers, ed. N. Shapiro and N. Hentoff (New York, 1957/R1979 as The Jazz Makers: Essays on the Greats of Jazz), 156; repr. in The View from Within: Jazz Writings, 1948–1987 (New York, and Oxford, England, 1988), 74 M. Gibson: “The Paradox of Art Tatum,” JJ, xiii/10 (1960), 3 M. Williams: “The Real Art Tatum,” JR, iii/6 (1960), 28; repr. in Jazz Masters in Transition, 1957–69 (New York and London, 1970/R1980) D. Katz: “Art Tatum,” Jazz Panorama, ed. M. Williams (New York and London, 1962/R1979) J. Mehegan: Jazz Improvisation, ii: Jazz Rhythm and the Improvised Line (New York, 1962) T. Rosenkranz: “Reflections on Art,” DB, xxix/14 (1962), 15 J. Mehegan: Jazz Improvisation, iii: Swing and Early Progressive Piano Styles (New York, 1964) R. Spencer: “Art Tatum Discography,” JJ, xix/10 (1966), 13 ——: “The Tatum Story,” JJ, xix/8 (1966), 6 ——: “The Tatum Style,” JJ, xix/9 (1966), 11 A. Bridgers: “Tatum the Master by Aaron, the Pupil,” Music Maker (1967), July, 14 W. Balliett: “One Man Band,” New Yorker, xliv (7 Sept 1968); repr. in Ecstasy at the Onion (New York and Indianapolis, 1971), 111 S. Rothman: “The Art of Tatum,” Blade Sunday Magazine [Toledo, OH] (14 June 1970), 4 D. Morgenstern: Liner notes, Art Tatum: God is in the House (Onyx 205, 1972) R. Stewart: Jazz Masters of the Thirties (New York and London, n.d. [1972]), 181 V. Genova: Melodic and Harmonic Irregularities Found in the Improvisations of Art Tatum (thesis, U. of Pittsburgh, 1978) J. A. Howard: The Improvisational Techniques of Art Tatum (diss., Case Western Reserve U., 1978) D. C. Brigaud: Art Tatum: essai pour une discographie des enregistrements hors commerce (Paris, 1980) [incl. listings of radio broadcasts, film music, and V-discs] Keyboard, vii/10 (1981) [special issue] H. Lyttelton: The Best of Jazz, ii: Enter the Giants, 1931–1944 (London, 1981), 113 B. Taylor: “An Art Tatum Recollection and Analysis,” Keyboard, vii/10 (1981), 36 A. Laubich and R. Spencer: Art Tatum: a Guide to his Recorded Music (Metuchen, NJ, 1982) [bio-discography] A. B. Spellman: Liner notes, Giants of Jazz: Art Tatum (TL 24, 1982)

A. Balalas: “Art Tatum,” BHcF (1983), no.304, p.3; no.305, p.6 [incl. Fr. trans. of interview by W. Conover] F. A. Howlett: An Introduction to Art Tatum’s Performance Approaches: Composition, Improvisation, and Melodic Variation (diss., Cornell U., 1983) H. Rye: “Visiting Firemen, 8(f): Art Tatum,” Sv, no.108 (1983), 216 M. Williams: “Art Tatum: not for the Left Hand Alone,” American Music, i/1 (1983), 36 R. Callender and E. Cohen: Unfinished Dream: the Musical World of Red Callender (London, 1985) S. Rothman: “Art Tatum’s Toledo Years,” Toledo Blade (30 June 1985) D. Asher: “Keys of the Kingdom,” Jazzletter, ix/3 (1990), 1 S. Mayer: “Tatum & Liszt at the Keyboard,” Keyboard Classics, x/2 (1990) 12 J. L. Anderson: “He Played Like the Wind,” MR, xviii/6 (1991), 1 D. Hyman, Piano Pro (Katonah, NY, 1992) J. Lester: Too Marvelous for Words: the Life and Genius of Art Tatum (New York, and Oxford, England, 1994) S. Mayer: “The Tatum–Horowitz Connection,” Keyboard Classics, xiv/6 (1994), 34 T. Piazza, ed.: Setting the Tempo: 50 Years of Great Jazz Liner Notes (New York and elsewhere, 1996) R. Scivales: The Right Hand According to Tatum (Bedford Hills, NY, 1998) [incl. transcrs.] A. Tercinet: “Piano intempérant: Art Tatum, le ‘Chopin fou’,” Jazzman, no.34 (1998), 22

Basie, Count [Bill; William]

(b Red Bank, NJ, 21 Aug 1904; d Hollywood, CA, 26 April 1984). American bandleader and pianist. He was a leading figure of the swing era in jazz and, alongside Duke Ellington, an outstanding representative of big-band style.

1. Life. 2. Ensemble style. 3. Solo style. SELECTED RECORDINGS SELECTED FILMS AND VIDEOS BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. BRADFORD ROBINSON/BARRY KERNFELD

1. Life.

After studying piano with his mother, as a young man Basie went to New York, where he met James P. Johnson, Fats Waller (with whom he studied informally), and other pianists of the Harlem stride school. Before he was 20 he toured extensively on the Keith and Theater Owners’ Booking Association vaudeville circuits as a solo pianist, accompanist, and music director for blues singers, dancers, and comedians, an early training that was to prove significant in his later career. Hospitalized for spinal meningitis in Kansas City in 1927 while accompanying a touring group, he remained there, playing in silent-film theaters. Later that year, while working as a freelance, he circulated his new nickname on business cards that read, “Count Basie – Beware the Count is Here.” In July 1928 he joined Walter Page’s Blue Devils which, in addition to Page, included Jimmy Rushing; both

© Oxford University Press 2007, Side 37 af 48 Tidlige Jazz-Pianister later figured prominently in Basie’s own band. Basie left the Blue Devils early in 1929 to play with two lesser-known bands in the area; later that year he joined Bennie Moten’s Kansas City Orchestra, as did the other key members of the Blue Devils shortly after. Basie served first on Moten’s staff and from early 1930 participated fully in the band’s activities, touring and taking part in numerous recordings, including a remarkable session in December 1932 in the midst of an otherwise disastrous trip to the eastern USA, after which the orchestra unraveled. In 1933 Basie was elected leader of a spinoff group which performed in Kansas City, Little Rock, Arkansas, and elsewhere in the Southwest; his sidemen included Hot Lips Page, Herschel Evans, Lester Young (replaced by Buddy Tate), Buster Smith, Walter Page, and Jo Jones.

By March 1935 Basie was back in Kansas City as a member of Moten’s group. Moten died suddenly soon afterwards, and the band continued under Buster Moten, but Basie did not stay for long. The same year, with Hot Lips Page, Buster Smith, Jack Washington, and several other former members of Moten’s orchestra, he organized a new, smaller group of nine musicians, which included Jones and later Lester Young; as the Barons of Rhythm it began a long engagement at the Reno Club in Kansas City. The group’s radio broadcasts led in 1936 to contracts with a national booking agency and the Decca Record Company, and it expanded to 13 instrumentalists (with Buck Clayton replacing Page) and a singer, Jimmy Rushing. Late in 1936 the band toured to New York, which remained its home base during the ensuing decades of incessant touring. Freddie Green and Billie Holiday joined in March 1937, Earl Warren in June, Eddie Durham in July, Benny Morton in September, Harry “Sweets” Edison in January 1938, Helen Humes (replacing Holiday) in June, and Dicky Wells in July. By this time the Count Basie Orchestra, as it had become known, was one of the leading big bands of the swing era (see illustration). By the end of the 1930s it had acquired international fame with such pieces as One o’Clock Jump (1937), Jumpin’ at the Woodside (1938), and Taxi War Dance (1939), but gradual recourse to written arrangements began to lead it towards stylization and conformity, and to subdue its personality to the personalities of its arrangers. Other notable soloists of this period include Tate, who joined after Evans’s death in February 1939, Vic Dickenson (February 1940), Tab Smith (December 1940), and Don Byas, who replaced Young in January 1941. Young rejoined in December 1943 and remained until he and Jones were drafted in September the following year, and in the mid-1940s it was Tate who engaged Illinois Jacquet, Lucky Thompson, or Paul Gonsalves in continuations of the band’s celebrated tenor saxophone battles; Wardell Gray replaced Tate in September 1948. Buddy Rich and Shadow Wilson were among those who took over the drum chair before and after Jones’s return from 1946 to 1948.

Briefly in 1948 and permanently in 1950 financial considerations forced Basie to disband, and for the next two years he led a six- to nine-piece group; among its sidemen were Clark Terry, Buddy DeFranco, Serge Chaloff, and Rich. After reorganizing a big band in 1952 he undertook a long series of tours and recording sessions that eventually led to his becoming an elder statesman of jazz, while his band was established as a permanent jazz institution and training ground for young musicians. He made the first of many tours of Europe in 1954, visited Japan in 1963, and issued a large number of recordings both under his own name and under the leadership of various singers, most notably Frank Sinatra and Joe Williams. During the 1970s Basie occasionally worked apart from his orchestra as a member of all-star swing groups. From 1976 a serious illness hampered his career, and in the 1980s he sometimes had to perform from a wheelchair; he devoted time increasingly to his autobiography. After Basie’s death the band continued under the direction of Eric Dixon, Thad Jones (1985–6), Dixon again, Frank Foster (1986–95), and

Grover Mitchell (from 1995); as the COUNTSMEN, a number of his former sidemen reconvened occasionally for concerts and tours from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s.

2. Ensemble style.

Like all bands in the Kansas City tradition, the Count Basie Orchestra was organized about its rhythm section, which supported the interplay of brass and reeds and served as a backdrop for the unfolding of solos. Using an elliptical style of melodic leads and cues, Basie was able to control his band firmly from the keyboard while blending perfectly with his rhythm section. This celebrated group (for illustration see Jones, jo), consisting of Basie, Page, Jones, and, from 1937, Freddie Green, altered the ideal of jazz accompaniment, making it more supple and responsive to the wind instruments and helping to establish four-beat jazz (with four almost identically stressed beats to a bar) as the norm for jazz performance. Of particularly far-reaching significance was Jones’s technique of placing the constant pulse in the hi-hat cymbal instead of the bass drum, thereby immeasurably lightening the timbre of jazz drumming. Another important factor was the accuracy and solidity of Page’s walking bass technique, which obviated the need for left-hand patterns in the piano and imparted a buoyant swing to the ensemble. To attain its unique timbre and swing, Basie’s rhythm section practiced for hours independently of the rest of the band. It was supreme in its day, and its innovations served as models for the even more spare and flexible rhythm sections of the bop school.

During the band’s heyday in the late 1930s Basie preferred light, readily expandable arrangements which are particularly notable for their use of riffs, a legacy of the Moten band and of Southwest ensemble jazz generally. Ex.1 shows a typical riff pattern (another may be found in Riff, ex.1), which might easily have been developed in rehearsal and played by rote as a head (rather than notated) arrangement. This sort of ensemble accompaniment, which contrasts with the more elaborate group writing of Duke Ellington, Don Redman, and Sy Oliver, gave full freedom to Basie’s outstanding soloists. These included Edison, Clayton, Wells, Morton, Humes, Rushing, and two excellent tenor saxophonists, Evans and Young, whose widely differing styles and artistic personalities gave added breadth and tension to the group’s performances. All of these soloists are prominently featured on the band’s recordings between 1937 and 1941 for Decca and Vocalion, which represent some of the finest recorded jazz of the period (Evans, who died in 1939, plays only on the Decca sides). Basie also issued small-group recordings with his band’s rhythm section and soloists (notably Young), which are masterpieces of their kind.

In his bands of the 1950s and 1960s Basie retained his swing-style rhythm section but chose soloists with more modern leanings, particularly Thad Jones, Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis, Frank Foster, Marshal Royal, and Frank Wess. Although the band’s sound tended to change with its current arrangers (most notably Neal Hefti, Benny Carter, Quincy Jones, Thad Jones, Ernie Wilkins, and Foster), it was unequaled for its relaxed precision and

© Oxford University Press 2007, Side 39 af 48 Tidlige Jazz-Pianister control of dynamics. Basie’s later bands, though musically less satisfying, never lost their large popular following. In the end, the Count Basie Orchestra proved the most long-lived and enduring in jazz.

3. Solo style.

Basie’s eminence as a bandleader tended to overshadow his considerable achievements as a jazz pianist. Early recordings with Moten, such as the introduction to Moten Swing (1932), reveal his mastery of the ragtime and stride idioms. By the mid-1930s, however, Basie had adopted a highly personal, laconic, blues-oriented style, compounded of short melodic phrases – often nothing more than jazz clichés – expertly placed and accented with wit and ingenuity. These seemingly fragmentary and disjoint solos, of which ex.2 is typical, were nevertheless capable of generating great forward momentum and cumulative energy, and of leading in the next soloist, a gift for which Basie was justly famed. Although sometimes wrongly attributed to laziness, Basie’s “minimal” style, with its avoidance of the ornate mannerisms to which other pianists of the time were prone, was in fact deliberately abstracted from the more elaborate jazz piano styles of his day to meet the demands of large-ensemble improvisation. It was of seminal importance to John Lewis and the cool pianists of the West Coast school in the early 1950s. Jazz pianists as diverse as Oscar Peterson and Mary Lou Williams have freely acknowledged their debt to Basie. Two volumes of transcriptions of his performances have been published – B. Harding: Count Basie’s Boogie Woogie Styles (New York, 1944) and C. Basie: Blues by Basie: a Collection of Original Blues Compositions for Piano as Recorded and Played by Count Basie (New York and Paris, 1943/Rc1979).

Basie also worked as a theater organist in New York and made a few recordings on pipe organ (see ORGAN, §1).

Oral history material in MoKmh and NjR (JOHP). See also ARRANGEMENT, §3 and Table 3; BLUES, §6; JAZZ (I), §IV, 3; and PIANO, §3; for further illustration see Films, fig.3.

SELECTED RECORDINGS swing period

(big band; recorded for Decca unless otherwise stated)

Swinging at the Daisy Chain (1937, 1121); One o’Clock Jump (1937, 1363); Good Morning Blues (1937, 1446); Sent for you yesterday and here you come today (1938, 1880); Every Tub (1938, 1728); Doggin’ Around (1938, 1965); Jumpin’ at the Woodside (1938, 2212); Shorty George (1938, 2325); Jive at Five (1939, 2922); Oh! Lady be Good (1939, 2631); Rock-a-bye Basie (1939, Voc. 4747) Taxi War Dance (1939, Voc. 4748); Miss Thing (1939, Voc. 4860); Clap hands, here comes Charlie (1939, Voc. 5085); Ham ’n’ Eggs (1939, Col. 35357); Tickle-toe (1940, Col. 35521); Gone with “What” Wind (1940, OK 5629); The World is Mad (1940, OK 5816); Stampede in G Minor (1940, OK 5987); Diggin’ for Dex (1941, OK 6365); The King/Blue Skies (1945, Col. 37070)

(small group)

Shoe Shine Boy (1936, Voc. 3441); Oh! Lady Be Good (1936, Voc. 3459); Oh! Red/Fare thee, honey, fare thee well (1939, Decca 2780); Dickie’s Dream/Lester leaps in (1939, Voc. 5118) later bands

Dance Session (1952–4, Clef 626, 647); Count Basie Swings and Joe Williams Sings (1955, Clef 678); April in Paris (1955–6, Verve 8012); Basie Plays Hefti (1958, Roul. 52011); Chairman of the Board (1958, Roul. 52032); The Count Basie Story (1960, Roul. RB1); The Legend (1961, Roul. 52086); Basie at Birdland (1961, Roul. 52065); L’il Ol’ Groovemaker (1963, Verve 68549); Basie Jam (1973, Pablo 2310718); For the First Time (1974, Pablo 2310712); On the Road (1979, Pablo 2312112)

SELECTED FILMS AND VIDEOS

Air Mail Special (1941); Take Me Back, Baby (1941); Choo Choo Swing (1943); Reveille with Beverly (1943); Stage Door Canteen (1943); Sugar Chile Robinson – Billie Holiday – Count Basie and his Sextet (1950); One o’Clock Jump (c1950); The Sound of Jazz (1957); Newport Jazz Festival 1962 (1962); Count Basie and his Orchestra (1965); L’aventure du jazz (1970); A Salute to Count Basie (1972); Born to Swing (1973); The Last of the Blue Devils (1979); To the Count of Basie (1979); Count Basie Live at the Hollywood Palladium (1984 [filmed 1970s]); Swingin’ the Blues: Count Basie: a Celebration of Basie’s Legacy (n.d.); A Great Day in Harlem (1995); Norman Granz présente improvisation: documents exceptionnels et inédits des plus grands noms de jazz (n.d.)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

McCarthyB; SchullerS; SheridanCB M. Berman: “Count Basie’s Style: Famous American Pianist Talks about Himself and his Piano Playing,” Rhythm, no.143 (1939), 98

G. Weaver: “Up with the Count,” Bandleaders, iv/1 (1947), 22 H. Panassié: “Count Basie and the Blues,” JJ, i/7 (1948), 2 R. J. Gleason: “Basie Will Always Have a Swinging Band,” DB, xvii/23 (1950), 1 H. Panassié: “Count Basie en Europe,” BHcF, no.36 (1954), 3 J. Hammond: “Count Basie Marks 20th Anniversary,” DB, xxii/22 (1955), 11; repr. in Eddie Condon’s Treasury of Jazz, ed. E. Condon and R. Gehman (New York, 1956/R1975), 250 N. Shapiro and N. Hentoff, eds.: Hear me Talkin’ to ya: the Story of Jazz by the Men who Made it (New York, 1955/R1966), 257 C. Delaunay: “Count Basie: 20 années de grand orchestre,” Jh, no.114 (1956), 11 S. Dance: “The Conquering Count,” JJ, x/12 (1957), 7 ——: “Basie in April,” Jazz Music Mirror, iv/4 (1957), 12 R. Horricks: Count Basie and his Orchestra: its Music and its Musicians (London and New York, 1957) H. Panassié: “Reminiscing about the Count,” JJ, x/4 (1957), 15 N. Shapiro: “William ‘Count’ Basie,” The Jazz Makers: Essays on the Greats of Jazz, ed. N. Shapiro and N. Hentoff (New York, 1957/R1979), 232 E. Towler: “Vintage Basie,” JM, iii/6 (1957), 2 A. Hodeir: “Du côté de chez Basie,” JR, i/2 (1958), 6 N. Hentoff: The Jazz Life (New York and London, 1961/R1975), 143 B. Schiozzi: Count Basie (Milan, 1961) A. Hodeir: Toward Jazz (New York, 1962/R1976), 97 D. Gelly: “The Count Basie Octet,” JM, ix/5 (1963), 9 G. E. Lambert: “Count Basie: the Middle Years,” JM, ix/7 (1963), 4 H. W. Shih: “Portrait of the Count,” DB, xxxii/9 (1965), 23 A. Morgan: “Collector’s Notes: Count Basie,” JM, no.161 (1968), 15 J. Burns: “Lesser Known Bands of the ’40s: Count Basie,” JM, no.171 (1969), 8 B. Scherman, C. Hallstrom, and J. G. Jepsen: A Discography of Count Basie (Copenhagen, 1969) M. Williams: The Jazz Tradition (New York, 1970, rev. 2/1983), 107 R. Russell: Jazz Style in Kansas City and the Southwest (Berkeley, CA, Los Angeles, and London, 1971/R1983, rev. 2/1973/R1997) L. Feather: From Satchmo to Miles (New York, 1972/R1987), 99 J. Aikin: “Count Basie,” CK, iii/7 (1977), 10 Jm, no.251 (1977) [special issue; see esp. A. Brunet: “Vers un classicisme: sur quelques arrangements exemplaires,” p.22] L. Feather: “Count Basie,” CK, iv/3 (1978), 55 S. Dance: The World of Count Basie (New York and London, 1980) G. Endress: Jazz Podium: Musiker über sich selbst (Stuttgart, Germany, 1980), 46 A. Morgan: Count Basie (Tunbridge Wells, England, 1984) Obituary, J. S. Wilson, New York Times (27 April 1984) B. Rusch: “Count Basie: Interview,” Cadence, x/7 (1984), 5 C. Basie and A. Murray: Good Morning Blues: the Autobiography of Count Basie (New York, 1985/R1995) M. Tucker: “Count Basie and the Piano that Swings,” Popular Music, v (1985), 45 B. Clayton and N. M. Elliott: Buck Clayton’s Jazz World (London and New York, 1986) D. J. Gibson: “Count Basie Saxophone Section,” Saxophone Journal, xi/3 (1986), 40 C. Deffaa: Swing Legacy (Metuchen, NJ, and London, 1989), 243 F. Büchmann-Møller: You Just Fight for your Life: the Story of Lester Young (New York, Westport, CT, and London, 1990) D. Helland: “The Count Basie Orchestra: Keeping the Spirit in a Ghost Band,” DB, lvii/6 (1990), 21

R. Nolden: Count Basie: sein Leben, seine Musik, seine Schallplatten (Schaftlach, Germany, 1990) M. Laycock: “Basic Basie,” Jazz CD/Jazz Cassette, i/1 (1992), 35 B. Kernfeld: What to Listen for in Jazz (New Haven, CT, and London, 1995) J. McDonough: “Doin’ ’em Proud: How the Mingus and Basie Big Bands Thrive on More than Just Nostalgia,” DB, lxiv/1 (1997), 16 Wilson, Teddy [Theodore Shaw]

(b Austin, TX, 24 Nov 1912; d New Britain, CT, 31 July 1986). American pianist. He grew up in Tuskegee, Alabama. At about the age of eight he began classical lessons on piano, and he also doubled as a violinist for several years. Having discovered jazz while in high school, he copied solos recorded by Earl Hines and Fats Waller; additionally during these years he played oboe and sopranino clarinet. He briefly studied music at Talladega College and began working professionally with the midwestern big band of Speed Webb, whose sidemen included Vic Dickenson and Roy Eldridge (1929 – early 1931). Wilson then replaced Art Tatum in Milton Senior’s quartet in Toledo, Ohio; there he found many opportunities to listen to and play with Tatum, who exerted a strong influence on his developing personal style. He traveled with Senior to Chicago, then worked with Erskine Tate (1931) and lesser-known leaders, and recorded and toured with Louis Armstrong (January–March 1933). He returned to Chicago to play with Jimmie Noone (mid-1933).

At the instigation of John Hammond, Wilson moved in September 1933 to New York to join Benny Carter, with whom he recorded the following month in both the big band and a small group, the Chocolate Dandies. From 1934 to early 1935 he was a member of Willie Bryant’s big band. Again through Hammond, he secured recording dates with Red Norvo and Benny Goodman. Hammond then introduced him to Billie Holiday and initiated the lengthy run of now classic recordings released variously under Wilson’s or Holiday’s name (1935–42). In this setting Wilson made crucial contributions to Holiday’s career by selecting songs for her, and by organizing and rehearsing small recording groups which introduced her, in various combinations, to many of the greatest musicians of the swing era. Ironically, for all these accomplishments, Wilson underestimated Holiday’s talent. When given the opportunity he chose other singers for his recordings, including Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, and Helen Ward; he also recorded as a sideman with Mildred Bailey. His partnership with Holiday was almost exclusively in the studio, although in September 1935 they worked together for a week at the Famous Door on 52nd Street.

In this same year Wilson played informally with Goodman. He officially joined Goodman’s trio the following year, thereby becoming one of the first black musicians to appear prominently with white artists. He remained with Goodman until February 1939, starring in the trio with Gene Krupa and the quartet with Krupa and Lionel Hampton. He then led his own big band for a year (May 1939 – April 1940); among his sidemen were Shorty Baker, Karl George, Doc Cheatham, Rudy Powell, Pete Clarke, Ben Webster, Al Casey, Al Hall, and J. C. Heard. The band had a fine reputation among musicians but made little impact, evidently because the leader’s reserved personality did not satisfy his audiences’ expectations.

In June 1940 Wilson founded a sextet with Bill Coleman, Benny Morton, Jimmy Hamilton, Al Hall, and Yank Porter. They first performed at Café Society in July and then in October opened the second Café Society, uptown. Wilson rejoined Goodman briefly from January

© Oxford University Press 2007, Side 43 af 48 Tidlige Jazz-Pianister to mid-February 1941, but continued with his own sextet. In the summer of 1941, after the group returned from performances in Chicago, Emmett Berry replaced Coleman and Israel Crosby succeeded Hall; soon wards Johnny Williams replaced Crosby, and by the end of the year Edmond Hall and Heard had joined. From this point until 1944, as Wilson continued his routine of alternating tours with long stands at the two Café Society venues, the sextet remained reasonably stable, comprising Berry or Joe Thomas (iv), Morton, Hamilton, Wilson, Williams, and Heard, with Sid Catlett taking Heard’s place from September 1942.

Wilson disbanded the sextet in May 1944 and worked with Goodman’s sextet for just over a year. He was with CBS radio in New York from 1946 and led his own trios at WNEW, New York, from 1949 to 1952; concurrently during the summer from 1945 to 1952 he taught privately at the Metropolitan Music School and at the Juilliard School, an early instance of the recognition of jazz by an important conservatory. He made his first trip to Europe (autumn 1952 – early 1953) and then renewed his job at CBS, acting as host for a radio show as the leader of a trio with Milt Hinton and Jo Jones, various guest artists also took part, including Edmond Hall in 1955. Wilson left CBS soon afterwards to participate in the making of the film The Benny Goodman Story. He then began touring with his own trio and in 1958 performed at the World’s Fair in Brussels before holding an engagement at the Embers in New York (summer 1958). He frequently rejoined Goodman for reunions, most notably for a tour of the USSR (1962) and for concerts at Carnegie Hall during the Newport Jazz Festival New York (1973) and its continuation as the Kool Jazz Festival (1982). He also appeared at a number of Dick Gibson’s Colorado Jazz Parties from the mid-1960s into the 1970s, performed at Michael’s Pub in New York during the 1970s, and made annual appearances at the Newport event. He toured regularly as a soloist, recorded numerous albums in Europe and Japan, and visited South America (where he gave concerts with Earl Hines, Ellis Larkins, and Marian McPartland in 1974) and Australia. He occasionally played with Benny Carter (1978–1981), mainly in the USA, but also in Japan (September 1980). In his final years he played on the television shows “Swing Reunion” (1985) and “Benny Goodman: Let’s Dance: All-Star Swing Reunion” (1986).

Wilson was the most important pianist of the swing period. His early recordings reveal a percussive style, with single-note lines and bold staccatos, that was indebted to Earl Hines; but by the time of his first performances with Goodman he had fashioned a distinctive legato idiom that served him for the rest of his career. His style was based on the use of conjunct 10ths in the left hand; by emphasizing the tenor voice and frequently omitting the root of the chord until the end of the phrase he created great harmonic refinement and contrapuntal interest. For the right hand he adapted Hines’s “trumpet” style, playing short melodic fragments in octaves, frequently separated by rests and varied with fleet, broken-chord passage-work. He used the full range of the piano, often changing register or texture to underscore formal divisions. His poised, restrained manner and transparent textures are especially evident on his solo recordings from the late 1930s, which served as models for countless pianists in the late swing period. From 1940 Wilson’s playing became somewhat florid, with frequent pentatonic passage-work, but he retained his basic approach and prowess into the 1980s. A volume of transcriptions and simplified piano arrangements was published as The Genius of Teddy Wilson (Lyndhurst, NJ, n.d.).

Oral history material in ATaT and NjR (JOHP). See also IMPROVISATION, §4 (III); and PIANO, §3, and fig.2.

SELECTED RECORDINGS

As unaccompanied soloist: Liza/Rosetta (1935, Bruns. 7563); Don’t Blame Me/Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (1937, Bruns. 8025); Smoke Gets in your Eyes (1941, Col. 36631); Rosetta (1941, Col. 36632); Body and Soul (1941, Col. 36634); I can’t get started (1941, Col. 36633); With Billie in Mind (1972, Chi. 111); Striding after Fats (1974, BL 308); Cole Porter Classics (1977, BL 51505) As leader: I wished on the moon (1935, Bruns. 7501); Mean to me (1937, Bruns. 7903); Just a Mood (1937, Bruns. 7973); What shall I say? (1939, Bruns. 8314); Liza (1939, Col. 35711); I know that you know (1941, Col. 36633); with L. Young: Pres and Teddy (1956, Verve 8205); Teddy Wilson and his All Stars (1976, Chi. 150); Three Little Words (1976, BB 33094) As sideman: L. Armstrong: I’ve got the world on a string (1933, Vic. 24245); Chocolate Dandies: I Never Knew (1933, Col. 2897D); Krazy Kapers (1933, OK 41568); B. Carter: Symphony in Riffs (1933, Col. 2898D); Blue Lou (1933, OK 41567); R. Norvo: Old Fashioned Love (1934, Col. 3059D); I Surrender, Dear (1934, Col. 2977D): B. Goodman: After You’ve Gone/Body and Soul (1935, Vic. 25115); Nobody’s Sweetheart (1936, Vic. 25345); Sweet Sue, Just You (1936, Vic. 25473); The Man I Love (1937, Vic. 25644); The Blues in my Flat (1938, Vic. 26044); B. Holiday: Jim (1941, OK 6369); B. Carter: on 3, 4, 5: the Verve Small Group Sessions (1954–5, Verve 849395-2), Rosetta, The moon is low (1954)

Selected Films and Videos

Hollywood Hotel (1937); Harlem Hotshots (1940); Boogie Woogie Dream (1941); Something to Shout About (1943); Make Mine Music [Swing Street] (1945); The Benny Goodman Story (1955); Steve Allen in Movieland (1955); Swing into Spring (1958); Playback (1963); Jazz Circle (1971)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ConnorBG; McCarthyB; SchullerS S. F. Dance: “Theodore Wilson,” Jh, 1st ser., no.1 (1935), 29 J. Hammond: “Theodore Wilson,” Swing Music, i/7 (1935), 85 T. Wilson: “How to Relax on Wax,” MM (21 Dec 1946), 9 A. Hodeir: “Teddy Wilson,” Jh, no.42 (1950), 21 L. Feather: The Book of Jazz: a Guide to the Entire Field (New York, 1957, rev. 2/1965) J. Mehegan: Jazz Improvisation, ii: Jazz Rhythm and the Improvised Line (New York, 1962), 80 ——: Jazz Improvisation, iii: Swing and Early Progressive Piano Styles (New York, 1964), 15 J. Simmen: “Le grand orchestre de Teddy Wilson, 1939–1940,” BHcF, no.201 (1970), 10; no.202 (1970), 10 D. M. Bakker: Billie & Teddy on Microgroove, 1932–1944 (Alphen aan de Rijn, Netherlands, 1975) S. Dance: The World of Earl Hines (New York, 1977), 183 J. McDonough: “Teddy Wilson: History in the Flesh,” DB, xliv/4 (1977), 17 G. Gelles and J. McDonough: Liner notes, Giants of Jazz: Teddy Wilson (TL 20, 1981) M. Berger, E. Berger, and J. Patrick: Benny Carter: a Life in American Music (Metuchen, NJ, and London, 1982)

D. Hyman: “Thinking about Teddy Wilson,” Keyboard, viii/9 (1982), 59 [incl. transcr.] L. Lyons: The Great Jazz Pianists, Speaking of their Lives and Music (New York, 1983), 59 Obituaries: B. Doerschuk, Keyboard, xii/10 (1986), 29; J. Simmen, BHcF, no.341 (1986), 5 M. Selchow: Profoundly Blue: a Bio-discographical Scrapbook on Edmond Hall (Lübbecke, Germany, 1988) D. Clarke: Wishing on the Moon: the Life and Times of Billie Holiday (London and New York, 1994) F. Krieger: “Jazz-Solopiano: zum Stilwandel am Beispiel ausgewählter Body and Soul: Aufnehmen von 1938–1992,” Jf, xxvii (1995), 5 [incl. transcrs.] S. Nicholson: Billie Holiday (Boston, 1995, London, 1996) T. Wilson, A. Ligthart, and H. van Loo: Teddy Wilson Talks Jazz (London and New York, 1996) [incl. discography by H. Rye]

J. BRADFORD ROBINSON/BARRY KERNFELD Confrey, Zez [Edward Elzear]

(b Peru, IL, 3 April 1895; d Lakewood, NJ, 22 Nov 1971). American composer and pianist. After studying music at the Chicago Musical College he formed a touring orchestra with his brother James in about 1915. Through his work as a pianist and arranger for various piano-roll companies (QRS, Ampico, Imperial and Victor) he developed a popular style known as NOVELTY PIANO. This combined classical piano technique with syncopated rhythms and peppy tunes. The technical possibilities of piano rolls helped inspire some of his flashy keyboard effects and rhythmic tricks that influenced later composers in the novelty-piano idiom. Among his most popular pieces were Stumbling (1922), Dizzy Fingers (1923) and Kitten on the Keys (1921), the last of which he performed at Paul Whiteman’s Aeolian Hall concert, 12 February 1924. These and other pieces were issued by Jack Mills, Inc. as Modern Novelty Piano Solos (1923). The novelty-piano craze soon ceased to be novel, but Confrey continued to compose concert, popular and student pieces into the 1940s.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

D.A. Jasen: ‘Zez Confrey: Creator of the Novelty Rag’, Rag Times, v/3 (1971), 4–5 D.A. Jasen and T.J. Tichenor: Rags and Ragtime: a Musical History (New York, 1978) E.A. Berlin: Ragtime: a Musical and Cultural History (Berkeley, 1980)

MARK TUCKER Bloom, Rube

(b New York, 24 April 1902; d New York, 30 March 1976). American pianist and composer. Although self-taught, he became an excellent pianist at an early age and in 1919 began working as an accompanist for vaudeville shows. He recorded in the Sioux City Six with Bix Beiderbecke and Frankie Trumbauer (1924) and performed in studio groups with Red Nichols, Miff Mole, Eddie Lang, Joe Venuti, and the Dorsey brothers (1924–31). He arranged songs for numerous publishing companies (1920s) and made several recordings as a soloist (1927–8, including versions of his own rags Soliloquy, OK 40867, and

Silhouette, OK 40901, both 1927); he also led a recording group called the Bayou Boys that included Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, and Adrian Rollini (1930). Although Bloom is perhaps best remembered for his popular songs, he made important contributions to the novelty piano idiom with such jazz-influenced pieces as Spring Fever (1926). A collection of his personal papers and song lyrics is in the library of the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming in Laramie; see LIBRARIES AND ARCHIVES, §2.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

L. G. Feather: “Brief Biographies: Rube Bloom,” Swing Music, i/5 (1935), 142 D. A. Jasen: Recorded Ragtime, 1897–1958 (Hamden, CT, 1973) D. A. Jasen and T. J. Tichenor: Rags and Ragtime: a Musical History (New York, 1978)

DAVID THOMAS ROBERTS Lamb, Joseph F(rancis)

(b Montclair, NJ, 6 Dec 1877; d Brooklyn, NY, 3 Sept 1960). American ragtime composer. A protégé of Scott Joplin, he remained unidentified for decades because he was assumed to be a black Midwesterner like Joplin and James Scott, with whom he shares honours as one of the three outstanding piano ragtime composers. His first published rag, Sensation, appeared in 1909 with an endorsement from Joplin. From then until 1919 he produced 12 rags on which his high reputation is based. Because Lamb spent his adult life working in the textile trade in Brooklyn, he became romanticized as a recluse amid the commercialism of Tin Pan Alley. After being rediscovered by Blesh and Janis in 1949 he resumed composing rags, occasionally performed his works in public and recorded for the first time in 1959. An anthology of his works was published in 1964.

According to Lamb’s own account he consciously composed in two distinct styles: the ‘light rags’ (e.g. Champagne and Bohemia), making use of tuneful lines and transparent textures and culminating in the commercial idiom of the cakewalk and two-step; and the ‘heavy rags’ (American Beauty and The Ragtime Nightingale), which abound in complex syncopations, dense textures and virtuoso passages. In these latter works he synthesized the styles of Joplin and Scott with some of his own identifying traits: a diversity of texture (as in the opening period of Excelsior), diatonic and chromatic (rather than pentatonic) melodies and chromatic harmony – including a predilection for the diminished 7th chord with an upper-note appoggiatura. He made considerable use of sequential writing, creating a sense of development very uncommon to ragtime, and concentrated on an eight-bar period, in contrast to Joplin's emphasis on four-bar phrases and Scott’s tendency towards two-bar phrases, and an AAB structure. This last trait led to Lamb’s most remarkable structural accomplishment: the complete elision of the four-bar caesura, exemplified in the opening strains of American Beauty and Top Liner.

Contrary to legend, Lamb did in fact seek a career in Tin Pan Alley, and published several songs and miscellaneous pieces. He continued to write into the 1920s; some of his pieces in the novelty style influenced his later rags. Lamb refined the piano rag into a very intimate composition, of which the prime example is his posthumously published Alaskan Rag, considered by many to be the supreme lyric and melodic achievement in the piano ragtime literature.

Williams, Mary Lou [née Scruggs, Mary Elfrieda]

(b Atlanta, GA, 8 May 1910; d Durham, NC, 28 May 1981). American jazz pianist and composer. She grew up in Pittsburgh, where she played professionally from a very early age; taking her stepfather's name, she performed as Mary Lou Burley. In 1925 she joined a group led by John Williams, whom she married. When in 1929 Andy Kirk took over Terrence Holder's band, of which John was a member, Mary Lou served the group as deputy pianist and arranger until 1931, at which time she became a regular member. The fame of Kirk's band in the 1930s was due largely to Williams's distinctive arrangements, compositions and solo performances on the piano; she also provided noteworthy swing-band scores for Benny Goodman, Earl Hines, Tommy Dorsey and others. After leaving Kirk in 1942 Williams formed her own small group in New York, with her second husband, Shorty Baker, as trumpeter. She briefly served as staff arranger for Duke Ellington, writing for him the well-known Trumpets No End in 1946. In the same year three movements from the Zodiac Suite were performed at Carnegie Hall by the New York PO, a very early instance of the recognition of jazz by a leading symphony orchestra.

By now Williams had become an important figure in New York bop, contributing scores to Dizzy Gillespie's big band and advancing the careers of many younger musicians. She was based in Europe from 1952 to 1954, when she retired from music to pursue religious and charitable interests. However, she resumed her career in 1957 and remained active throughout the 1960s and 70s, leading her own groups in New York clubs, composing sacred works for jazz orchestra and voices and devoting much of her time to teaching. In 1970, as a solo pianist, and providing her own commentary, she recorded The History of Jazz (FW). Towards the end of her life she received a number of honorary doctorates from American universities, and from 1977 taught on the staff of Duke University.

Williams was long regarded as the only significant female musician in jazz, both as an instrumentalist and as a composer, but her achievement is remarkable by any standards. She was an important swing pianist, with a lightly rocking, legato manner based on subtly varied stride and boogie-woogie bass patterns. Yet by constantly exploring and extending her style she retained the status of a modernist for most of her career. She adapted easily in the 1940s to the new bop idiom, and in the 1960s her playing attained a level of complexity and dissonance that rivalled avant-garde jazz pianism of the time, but without losing an underlying blues feeling. A similar breadth may be seen in her work as a composer and arranger, from her expert swing-band scores for Kirk (Walkin' and Swingin', 1936, Decca; Mary's Idea, 1938, Decca) to the large-scale sacred works of the 1960s and 1970s. Her Waltz Boogie (1946, Vic.) was one of the earliest attempts to adapt jazz to non- duple metres. Among her sacred works are a cantata, Black Christ of the Andes (1963, Saba), and three masses, of which the third, Mary Lou's Mass (1970, Mary), was commissioned by the Vatican and became well known in a version choreographed by Alvin Ailey.