game vocal, and she has inherited her old this band and it stays together, the solo­ Vintage series, this album presents a c man's sense of time. ists undoubtedly will grow stronger and section of important piano styles: rag:.Osi. Though the band does well with the ma­ more confident, and this group will join boogie woogie, stride, swing. Put ~Ille, terial and Rich offers a 4th of July solo, the handful of great bands around. the exponents heard here are all di:i~ 1 nothing can rescue Bugle Call from its I'd still like to see Duke Ellington with individualists, this is anything but an !1ct dated pose. After a flashy ensemble blast a television show. -Quinn demic survey. Rather, it is proo f Jiat ga~ that leads to another Rich moment of stylists transcend styles. rca: glory-a filigreed march-time beat generat­ Various Artists CLASSIC JAZZ PIANO STYLES-RCA Victor An exception, though, is Yancey Wb ing into a nearly polymetric display of LPV-543: Prtakisb; Fat Frances; Pep; Handful while certainly the possessor c r ~ v 0, virtuosity-the leader caps this with a pre­ of Keys; E-Flal Bluts; Tea for Two; Russian Fantasy; Rosella; Body and Soul; Sunny Side of personal vocabulary, is probabl y the pue ~ dictable ruffle and flourish to let the group the Street; Melancholy Baby; Yancey Stomp; representative of boogie woogie pianorC!l know that it can come back in again. State Street Special; Boogie W oogie Man; Cullin' record. and are 11,0 of: the Boogie. Stomp Special Generally, the reed soloists are made ~{ Personnel: Tracks 1-3: Jelly Roll Morton, best pieces; the first a fast-paced daZZ]c sterner stuff than their brass counterparts, piano; rracks 4-7: Fats Waller, piano; rracks 8-11: the second more reflective. Both have r, and the group's best moments come with Earl Hines, piano; tracks 12, 13: Jimmy Yancey. 1 piano; rracks 14, 15: Albert Ammons, Pete John• characteristic Yancey idiosyncra l; : a co all the instruments firing away together son, pianos; Jimmy Hoskins, drums. eluding modulation to E-flat, regardless: i while Rich bombards the ground around Rating:**** what has preceded. them. But if the public keeps supporting Another excellent entry in Victor's Boogie woogie is the only j:,zz Piano style that owes absolutely noth ing to the non-jazz traditions of the instru ment, and this is apparent in Yancey's \\ vrk. The somewhat younger Ammons and Johnson reflect a familiarity with other approaches, but their crack teamwork is cer,,1inly not unauthentic, and generates terrific swing, especially on the stomping Man. (The presence of drummer Hoskins is not indi­ cated in the notes.) The three Morton pieces are among his best recorded solos. Freakish is aptly titled; the unusual 9th chords in the first strain give the tune an ominous quality. Gaiety, however, soon takes comman d, and the construction of this and the other two pieces, as well as their melodies, contain more than an echo of ragtime's charm. Morton's beat, though, is jazz. as is his phrasing. But it is a slightly archaic con­ ception of rhythm when com,iared to On lhe road wi1-. Waller's, whose Keys also strongly reflects ragtime. This version (like the other Waller Duke Ellington items in this collection, it ste,ns from transcription sources) is the fastest he Get to know the great man of made, and displays the prowess Art Tatum jazz.Travel with him as he plays a so admired. sacred concert in Columbus, Waller's E Flat, like most blues per· formances by stride pianists, is almost a recording session in New York, a delicate when contrasted with ·'funkier" string of one-night stands in the examples of piano blues, but it is moving mid-west; and composes a song in and beautiful. Tea is an extended perfonn· ance by mid-'30s standards ( r1.corded), his spare minutes. being over four minutes long. It i~ a fancy Duke Ellington-the legend, the man and version, with showmanship flourishes, and his music-on the Bell Telephone Hour, a lot of fun to hear. Russian Fantasy, a Waller oddm~nt, Friday, October 13th. on NBC-TV. In color. shows that he, like Willie (The Lion) Smi_t;; James P. Johnson, and the other _stnf greats, was raised on the light clas sies 0 the turn of the century. At the end, there 1 ~t ► ·1t ' "1 i1/ \, E • l are echoes of Rachmaninoff. In the work of Hines (the pieces da~e BLUE NOTE ~H~~~JA~S~;~ from 1939 to '41) we find fu]l-fled~e' what later was to b~ called ,:mod.:rn" J~ A PROOUCT OF LIBERTY RECORDS OA PRODUCT OF LIBERTY RECORDS piano. His extremely flexible rhythmic a~ harmonic sense invests these performan 1Hf • r11 r ". ,·,' \ · • with a permanent power to surprise. ,. Soul was recorded on a "St~rytof;. BLUE NOTE piano, a 1940 RCA experimen t 1n ~ iS tronic instrument-building. The soun ard A PRODUCT OF LIBERTY RECORDS dry and lacks resonance, but th~ keY;nes action must have been good, slllce. in­

1 H• I ',t ,. 0 1 • ', - ,_ .. • is inspired to do some fancy fioge~•~gcenl deed (some of his "asides" are rem101s ) of Monk-or more probably, vice ver~~ BLUE NOT E All four Hines tracks are brilliant exao_1Pno •azzp1a · A PRODUCT OF LIBl!RTY RECORDS of the true father of post-stri d e J ,n -M orgenste

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