My clothes are soaking wet from dawn to dusk. This worried me at first, but when I went to a doctor and described my normal daily intake of booze, drugs and poison, he told me to come back when the sweating stopped. That would be the danger point, he said –- a sign that my body’s desperately overworked flushing mechanism had broken down completely. “I have great faith in the natural processes,” he said. “But in your case…well…I find no precedent. We’ll just have to wait and see, then work with what’s left.”

There is no precedent for Trump v.2 and his cabinet. We’ll just have to wait and see, and — when they finally get out of office — try to work with and salvage whatever is left.

If I’m a patriot, I’m a patriot because of Miles Davis and John Coltrane, who are both celebrating a centennial in 2026.

Burble is moving lines, advanced technique and busy harmonic movement. Everything is stated and resolved.

Sleek is spacious, groovy, and fashionable. The sentences are not completed and tensions are not resolved.

Musicians like burble. Fans like sleek. Of course, both are important, and many of the best jazz musicians blow nice and sleek with plenty of burble.

Until 1954, the Miles Davis discography is a patchwork of burble. Miles played with Charlie Parker, the most sleek of the burbling beboppers. Dizzy Gillespie is the height of burble, but Bird also had the sleek.

If fancy chords move slow enough, they are sleek. The 1947 Gil Evans arrangement of “Robbins’ Nest” written for Claude Thornhill was perfect, and Miles pocketed that concept for the rest of his life.

On some elemental and sensual level nobody understood harmony better than Miles Davis. He could play piano himself, but Miles’s specialty was hearing other people play chords and saying whether they were right or not. There are many good records of burbling “Robbins’ Nest” by other jazz masters — and then there is that mysterious and sleek chart Gil wrote for Thornhill in 1947. That’s just like the Miles Davis discography: There are all those awesome ‘50s and ‘60s jazz LPs from everyone else, and then there’s the luminous Miles collection. Miles told people what to do — not enough to impede their creativity, but enough to ensure there was sleek within the burble.

As much as he understood harmony, Miles does not always play that harmony when he is improvising on trumpet. His solo pitches can often operate at some esoteric remove. Miles is really like Charlie Parker. Yes, Bird played the changes, obviously. But there’s also some kind of private intellect and private folklore that sorts the discourse of his alto solos. No one has ever said what that is, and that goes doubly true of Miles. In terms of melodic and harmonic content (not rhythm) one can basically explain what takes place in Sonny Stitt or Clifford Brown solo. You can’t explain it in the same way for Bird or Miles, for we simply lack the grammar.1

Tadd Dameron was precise and generous, and deserves major credit for codifying the basic language of II/Vs, releasing an all-purpose system that fit any Broadway standard and most other conventional jazz. The whole scene looked up to Dameron, and one of Miles’s earliest compositions, “Half Nelson,” is based on the chord progression of Dameron’s “Lady Bird,” recorded on Miles’s first date in 1947 with Bird on tenor.

What the hell is the first phrase of “Half Nelson?” You certainly can’t harmonize it with Dameron block chords! The rest of the melody is normal bop burble, but only Miles could have thought of that sleek first phrase. That opening phrase reminds me more of Ornette Coleman than anybody else — although some of Bird’s tunes like “Ah-Leu-Cha” (later played by Miles with Coltrane) also feature this kind of diatonic twilight. As it shook out, Miles more or less gave up trying to write it down. He would let other people dream up the charts, and then he would supply in-the-moment mystery as star bandleader and trumpet soloist.

Miles studied Bird up close before roaming the workshops of New York City. The seminal 1949 sessions on 78 now collected as The Birth of the Cool are influenced by Claude Thornhill and Lennie Tristano (Lee Konitz is the ambassador from the Tristano camp), with Gil Evans, Gerry Mulligan, and John Lewis as further important compositional voices.

During the 10-inch era from 1951 through 1954 Miles recorded for Prestige and Blue Note. It’s all a bit bluesier and tougher, which in a way makes it a shade less distinctive than The Birth of the Cool. When there are several horns in the mix there’s a lot of burble, as in a band version of Bud Powell’s “Tempus Fugit” or the truly surprising John Lewis piece “Morpheus.” There is a bit of high-level small group music with Sonny Rollins and Jackie McLean including “Dig,” a few blues, and lovely Miles melodic statements on standards and ballads such as “It Was Only a Paper Moon” and “My Old Flame.”

Miles’s heroes included Dizzy Gillespie and Billie Holiday, and a burnished synthesis of these two is presented on the version of Gillespie’s theme song “I Waited for You” for Blue Note in 1953. Gil Coggins supplies a gently burbling piano part full of Dameron chords as Miles explains matters of the heart (on open horn, the mute was still to come).

In 1954 it all starts to focus. The piano players are important, especially esoteric Thelonious Monk and bluesy Horace Silver. There are nine tracks of Miles in quartet with Silver, Percy Heath, and Art Blakey in March 1954 spread over Blue Note and Prestige: “Four,” “Old Devil Moon,” “Blue Haze,” “The Leap,” “Lazy Susan,” “Weirdo,” “Take Off,” “Well, You Needn’t,” and “It Never Entered My Mind.” The last is a ballad with the soon-to-be signature sound of harmon mute. Taken as a set, these are the best Miles Davis quartet sides. The rhythm section is more interactive than before, and Miles gleefully rides the wave of Silver’s busy comping, Heath’s firm stroke, and Blakey’s enthusiastic fills. For me, Silver’s best piano playing was early in his timeline: Every circa-1954 Silver piano solo anywhere is gem, with phrases that alternate tight bop burble and sleek blues truth.

A month earlier, in February 1954, Blakey had led the canonical A Night at Birdland with Clifford Brown, Lou Donaldson, Silver, and Curley Russell; at the end of the year Silver and Blakey would establish the major beachhead of hard bop, the Jazz Messengers. Hard bop was a wholesale agreement by that community to make bebop burble a bit more funky and sleek with an infusion of blues and gospel. Miles Davis didn’t stay in that Jazz Messengers/hard bop groove, but he was one of the architects, especially with “Walkin,’” a long blues in F recorded in April 1954. It turned out that letting the rhythm section come to the fore was the answer, and the groove Heath and Kenny Clake set up for “Walkin’” powers the first of many Miles tracks studied by most important bassists and drummers to follow.

Percy and Klook did it again for another long Miles Davis blues in F, “Bags’ Groove” with Milt Jackson and Thelonious Monk on Christmas Eve 1954.

Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie recorded with Monk, and the result was not a showcase for Monk. Indeed, one is left with the impression that Bird and Diz liked the radical ideas of the pianist but didn’t know what to do with him as a player. Miles knew better, and built the ‘54 Christmas Eve sounds around the unique stylings of Thelonious Sphere Monk. Indeed, this is Monk’s best session as a sideman.

Miles has now evolved into a leader who makes choices based on who he hires, an approach that would not have occurred to Charlie Parker. On topic, and before we leave 1954 and enter the more familiar 12-inch era: In the middle of the year there was a delicious Davis set with Sonny Rollins, Silver, Heath, and Clarke. Three of Rollins’s best and most-played compositions make their debut here, “Oleo,” “Doxy,” and “Airegin.”

While much burble is present, the overall presentation is unfussy and sleek. Part of the way Miles makes that happen is simple enough: He makes the pianist lay out on the heads and in other key places. (For example, Monk didn’t always get to comp behind Miles.)

1955

New year, new format: Going forward, everything was a 12-inch release. Miles’s image gets a makeover with the sexy cover photo adorning The Musings of Miles, marking the ascent of Miles as celebrity not just in jazz but the culture at large. Billy Hart told me that as soon at this album came out, he bought a jacket and a cap just like the ones Miles wore in this photo. Billy would put the gear on and pretend to be a trumpet player, fingering an imaginary instrument while looking in the mirror.

Miles has found two of his most important collaborators, Red Garland and Philly Joe Jones. Everyone sounds pretty good but perhaps there is too much burble and not enough sleek. It’s easy enough to blame some of the problem on Oscar Pettiford, who is not quite in sync with the aesthetic.2 There’s a nice moment in “I Didn’t” (based on Monk’s “Well You Needn’t”) where Miles and Philly Joe blast out a particular call that would feature in the rest of Miles’s acoustic bands.

The Musings of Miles was recorded in June 1955, and a month later there was an odd session of fussy ballads on “full burble” setting with Britt Woodman, Teddy Charles, Charles Mingus, and Elvin Jones. (Miles dismissed this mostly Teddy Charles-arranged LP in his autobiography.) At the end of July, Miles played an important gig at Newport with Thelonious Monk, the only time Miles is heard on “‘Round Midnight” with composer’s own changes. This Newport performance was noted triumph and George Avakian signed Miles to a contract with Columbia for an album to be called ‘Round About Midnight.

For the rest of ‘55 and through ‘56 the discography is packed with Miles running through sessions for Prestige to fill out his contract with Bob Weinstock while already recording for Avakian a bit on the side.

I missed Miles Davis and Milt Jackson Quintet/Sextet entirely until just last month when listening to various things in anticipation of writing this post. Shame on me, for it’s a killer record! Miles plays great and also brings out the best in his collaborators Jackson, Jackie McLean, Ray Bryant, Percy Heath, and Art Taylor. Four long swinging tracks; the two with McLean are McLean’s own melodies. (This was an important record for McLean for he was not yet well-known.) Bryant might not quite be the outrageous stylist of Monk or Horace Silver, but Miles uses Bryant’s Parker-esque blues “Changes” and the pianist delivers throughout the LP. The familiar version of McLean’s “Dr. Jackle” is on Milestones, but this earlier version also has wonderful qualities. It’s almost comic how many blues in F are on Miles Davis records of this era. “Dr. Jackle,” “Changes,” “Bags’ Groove,” “Walkin,’” “Weirdo” — they are all great. Miles also programs “Bitty Ditty” by Thad Jones, which has a burbling form that Miles infuses with sleek.

By fall 1955 Miles has his first great working band with John Coltrane, Red Garland, Paul Chambers, and Philly Joe Jones. They recorded a few tunes for Columbia in October; the only one to eventually go on ‘Round About Midnight a year and a half later is “Ah-leu-cha,” which links Miles directly to his mentor Charlie Parker. The A section is both contrapuntal and rather modal sounding in straight G minor, although the A section blowing is like “Honeysuckle Rose” or “Scrapple From the Apple.” Miles loved Philly Joe Jones, as well he should, and inserted a lot of drum breaks into “Ah-leu-cha” not present in Parker’s original. The rhythm section is swinging, Paul Chambers has a forward lean, the band will settle in as they keep playing together. It’s only been 10 months since Miles used Percy Heath and Kenny Clarke, but they already seem like a distant memory when listening to P.C. and Philly Joe. John Coltrane makes a very strong impression. As busy as Coltrane plays, he is always completely relaxed on a Miles Davis record. This is exactly what Miles wanted: He wanted to play pretty and relatively slow and have the contrasting saxophonist play hard and relatively fast. But Coltrane was also instinctively sleek, although it was a country kind of sleek. Listen to Coltrane talk in his audio interviews: slow, thoughtful, a bit of a drawl — a perfect underpinning for an explosively virtuosic and exploratory musician.

Red Garland was an excellent bebop piano player, but Miles made him study Ahmad Jamal. While Jamal was the height of sleek, Jamal had almost no burble. Garland could play those slick Jamal voicings and arrangements but then cut all that with some burning bebop. In the end, to play with Miles Davis, you absolutely had to be in the lineage of the ultimate authority, Charlie Parker.

The direct and intense vibe of “Ah-leu-cha” is not apparent when recording for Bob Weinstock and Prestige three weeks later, but Miles may not have had too much to do with the presentation. For some reason the tracklist begins with one of the most unfocused tracks from the first great quintet, “Just Squeeze Me.” It’s basically fine but this is a Duke Ellington tune, after all! (The Ellington original with Ray Nance has a lot more character.) Then the ballad “There Is No Greater Love” is also neither here nor there. Things get more provocative on the second side with clever arrangement ideas in “The Theme” and the first recording of the Benny Golson classic, “Stablemates.” As is standard practice by this point, Miles has Garland lay out on the melody, and the effect is immediately more sleek than most hard bop versions of “Stablemates.” Thanks to Golson’s angular intervals, the melody of “Stablemates” almost sounds like later Miles and Wayne Shorter on something like “Dolores.”

I wouldn’t be surprised if someone buying this album at the time of release would have thought, “Huh, ‘Walkin’’ and ‘Bags’ Groove’ were better than this sleepy new platter. And who is this John Coltrane guy?” As we now know, this ensemble was just getting started. Miles is listening to how everyone sounds and considering what to do.

1956

In March 1956, Miles brought Sonny Rollins, Tommy Flanagan, Paul Chambers, and Art Taylor into the studio for three tunes specifically to fill out Collector’s Items. (The first side were 1953 tracks with Rollins, Bird on tenor, and smoking Philly Joe Jones.) I never listened to March ‘56 much, although Rollins plays a notably awesome solo on the blues “No Line.” Miles and Sonny were great together, but the best meeting of them in the studio remains 1954 with Horace, Percy, and Klook.

The rest of ‘56 was devoted to the first great quintet and their supremely satisfying five-album discography. The Prestige LPs Cookin’, Relaxin’, Steamin’ and Workin’ were recorded either May 11 (twelve substantial tracks) or October 26 (13 substantial tracks). Over at Columbia, one track, “Ah-leu-cha,” was already in the can for ‘Round About Midnight, and the rest of the album was completed on either June 5 or September 10. There is an argument for going in strict chronological order, especially as the band does seem to get a bit better over time. (They were working a lot.) However, I’m swayed by the argument that these five core texts of jazz were appreciated and digested by the community album in order of release. Those that play straight ahead jazz know these records, they are the bible, and that’s been true since 1957 when 'Round About Midnight was released.

After all these years I am still skeptical about this reharmonization of “‘Round Midnight,” which is apparently by Gil Evans. As is well known, Miles didn’t seem to care too much about the integrity of the source material. He listened to make sure the vibe was right and whether it was swinging. He was a supreme master of sleek harmony but didn’t stop to consider any kind of birds-eye compositional plan, and thus we have the casual and somewhat inconsiderate facelifts of “Well You Needn’t,” “When Lights Are Low,” “In Your Own Sweet Way,” and so forth. The reharmonization of “‘Round Midnight” is in a different category, it is far more deliberate. In the realm of total speculation: Miles knew that people were talking about his “‘Round Midnight” with Monk on piano at Newport, and thus he hired Gil Evans to do something different than the composer. It’s a great track, with perfect statements from both Miles and Trane. But I just don’t know about that reharm with an opening B-flat under E-flat minor and that F7 to E major7 in bar four. Wasn’t Monk’s original already perfect and also perfectly surprising? Well. Who am I to question Miles Davis and Gil Evans…

The rest of the album is miraculous, especially “Bye Bye Blackbird” and “All of You,” boasting two of Red Garland’s finest solos, while the ominous pedal point and minor key of “Dear Old Stockholm” foreshadow modal jazz. These three pieces would become common currency for jazz musicians because of Miles Davis’s quintet. Indeed, most things recorded by the quintet in 1956 would go into the big book of common practice jazz tunes.

It was a smart move on Bob Weinstock’s part to name the four albums Cookin’, Relaxin’, Workin’, and Steamin’. Perfect.

I know Cookin’ best, for I somehow had the vinyl very young. I admit that nostalgia is a factor, but if I had to pick just one, it would still be Cookin’. Perhaps Weinstock agreed, for he put it out first, going neck and neck with ‘Round About Midnight.3 It is all from the final session of the band in October. The first side is particularly amazing: epic “My Funny Valentine” and incredibly swinging “Blues by Five.”

The bulk of Relaxin’ feature October tracks filled out with “It Could Happen to You” and “Woody ‘n’ You” from the earlier session in May. Part of the allure is the studio banter that Weinstock included on first release.

“I’ll play it and tell you what it is later.”

“Block chords, Red.”

“Could I have the beer opener?”

The fan favorite may be “If I Were a Bell,” and this kind of medium-up swing helps define the unique romance of the first great quintet. Red Garland’s style works within as narrowly defined parameters as Thelonious Monk or Horace Silver: the upbeats happen just so, and — on the topic of “If I Were a Bell!” — the overtone series heard in any good bells give Garland’s crunchy bell-like block chords their unique resonance. Even more than “If I Were a Bell” I personally dig “If I Could Write a Book”: pure levitation. (In fact I have never heard another version of this lesser Rodgers and Hart tune that is anywhere near as good.) “Oleo” has a tricky arrangement that would stay in the band book and keep developing for years. Everyone played rhythm changes, but the Miles Davis versions of rhythm changes always had a bit less burble. For his piano solo, Garland brings the sleek by playing low in register a la Tristano. 4

Both Workin’ and Steamin’ are all May with one track from October on each. (“Half Nelson” here, “Well You Needn’t” on Steamin’.) Garland’s broken chord accompaniment on “It Never Entered My Mind” is purely European in affect, almost like Schubert, and Miles plays particularly well on “Four.” There are two short sign-offs of “The Theme” to close each side. Garland’s trio version of "Ahmad's Blues" offers an interesting comparison with the Jamal original, and “Half Nelson” is graced with a new shout chorus before the outstanding trades with Philly Joe.

Probably Steamin’ is the least of the four, not that it isn’t very good. The drum solo from Philly Joe on “Salt Peanuts” is a highlight. Bob Weinstock comes in for his share of criticism, especially from the musicians, who thought Weinstock could take advantage. However Weinstock certainly oversaw some of the greatest jazz ever recorded, and in terms of knowing how to listen to the music, one could make a pretty good argument that the four Cookin’, Relaxin’, Workin’ and Steamin’ proceed from best to lesser, with all four albums nonetheless having appropriate balance.

Before we leave 1956, a quick mention of a three movement suite by John Lewis called “Three Little Feelings” for brass ensemble, Milt Hinton, and Osie Johnson. Miles is the featured soloist on the first two movements, and he recorded it just a week before the October quintet session for Weinstock. ( J.J. Johnson is the soloist during the third movement.)

Gunther Schuller named the genre “Third Stream” and, at least in the beginning, there was tremendous energy around this idea of combining jazz and classical music. Schuller produced this record, which includes one of Schuller’s best pieces, Symphony For Brass And Percussion, Op. 16., and Schuller was also almost certainly the commissioner of the pieces by John Lewis, J.J. Johnson, and Jimmy Giuffre. It all comes out of the later experimental side of the late ‘40s ensembles: Claude Thornhill, George Russell’s charts for Dizzy Gillespie, and Miles’s own Birth of the Cool. Miles’s most famous collaborator in this idiom was Gil Evans, and starting next year they will cement their legacy together.

Of the John Lewis formal works I’ve heard, “Three Little Feelings” is one of the best, and overall I rank it with the Miles Davis/Gil Evans collaborations to come.

There’s no weight of thought when Miles Davis plays the trumpet. It exists: it is very strong: it is also just there. Each moment is exactly that moment. Perhaps more than any other soloist in history, Miles is a chemical agent that instantly transforms the surrounding sounds.

1957

In the liner notes to Miles Ahead: Miles Davis + 19, producer George Avakian credits both 1949’s The Birth of the Cool (just recently issued on LP by Capitol for the first time) and the previous year’s Music for Brass as inspirations for the first of three epochal late-’50s collaborations with Gil Evans. Miles Ahead made profound impression on Herbie Hancock, who modeled his sextet on the flute-heavy sounds of Miles Davis + 19, starting with Speak Like a Child and continuing through the Mwandishi years.

I cede the floor to Vinnie Sperrazza, who investigated the references to Miles Ahead track by track.

Miles fired Coltrane for much of 1957, which gave the saxophonist a chance to not just quit drinking and doing drugs, but also to work under the leadership of Thelonious Monk. One gets the sense that Monk, not Miles, was the person to show Trane how to treat music a bit more systemically.

Working with Monk brought me close to a musical architect of the highest order. I felt I learned from him in every way—through the senses, theoretically, technically. I would talk to Monk about musical problems, and he would sit at the piano and show me the answers just by playing them. I could watch him play and find out the things I wanted to know. Also, I could see a lot of things that I didn’t know about at all. (from “Coltrane on Coltrane” as told to Don DeMicheal, 1960)

Both Miles and Trane were devout students. They looked up to their heroes, played with their heroes, and absorbed every interaction. They also had big music collections, read journals, and went to both movies and the library.

They were almost the same age — again, this is their shared centennial year — but Coltrane was far more casual than Miles until his Monk year of 1957. Though he was not prone to sharing secrets, Miles was pretty organized when working out how to look and sound good while bringing out the best in his colleagues. During all the time Miles was putting that together, Trane just strapped on the tenor and played. He was good for Dizzy Gillespie in 1949-51, Earl Bostic in ‘52, and Johnny Hodges in ‘54, all the while playing in any kind of R ‘n B bar band. After Miles exposed Coltrane to the wider New York jazz community, Trane started appearing on many casual dates as a sideman. His raw virtuosity is exciting and undeniable on ‘56 albums with Elmo Hope, Sonny Rollins, and Tadd Dameron, and his contacts only spread out from there; in ‘57 there were LPs supporting Sonny Clark, Art Blakey, Mal Waldron, and Oscar Pettiford. I suspect he tried his best to learn from any situation, but Coltrane did not automatically shape the discourse of any of that music in the manner that Miles or Monk sought from the beginning.

Coltrane’s first two albums as a leader for Prestige in 1957 are in line with whatever he was doing as a sideman. It’s not tentative, but it is not a grand reveal, either. His third album Blue Train for Blue Note in 1957 is far more ambitious, confirming that the broad outline of his career as a leader is easy enough to sort by label: There’s a whole bunch of casual tracks for Prestige 1957/58, a nerdy one-off for Blue Note in 1957, then a bright new sound for Atlantic 1959-60. From 1961 to the end he was recording imperishable masterpieces for the new arrival Impulse!

It is just a decade’s worth of material, 1957-1967, but nobody made more out a decade than John Coltrane.

The 6-CD box set of the 11 Prestige LPs is called Fearless Leader. While Trane obviously was a fearless leader, his early work for Prestige should actually be called Community Music. Jazz was at a peak, and Coltrane was fitting in with a crowd. He is not bringing hard original compositions to these Prestige record dates, he is treating the occasions mostly as blowing sessions with peers. On many occasions Coltrane is sharing leader credit, and despite the prospect of disagreement, nothing ever seems competitive. Rather, Trane shows up and does his job with a minimum of fuss. Nobody else has to change the way they play when standing next to Coltrane. (Again, that is different than Miles. People played different standing next to Miles.)

Of the 11 Coltrane-led Prestige albums, only the first three were issued in a timely manner, while the rest came out over the years as Trane moved on to other things. This was the Bob Weinstock style: treat sessions like gigs and record a lot. Weinstock tracked so much Gene Ammons that the Ammons output from the label continued unimpeded whenever Ammons went to prison.

It is not clear how much oversight Coltrane had on issues from the ‘57/’58 Prestige sessions. The LP industry was brand new, and the recording artists were hardly auteurs. Sequence was decided by the producer after the session, and Weinstock’s shop was particularly casual, with some of the later Prestige Coltrane records “from the vault” having a decidedly hodgepodge effect. Still, I speculate that Trane did have a general plan in mind for those first three nicely contained albums that came out when Coltrane was under contract: Coltrane, John Coltrane with the Red Garland Trio (AKA Traneing In) and Soultrane. These three are covered in this quick overview, but the rest of the Prestige music is also eminently worthy. Notable Prestige tracks not from those three albums include “I Love You,” trio with Earl May and Art Taylor, where Coltrane’s rhapsodic flurries complete the harmony without piano; one of the first recordings of “Invitation” with a surprisingly interactive bass part from Paul Chambers that foreshadows Jimmy Garrison; scalding “Lover” and “Lover Come Back to Me,” both with Donald Byrd and Louis Hayes; the first McCoy Tyner composition on record, “The Believer”; and the bewildering tenor solo on “Sweet Sapphire Blues,” which surely boasts the most outrageous and extensive conventional double-time jazz that has ever been captured in the studio, a pure wall of sound that goes on and on.

Coltrane was friendly to the scene and liked giving lesser known talents a chance. His debut album Coltrane features Philadelphia representatives composer Cal Massey, trumpeter Johnnie Splawn, and Tootie Heath, who managed the feat of drumming on the first albums of Coltrane and Nina Simone in the same year. Splawn is part of an intriguing bunch that are best-known today as a credit on single Trane album or two — others include Donald Garrett, Dewey Johnson, and Joe Brazil — and bari saxophonist Sahib Shihab is something of a lesser-known as well. Red Garland and Paul Chambers are there, as is house Prestige pianist Mal Waldron on the second side.

Considering both the Miles quintet and the future Trane to come, the first Coltrane LP is reasonably uneventful, although the presence of Massey’s “exotic” and nearly modal “Bakai” and the minor pentatonic line of Trane’s own “Chonic Blues” foreshadow the future. The best track is the ballad “Violets for Your Furs.” For all his technical mastery, Coltrane could really play the hell out of a straight standard ballad.

Things settle into more of a groove on With the Red Garland Trio completed by Paul Chambers and Art Taylor, the ace rhythm section most associated with Coltrane and the Prestige years. (Garland also recorded several great trio albums with Chambers and Taylor.) “Traneing In” is a blues with bridge, a form that dates to Lester Young’s “D.B. Blues” twelve years earlier. Trane is quite monstrously awesome on “Traneing In,” and he found this uncommon structure intriguing enough to bring it back on tour in 1962. Chambers comes to the fore, with a mysterious intro to “Slow Dance” and a doubled melody on “Bass Blues.” Brisk tempos are everywhere on the Prestige Trane collection, and the LP concludes with a very fast “Soft Lights and Sweet Music.” These days I can hear how uncomfortable everyone but Trane is all the way upstairs; it would have been interesting to hear the saxist play one of these peak velocity exercises with Max Roach. (Louis Hayes is more born to this particular mission than Art Taylor; Hayes effortlessly powers the uptempo Coltrane Prestige sides “Lover” and “Lover Come Back to Me.”)

While Coltrane understood bebop, he didn’t understand it as well as Bird, Miles, or Sonny Rollins. Trane played the changes too literally, too much like merely arpeggiating the Tadd Dameron chords on the page. Of course, he loved Tadd Dameron, and he understood Tadd Dameron. Dameron is the underpinning. But that mysterious place outside of the changes is the next level. Bird, Miles, and Rollins had their ways with that, as did the white crew of Lennie Tristano, Lee Konitz, and Warne Marsh.

Dameron and Coltrane recorded together in 1955’s Mating Call. Mating Call is burble. Very good burble! But it could use a bit more sleek. Sleek is dissonant Red Garland block chords, sleek is the blues, sleek is Monk avant-garde or even Tristano avant-garde. The one cat really dealing with sleek on Mating Call is wonderful Philly Joe Jones. What would Mating Call have sounded like with Bird, Miles, Rollins, or Konitz in place of Trane? 5

Both Miles and Trane were expert students, but they were also experts at honoring themselves. They knew what the were naturally good at and kept doubling down. Miles was something of a minimalist, while Coltrane was a maximalist. The koan “less is more” has little place in the Coltrane style, although to the master’s credit he never overplays, either. Despite the virtuoso speed, Trane always sounds like a rapturous singer.

Rather than stepping back, Trane forced his virtuosity through to the other side of the equation, using pure speed and flamboyantly esoteric progressions on his way to engendering both bebop mystery and sleek.

It was Miles who made me want to be a much better musician. He gave me some of the most listenable moments I’ve had in music, and he also gave me an appreciation for simplicity. He influenced me quite a bit in music in every way. I used to want to play tenor the way he played trumpet when I used to listen to his records. But when I joined him I realized I could never play like that, and I think that’s what made me go the opposite way. — from “Conversations with Coltrane” by Val Wilmer in Jazz Journal

If there is enough speed on the ball, then bebop “hooks and ladders” can be more safely ignored. I believe Thelonious Monk was a huge influence, for Monk was interested in fast chains of dominants or unrelated chords. On any live “Rhythm-a-ning,” Monk will play a circular chain of dominants, and plenty of Monk tunes have esoteric bass motion foreign to Dameron. Miles himself considered this topic when repeatedly programming Monk’s “Well You Needn’t,” which has disjunct harmonies that can be played in a literal fashion with a certain amount of hipness. There was something there, but what was it?

Coltrane was working on an answer. The most famous set of “Coltrane changes” is “Giant Steps,” which starts with the classic “far reaching” turnaround that ends Dameron’s “Lady Bird.”6 However the extended “unresolved” nature of the tonic is like Monk’s “Bye-Ya” or “Epistrophy,” and the bald half notes in an angular line is also like Monk. Dameron + Monk = “Coltrane changes.” 7

Blue Train does not quite have classic “Coltrane changes” yet, but both “Moment’s Notice” and “Lazy Bird” are undoubtedly hypercomplex. Some believe the titles were mistakenly reversed, for the melody of what we know as “Moment’s Notice” shares a certain profile with Dameron’s “Lady Bird.” It’s fair to say that only Trane has full measure of these two new hard burbling tunes. Another B-flat blues with a bridge, “Locomotion” (it is less than a month after “Traneing In”) is not that easy for the band, either.

The sleek is represented by the title country blues, which in Miles Davis-esque fashion brings out the best in the all-stars Lee Morgan, Curtis Fuller, Kenny Drew, Paul Chambers, and Philly Joe Jones.

Coltrane’s course was clear: How was he going to balance the innovative burble of brand-new “Coltrane changes” with his innate countrified sleek?

At the end of 1957, Miles Davis toured France, playing with René Urtreger and improvising the soundtrack to the Louis Malle film Ascenseur pour l’échafaud with a nice band that included Urtreger, Barney Wilen, Pierre Michelot, and Kenny Clarke. The slower cues for the film with vulnerable trumpet over dry/sad piano chords are perfect Miles Davis noir.

1958

When Coltrane rejoined Miles, there was another saxophonist in the band, alto genius Cannonball Adderley. Adderley had all the chops and the bebop know-how but also a gregarious kind of preach. This cat always sounded like the blues.

Miles accepted his fate and curated a six-tune album with four of the tracks being blues. In a very real sense, Milestones is as good as it gets for the bebop blues. Miles gathers his family together in the compositional credits: Dizzy, John Lewis, Jackie McLean, Monk; the trumpeter is also the one to play crunchy piano chords on “Sid’s Ahead.”

“Straight, No Chaser” is it. Trane’s tenor solo plus Red, P.C., and Philly Joe on “Chaser” is perhaps the most swinging/searching thing in the whole discography. It’s crazy. It’s almost like there will be nothing left to discover…

…Except, of course, there’s an escape clause presented by the title track “Milestones,” where the soloists leave conventional tension and release and blow on scales. Modal jazz had been brewing for a while, but here at last was something truly charismatic and user-friendly. They all play on it comfortably with the exception of Red Garland, who only comps the material of the head and doesn’t solo. (Garland would never do anything with modal music.) There’s a lot of latin music heritage in modal jazz, and Chambers plays a beautiful Afro-Cuban bass part on the bridge.

The piano and drum chairs fluctuate for a year as the three horns and Paul Chambers stay consistent. Milestones with Red Garland and Philly Joe Jones is March ‘58. Bill Evans and Jimmy Cobb come in circa April and play a whole slew of gigs and do a bit of recording. Wynton Kelly replaces Evans late November. Evans returns for Kind of Blue in March ‘59, although Kelly plays on “Freddie Freeloader.”

Miles needed someone who could adapt to the modal concept, and he found that perfect person in Bill Evans. The first recording of Miles and Bill together was on May 1958 alongside Cannonball Adderley, John Coltrane, Paul Chambers, and Jimmy Cobb. In terms showing the way forward with modal/scalar thinking within common-practice jazz, “On Green Dolphin St.” and “Stella By Starlight” were just as important as “So What” from a year later. Both tunes were sourced from Hollywood movies released in the previous decade: Green Dolphin Street (1947) was scored by Bronislau Kaper, The Uninvited (1944, with “Stella” over the main title) by Victor Young. Both also featured notable structural factors that promoted scalar theory. “On Green Dolphin St.” offers a chromatic decent over a pedal point: each station along the way requires a new scale. The long through-composed form of “Stella by Starlight” is hard to follow by ear, and foreshadows future jazz compositions by someone like Wayne Shorter, where complex chords sit next to each other without implying a clear tonic. I suspect the harmonizations of both standards are authored by Bill Evans, although Evans’s “Stella” seems to have been influenced by the version by Chet Baker and Russ Freeman in 1954. (The Ahmad Jamal “On Green Dolphin St.” is probably why Miles played the tune, but Jamal’s harmonization is quite different.) In short order, both standards were embraced by jazzers everywhere, along with a scalar approach to harmony.

This dynamics of this music are quite different than the fierce set on Milestones. In time modal jazz would mean Coltrane intensity, but for these two standards and the upcoming Kind of Blue, the scales were light-footed and impressionistic, mainly thanks to a poet who conjured something non-percussive out of the piano. Once again, Miles changed the sound of his band based on a key sideman.

Miles Davis’s rejected the minstrel tradition wholesale. At the time it was a big deal when he didn’t smile. He even turned his back on the audience! His autobiography goes into this topic in some detail. It’s very important.

I’ve seen Porgy and Bess at the Met, and I thought it was pretty damn minstrel. Beautiful music, but bad politics. One can’t really blame George Gershwin, it was what it was. The fact that Gershwin demanded an all-black cast says a great deal of where America was at the time of the work’s premiere in 1935. 8

However, Miles liked the score, and so did Gil Evans. Together they go deep into the music and pull out amazing and unexpected emotions and effects. The Miles and Gil Porgy and Bess is a good one to listen to for the semiquincentennial. Progress is possible.

I’d like to see Porgy and Bess again…Thar’s good black artistic gold in them stereotypes, so instead of being thrown off by the crap it’s best to seek it out, learn from it, and transcend it….Because, like it or not, it is the vitality of Afro-American artistic cultural style which lends such work its interest and endurance. — Ralph Ellison to Romare Bearden in a 1986 letter

The last of the Prestige Trane albums under consideration here — again, there are many more — is Soultrane, which for my money is the best ‘50’s Trane album as a leader (which means I’m giving it the nod over Blue Train and Giant Steps). Red Garland, Paul Chambers, and Art Taylor were really great, and they evolved into a certain grand accompaniment for the saxophonist. The trio is bright and dark at the same time, an even keel of swing. Tadd Dameron looms large; the first tune is Dameron’s “Good Bait,” and the second is Billy Eckstine’s “I Want to Talk About You,” which was a Dameron arrangement. I speculate that the triplets in Eckstine’s 1944 melody were an influence on Trane’s own everyday convoluted phrasing. Trane would go on to play “I Want to Talk About You” a lot more in the 1960s.

The second side has one of Coltrane’s best medium straight-ahead swinging standards, “You Say You Care,” alongside a ballad sourced from the community, Fred Lacey’s “Theme for Ernie.” The closer is the amusing “Russian Lullaby.” Coltrane joked to Weinstock that the name of this uptempo flag-waver was “Rushin’ Lullaby,” but that’s not the only comedy: Garland’s portentous intro is straight out of a Looney Tunes cartoon.

1959

If Milestones was the final chapter on a certain bebop blues tradition, then Kind of Blue begins the modal journey, especially on the opening “So What.” The whole album has some of Miles’s greatest solos, pure melody caught on the wing. It is Bill Evans’s album as much as it is Miles’s, but Wynton Kelly steps in on “Freddie Freeloader” to deliver a flawless sermon. The title named a real person, and according to Billy Hart it is Freddie Freeloader himself who yells very loudly in the middle of a pregnant pause on the 1964 Miles Davis “Stella by Starlight” at Lincoln Center with George Coleman and Herbie Hancock.

Now signed to Atlantic, Coltrane gave up on adding other horns to his new hypercomplex progressions in the manner of Blue Train and documented “Giant Steps” and “Countdown” with a quartet. Instead of Red Garland, the pianists on Blue Train and Giant Steps are Kenny Drew and Tommy Flanagan; Trane may have felt that Red was not up to the challenge. A first attempt at “Giant Steps” with Cedar Walton on piano occurred a couple months earlier.

This post began with the declaration that “musicians like burble, fans like sleek.” The musicians hungrily fell upon “Giant Steps” as if this was what they always wanted. Hod O’Brien was there at the time, and writes in Have Piano…Will Swing! that “Giant Steps” was suddenly featured in all the New York jam sessions. The great Al Cohn was a bit skeptical, and when people called “Giant Steps,” Cohn would reply, “Sure, but I have my own changes.”

Kind of Blue and Giant Steps, recorded nearly simultaneously: One is the height of sleek, one is the height of burble. However, there is one track on Giant Steps that exhibits a new synthesis, the gorgeous ballad “Naima.” This elegant set of suspended chords would directly inspire a whole generation of ‘60s jazz composers including Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Joe Henderson, Bobby Hutcherson, and Woody Shaw.

Most of Giant Steps was recorded in May with Flanagan, Chambers, and Taylor, with “Naima” being the lone track from later sessions in November and December with Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers, and Jimmy Cobb. A parallel situation exists on Coltrane Jazz, which is mostly the November/December Kelly quartet with the exception of one tune, “Village Blues,” being from late 1960 and the new band of McCoy Tyner, Steve Davis, and Elvin Jones.

All of Coltrane Jazz is pretty great, but “Village Blues” is clearly the future. More on that new sound next year. And while Wynton Kelly is typically wonderful throughout the rest of Coltrane Jazz, I also miss Red Garland’s immutable, bell-like comping. Kelly is swinging, tasteful, and interactive. Garland was more rigorous and self-same, foreshadowing the texture that McCoy Tyner would give the Coltrane quartet in the next decade. It helped when the comping was utterly sleek, for Coltrane had so much burble on his own.

1960

Sketches of Spain was recorded at the end of 1959 and the top of 1960. The essential track is “Saeta,” which has a kind of Charles Ives marching band collage effect, with processional drums, trumpet choir, and Miles himself mourning humanity.

I like the rest of the album also, but my current ruling is that leaving out jazz drums was a mistake. On Miles Ahead and Porgy and Bess, Art Taylor, Philly Joe Jones, and Jimmy Cobb keep some kind of order and frankly smooth out the mistakes made by the band reading challenging Gil Evans orchestrations.

It may also be a bit on the nose to do a whole album of Spanish music. On a related topic, Coltrane’s Olé and Africa/Brass are also a bit on the nose. That said, all these albums needed to be done, they are still wonderful experiments and key documents of the moment when jazz was embracing what would later be called “world music.” 9

Miles and Coltrane toured Europe together in spring of 1960. Almost every gig was recorded, and the outrageous tenor solos show Trane pulling far ahead of the band. This would be more or less the end of the great five-year partnership, although Trane peeked his head into a Miles studio session in 1961 to cut poor Hank Mobley on “Someday My Prince Will Come.” Trane isn’t trying to be competitive, it just is what it is. 10

Over the course of three days in October 1960, Coltrane recorded a tremendous amount of material with his new band of McCoy Tyner, Steve Davis, and Elvin Jones. This is a parallel situation to the Miles Davis Prestige Cookin’/Relaxin’/Workin’/Steamin’ sessions, where fresh faces got the bit between their teeth and almost every take in the studio would be first releasable and then influential. In addition to more than three full albums of Coltrane sourced from October 1960, there are also two lovely trio tracks from McCoy Tyner, “Lazy Bird” and “In Your Own Sweet Way,” eventually collected on the trope-namer 1976 anthology of the big four, Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, Keith Jarrett, McCoy Tyner.

The title track of My Favorite Things was a hit, probably because it was so different and fresh: A modal drone, a waltz, a wailing soprano saxophone. This was an early shot in the “peace and love” genre that would soon become a dominant force in commercial pop and rock. Incredibly, the label even got a hit single out of the long track: the 45 with “My Favorite Things pt. 1” and “My Favorite Things pt. 2” was found in any 1961 jukebox.

As with Kind of Blue, My Favorite Things is utterly sleek and a classic gateway album for the casual fan. The fans like modal jazz. Modal jazz is sleek.

For the first time, the rhythm section is younger than Trane, and they are eagerly bringing their own outstanding innovations to the table. 1960’s Trane is unthinkable without chiming McCoy Tyner and polyrhythmic Elvin Jones; the bassists were great too, with Jimmy Garrison coming in to complete the perfect equation in 1961. In October 1960 it is the estimable and hard-swinging Steve Davis. Davis is also part of Coltrane’s “community music” aesthetic, for the bassist was Tyner’s brother-in-law back in Philadelphia.

In addition to his bandmates, Coltrane was influenced by the new breed of avant horn players: At this time it was Ornette Coleman, later it would be Albert Ayler. In mid-1960 Trane met Don Cherry in Atlantic studios for a Coleman-inspired date, The Avant-Garde — which is perhaps not a great record for Trane, who is still digesting in the material. While neither McCoy or Elvin naturally related to the concepts of so-called “free jazz,” the open-ended, modernist, and sleek feeling of both the pianist and the drummer allowed the saxophonist to access the Ornette-to-Ayler moment within standard forms. This approach would not have worked with Red Garland and Art Taylor. Trane needed McCoy and Elvin.

Miles recorded “Summertime” on Porgy and Bess, Trane includes it on My Favorite Things. Hard to choose! There’s also Duke Ellington’s stunning trio deconstruction of “Summertime” with Aaron Bell and Sam Woodyard a year later in 1961. Duke never said, but this truly avant-garde track might have been in reaction to Civil Rights unrest — or it might have been made in anger, a rejoinder to Gershwin’s continued eclipse of Ellington as the great American composer long after Gershwin was dead. The ending of this Ellington track is truly dire.

To say John Coltrane influenced future tenor players understates the matter. One of the key albums for all those later saxophonists was Coltrane’s Sound, especially “The Night Has a Thousand Eyes” and “Satellite.” Mark Turner told me that when students wanted to know how Coltrane played “out,” he told them to transcribe Trane on the pedal point sections of “The Night Has a Thousand Eyes.”

Here we have finally arrived at the endpoint of my artificial conceit of “burble and sleek.” Coltrane himself explained:

At the time I left Miles I was trying to add a lot of sequences to my solo work, putting chords to the things I was playing, and using things I could play a little more music on. It was before I formed my own group that I had the rhythm section playing these sequences forward, and I made Giant Steps with some other guys and carried the idea on into my band. But it was hard to make some things swing with the rhythm section playing these chords, and Miles advised me to abandon the idea of the rhythm section playing these sequences, and to do it only myself. — from “Conversations with Coltrane” by Val Wilmer in Jazz Journal

Miles, the king of sleek, told Coltrane, the king of burble, to keep his fast progressions on the horn but straighten out the rhythm section. It took him a minute, but then he got there: On “The Night Has a Thousand Eyes” Coltrane plays abstract Coltrane changes over a pedal point. That was it. That was the answer. The future was assured. 11

It must be said the 1960 rhythm section is also sounding far more relaxed than their forebears while playing literal Coltrane changes on “Satellite,” “26-2,” and “But Not For Me.” But this would essentially conclude that kind of preplanned oblique bass motion within the Coltrane quartet, although Coltrane changes in the bass do appear on the occasional later versions of “Body and Soul.” (The 1965 performance of “Body and Soul” in Seattle is essential.)

The general fans liked My Favorite Things, while the tenor players liked Coltrane’s Sound. However, my personal favorite from October 1960 is that direct and passionate statement of the truth, Coltrane Plays the Blues.

I proposed Porgy and Bess for a Miles semiquincentennial listen, and for Trane I propose Coltrane Plays the Blues. There’s nothing more American than the blues, and there’s also nothing more American than relentless expansion of a hallowed tradition (such as the blues).

The titles were undoubtedly casual, but they also speak to larger project: “Blues to Bechet” honors a revered forebear, “Blues to Elvin” honors a new creator, and “Blues to You” honors…

…well…

…I guess “Blues to You” honors all of us. Ain’t that democratic?

Thanks to Mark Stryker and Lewis Porter for help with this post.

Part one: The new book Speakeasies to Symphonies: The Jazz Genius of James P. Johnson by Scott E. Brown, and a reprint of the substantial interview of James P. Johnson by Tom Davin

Part two: Mike Lipskin on stride piano; two tracks from “The Beetle” and a session from Willie Gant; favorite tracks from a few other more famous names

Part three: A basic guide to the first two decades of James P. Johnson solo recordings, plus a couple of historical photos

Part four: In Search of “Carolina Shout”

Coda

Many of my otherwise talented jazz piano students are not skilled at reading sheet music on the grand staff. They can improvise on standards from a lead sheet, but they can’t sightread the original easy musical theatre scores. I frequently grumble to myself, “Chord symbols ruined everything!”

Back when the music was being created, just about every kind of ensemble played tunes and dances in the European idiom for all sorts of occasions. Opera overtures were important, as were light classics and “salon” piano pieces. A lot of this stuff has fallen out of fashion today, but at the time it was a form of popular music.

Depending on how many cartoons you watched as a kid, you may know more of these tunes than you realize.

Jelly Roll Morton said of hanging out in a St. Louis ragtime club around 1912:

So he decided to find out whether I could really read and play piano and he brought me different light operas like ‘’Humoresque,’‘ the overture from Martha, the “Miserere” from Il Trovatore and, of course, I knowed them all. Finally they brought me the Poet and the Peasant. It seems like in St. Louis, if you was able to play this piece correctly, you was really considered the tops. The man that brought it was the best musician in town and he hadn’t been able to master this piece. Well, I had played this thing in recitals for years…

James P. Johnson said of hanging out in Harlem in about 1914:

Ernest was a good classical pianist. Luckey [Roberts] used to ask him to play the William Tell Overture and the Light Cavalry Overture. These were considered tops in classical music amongst us…I did rag variations on William Tell Overture, Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite and even a “Russian Rag” based on Rachmaninoff’s “Prelude in C Sharp Minor”…

Count Basie also mentions the Poet and Peasant Overture, although in this case Basie was unable to deliver. It is 1936, and his brand new band has landed in Chicago.

I also must have known that I was really pulling out of Kansas City for good after being out there for nine fantastic years…We were supposed to be at the Grand Terrace to rehearse with the new floor show a few times before we were due to open…We went in there for the rehearsal that next day, and I found out that the music we were supposed to play for the big number was a special arrangement of the Poet and Peasant Overture. All I had to do was just get one quick look at that thing…I said sheeoot, they better send to the union or somewhere and get somebody to play that, because damn if I can. So they finally sent and got some lady, and she came in there and played it…We caught hell trying to play that show…

For the St. Louis ticklers, Poet and Peasant was a supreme test, and the same work struck terror into the heart of Count Basie. Neither mentioned the composer, Franz von Suppé, who was also responsible for Light Cavalry Overture, one of the pieces James P. Johnson and Luckey Roberts considered “tops in classical music.”

An elite classical musician might not be so impressed with this rather undiscerning taste. Indeed, when complaining about James P. Johnson’s accompaniment for Bessie Smith, Gunther Schuller says that James P. “leaves the nagging impression that his interests in commercial music and a ‘classical’ repertoire closer to semi- or light classics had left its imprint on his playing.”

Although I dispute Schuller’s scolding tone, he is right about “semi- or light classics.” James P. Johnson and the rest of the early jazz masters didn’t talk about Bach’s Art of the Fugue or Beethoven string quartets.1 Instead, they talked about Poet and Peasant.

In my view, this is nothing to be snooty about. Poet and Peasant was there, it was embedded in the culture, and while von Suppé rarely makes anyone’s list of greatest composers today, he’s good enough. Von Suppé can teach you all you need to know about basic European harmonic motion and melodic shape. Chord symbols are not required. (In fact, chord symbols obscure the bass line and the movement of inner voices.)

A partial list of opera, operetta, and salon themes that a tickler like James P. Johnson would have been familiar with.

The Poet and Peasant Overture (von Suppé)

Light Calvary Overture (von Suppé)

William Tell Overture (Rossini) — has the driving Lone Ranger theme and the bucolic background to Bambi Meets Godzilla

Merry Widow Waltz (Lehár)

Sextet from Lucia Di Lammermoor (Donizetti)

Barcarolle from Tales of Hoffman (Offenbach)

Meditation from Thaïs (Massenet)

Élégie (Massenet)

Peer Gynt Suite (Grieg) — includes “Morning,” “Anitra’s Dance,” and “In the Hall of the Mountain King,” all frequently heard in silent movie accompaniments and cartoons

Melody in F (Rubinstein)

Tango in D (Albeniz)

Humoresque (Dvořák)

The king of “ragging the classics” is the great Donald Lambert, who recorded four examples for his lone studio session.

However, Lambert is sui generis, a genius, an astronaut. (As is Art Tatum in his transfigurations of Massenet’s “Élégie” and Dvořák’s “Humoresque.”) My point is less about such genius than about any regular whorehouse piano professor running through an overture or “Melody in F” during his nightly routine.

The topic is worthy of further investigation, both as Americana (including silent movie scores and Looney Tunes) and as the dawn of the jazz tradition — and not just for the pianists. The cover page of a Carl Fischer anthology of Famous Overtures offers a bewildering array of potential ensembles from the same template, with an optional cornet or flute part each costing an additional 15 cents. This is a pretty freewheeling approach to ensemble and orchestration! Sounds like jazz to me!

The 1913 recording of the second part of Poet and the Peasant by the American Symphony Orchestra is slightly out of tune and generally pretty raw. The conductor is unknown — although is there a slight chance there is no conductor, for the band clearly understands the argument on a folk music level.

I can hear nascent blues, rags, and even Ellington and Charlie Parker in this ancient piece of lacquer.

Later tickler Jim Turner — who has also made a good album of James P. Johnson music — plays Poet and the Peasant in 1986. Turner begins with the music “as is” before eventually turning it into a stride showpiece.

Part one: The new book Speakeasies to Symphonies: The Jazz Genius of James P. Johnson by Scott E. Brown, and a reprint of the substantial interview of James P. Johnson by Tom Davin

Part two: Mike Lipskin on stride piano; two tracks from “The Beetle” and a session from Willie Gant; favorite tracks from a few other more famous names

Part three: A basic guide to the first two decades of James P. Johnson solo recordings, plus a couple of historical photos

Part four: In Search of “Carolina Shout”

Coda: “Poet and Peasant Overture” and other light classics circa 1910

Part four

New upload: A score follower video of James P. Johnson’s “Carolina Shout” with my light transcription.

I have added this transcription to the collection I share with my students.

Ethan Iverson Teaching PDFs [dropbox link]

includes

Original Sheet Music of Two Dozen Jazz Standards
Theory of Harmony
Bird is the Word
Doodlin’
Core Repertoire
21 Cramer Studies Taught by Beethoven
Bud Powell Trifecta
Trane ’n Me (by Andrew White)
Dohnanyi first three pages (polyphony) + accents (bebop)
Carolina Shout (two versions)

(If you want to share the dropbox further that’s fine, just encourage the recipients to sign up for Transitional Technology.)

James P. Johnson recorded “Carolina Shout” several times, with four of the solo or duo performances being intended for commercial release. Two were piano rolls and two were records.

Artempo Piano Roll 12975 (1918)
QRS Piano Roll 100999 (1921)
1921 solo for OKeh
1944 duo with drummer Eddie Dougherty for Decca

There are also studio band recordings and live solo performances, including at Carnegie Hall in 1938 for the John Hammond evening of “Spirituals to Swing" and a rare 1944 aircheck with a spoken introduction by Eddie Condon. None are the same, and sometimes the differences are reasonably radical. There’s clearly no one way that Johnson played “Carolina Shout.”

In Black Bottom Stomp, David A. Jasen argues convincingly that the second piano roll (the one made in 1921 for the bigger company QRS) was the one that mattered the most, at least in terms of shaping jazz history. Duke Ellington explained how he learned this version in Music is My Mistress:

Percy Johnson was a drummer and a buddy of mine. His nickname was “Brushes.” One day he invited me over to his house just across from that sign shop on T Street.

“You’ve got to listen to this,” he said when we got there.

He had a player-piano and he put on a roll by James P. Johnson. This was, of course, an entirely new avenue of adventure for me, and I went back there every day and listened. Percy slowed the mechanism down so that I could see which keys on the piano were going down as I digested Johnson’s wonderful sounds. I played with it until I had his “Carolina Shout” down pat, and then Percy would go out on the town with me and show me off. I really had it perfect, so that when James P. Johnson himself came to Washington to play at Convention Hall my cheering section and pals waited until he played “Carolina Shout” and then insisted that I get up on the stand and cut him!

I was scared stiff, but James P. was not only a master, he was also a great man for encouraging youngsters. He went along with the whole scene, and when I finished “Carolina Shout” he applauded too. I didn’t play any more that night but just leaned over the piano and listened to the one and only. What I absorbed on that occasion might, I think, have constituted a whole semester in a conservatory.

The sheet music was published in 1926 by Clarence Williams in a folio that apparently included a few other Johnson pieces: “Keep Off the Grass,” “Jingles,” and “Scalin’ the Blues.” I have never seen the folio, it is very rare, but the individual pieces have been uploaded by an angel to IMSLP. “Carolina Shout” is the only one of the four described as a “Negro Classic,” the others are described as “Novelty Solos.”

This official sheet to “Carolina Shout” is really but a vague simulacrum compared to a Johnson recording. Some believe Johnson’s scores were simplified for the amateur in the manner that Jelly Roll Morton’s published scores were also apparently simplified for the amateur. Perhaps writing out what they actually played was also simply too time consuming, especially when Johnson and Morton were going to change it a bit by next week anyway.

There’s also a parallel thought experiment: Would Chopin and Liszt have bothered notating so much nerdy filigree if they could have recorded their daily improvisations? Or to bring it a bit closer to home: Scott Joplin’s own piano roll of “Maple Leaf Rag” has additions not marked in his score. Indeed, for some professional ragtimers, a playing Joplin “straight” is the hallmark of an amateur.

This basic sheet of “Carolina Shout” has influenced my fresh edit of a transcription done some time ago, and I have added the score as an addendum to my transcription in the dropbox. However, as far as I know, this formerly rare piece of sheet music has never been that relevant to any jazz professional and those 100+ recordings mentioned in the previous post. The earlier jazzers worked with the 1921 piano roll and the 1921 record, although later players also may have consulted a transcription of the 1944 version of “Carolina Shout” (where Johnson duos with drummer Eddie Dougherty) by Dick Meares and David Le Winter.

That ‘44 transcription was part of the folio Piano Solos by James P. Johnson, which also had ‘44 “Keep Off the Grass,” “Riffs,” “Snowy Morning Blues,” and “Over the Bars.” These transcriptions are not perfect: In addition to questionable note choices, usually Meares and Le Winter run out of steam before the record does. Later on, the Meares/Le Winter transcription was reprinted (without attribution) in the popular Hal Leonard anthology Jazz, Blues, Boogie, and Swing, and thus is somewhat common currency: When I heard the great Stanley Cowell play “Carolina Shout,” it was clear that Meares/Le Winter was his starting point. Since the score is not marked a transcription, it would be easy enough to assume that the page was Johnson’s own score, which it is not.

I would love to go back in time and grill James P. Johnson. What was his rationale for what he wrote out for publication? (I literally want to point to certain bars and ask why they aren’t syncopated like other similar bars.) How did he see his scores in relation to Joplin and Gershwin scores? What did he think of the Meares/Le Winter transcriptions? What did he like to sight-read at home? What kind of sheet music did he bring to a record session — for example, was there paper at hand for all those marvelous duos with Bessie Smith? What about his symphonic work? In my opinion, those large-scale pieces (such as Yamekraw and Harlem Symphony) will only be successful if the work is let off the leash, with a fearless music director willing to embrace the avant-garde and section leaders given room for improvisation and elaboration. (What would he say to that presumptuous declaration??)

Would he be surprised to learn I was handing out transcriptions and scores to “Carolina Shout” to students in 2026, over 130 years since his birth?

The only thing I know for sure is that notation was important, and important not just to James P. Johnson, but to a whole lost world of black entertainment that once thrived in New York.

Part one: The new book Speakeasies to Symphonies: The Jazz Genius of James P. Johnson by Scott E. Brown, and a reprint of the substantial interview of James P. Johnson by Tom Davin

Part two: Mike Lipskin on stride piano; two tracks from “The Beetle” and a session from Willie Gant; favorite tracks from a few other more famous names

Part three: A basic guide to the first two decades of James P. Johnson solo recordings, plus a couple of historical photos

Part four: In Search of “Carolina Shout”

Coda: “Poet and Peasant Overture” and other light classics circa 1910

Part three

Names frequently happen after the fact. In the extensive Tom Davin interview, James P. Johnson does not use the word “stride.” He refers to his piano music as “ragtime.”

Scott Joplin’s music came out of Sedalia and St. Louis. Jelly Roll Morton’s music came out of New Orleans. James P. Johnson was third in the timeline, and he was the first New York pianist, the one from which we all descend from, whether we know it or not. Johnson liked to be known as the Dean of Jazz Pianists, and after Spike Wilner led the fundraiser “The Last Rent Party” in 2009, that’s what went on the tombstone. (Previously Johnson was buried in an unmarked grave.)

The early 1920s were when black musicians were first regularly documented on 78, and thus the James P. Johnson discography begins within a year or two of Eubie Blake and Jelly Roll Morton.

“Harlem Strut” (9/21) Most of James P. Johnson’s early piano music is now known as the apotheosis of Harlem Stride. Usually there is a sequence of themes in the Joplin manner, with a concluding “trio” that goes up a fourth. “Harlem Strut” is in cheerful C major, with a twisty F major section to take it home.

“Keep Off the Grass” (10/21) The first strain of “Keep Off the Grass” has a mysterious chromatic “thumb line” (the lower note of the dyads and chords) that, if isolated, would be just like Thelonious Monk. The last strain and its variants are made up of falling diminished chords. After nearly a century of increasingly advanced jazz harmony, it’s hard to hear parallel diminished chords as provocative today. In 1921, though, James P. would have meant those diminished sequences to mean uncertainty and perhaps even sadness, the tear beneath the smile.

“Carolina Shout” (10/21) Johnson’s finest recording of his most famous instrumental work. David A. Jasen makes the astute observation that the themes get funkier as they go along. Duke Ellington learned “Carolina Shout” from the earlier Johnson piano roll, and it would go on to be recorded by Fats Waller, Willie The Lion Smith, Art Hodes, Donald Lambert, Dick Wellstood, Dick Hyman, Terry Waldo, Judy Carmichael, Marcus Roberts, Helen Sung, Stephanie Trick, and over 100 others.

We don’t know who invented what or when in the 19th-century, but for the 20th-century piano players, the blues occurred after ragtime. Someone like Eubie Blake always considered the blues a modern fad.

For the next four pieces from 1923, James P. seems to be keeping up with the times by investigating the conceit of “piano roll blues,” for they are mostly 12-bar forms and have the kind of constant chattering repetition common to most piano rolls. (This would be right around the time that piano rolls were on their way out in terms of commercial viability as that medium started losing ground to recordings.)

“Weeping Blues” (6/23) Wide-ranging melodies and a fat beat. At a medium tempo like this, Johnson’s left hand suggests a full orchestra.

“Worried and Lonesome Blues” (6/23) This one especially sounds like a piano roll, with the verse constantly articulated in repeated triplets. There’s some fun two-handed “middle of the keyboard” interjections in the multiple blues variations. My favorite of this set.

“You Can’t Do What My Last Man Did” (7/23) A blues in feeling but not in form. Again, the “piano roll triplets.”

“Bleeding Hearted Blues” (7/23, comp. Austin) Bessie Smith recorded this Lovie Austin composition with Fletcher Henderson on piano, although the cover of the sheet music cites Alberta Hunter.

Johnson’s right hand owns this one with big chords and aggressive punches throughout.

“Scouting Around” (8/23) A “break” begins every blues chorus. Eventually Johnson modulates up a fourth and explores some harmonic subtleties.

“Toddlin’” (8/23) The loping right hand figures are probably connected to the “novelty piano” style of Zez Confrey. As the track goes along, Johnson breaks up the 4/4 stride into 3/4 and 5/4, a famous effect.

It’s great blues playing, although not everyone thinks so. In 1958, Dick Wellstood wrote in the Jazz Review:

James P.’s blues were not too successful, except for Backwater Blues and a few others. He certainly was not a blues pianist in the same way that someone like Jimmy Yancey was. He plays blues much in the same way that he plays a tune like Blue Turning Gray Over You, and his blues suffer for it.

This trope is explored further by Gunther Schuller in his influential 1968 book Early Jazz:

Johnson’s playing for Bessie Smith…also leaves the nagging impression that his interests in commercial music and a “classical” repertoire closer to semi- or light classics had left its imprint on his playing. One might say that he played his blues very much the way he would play a show or pop tune.

Art Hodes gave his take in the liner notes to an Edmond Hall reissue (the track is 1943’s “Blues at Blue Note”). Unlike Wellstood or (especially) Schuller, Hodes is inside the community, and his criticism has less authoritarian sting:

James P. takes a chorus. I regard Jimmy with reverence. He was Big Daddy (although this tempo blues wasn’t his bag) and if you listen there’s always something you can learn from his playing.

Schuller’s claim that Johnson doesn’t understand genre is particularly irritating. Johnson told Tom Davin:

We moved from Jersey City to New York in 1908 when I was 14. We had a piano in the house again. In Jersey City I heard good piano from all parts of the South and West, but I never heard real ragtime until we came to New York. Most East Coast playing was based on cotillion dance tunes, stomps, drags and set dances like my “Mule Walk Stomp,” “Gut Stomp,” and the “Carolina Shout” and “Balmoral.” They were all country tunes. In New York, a friend taught me real ragtime. His name was Charley Cherry. He played Joplin. First he played, then I copied him, and then he corrected me.

(…)

In New York I got a chance to hear a lot of good music for the first time. Victor Herbert and Rudolph Friml were popular.

(…)

From 1910 on, Handy’s blues were played in cabarets. Mannie Sharp, a singer and dancer, and Lola Lee, a blues singer, taught me Handy’s blues in 1911… Memphis Blues, St. Louis, and later Beale Street and Yellow Dog. Before that, there were “natural blues” sung on southern waterfronts, in turpentine camps, farms, chain gangs. Leadbelly and Ma Rainey were singing “natural” 12-bar blues that were developed from the spirituals.

It is all pretty obvious when glancing at the published scores to some of Johnson’s most famous themes. “The Charleston” is a dance from Carolina, “Old Fashioned Love” is a hymn-like pop song that is next door to Victor Herbert, and “Worried and Lonesome Blues” is blues that looks just like the pieces in a W. C. Handy folio. None of them are ragtime in the manner of the sheets to “Carolina Shout” or “Keep Off the Grass.”

Johnson studied the blues, he knew what the blues was, and he used it for specific reasons. This was true of most of the New York piano players. The legendary music mogul John Hammond heard James P.’s solo piano version of “Worried and Lonesome Blues” when it was first released in 1923 and said it “changed his life.”

It was five years before Johnson recorded solo again. The improvement in recording technology is noticeable, and the piano for the 1927 session is excellent.

“All That I Had Is Gone” (7/27, comp. Bradford) Perry Bradford was a mover and shaker for Johnson in those days, and Johnson recorded a fair amount of Bradford in band settings. “All That I Had Is Gone” is an attractive blues-based pop song in mid-tempo C major. When playing marching quarter notes, the left hand articulates not just octaves but the fifths the middle, emulating the overtones of a bass drum, making the keyboard that much more percussive. (Jelly Roll Morton did this also.)

“Snowy Morning Blues” (7/27) Perhaps James P. Johnson’s finest melody in his best recording, a perfect blend of black folklore and American pop song.

“Riffs” (1/29) A B-flat blues with breaks that also mixes with a non-blues E-flat theme. It seems to be an update on what he was working on with “Scouting Around,” now with truly outlandish displacement of the beat.

“Feelin’ Blue” (1/29) Begins with the folkloric B-flat changes that Sonny Rollins also took for “Doxy.” The right hand phrases with unusual freedom in the minor-key section.

The next session is from the dawn of the next decade.

“Crying for the the Carolines” (1/30, comp. Warren) Harry Warren’s E minor ditty is still known just because of this performance. Perhaps James P. played it because of its reference to his beloved Carolina. After the whole piece being in minor, Johnson cheekily ends with two bars of major.

“What Is This Thing Called Love?” (1/30, comp. Porter) Cole Porter’s famous tune was brand new at the time of this recording., and Johnson record demonstrates how jazz musicians in 1930 thought about pop songs. If you look at Cole Porter’s published sheet music you can see exactly where Johnson is coming from, which is also true of Warren’s “Crying for the the Carolines” and Austin’s “Bleeding Hearted Blues.” Johnson plays the verses, and eventually bases his improvisations closely on the melody.

In a related topic: There is a later James P. studio record of George Gershwin’s “Liza” from 1945 that is just great. Apparently this song was a long-term Johnson cutting-contest speciality. Indeed, a lo-fi live document of Johnson goofing off to impress his peers at Fats Waller’s house in 1937 is simply extraordinary. I think Art Tatum could take him here, but not Fats or the Lion. No way.

“You’ve Got to Be Modernistic” (1/30) For Johnson, “Modernistic” seems to mean the whole tone scale and the corresponding augmented triad. This is in the Confrey “novelty” tradition until the third theme in D-flat, where James P. settles down to do some serious swinging. The beat does push, but this was normal for the era. The clanging minor seconds show just where Thelonious Monk comes from.

“Jingles” (1/30) An earlier ragtime piece in bright F major. It’s not just the speed, it’s the meaty touch that is so important. James P. Johnson will always be the gold standard for the stride “feel.”

The next solo session is from from nine years later.

“If Dreams Come True” (6/39, comp. Goodman/Sampson) Duke Ellington said that when James P. Johnson took over the keyboard at a rent party, “Then you got real invention – magic, sheer magic.” The tune is quickly discarded and the variations unroll. These variations seem like they could keep coming forever, like “magic.” Later on in the track we hear one of the most fabulous aspects of Johnson’s late style, “displaced bells” in the right hand, where big chords are splashed out at irregular intervals while the left keeps pumping away. It’s quite modern, really. Jason Moran uses this kind of thing without sounding old-fashioned in the slightest.

“Fascination” (6/39) Reminiscent of an earlier ragtime-style piece, although by this point James P.’s phrasing is more relaxed. Double thirds in the left hand are notably uncommon.

“A Flat Dream” (6/39) The first and best boogie-woogie record from Johnson. It’s a minor masterpiece: the first A-flat themes are memorable, then, presto! The 32-bar Db-flat tune has two incarnations, first as chimes over a cello, then as authentic Harlem stride.

The boogie bass Johnson uses is not a particularly hard one. Most pianists would consider the stride in the last chorus harder than the gently rocking boogie figure. But it doesn’t seem like Johnson had played boogie that much. Boogie-woogie was popular at the time, almost everyone made a boogie record or two whether they were boogie masters or not.

At any rate, it is of pianistic interest to note that Johnson muddles the boogie figure a little bit: not badly, but he probably could have used another take to work on getting the feel right. The stride in the last chorus is perfect.

“The Mule Walk” (6/39) This is a folkloric shout or “ring dance” from Carolina, and a great one, too.

“Lonesome Reverie” (6/39) Like “A Flat Dream,” this performance has an unusual form. After two choruses of lovely slow blues in G, Johnson shifts to C and gives us a beautiful 32-bar tune with a rich harmonization worthy of Ellington. Then up to E-flat for some variations and a hint of stomp.

“Blueberry Rhyme” (6/39) One of Johnson’s prettiest pieces, reminiscent of “Snowy Morning Blues” but slower and sadder. Wonderful ornamentation in the melody. There is also a great live version captured at the John Hammond “From Spirituals to Swing” concert the same year.

There is a lot of later James P. Johnson solo piano on record, but after his first stroke in 1940 his mechanism slowed down a bit. Beautiful tracks include a purely Harlem “Gut Stomp,” a richly-harmonized version of “Sweet Lorraine,” and a hard-charging rendition of “Caprice Rag” that sounds like it is 1920 again. By default, everything James P. recorded is important, especially unusual items like the extended composition Yamekraw, the Cuban-influenced “The Dream,” and the Harlem-ized Joplin of “Maple Leaf Rag” and “Euphonic Sounds.”

When I first worked on this essay in 2009 I simply consulted my record collection, for I owned whatever was readily available commercially. But since then, the streaming era has brought forth many formerly obscure things to light. Johnson was in notably good form playing Bessie Smith’s “Backwater Blues” at Alumni Gymnasium at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y. The uploader says 1949, while Lord has May 3, 1947.

Duos with Bessie Smith

From early 1927 until mid-1930 Johnson recorded 14 duets with Bessie Smith: “Preachin’ the Blues,” “Backwater Blues,” “Sweet Mistreater” “Lock and Key,” “He’s Got Me Goin,’” “It Makes My Love Come Down,” “Wasted Life Blues,” “Dirty No-Gooders Blues,” “Blue Spirit Blues,” “Worn Out Papa Blues,” “You Don’t Understand,” “Don’t Cry Baby,” “On Revival Day,” and “Moan Mourners.” (On the last two selections Smith and Johnson are joined by a small male gospel choir, the Bessemer Singers.)

This is Johnson in prime condition playing with the most celebrated singer of the era. The visions-of-Katrina “Backwater Blues” is on every Smith compilation, but most of the other music is not well known, and rarely assessed as a discrete body of work.

The songs are mostly blues or blues-inflected pop ranging from the death and gloom “Blue Spirit Blues” to the erotically charged “It Makes My Love Come Down,” the tuneful “You Don’t Understand” and the sanctified numbers with the Bessemer Singers.

Naturally, the music is a showcase for Bessie’s astounding rhythmic flexibility and swing. She also makes any lyric at all seem like inevitable truths. (From “No Gooders Blues”: There are 19 men in my neighborhood/There are 19 men in my neighborhood/18 of them are fools and one ain’t no good.) Johnson doesn’t get much solo space but he plays out the whole time, swinging like crazy and sounding like a full band. Whatever the source material was, it was undoubtedly fairly basic. Johnson creates veritable rhapsodies out of nearly nothing. These tracks may actually showcase Johnson’s rollicking time feel better than many of his piano solos. He was veteran of countless shows and revues and knows just how to take care of the soloist. Those like Gunther Schuller who say that James P. Johnson couldn’t play the blues can go climb a tree.

James P. was a big man who played a lot of keyboard with those massive hands. Bessie’s voice could raise the roof. Their mission together is pride, rhythm, and love.

From the historical files

The original press blast of the event at Smalls 17 years ago:

James P. Johnson’s Last Rent Party!

Smalls Jazz Club
October 4th, 2009

James P. Johnson, the father of stride piano, the composer of The Charleston and The Carolina Shout and one of the founders of modern jazz piano lies, shockingly, in an unmarked grave in Maspeth, Queens, Mt. Olivet Cemetery.

Please join the James P. Johnson Foundation, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to music education and to raise the awareness of James P. Johnson, the Johnson family and Smalls Jazz Club for an all day “rent party” to raise money to buy a monument to commemorate this great musician!

Join us on Sunday, October 4th beginning at 1:00 PM at Smalls Jazz Club located at 183 West 10th street at 7th Ave. The afternoon will begin with a symposium by musicologist and Johnson scholar Scott Brown on the life and work of James P. Johnson. This will include an exhibit from the James P. Johnson archive housed at the Rutgers Institute for Jazz Studies.

Around 3:00 will then be a steady stream of pianists to play solo piano in tribute to James P. Johnson.

Suggested tax-free donations are $20 with all the proceeds to go to the James P. Johnson Foundation. You may come and go as you please throughout the afternoon. Refreshments will be served.

Please come by and pay your respects to The Dean of Stride Pianists!

1:00 PM Doors Open
1:30 PM Opening Words – Barry Glover and The James P. Johnson Society
2:00 PM Symposium – James P. Johnson: The Man Who Made The Twenties Roar – Scott E. Brown
3:00 PM Symposium – James P. Johnson: Invisible Pianist of the Harlem Renaissance – Mark Borowsky
4:00 PM J Michael O’Neal and Natalie Wright
4:30 PM John Bunch
5:00 PM Tardo Hammer
5:30 PM Conal Fowkes
6:00 PM Terry Waldo
6:30 PM Spike Wilner
7:00 PM Ethan Iverson
7:30 PM Mike Lipskin
8:00 PM Aaron Diehl
8:30 PM Ted Rosenthal
9:00 PM Dick Hyman

Nelson George on the late Clive Davis.

Ted Panken on the late James “Blood” Ulmer.

Olivia Giovetti improvises a “Dirtbag Mozart.” This is truly hilarious.

Also very funny: Vince Keenan gets the high-school commencement speaker he wanted.

Part one: The new book Speakeasies to Symphonies: The Jazz Genius of James P. Johnson by Scott E. Brown, and a reprint of the substantial interview of James P. Johnson by Tom Davin

Part two: Mike Lipskin on stride piano; two tracks from “The Beetle” and a session from Willie Gant; favorite tracks from a few other more famous names

Part three: A basic guide to the first two decades of James P. Johnson solo recordings, plus a couple of historical photos

Part four: In Search of “Carolina Shout”

Coda: “Poet and Peasant Overture” and other light classics circa 1910

Part two

Mike Lipskin has held it down for decades as one of the few truly qualified stride pianists in America. He was there in the late 1950s and studied with Willie “The Lion” Smith, Eubie Blake, and Luckey Roberts; Lipskin even accompanied The Lion to the Great Day in Harlem photo shoot.

At 20:44 during this 1987 archival tape, Lipskin plays James P. Johnson’s “Mule Walk.” It’s the real deal.

Maurice Waller wrote a valuable biography of his father with an assist from Anthony Calabrese simply called Fats Waller. It was published in 1977 with a substantial foreword by Mike Lipskin.

I don’t always trust the jazz histories from a certain vintage. Once-famous reference works like Rudi Blesh’s They All Played Ragtime and Gunther Schuller’s Early Jazz were written by egotistical critics who try too hard to prove they have the measure of the music. However, Lipskin is a player and he knew the creators, and his pocket history of stride piano (which is part of the foreword to Fats Waller) rings true. This excerpt goes through the start of the blues recording industry, and naturally includes a fair amount about James P. Johnson:

…“Stride” is a word coined in the early fifties…This musical language developed and was identified with the maturation of Harlem as a cultural center for black America before World War II.

In 1923, when a young Duke Ellington first arrived in New York, he called Harlem “the world’s most glamorous atmosphere. Why, it’s just like the Arabian Nights.” Ellington was more than correct, as this small northern section of New York’s Manhattan Island was the hub where musicians ended up after leaving New Orleans, Chicago, or St. Louis. The area fostered not only stride piano, but the first big band jazz units that eventually led to the swing era, and finally bebop.

As Harlem developed, at first middle-class Negro society moved there, and a proper music followed. By 1910 there were enough musicians uptown to form the Clef Club, a booking agency that provided the prejazz orchestras for high society, the show functions of the Castles, and the Ziegfeld Follies. The piano was then the main source of home and saloon entertainment in the United States, and every bar had one. Correspondingly, there appeared a growing number of keyboard “professors,” ragtime kids or ticklers as they were called, traveling from city to city and bar to bar. Often they were accompanied by a retinue of “ladies of the evening” who supplemented the musicians’ limited income.

From Baltimore to the Jungles, one could hear such colorful characters as Willie “Egghead” Sewell, “One Leg” Willie Joseph, Walter Gould, Jack “The Bear” Wilson (immortalized by Duke Ellington in a big-band piece of the same name), Richard “Abba Labba” McLean, Freddy “Harmony King” Bryant, William Turk, Fats Harris, and Jess “Old Man” Pickett. As Harlem grew, these pre-World War I musicians slowly migrated to New York, playing a version of ragtime that differed from the slower Midwest sound of Scott Joplin and Tom Turpin. Their music reflected a cosmopolitan exposure, and rather than play specific pieces they used a variety of material that included popular songs of the day and classical themes. Theirs was a faster ragtime that also combined the rhythms of the Southern Baptist church dance known as the ring shout (referred to in James P. Johnson’s “Carolina Shout”).

When they reached the Northeast, a group of younger pianists that included Eubie Blake, Luckey Roberts, Stephen “Beetle” Henderson, Leroy Tibbs, Willie “The Lion” Smith, and James P. Johnson followed the “professors” around. At the same time, an influx of Southerners and West Indians into Harlem slowly changed the atmosphere of the area from staid middle class to a vibrancy exploding within a set of city blocks featuring a variety of cabarets and nightclubs.

This then became the center of performance and music development where the younger men could expand their ideas and professionalism. Unlike the older pianists, they were very much interested in their music, and did not engage in pimping. They worked more steadily at jobs that gradually demanded reading sheet music and the ability to transpose songs on sight to accompany singers.

After hours the young men would meet, and try to outplay each other. These “cutting contests,” in which musicians tried to prove technical superiority over one another, happened throughout jazz history. Sometimes whole bands battled all night. With stride, though, the sound literally went nonstop for hours as one pianist took over from another. Beetle, for instance, would begin a pop tune and play as long as his creative juices would flow. Luckey Roberts, standing by, would then slide in alongside him and, at the end of a chorus, relieve Beetle’s hands, one at a time. Luckey would play for as long as he cared, and then Willie The Lion would replace him in the same fashion. Finally the dean, James P. Johnson, would sit in, and in this manner a single tune would last for perhaps a hundred choruses, with seemingly infinite variations. During the 1920s Cliff Jackson, Donald Lambert, Duke Ellington, Willie Gant, and other younger pianists like Fats Waller entered the cutting contests. As testimony to James P.’s superiority, they often used one of his compositions as the basis of a contest, each performer trying to equal the master on “Harlem Strut” or “Carolina Shout.” The nightclub job requirements, and the fine honing of cutting contests, helped evolve Harlem stride into an anachronistically mature idiom unequaled in either variety or subtlety of technique until decades later.

By 1919 it was evident that James P. Johnson was the master and leader of the uptown piano. He could play faster than the others, transpose with a singular facility, and improvise with an inventiveness that didn’t stop. Born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1894, Jimmy moved to San Juan Hill while in his teens. As the young Fats would a decade later, James P. played piano day and night as a child. First learning by ear, he sharpened his technique by “woodshedding” (playing in all keys) the rags of the older men. Later he taught himself Bach and Chopin. By the time he was twenty-five he had commercial player-piano rolls on the market, and his “Caprice Rag,” “Carolina Shout,” “Harlem Strut,” and “Mama and Papa Blues” were a part of the repertoire of many other pianists.

James P. remained a musician’s musician even though he had pop success on Broadway, recorded beautiful sides with Bessie Smith, and wrote the hit theme of the 1920s, “Charleston.” During the Depression he spent most of his time at home in St. Albans, New York, writing serious symphonic works, some of which were performed at the Brooklyn Academy and Carnegie Hall.

The story of Fats and James P. would make a book in itself. No student and teacher in jazz were ever closer. Shortly after the death of Fats’ mother, James P. took Fats under his wing and painstakingly taught him basic technique, the concept of composition and improvisation, and, of course, the language of stride. Here was a generosity and devotion to music that left a strong, lifelong mark on Fats. Without Johnson, jazz piano’s course would have been altered; further, Waller’s sound would have been totally different.

While James P. was teaching Fats, Harlem was witnessing the birth of “race” records discs recorded by black talent for the black audience. Although the first supposed jazz record, “Livery Stable Blues” by the Original Dixieland Jass Band, had been released by the Victor Talking Machine Company in 1917, it was a white version of the poetic New Orleans music that was being created in the ghettos throughout the South and Midwest.

Then there were almost no black records, and the only significant ethnic outlet then was through piano player rolls. Eubie Blake, Luckey Roberts, and James P. had all cut rolls by 1916, but the final sound was mechanical, not conducive to displaying the subtle rhythmic and technical differences. For this reason their piano-roll product was distributed in the same manner as that of George Gershwin, Jimmy Durante, Felix Arndt, and Max Kortlander. Young Ellington and Waller studied their masters’s styles and techniques by slowing the rolls down and placing their fingers in the depressed keys as the piano played.

In any case, Harlem was host to an ever-increasing number of blues singers, dancers, and instrumentalists, all making the new “hot” music in the uptown nightspots. One songwriter from Georgia, Perry Bradford, had some blues songs, and vainly attempted to get the downtown record companies interested in his material. Ralph Peer, the recording director for Okeh, was finally interested after hearing Mamie Smith, a singer then working in Harlem, sing Bradford’s “Crazy Blues.” In 1920 an Okeh recording session was arranged, with Willie The Lion conducting the house band from the Club Orient. They cut “That Thing Called Love,” “You Can’t Keep a Good Man Down,” “Crazy Blues” and “It’s Right Here for You,” all with Mamie Smith as featured vocalist. Okeh released the first two sides without much reaction, probably because they contained more of a novelty than a blues feeling. But when they issued “Crazy Blues” someone had the idea of making sure the Harlem record stores would play the disc.

As uptown people went to work one morning they were astounded to hear, coming out of stores, the sound of one of their own, singing the blues with a band that was definitely from the neighborhood. The response was fantastic, and Okeh, happily surprised, sold hundreds of thousands of this first blues record in black areas throughout the United States. This episode was important because it proved to the music businessmen that there was money to be made in black music. — Mike Lipskin, from the foreword to Fats Waller

In the Tom Davin interview reprinted yesterday, James P. Johnson lists all sorts of New York area players active in the first quarter of the 20th century. The most famous are known to aficionados thanks to some imperishable recordings, especially Eubie Blake, Luckey Roberts, Willie “The Lion” Smith, and Donald Lambert. The younger generation included Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, and even Count Basie. Cliff Jackson, Hank Duncan, and Joe Turner also made worthy records.

But what of Abba Labba, “Snowball” Wilkerson, Alberta Simmons, Ernest Green, Sam Gordon, Fred Bryant, Fats Harris, Dickie Huff, Floyd Keppard, Dan Avery, Bob Hawkins, Lester Wilson, Freddie Tunstall, Kid Sneeze, and Mike Jackson…?

Above, Mike Lipskin cites Leroy Tibbs, Willie “Egghead” Sewell, “One Leg” Willie Joseph, Walter Gould, Jack “The Bear” Wilson, Freddy “Harmony King” Bryant, William Turk, and Jess “Old Man” Pickett…?

Were all these many players really that good?

Maybe so. Just recently I discovered two tracks from Stephen “The Beetle” Henderson, a mysterious figure who usually turns up in these lists of top Harlem pianists. Ellington thought highly of the Beetle. I thought the Beetle didn’t record, but it turns out there are two James P. Johnson pieces caught live on Art Hodes’s radio show in 1945.

The composer played “Keep Off the Grass” in F and “Carolina Shout” in G, and the Beetle plays both in B-flat. Odd! Perhaps he played everything in B-flat? At any rate these are truly outstanding stride piano performances that sound like nobody else.

James P. Johnson talks quite a bit about Willie Gant, and all of sudden five minutes of Gant exist on YouTube. These are not in the Lord discography, and a bit more documentation would be helpful (just says private session in 1959). It does sound like an old-time player, someone who is an all-round party pianist rather someone overly concerned with new-fangled “jazz,” although the uptempo left hand on “After You’ve Gone” and “Twilight in Turkey” is marvelously accurate and swinging.

It is worth mentioning that the Harlem Piano heyday was around 1920 and a bit later, so we are hearing these pianists somewhat after the fact. It doesn't sound like it! The Beetle and Gant seem to be at full power. But only James P. Johnson recorded many sides in the 1920s, although there is a tiny bit of Eubie Blake, especially a wonderful “Sounds of Africa” from 1921. Even Willie The Lion, Donald Lambert, and Luckey Roberts only got into the studios in the later ‘30s and then the ‘40s.

Gimme one track from each? Ok, you got it.

Eubie Blake, “Sounds of Africa,” 1921.

James P. Johnson, “Keep Off the Grass,” 1921. (Interesting to compare with the Beetle’s later version.)

Willie The Lion Smith, “Echoes of Spring,” 1939.

Luckey Roberts, “Railroad Blues,” 1946.

For Eubie, JPJ, the Lion, and Luckey, I choose terrific original compositions. Lambert will be represented by a wonderfully outrageous transfiguration of Richard Wagner.

Part one: The new book Speakeasies to Symphonies: The Jazz Genius of James P. Johnson by Scott E. Brown, and a reprint of the substantial interview of James P. Johnson by Tom Davin

Part two: Mike Lipskin on stride piano; two tracks from “The Beetle” and a session from Willie Gant; favorite tracks from a few other more famous names

Part three: A basic guide to the first two decades of James P. Johnson solo recordings, plus a couple of historical photos

Part four: In Search of “Carolina Shout”

Coda: “Poet and Peasant Overture” and other light classics circa 1910

Part one

James P. Johnson has a worthy biographer, Scott E. Brown. Brown’s earlier book James P. Johnson: A Case Of Mistaken Identity from 1986 is now superseded by Speakeasies to Symphonies: The Jazz Genius of James P. Johnson.

Brown’s perspective and through-line is valid: “Rare jazz aficionados know him as the Father of Harlem Stride piano but his other monumental contributions to American music are seldom acknowledged.”

Indeed, James P. himself regarded his piano playing as just part of a larger career. A highlight of Speakeasies to Symphonies is a long look at Plantation Days, Johnson’s most successful revue. Plantation Days even traveled to England for controversial performances.

Brown also digs into where the word “stride” comes from, and decides that it begins picking up steam as a trope-namer in about 1944. The phrase “Father of Stride Piano” would eventually be synonymous with James P. Johnson, and that phrase seems to be the work of Stanley Dance, who was in charge of the Columbia anthology Father of the Stride Piano from 1962.

Kevin Whitehead reviews Speakeasies to Symphonies at NPR.

Jeff Sultanof gives a rave at An Eclectic’s Corner.

I left a review at Amazon.

The Jazz Review published several priceless documents, including Tom Davin’s five-part interview with James P. Johnson. Davin writes that this conversation took place two years before Johnson died, which would mean circa 1953. Some dispute this date, for in 1951 Johnson had a major stroke that left his speech impaired — although in the last section, Johnson mentions the 1953 Riverside Records release of his early piano rolls. According to Scott E. Brown, Davin also took down the interview in shorthand, which obviously means mistakes could be made.

At one point, James P. is quoted:

Alberta Simmons was kind enough to teach me the full Joplin rags that she played so well: “Frog Legs,” “Maple Leaf Rag,” and “Sunflower Slow Drag.”

“Frog Legs Rag” from 1906 is not by Joplin, but by James Scott, and since Johnson is usually conscientious about composer credit, I speculate that this is Davin’s shorthand momentarily betraying the truth.

More importantly, Alberta Simmons also taught Thelonious Monk. According to Monk’s biographer Robin D.G. Kelley, Simmons frequently played Eubie Blake’s “Memories of You,” and this may be why Monk played “Memories of You” so often in later years. At any rate, the fact that James P. Johnson and Thelonious Monk actually shared a piano teacher is a wonderful detail. I believe Scott E. Brown is the first to bring this detail to light: one of many revelations from Speakeasies to Symphonies.

Here is my light edit of the substantial, informative, and entertaining Davin interview, with Davin’s questions and a certain amount of connective or lesser commentary removed. When I dispute Davin’s grasp of musical techniques, I take it out or make a note. Nonetheless, sincere gratitude to Tom Davin: If only we had one of these interviews from all the jazz greats!1

JAMES P. JOHNSON SPEAKS TO TOM DAVIN

Part one, from The Jazz Review Vol. 2, No. 5, June 1959, edited by yours truly

In New Brunswick, N. J., where I was born, my mother was a choir singer in the Methodist church. She worked out as a maid and one day she got the chance to buy a big, ebony, “flat top” square piano from the people she worked for.

When I was just a little baby I used to play on the floor with the piano pedals while she played hymns and simple tunes. Her favorite piece was “Little Brown Jug.” When I got big enough, I got up to the piano and picked out the tunes she played.

My sister, who was eight years older than me, was taking piano lessons, but she used to dodge them. She and my brothers used to bring sheet music home, so I learned to sing all the latest popular tunes. I had a high soprano voice until I was 14 and was a good enough singer for people to give me 10 or 15 cents to sing songs like “There’ll Be A Hot Time In The Old Town, Tonight!” and “I’m Looking For That Birdie.” This would be about 1900, when I was six.

In New Brunswick, the only music I heard outside of home was from bands that paraded in the town. Kids would yell: “There’s a band!” and we’d all run in the direction of the music.

My mother was from Virginia and somewhere in her blood was an instinct for doing country and set dances — what were called “real shoutings.” My “Carolina Shout” and “Carolina Balmoral” are real southern set or square dances. I heard them first at my mother’s social parties with her friends and my stepfather’s friends in New Brunswick. Of course, I was supposed to be in bed, but I’d creep to the head of the stairs and listen and watch.

One of the men would call the figures and they’d dance their own style of square dances. The calls were :“Join hands” — “Sashay” — “Turn around” — “Ladies right and gentlemen left” —“Grab your partner” — “Break away” — “Make a Strut” —“Cows to the front, bulls stay back.”

When he called “Do your stuff” or “Ladies to the front,” they did their personal dances. The catwalk, for instance, was developed from the cotillion, but it was also part of the set dances.

Sometimes, they would have a prize for the best dancing: a quart of wine, gin or whiskey or maybe $5. When the caller shouted “Ladies, show your underwear,” the girls got prizes for fancy ribbons on their pantalettes or petticoats. The man with the funniest patch on his pants or the funniest coat would get a prize. Sometimes the men would get drunk and go out in the road to fight.

These people were from South Carolina and Georgia where the cotillion was popular, and the “Charleston” was an offspring of that. A lot of my music is based on set, cotillion and other southern dance steps and rhythms.

In my mother’s church the hymns attracted me and they have ever since. Southern Negroes who came north carried their traditional music with them. You could hear real southern country church singing in New Brunswick around 1900.

In 1902, when I was eight, we moved to Jersey City .My older brother met some ragtime piano players, or ticklers as they were called, and since they were popular fellows, always in demand socially, I looked up to them.

I became friendly with one tickler, Claude Grew, who could play anything in all keys. That was the mark of a cabaret player, who had to accompany different singers in their favorite keys. He taught me everything he knew. So did an older boy, George Perry, who was another real tickler. I remember another player, Floyd Keppard, a Creole with French background, sharp features and thick, good hair.

What they played wasn’t ragtime as we know it now. It was mostly popular songs with a strong rhythm and with syncopated vamps, not a whole composition or arrange- ment. Scott Joplin’s pieces were popular. They got around the country, but the ticklers I knew just played sections of them that they heard someplace. I never knew that they were Joplin’s until later.

I guess at times there were more good ragtime players in Jersey City in those days than any other place in the United States. Most of the ragtime players were working in sporting houses and cabarets in the South: Baltimore, Norfolk, Charleston, Atlanta-and in the Middle West: Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Memphis and other places.

Now, most of these fellows were big-time pimps or at least did a little hustling on their own. The ladies liked their music, so these boys would play slow drags, rags or songs that would touch the ladies’ hearts, so they would get a woman or two or three to hustle for them. These ticklers didn’t make much money, playing sometimes 12 hours a day in the houses or cafés-maybe $10 a week, and as much more in tips. Some had to work on tips alone. So they managed a few girls on the side.

Now, a good girl was measured by how much money she could draw, and the best kind of sporting woman was a thieving woman who knew how to get into a man’s pocket and get his bankroll. Sometimes, a girl would roll a live one and get $500 or $1,000. This usually brought a complaint to the police, so the girl and her tickler friend would have to leave town. They’d head north and east to New York and the last stop on the railroad was Jersey City. These fellows brought all the latest styles of playing from the cabarets and sporting houses of the South and West to Jersey City and that’s where I heard them. They were popular fellows, real celebrities. They had lots of girl friends, led a sporting life and were invited everywhere there was a piano. I thought it was a fine way to live, just as later kids would think singers like Crosby or Sinatra were worth copying.

Like other kids, I used to work around saloons, doing a little buck dance, playing the guitar and singing songs like “Don’t Hit That Lady, She Got Good Booty, “Left Her On The Railroad Track,” “Baby, Let Your Drawers Hang Low.” Poor people drank beer, whiskey cost 10 to 12 cents a half-pint or less at the barrelhouses where you brought your own bottle. We came from a religious family, my mother still sang in the church choir, but we lived out near the Dixon pencil factory on Monmouth Street, a tough Jersey City neighborhood with sporting houses all around.

We moved from Jersey City to New York in 1908 when I was 14. In Jersey City I heard good piano from all parts of the South and West, but I never heard real ragtime until we came to New York. Most East Coast playing was based on cotillion dance tunes, stomps, drags and set dances like my “Mule Walk Stomp,” “Gut Stomp,” and the “Carolina Shout” and “Balmoral.” They were all country tunes.

In New York, a friend taught me real ragtime. His name was Charley Cherry. He played Joplin. First he played, then I copied him, and then he corrected me.

When I went to Public School 69, I was allowed to play for the Assembly and for the minstrel shows we put on there. I had a high soprano voice yet, so I was put into the school chorus. Once, Frank Damrosch (Walter Damrosch’s brother) auditioned us for his production of Haydn’s Creation. He used 100 boys in sections. I remember that he personally complimented me because I was singing so strong. We all got a bronze medal for taking part.

In New York I got a chance to hear a lot of good music for the first time. Victor Herbert and Rudolph Friml were popular. I used to go to the old New York Symphony concerts; a friend of my brother’s who was a waiter used to get tickets from its conductor, Josef Stransky, who came to the restaurant where he worked. The full symphonic sounds made a great impression on me. That was when I first heard Mozart, Wagner, von Weber, Meyerbeer, Beethoven and Puccini.

There weren’t any jazz bands like they had in New Orleans or on the Mississippi river boats, but ragtime piano was played all over in bars, cabarets and sporting houses. From what I have heard from older men who played in New York in 1890 and 1900, there was a kind of ragtime played then. W. C. Handy told me the same. A lot of early New Orleans tunes were played by bands and piano players around New York.

The other sections of the country never developed the piano as far as the New York boys did. Only lately have they caught up. The reason the New York boys became such high-class musicians was because the New York piano was developed by the European method, system and style. The people in New York were used to hearing good piano played in concerts and cafés. The ragtime player had to live up to that standard. They had to get orchestral effects, sound harmonies, chords and all the techniques of European concert pianists who were playing their music all over the city.

New York developed the orchestral piano: full, round, big, widespread chords and tenths, a heavy bass moving against the right hand. The other boys from the South and West at that time played in smaller dimensions.

We didn’t have any instruments then except maybe a drummer, so we had to use a solid bass and a solid swing to get the most colorful effects. In the rags, that full piano was played as early as 1910. Even Scott Joplin had octaves and chords, but he didn’t attempt the big hand stretches. Abba Labba, Luckey Roberts and later ticklers did that.

When you heard the biggest ragtime specialists play, you would hear fine harmony, exciting touch and tone and all the themes developed.

From 1910 on, Handy’s blues were played in cabarets. Mannie Sharp, a singer and dancer, and Lola Lee, a blues singer, taught me Handy’s blues in 1911: “Memphis Blues,” “St. Louis,” and later “Beale Street” and “Yellow Dog.” Before that, there were natural blues sung on southern waterfronts, in turpentine camps, farms, chain gangs. Leadbelly and Ma Rainey were singing natural 12-bar blues that were developed from the spirituals.

In 1911, when I was still going to school in short pants, we lived on 99th Street, Manhattan, and I used to go to a cellar on 100th Street and 3rd Avenue, called The 100th Street Hall, run by a fellow nicknamed “Souser.” I never knew his name; he was a juice hound. They had a four or five-piece band there (piano, drums, violin, flute or clarinet). It was called the New Amsterdam Orchestra or Hallie Anderson’s Orchestra. They played verses and choruses, in simple arrangements until 2 A.M. every night. But after two, they pulled the piano out into the middle of the floor and “Souser” would play terrific rags. Then he’d let me play and I’d hit the piano until 4 A.M. I kept my schoolbooks in the coal bin there and went on to school after a little sleep.

In the same year, I was taken uptown to Barron Wilkins’ place in Harlem. Another boy and I let our short pants down to look grown up and sneaked in. Who was playing there but Jelly Roll Morton! He had just arrived from the West and he was red hot. The place was on fire! We heard him play his “Jelly Roll Blues.” I remember that he was dressed in full-back clothes. and wore a light brown melton overcoat, with a three-hole hat to match. He had two girls with him.

Then I was just a short-pants kid in the back of the crowd and I never saw him again until 10 years later in Chicago. I was able to appreciate him then, but I couldn’t steal his stuff. I wasn’t good enough yet. In 1943, though, they picked me to impersonate his style at the New Orleans Jazz Carnival.

That same year, 1911, I heard Thad “Snowball” Wilkerson who played only by ear and in one key, B natural. He had taught Alberta Simmons to play rags. She was a fine instrumental pianist who played with Clef Club Bands. She lived at 8th Avenue and 41st Street. Alberta Simmons was kind enough to teach me the full Joplin rags that she played so well: “Frog Legs,” “Maple Leaf Rag,” and “Sunflower Slow Drag.” (ed: see comment above.)

Part two, from The Jazz Review Vol. 2, No. 6, July 1959, edited by yours truly

In the years before World War I, there was a piano in almost every home, colored or white. The piano makers had a slogan: “What Is Home Without A Piano?” It was like having a radio or a TV today.

If you could play piano good, you went from one party to another and everybody made a fuss about you and fed you ice cream, cake, food and drinks. In fact, some of the biggest men in the profession were known as the biggest eaters we had. At an all-night party, you started at 1:00 A.M., had another meal at 4:00 A.M. and sat down again at 6:00 A.M. Many of us suffered later because of eating and drinking habits started in our younger socializing days. But that was the life for me when I was seventeen.

In the summer of 1912, during high-school vacation, I went out to Far Rockaway, a beach resort near Coney Island, and got a chance to play at a place run by a fellow named Charlie Ett. It was just a couple of rooms knocked together to make a cabaret. They had beer and liquor, and out in the back yard there was a crib house for fast turnover.

It was a rough place, but I got nine dollars and tips, or about eighteen dollars a week. That was so much money that I didn’t want to go back to high school. That fall, instead of going back to school, I went to Jersey City and got a job in a cabaret run by Freddie Doyle. He gave me a two-dollar raise.

In a couple of months, Doyle’s folded up, and I came back to Manhattan and played in a sporting house on 27th Street between 8th and 9th Avenues, which was the Tenderloin then. It was run by a fellow named Dan Williams, and he had two girl entertainers that I used to accompany. I played “That Barbershop Chord,” “Lazy Moon,” Berlin’s “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” Some rags, too, my own and others: Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag” (everybody knew that by then), his “Sunflower Slow Drag.” “Maori” by Will Thiers. “The Peculiar Rag” and “The Dream” by Jack the Bear. Then there were piano arrangements of medleys of Herbert and Friml, popular novelties and music-hall hits — many by Negro composers. Indian songs were also popular then, and the girls at Dan Williams’ used to sing “Hiawatha,” “Red Wing,” “Big Chief Battleaxe,” and “Come With Me To My Big Teepee.”

Blues had not come into popularity at that time. They weren’t known or sung by New York entertainers.

I was working out a number of rags of my own that they wanted to publish at Gotham & Attucks, a Negro music publishing firm whose offices were at 37th Street off Broadway. I couldn’t write them down and I didn’t know anybody who would do them for me. Cecil Mack was president of Gotham & Attucks. All the great colored musicians had gathered around the firm: Bert Williams, George Walker, Scott Joplin, Will Marion Cook, Joe Jordan, Tim Brymm. They had a lot of hit songs. Gussie L. Davis, who wrote white-style ballads for them, was the composer of “The Baggage Coach Ahead,” the greatest tear-jerker of the time.

I had a number of jobs in the winter of 1912-13. One was playing movie piano at the Nickelette at 8th Avenue and 37th Street. In the spring of 1913, I really got started up in The Jungles: the Negro section of Hell’s Kitchen. It ran from 60th to 63rd Street, west of 9th Avenue. It was the toughest part of New York. There were two to three killings a night. Fights broke out over love affairs, gambling, or arguments in general. There were race fights with the white gangs on 66th and 67th Street. It was just as tough in the white section of Hell’s Kitchen.

In 1910 and 1911, I used to drop in at Jim Allan’s place at 61st Street and 10th Avenue, where I’d wear my knickers long so they wouldn’t notice that I was a short-pants punk. After they heard me play, they would let me come when I wanted.

So, in the spring of 1913, got a job playing at Jim Allan’s. It was a remodeled cellar, and since it operated after hours, it had an iron-plated door like the speakeasies had later. There was a bar upstairs, but downstairs there was a rathskeller, and in the back of the cellar there was a gambling joint. When the cops raided us now and then, they always. had to go back to the station house for axes and sledge hammers, so we usually made a clean getaway.

My New York Jazz album on Asch tried to show some types of music played in The Jungles at that time: Joplin’s “Euphonic Sounds,” “The Dream,” and Handy’s “Hesitation Blues.”

One night a week, I played piano for Drake’s Dancing Class on 62nd Street, which we called “The Jungles Casino.” It was officially a dancing school, since it was very hard for Negroes to get a dance-hall license. But you could get a license to open a dancing school very cheap. The Jungles Casino was just a cellar, too, without fixings. The furnace, coal, and ashes were still there behind a partition. The coal bin was handy for guests to stash their liquor in case the cops dropped in. There were dancing classes all right, but there were no teachers. The “pupils” danced sets, two-steps, waltzes, schottisches, and “The Metropolitan Glide,” a new step. I played for these regulation dances, but instead of playing straight, I’d break into a rag in certain places. The older ones didn’t care too much for this, but the younger ones would scream when I got good to them with a bit of rag in the dance music now and then.

The floor of the dancing class was plain cement like any cellar, and it was hard on the dancers’ shoes. I saw many actually wear right through a pair of shoes in one night. They danced hard. When it rained, the water would run down the walls from the street so we all had to stop and mop up the floor.

The people who came to The Jungles Casino were mostly from around Charleston, South Carolina, and other places in the South. Most of them worked for the Ward Line as longshoremen or on ships that called at southern coast ports. There were even some Gullahs among them. They picked their partners with care to show off their best steps and put sets, cotillions and cakewalks that would give them a chance to get off.

The Charleston, which became a popular dance step on its own, was just a regulation cotillion step without a name. It had many variations, all danced to the rhythm that everybody knows now. One regular at the Casino, named Dan White, was the best dancer in the crowd and he introduced the Charleston step as we know it.

It was while playing for these southern dancers that I composed a number of Charlestons, eight in all, all with the same rhythm. One of these later became my famous “Charleston” when it hit Broadway.

My “Carolina Shout” was another type of ragtime arrangement of a set dance of this period. In fact, a lot of famous jazz compositions grew out of cotillion music such as “The Wildcat Blues.” Jelly Roll Morton told me that his “King Porter Stomp” and “High Society” were taken from cotillion music.

The dances they did at The Jungles Casino were wild and comical: the more pose and the more breaks, the better. These Charleston people and the other southerners had just come to New York. They were country people and they felt homesick. When they got tired of two-steps and schottisches, they’d yell: “Let’s go back home!” or “Now, put us in the alley!” I did my “Mule Walk” or “Gut Stomp” for these country dances.

Breakdown music was the best for such sets, the more solid and groovy the better. They’d dance, hollering and screaming until they were cooked. The dances ran from fifteen to thirty minutes, but they kept up all night long, or until their shoes wore out.

About this time, I played my first “Pigfoot Hop” at Phil Watkin’s place on 61st Street. He was a very clever entertainer and he paid me $1.50 for a night’s playing with all the gin and chitterlings that I could get down. This was my first “Chitterlin’ Strut” or parlor social, but later in the depression I became famous at “Gumbo Suppers,” “Fish Fries,” “Egg Nog Parties,” and “Rent Parties.” I loved them all.

Luckey Roberts was the outstanding pianist in New York in 1913 — and for years before and after. He had composed “The Elks March,” “Spanish Venus,” “Palm Beach Rag,” and “The Junkman’s Rag.”

Luckey had massive hands that could stretch a fourteenth on the keyboard, and he played tenths as easy as others played octaves. His tremolo was terrific, and he could drum on one note with two or three fingers in either hand. His style in making breaks was like a drummer’s: he’d flail his hands in and out, lifting them high. A very spectacular pianist.

He was playing at Barron Wilkins’ place in Harlem then, and when I could get away I went uptown and studied him (I was usually working at Allan’s from 9:00 P.M. to 7:00 A.M.). Later we became good friends, and he invited me to his home. Afterwards, I played at Barron Wilkins’, too, as did my friend Ernest Green, who first introduced me to Luckey. Ernest was a good classical pianist. Luckey used to ask him to play the William Tell Overture and the Light Cavalry Overture. These were considered tops in classical music amongst us.

Ernest Green’s mother was studying then with a piano and singing teacher named Bruto Gianinni. She did house cleaning in return for lessons, and several Negro singers got their training that way. Mrs. Green told me: “James, you have too much talent to remain ignorant of musical principles.” She inspired me to study seriously. So I began to take lessons from Gianinni, but I got tired of the dull exercises. However, he taught me a lot of concert effects.

I was starting to develop a good technique. I was born with absolute pitch and could catch a key that a player was using and copy it, even Luckey’s. I played rags very accurately and brilliantly. These would run other ticklers out of the place at cutting sessions. They wouldn’t play after me. I was playing a lot of piano then, traveling around and listening to every good player I could. I’d steal their breaks and style and practice them until I had them perfect.

From listening to classical piano records and concerts, from friends of Ernest Green such as Mme. Garret, who was a fine classical pianist, I would learn concert effects and build them into blues and rags.

Sometimes I would play basses a little lighter than the melody and change harmonies. When playing a heavy stomp, I’d soften it right down then, I’d make an abrupt change like I heard Beethoven do in a sonata.

Some people thought it was cheap, but it was effective and dramatic. With a solid bass like a metronome, I’d use chords with half and quarter changes. [This might be chords moving in half notes and quarter notes — ed.] Once I used Liszt’s Rigoletto Concert Paraphrase as an introduction to a stomp. Another time, I’d use pianissimo effects in the groove and let the dancers’ feet be heard scraping on the floor. It was used by dance bands later.

In practicing technique, I would play in the dark to get completely familiar with the keyboard. To develop clear touch and the feel of the piano, I’d put a bed sheet over the keyboard and play difficult pieces through it.

I had gotten power and was building a serious orches tral piano. I did rag variations on William Tell Overture, Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite and even a “Russian Rag” based on Rachmaninoff’s “Prelude in C Sharp Minor,” which was just getting popular then.

In my “Imitators’ Rag” the last strain had “Dixie” in the right hand and “The Star Spangled Banner” in the left. (It wasn’t the national anthem then.) Another version had “Home, Sweet Home” in the left hand and “Dixie” in the right.

When President Wilson’s “Preparedness” campaign came on, I wrote a march fantasia called Liberty.

From 1914 to 1916, I played at Allan’s, Lee’s, The Jungles Casino, occasionally uptown at Barron Wilkins’, Leroy’s and Wood’s (run then by Edmund Johnson). I went around copping piano prize contests and I was considered one of the best in New York—if not the best. I was slim and dapper, and they called me “Jimmie” then.

Entertainers used to sing blues to me, homemade blues, and I’d arrange them for piano, either to accompany them or play as solos. One of these homemade blues, “All Night Long,” was made into a song by Shelton Brooks, who also wrote “The Darktown Strutters’ Ball.”

Then I met Will Farrell, a Negro song writer, and he showed me how to set my pieces down in writing. He also wrote lyrics for them. With him, I set down my first composition to be published, “Mamma’s and Pappa’s Blues.”

There had been a piece around at the time called “Left Her On The Railroad Track” or “Baby, Get That Towel Wet.” All pianists knew it and could play variations on it. It was a sporting-house favorite. I took one opening strain and did a paraphrase from this and used it in “Mamma’s and Pappa’s Blues.” It was also developed later into “Crazy Blues,” by Perry Bradford.

I had composed “Carolina Shout” before that. It wasn’t written down, but was picked up by other pianists. My “Steeplechase Rag” and “Daintiness Rag” had spread all over the country, too, although they hadn’t been published.

With Farrell, I also wrote “Stop It, Joe!” I sold it, along with “Mamma’s and Pappa’s Blues,” for twenty-five dollars apiece to get enough money for a deposit on a grand piano.

In the summer of 1914, I went for a visit to Atlantic City and heard Eubie Blake (who composed Shuffle Along later), one of the foremost pianists of all time. He was playing at The Belmont, and Charles Johnson was playing at The Boat House, both all-night joints. Eubie was a marvelous song player. He also had a couple of rags. One, “Troublesome Ivories,” was very good. I caught it.

I saw how Eubie, like Willie Smith and Luckey Roberts, could play songs in all keys, so as to be ready for any singer or if one of them started on a wrong note. So I practiced that, too. I also prepared symphonic vamps — gutty, but not very full.

While in New Jersey that summer, I won a piano contest in Egg Harbor, playing my “Twilight Rag” (which had a chimes effect in syncopation), “Steeplechase Rag,” and “Nighttime in Dixieland.”

There was a pianist there who played quadrilles, sets, rags, etc. From him, I first heard the “Walking Texas” or “boogie woogie” bass. The boogie woogie was a cotillion step for which a lot of music was composed. I never got his name, but he played the “Kitchen Tom Rag” which was the signal for a “Jazz” dance.

When I came back to New York, I met the famous Abba Labba in the Chelsea district, he was a friend and pupil of Luckey Roberts. Abba Labba was the working girls’ Jelly Roll. His specialty was to play a lot of piano for girls who were laundresses and cooks. They would supply him with stylish clothes from their customers’ laundry and make him elaborate rosettes for his sleeve guards. The cooks furnished him with wonderful meals, since they had fine cold kina (keena) then. Cold kina was leftover food from a white family’s dinner that the cook was entitled to. This was an old southern cooks’ custom: they fed their own family with these leftovers and they were sure to see that there was plenty of good food left. That’s why old southern home cooking was so famous--the cook shared it.

Most of the full-time hustlers used to cultivate a working girl like that, so they could have good meals and fancy laundry.

Abba Labba had a beautiful left hand and did wonderful bass work. He played with chromatic changes that were new ideas then. He would run octaves with chords, and one of his tricks was to play “Good Night, Beloved, Good Night” in schottische, waltz, and ragtime. I fell on his style and copied a lot of it. I was getting around town and hearing everybody. If they had anything I didn’t have, I listened and stole it.

Sam Gordon played at The Elks Café at 137th and 138th Streets and Lenox Avenue. He was a great technician who played an arabesque style that Art Tatum made famous later. He played swift runs in sixths and thirds, broken chords, one-note tremolandos and had a good left hand. He had been a classical pianist and had studied in Germany. He picked up syncopation here.

Fred Bryant from Brooklyn was a good all-around pianist. He played classical music and had a velvet touch. The piano keys seemed to be extensions of his fingers. Incidentally, as far as I know, he invented the backward tenth. I used it and passed it on to Fats Waller later. It was a keynote of our style.

Down in Chelsea, there was a player named Fats Harris, who looked like Waller did later. He had a rag in D called “Fats Harris’s Rag,” a great stomp tune.

Then in the fall of 1914, I went over to Newark, New Jersey, and first met Willie (The Lion) Smith and Dickie Huff who were playing on The Coast, a tough section around Arlington and Augusta Streets. Both were great players. I don’t have to tell you about Willie, he’s still playing great. He’s the last of the real old-time ticklers along with Luckey.

Part three, from The Jazz Review Vol. 2, No. 7, August 1959, edited by yours truly

Willie Smith was one of the sharpest ticklers I ever met and I met most of them. When we first met in Newark, he wasn’t called Willie The Lion, he got that nickname after his terrific fighting record overseas during World War I. He was a fine dresser, very careful about the cut of his clothes and a fine dancer, too, in addition to his great playing. All of us used to be proud of our dancing. Louis Armstrong, for instance, was considered the finest dancer among the musicians. It made for attitude and stance when you walked into a place, and made you strong with the gals.

When Willie Smith walked into a place, his every move was a picture. Yes, every move we made was studied, practiced, and developed just like it was a complicated piano piece.

When a real smart tickler would enter a place, say in winter, he’d leave his overcoat on and keep his hat on, too. We used to wear military overcoats or what was called a Peddock Coat, like a coachman’s: a blue double-breasted, fitted to the waist and with long skirts. We’d wear a light pearl-gray Fulton or Homburg hat with three buttons or eyelets on the side, set at a rakish angle over on the side of the head. Then a white silk muffler and a white silk handkerchief in the overcoat’s breast pocket. Some carried a gold-headed cane, or if they were wearing a cutaway, a silver-headed cane. A couple of fellows used to wear Inverness capes, which were in style in white society then.

Many fellows had their overcoats lined with the same material as the outside—they even had their suits made that way. Pawnbrokers, special ones, would give you twenty or twenty-five dollars on such a suit or overcoat. They knew what it was made of. A fellow belittling another would be able to say: “G’wan, the inside of my coat would make you a suit.”

When you came into a place you had a three-way play. You never took your overcoat or hat off until you were at the piano. First you laid your cane on the music rack. Then you took off your overcoat, folded it, and put it on the piano, with the lining showing. You then took off your hat before the audience. Each tickler had his own gesture for removing his hat with a little flourish: that was part of his attitude, too. You took out your silk handkerchief, shook it out and dusted off the piano stool. Now, with your coat off, the audience could admire your full-back — or box-back — suit, cut with very square shoulders. The pants had about fourteen-inch cuffs and broidered clocks. Full-back coats were always single-breasted to show your gold watch fob and chain. Some ticklers wore a horseshoe tiepin in a strong single colored tie and a gray shirt with black pencil stripes.

We all wore French Shriner & Urner or Haman straight or French last shoes with very pointed toes, or patent-leather turn-up toes, in very narrow sizes. For instance, if you had a size 7 foot, you’d wear an 8 1/2 shoe on a very narrow last. They cost from twelve to eighteen dollars a pair.

If you had an expensive suit made, you’d have the tailor take a piece of cloth and give it to you so that you could have either spats or button cloth-tops for your shoes to match the suit. Some sharp men would have a suit and overcoat made of the same bolt of cloth. Then they’d take another piece of the same goods and have a three-button Homburg made out of it. This was only done with solid-color cloth, tweeds or plaids were not in good taste for formal hats.

There was a tailor named Bromberger down on Carmine Street, near Sheridan Square in the old 15th Ward, who made all the hustlers’ clothes. That was a Negro section around 1912. He charged twenty-five to forty dollars a suit.

Another tailoring firm, Clemens & Ostreicher, at 40th Street, and 6th Avenue, would make you a sharp custom suit for $11.75—with broadlap seams (34 in.), a fingertip coal, shirred in at the waist with flared skirts, patch pockets, five-button cuffs and broad lapels.

Up on 153rd Street there was a former barber named Hart who had invented a hair preparation named Kink- No-More, called “Conk” for short. His preparation was used by all musicians, the whole Clef Club used him. You’d get your hair washed, dyed and straightened; then trimmed. It would last about a month.

Of course each tickler had his own style of appearance. I used to study them carefully and copy those attitudes that appealed to me.

There was a fellow name Fred Tunstall, whom I mentioned before. He was a real dandy. I remember he had a Norfolk coat with eighty-two pleats in the back. When he sat down to the piano, he’d slump a little in a half hunch, and those pleats would fan out real pretty. That coat was long and flared at the waist. It had a very short belt sewn on the back. His pants were very tight.

He had a long neck, so he wore a high, stiff collar that came up under his chin with a purple tie. A silk handkerchief was always draped very carefully in his breast pocket. His side view was very striking.

Tunstall was very careful about his hair, which was ordinary, but he used lots of pomade. His favorite shoes were patent-leather turnups. His playing was fair, but he had the reputation of being one of our most elegant dressers. He had thirty-five suits of clothes: blacks, grays, brown pin stripes, Oxfords, pepper and salts.

Some men would wear a big diamond ring on their pinky, the right-hand one, which would flash in the treble passages. Gold teeth were in style, and a real sharp effect was to have a diamond set on one tooth. One fellow went further and had diamonds set in the teeth of his toy Boston bulldog. There was a gal named Diamond Floss, a big sporting-house woman, a hot clipper and a high-powered broad, who had diamonds in all her front teeth. She had a place in Chelsea, the west thirties, in the Tenderloin days.

[Q. Where did these styles come from, the South?]

No, we saw them right here in New York City. They were all copied from the styles of the rich whites. Most of the society folks had colored valets and some of them would give their old clothes to their valets and household help.

Then we’d see rich people at society gigs in the big hotels where they had Clef Club bands for their dances. So we wanted to dress good, copied them and made im- provements.

In the sporting world of gamblers, hustlers and ticklers, the lowest rank is called a punk. He’s nothing. He doesn’t have any sense; he doesn’t know anything about life or the school of the smart world. He doesn’t even know how to act in public. You had to have an attitude, a style of behaving that was your personal, professional trade-mark.

The older Clef Club musicians were artists at this kind of acting. The club was a place to go to study these glamorous characters. I got a lot of my style from ticklers like Floyd Keppard, who I know in Jersey City, Dan Avery, Bob Hawkins, Lester Wilson, Freddie Tunstall, Kid Sneeze, Abba Labba, Willie Smith and many others.

I’ve seen Jelly Roll Morton, who had a great attitude, approach a piano. He would take his overcoat off. It had a special lining that would catch everybody’s eye. So he would turn it inside out and, instead of folding it, he would lay it lengthwise along the top of the upright piano. He would do this very slowly, very carefully and very solemnly as if that coat was worth a fortune and had to be handled very tenderly.

Then he’d take a big silk handkerchief, shake it out to show it off properly, and dust off the stool. He’d sit down then, hit his special chord (every tickler had his special trade-mark chord, like a signal) and he’d be gone! The first rag he’d play was always a spirited one to astound the audience.

Other players would start off by sitting down, wait for the audience to quiet down and then strike their chord, holding it with the pedal to make it ring.

Then they’d do a run up and down the piano a scale or arpeggios or if they were real good they might play a set of modulations, very offhand, as if there was nothing to it. They’d look around idly to see if they knew any chicks near the piano. If they saw somebody, they’d start a light conversation about the theater, the races or social doings light chat. At this time, they’d drift into a rag, any kind of pretty stuff, but without tempo, particularly without tempo. Some ticklers would sit sideways to the piano, cross their legs and go on chatting with friends near by. It took a lot of practice to play this way, while talking and with your head and body turned.

Then, without stopping the smart talk or turning back to the piano, he’d attack without any warning, smashing right into the regular beat of the piece. That would knock them dead.

A big-timer would, of course, have a diamond ring he would want to show off to some gal near by that he wanted to make. So he would adjust his hand so that the diamond would catch her eye and blind her. She’d know he was a big shot right off.

A lot of this was taught to me by old-timers, when they would be sitting around when I was a kid and only playing social dance music. I wasn’t a very good-looking fellow. but I dressed nice and natty. I learned all their stuff and practiced it carefully.

In the old days, these effects were studied to attract the young gals who hung around such places. Ed Avery, whose style I copied, was a great actor and a hell of a ladies’ man. He used to run big harems of all kinds of women.

After your opening piece to astound the audience, it would depend on the gal you were playing for or the mood of the place for what you would play next. It might be sentimental, moody, stompy or funky. The good player had to know just what the mood of the audience was. At the end of his set. he’d always finish up with a hot rag and then stand up quickly, so that everybody in the place would be able to see who knocked it out.

Every tickler kept these attitudes even when he was socializing at parties or just visiting. They were his professional personality and prepared the audience for the artistic performance to come. I’ve watched high-powered actors today, and they all have that professional approach. In the old days they really worked at it. It was designed to show a personality that women would admire. With the music he played, the tickler’s manners would put the question in the ladies’ minds: “Can he do it like he can play it?”

Full-back clothes became almost a trade-mark for pimps and sharps. Church socials and dancing classes discriminated against all who wore full-back clothes. They would have a man at the door to keep them out. So, in self-defense, the hustlers had to change to English drape styles, which were rumored to be worn only by pansies and punks. Oh, yes. Some of the toughest guys would even attend Sunday school classes regularly, just to get next to the younger and better-class gals there. They wore the square style of pinch-back coats and peg-top pants and would even learn hymns to impress a chick they had their eye on. They were very versatile cats.

Part four, from The Jazz Review Vol. 2, No. 8, September 1959, edited by yours truly

I told you about writing songs with Will Farrell. Well, right after publishing “Mama’s and Papa’s Blues,” “Stop it, Joe,” and “The Monkey Hunch,” the two of us opened an office together. We wanted to meet artists, write special material and generally contact the entertainment field. I wanted to learn how to write for the theater.

Nothing happened at first, but when things go low, somebody would walk in. We’d get jobs like social club shows, special music for industrial shows, conventions, topical songs…We’d put on one-night shows and dances to attract actors and looking get a week at the Lincoln or Crescent in Harlem.

Producers in those days would round up a couple of clever girls, work up an act with scenery and costumes, promote the music and then try to sell the whole unit to a circuit. We’d get paid for performing (not for composing). It would get our songs heard and maybe published. All composers and lyric writers started out that way then, even those who became the biggest in their field.

We learned a lot in those shoe-string days. We’d get the Negro reaction in the South and the opera house, white reaction in upper Pennsylvania, Connecticut and New York State. I was learning how to do show music, and it was all a new experience.

I played with the Clef Club on some gigs and fast calls. That organization was well run by Jim Europe. They used to have concerts with a 110 piece orchestra and 10 pianos on the stage. They made a fine sound.

I also worked in a song and dance act with Ben Harney, who was one of the greatest piano players and who was supposed to be “the inventor of ragtime.” He used to play two pianos together — one with each hand. Ben was also a great entertainer on the TOBA time, a southern vaudeville circuit. His big songs were: “I’m a Natural Born Cannon Ball Catcher,” and “Mr. Johnson, Turn Me Loose!”

One day I got a message to go see Mr. Fay at the Aeolian Company. He wanted someone to cut ragtime piano rolls.

Now, I had never cut a roll before. In fact, no Negro had ever cut his own compositions before. Mr. Fay at Aeolian set me down at a piano and I played a rag. Until he played it back at me, I didn’t know I had cut a roll. Later, Russell Robinson, a white pianist, taught me how to run the piano roll cutter. From 1916 on, I cut one or two rolls a month of my own pieces at Aeolian. I wrote rags in every key in the scale. Every one of them had to be written out perfectly because the manuscript of each piece was used for correcting the rolls, if any note wasn’t punched right.

Being the first Negro composer to cut his own rags, I saw them become famous and studied all over the country by young ticklers who couldn’t read much music. Later did the same type of rolls for QRS, which had a bigger circulation and really spread my rags around. These were all terrific rags. They have been recut and recorded on LP by Riverside Records.

It was at Aeolian later, in 1920, that I met George Gershwin who was cutting “Oriental” numbers there when I was making blues rolls which were popular then. He had written “Swanee” and was interested in rhythm and blues. Like myself, he wanted to write them on a higher level. We had lots of talks about our ambitions to do great music on American themes.

At this time, I was rehearsing 3, 5, 7, and 14 piece combos and trying to introduce small chamber orchestras in symphonic style. I wanted to be a bandleader, and not just a leader, but an arranger too. I liked to work out ideas and experiments and I tried out what were known as “skulls” or “head arrangements”— full of counterpoint and contrasting melodies.

Those 1916-1918 years were “The Giggin’ Years” for me. Happy Rowan, a drummer, had various jobs to offer working in Clef Club gigs and on his own promotions. They were all fast calls; sometimes I’d work three jobs a day, and get eighteen to twenty- five dollars a night for a job.

So, I formed the Jimmie Johnson Trio and took on Happy’s gigs with them. My musicians, all virtuosos, were Nelson Kinkaid, sax/clarinet, who could reach E-flat above altissimo and could transpose from trumpet parts on sight. The violin was Shrimp Jones and we had a relief man, Clarence Tisdale, alto sax, from the Wright Quintet who were playing at Reisenweber’s.

All of them were well schooled and could play with the best people today. We had bags of music as big as trunks; all the parts were written out. There were no special arrangements in those days, but I had written some variations on pieces like “The Crocodile,” “The Sheik,” “The Vamp,” and “La Vida.” But we had learned all our repertoire by heart and never had to crack the music bags once.

Among other jobs, I played and accompanied Reece Dupree, a blues singer, at the Crescent, a little hole- in-the-wall vaudeville house on 135th Street. That was the cradle of colored entertainment in New York, Then I got a call to form a five-piece band for the play What’s Your Husband Doing? which played on Broadway. It was my first five-piece band, and we had a five-minute scene onstage. We went on the road with it to Boston, I met Fleurnoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles (who were later to write Shuffle Along) at Lucas’ place on Tremont Street, which was a hangout for professionals. After the show, I used to play the piano there with Louis Mitchell, a classical violinist then at Boston Music Conservatory.

When we got back to New York, there was great excitement: the Original Dixieland Band had hit the town and had made a big impression playing “Barnyard Blues” and “The Dixieland One-Step.” It was a white band, you know, imitating the New Orleans jazz style that had never been heard in New York before.

I saw that it was going to be popular and tried to get a similar band organized at the Clef Club, but the older men there vetoed it. They thought that kind of playing was vulgar compared to what they were trying to do. This experience, and others, was an example of their not encouraging the younger musicians. As a result, their membership fell off. There was another band that played in New York and other northern cities in the years between 1910-1916 that could really swing. That was the Jenkins Orphan Asylum Band from Charleston, S. C. It was a boys’ band, Negro orphan boys from 8 to 16 or 18 years old that made the rounds of northern cities. They played in the streets and in backyards in the Negro neighborhoods and passed the hat. They had white caps with red jackets and their drum-major was a great poser and strutter who knew all the tricks. Every boy who saw him wanted to be a drum-major. They played marches and minstrel and cotillion tunes with real syncopation and swing.

Many jazz musicians came from this boys’ school. The Aiken brothers, trumpeters in Joe Oliver’s band that was playing at Leroy’s in 1920, were from the Jenkins Orphan Asylum Band. “Traps” McIntosh, in my opinion the greatest drummer of all time, was trained there, as was Herbert Wright (Jim Europe’s drummer) and Gene Anderson whose specialty was drumming on the wall. Other drummers at that time included Bob Gordon, who was known as “The March King,” also played the piano regularly at Allan’s before I went there. He wrote “Oh You Drummer!” — a piece that made him popular because it had breaks for drums. A lot of drummers came to see him and I met them and heard them later. Some of the famous ones were Si Moore; Buddy Gillmore, (who was The Prince of Wales’ teacher when he took to the traps); a fellow known as “Battleaxe” who could do a perpetual bass drum roll with his right foot and had a comedy style.

But the greatest drummer of all time was “Traps” McIntosh, who was from the Jenkins Orphan Asylum Band. He used to play with different bands and when he was out of work he would hock his traps. If any leader wanted him, the leader had to get them out.

McIntosh used a small drum, bass drum and cymbal. His drumsticks were two chair rungs, whittled down. He played the cymbal with a stick. He had a roll that was like tearing toilet paper and he was a sensational exhibitionist, flying sticks and all. He’d hit the gong, toss his sticks into the air and go right into the groove. I worked with “Traps,” Herbert Wright and Gene Anderson and used to try and develop them and their effects. When the drums were tuned to a low G or A flat, it gave them a dull thud that was fine for jazz. A square, open box was used to set off the effects such as the rackazoo, chinese gong, blocks, cymbals, and triangle.

In the old days, the drummer was the salesman of the band, usually with his comedy effects. Later in the 1920’s, his place was taken by the dancers and the acrobatic specialties. Still later, the band salesman became the girl singers who just looked good. The movies came in and killed novelty drummers by making them sound effects men. So now they play rhythm all through. Some day they’ll come back.

Oh, I mustn’t forget something important in 1917. That year I married Lillie Mae Wright, whom I met at Allan’s in 1913. We’ve trouped together for years and have seen lots of things change.

Part five, from The Jazz Review Vol. 3, No. 3, March/April 1960, edited by yours truly

Ford Dabney had the best Negro band in New York at that time [1917]. It played at the Ziegfeld Roof and was made up of sixteen musicians who played straight Broadway music, pops and show tunes. Dabney got the job there through Jim Europe.

One of Dabney’s men, Allie Ross, a pianist and violinist, was one of our early ambitious musicians. He wanted to be a leader of ability and studied theory and harmony with E. Aldema Jackson, a juilliard graduate, organist and music theory teacher.

Allie later became a conductor for Lew Leslie; he rehearsed the orchestra for W. C. Handy’s “The Blues” and later trained Fletcher Henderson’s first orchestra that opened at Club Alabam on Broadway.

Allie was a very serious musician and was a good friend of mine. He was one of the first to recognize my talent, and one of his ambitions was to transcribe some of my piano pieces for chamber orchestra; but he never got around to it.

Harlem was starting to grow then. One of the great hangouts for musicians was a place called The Rock; some people called it The Garden of Joy. Anyway, it was located on top of a big shelf of rock in a vacant lot at 140th Street and Seventh Avenue, where Adam Powell’s church and the Mt. Zion apartments stand now. On the top of this rock, a man built a summer house with a dance floor and a kitchen. It was all hung with Japanese lanterns and looked like a summer resort in the middle of the city. There was always a breeze from the Heights or from the Harlem River below. Some of the best musicians in Harlem used to relax there. On weekends, the dictys would hold their socials, but on weekdays us musicians had it to ourselves. Piano players would come up there to improvise and show off their latest riffs afternoons and evenings; lots of small bands worked out their arrangements on The Rock, or sat in with us piano players developing new music. It was a lively little musical mountain, visited by all the talent in Harlem. Willie “the Lion” Smith, Fats Waller, Willie Gant and myself hung out there regularly, knocking each other out with rags, stomps, shouts and every wild chorus and freakish break we could think of. It was an odd place for an academy of music, but very relaxing, and there was always an intelligent and appreciative audience to follow us.

A short time later, on the 139th Street side of this vacant lot, a little cabaret called The Livia was built. All the rising girl singers visited it: Ethel Waters, Bessie Smith, Florence Mills, Gertrude Saunders, Adelaide Hall and Martha Copeland, among dozens of others. It was a favorite place to catch the latest blues and ballads, for the artists passing through would give out without too much coaxing.

I remember that Johnnie Dunn, a disciple of Joe Oliver, played his trumpet there. In Memphis or Chicago he had heard the King and copied all his effects. Seven years later, Joe Oliver himself came to New York but his style of playing had already been established here and had been widely imitated from its early introduction by Johnnie Dunn.

On 139th Street, right below The Rock was another jazz joint, The 101 Ranch, where wild little bands sounded off, defying all musical convention. They played without written music, never bothered with arrangements, orthodox modulations or harmonies, but just let go with natural blues, hot stomps and all sorts of wild rhythms and sounds that popped into their heads and right out through their instruments without the benefit of formalities. These original bands reminded me of the music we used to hear in The Hole In The Wall on 135th Street, which was another early and original well of unrestricted hot music.

We used to drop into The 101 Ranch with a small bottle, order a bottle of soda or a pitcher of ice water and sop up some of this primitive sound. It would rest our ears after working on complicated head arrangements. For fancy piano, we would drop into some place where Willie “the Lion” Smith was playing “The Sheik of Araby” or “Moonlight” with elaborate concert-style introductions based on Schubert’s “Marche Militaire.” That was considered very sophisticated in those days as we liked people to know that we could play the classics, too. I used to like to rip off a ringing concert-style opening using Liszt’s Rigoletto Paraphrase that was full of fireworks in the classical manner and then abruptly slide into a solid, groovy stomp to wake up the audience and get a laugh. Donald Lambert, who plays out in Jersey now, still does those classical bits on Grieg, Massenet and Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. They used to be in every tickler’s repertory in the early days, but few do them now. Lambert made some great records for Bluebird using these classical concert themes. He used to study me a lot.

Another tickler, Mike Jackson, now dead, came to play at Barron Wilkins’ from St. Louis and Louisville. His “Chinese Blues” was very popular. It was in D Minor and he used a muffled bass drum with it for Oriental effect. When vamping, he did an imitation Chinese monologue, and then he’d go into a natural blues (like “All Night Long”) with words that compared the troubles of the Chinese and the Negroes. Pace & Handy published it. Then we got into the war, and all the open cabarets turned into dance halls when prohibition came along.

I wasn’t a fighter like Willie Smith. He got in the army and made one of the fightingest records of any soldier in that war; he was decorated and everything. That’s when he got the nickname “The Lion.” He was always a fighter; and he fought a lot of my battles over the years. I remember the first thing he ever said to me when I met him and played after him on The Coast over in Newark. He said: “Well, you may be able to play better than I can, but I’ll bet I can beat you fightin’.” And he’s still got his pep and attitude to the present day. Nobody ever put anything over on Willie and got away with it.

In that war, you had to carry a draft card with you all the time. They used to have raids, and if you didn’t have your card, it was the end. One night, when I didn’t have my card on me, I was in a place when the MPs raided. I knew what it meant, so I just jumped out a window; it was only on the second floor.

I knew I had to get a war job or be drafted, so I got one in the Quartermaster Corps warehouse at 6th Avenue and 38th Street. The officers and soldiers uniforms were kept there. I pushed a 1/8 ton hand truck that really needed two men.

After work, I would go out to the cabarets and play late and then get up early to scuffle with the hand truck. I used to go into the toilet and get a little rest when I could. After awhile, I was moved to an easier job on the second floor of the warehouse, but I quit a few weeks after that. The war was over.

A funny thing happened during that year. Before I got that job, I was expecting to be drafted any minute, but nothing happened. Later I found out that the three Army doctors who had examined me had died in the big influenza epidemic that broke out — one after the other. By the time they got my records straightened out, the whole war was over.

In those days the Clef Club used to give big concerts in which all the good musicians played. I was ambitious to conduct one of these concerts and worked hard at it. But I didn’t get it, and it broke my heart. I quit the Clef Club and returned to rehearsing my own group.

We began to use new effects, like having a xylophone solo for the fast breaks, and copied the Dixieland style to get attention. During this time, I wrote “After Hours,” a good instrumental that had a blues in the last strain with a slow, sobbing end that was muffled. It used to break up dance hall audiences.

I took it to Columbia Records, but it didn’t go. Victor Records also turned it down. Harry Pace had formed the Black Swan Record Company that made the first successful colored record with Ethel Waters’ “Go Back Where You Stayed Last Night” and “Georgia Blues.” He gave me a chance to back singers with my combos. I made a solo, “Harlem Strut,” for Black Swan and some commercial songs, too.

We’d play anywhere for small dough to keep busy, and go around to dancing classes in the afternoon. Then I got a break and was offered a road job playing with a Smart Set show on the road-one week in Philly, one and a half weeks in Wilmington, Baltimore. Norfolk and Atlanta.

We played first in the Standard Theatre in Philadelphia, which was a haven for colored performers. It was run by a Negro, John T. Gibson. The director of the orchestra there at the time was Benton Overstreet, a fine musician and arranger. He was the composer of “There’ll Be Some Changes Made.” He never lived to hear it become famous. In the Philadelphia Dancing Class, a lively girl named Ethel Waters from Chester, Pa. had made quite a hit. She wasn’t pretty, but she had a lively, funny personality and was a great comic dancer.

After Philadelphia, we played Wilmington and Baltimore. The next stop was Norfolk, sa we took the Chesapeake Bay boat and relaxed... a little bit too much. I had a few drinks and dozed off. When I woke up, I found that somebody had taken all my money and my collar buttons, which were gold. Others had been robbed, too, by the lush-rollers. We wouldn’t have a cent when we got to Norfolk.

There was a piano on the boat, so I sat down and started to play, and my wife, who was with me, began to sing and dance. Pretty soon money started dropping. When the boat tied up, we had enough to eat in Norfolk. In Atlanta with the same Smart Set show, we played at the 81 Theatre on Carter St. At 91 the Bessie Smith Trio was singing. Since there was still a wartime atmosphere, they were singing “Liberty Bells” and when they came to the end of the chorus about the Liberty Bells ringing out victory, they used to turn around and waggle their plump butts in time to the bell ringing. It was a knockout effect.

Later I went to a party in Atlanta where Bessie was, and I played behind her in her “Alcoholic Blues,” improvising the accompaniment. This wasn’t so hard because all true blues are the same form. Every natural blues has: 4 bars opening in tonic/2 bars to subdominant/2 bars back to tonic/2 bars to dominant/2 bars ending in tonic. To be a real blues it must follow that plan.

At 91 Carter St., Eddie Heywood Sr. played regularly, although he was laying off when I was there. He was a great blues player and was known as “The Ragtime King of the South.” I wish I had been able to hear him. His son is a fine player and arranger now: Eddie Heywood, Jr.

During the same trip, I got out to Toledo, Ohio where I heard Johnny Waters who played “Western” piano. He taught his tricks to Roy Bargy, who was later pianist in Paul Whiteman’s orchestra. Waters was a fine, natural piano player who had a pint of whisky every morning for breakfast. He did slow blues with tenths: “When The Cold, Cold Winds,” “Easy Rider,” “All That I Had Is Gone,” “Walkin’ The Dog,” etc. Handy was becoming popular then.

When I was in Toledo, I studied composition with Jan Chiapuse who was at the Toledo Conservatory. He was a Paris Conservatory graduate. All the time, I was playing in a club called The Lion’s Jaw. Art Tatum later told me that he caught me there and studied my style. He was about 14 then.

At the end of 1919, when we got back, I picked up some short money playing gigs and Clef Club fast calls. I dropped into Edmund Johnson’s place at 132nd Street and Fifth Avenue. It was a black-and-tan place with singing waiters and that lively girl from the Philadelphia Dancing Class, Ethel Waters. Ethel was making her first big hit in New York singing songs like: “If You Go Away and Come Back and Somebody Has Taken Your Place-Don’t Get Mad,” “All Night Long,” a blues based on a current riff that was going around, and “The Blues,” with no special tune and with words she made up herself. She also used to sing my “Stop It, Joe!” and I would play behind her. She was a great comic singer — the greatest, in fact. I made records with her later.

Also at Johnson’s were Mattie Hite, one of the greatest cabaret singers of all time and Josephine Stevens, a coloratura, who was able to hold a note while the rhythm strode through and then pick up the rhythm without a break, a terrific effect.

Another interesting place in 1920 was Small’s Sugar Cane Club, a cellar club located on the southwest corner of 135th Street, and Fifth Avenue. It was the first Harlem night club to become popular with whites from downtown; the first of the big black-and-tan clubs, like The Cotton Club and Connie’s were to become later.

It was Charlie Small’s first place and the room where he made all his money. Charlie came from South Carolina, and most of his help were from that state, too. Many of them came from the Jungles, where I first played at Allen’s and Georgie Lee’s, since that neighborhood was full of South Carolinians. It was near the Ward Line docks whose boats ran to Charleston and other southern ports. Most of them were dock workers for the line. One of the attractions at The Sugar Cane was the jive of the waiters, who sang, danced and carried on a separate sideshow of their own while they took care of the customers between the regular floor shows. Each waiter served drinks or set-ups to his tables with an original strut, shuffle or tap, and then they’d cut away with a heel pivot and dip, spinning their empty trays over their heads like jugglers.

Those Small’s waiters sang, too! Solos and quartets, or if a shout refrain was indicated, they all joined in to make the room ring.

One of them was called “Whistling Seath” because he could whistle beautiful blues through his teeth with a fine mellow tone, giving as fine an effect as any voice or instrument. He was a very popular and attractive character and had a solid following, not only at The Sugar Cane, but all over Harlem.

At that time all good colored performers played at the Lincoln Theatre, which was to Harlem what The Palace was to Broadway or The Standard to Philadelphia. The Lincoln Theatre was the big, handsome successor to The Crescent, that little hole in the wall on 135th Street, where Harlem stage entertainment was born. As in all popular theatres, the gallery gods decided the fate of the performers. Some entertainers called The Lincoln “The Temple of Ignorance” because of the audi- ence’s preference for old-fashioned natural blues rather than the more artificial songs and ballads of Tin Pan Alley.

“Whistling Seath” from Small’s was a regular attendant at The Lincoln, and when a performer sang or played a blues, “Whistling Seath” would join in with his mellow whistle. The audience liked it, and most performers did, or seemed to. If he whistled behind you, it was a mark of acceptance, of success. You were in and had the house with you. He was part of a group known as Pimp’s Gang who acted like the permanent rulers of the Lincoln’s balcony and led the applause like the claques they have at the Opera downtown. Some artists used to entertain these fellows with liquor and food on the outside because they were influential, and their reaction in the audience could make you or break you.

When this gallery gang yelled: “Put us in the alley!” that was the signal for the entertainer on the stage to go into a low-down blues. Every piano player knew what to do. First, he hit the classical “blues announcement” with its familiar figure, and the audience squealed with anticipation. Then the musicians went into the groove with “Whistling Seath’ singing like a bird in the gallery. Everybody had a fine time. When you went “down the alley” at The Lincoln, you could be sure of a week and a return engagement.

Later on, Fats Waller got the same effect there playing the organ behind “Whistling Seath” during movies.

[Sadly, the interview abruptly ends there with the promise of more to come. However The Jazz Review folded and Tom Davin did not place further installments with any other publication. ]

For the last two or three years I have been working out of a famous book of piano exercises by Ernst von Dohnányi. Frankly I wish I had looked at them when I was much younger. A few significant pages have been added to my collection of educational pdfs.

Ethan Iverson Teaching PDFs [dropbox link]

includes

Original Sheet Music of Two Dozen Jazz Standards
Theory of Harmony
Bird is the Word
Doodlin’
Core Repertoire
21 Cramer Studies Taught by Beethoven
Bud Powell Trifecta
Trane ’n Me (by Andrew White)
Dohnanyi first three pages (polyphony) + accents (bebop)

(If you want to share the dropbox further that’s fine, just encourage the recipients to sign up for Transitional Technology.)

Apologies for unreturned emails and ignored direct messages. It just gets away from me. However, the algorithm likes comments, and thus I do respond to comments. Ask me anything, or just comment. Next week I’ll be posting a bit about James P. Johnson, connected to my solo gig at the Jazz Gallery.

Update: Monk’s “Criss Cross” came up in the comments, this is my quick version. I’m not saying it is exactly like Monk’s — it is not — but it is what I play.

The Abdullah Ibrahim track I know best is gorgeous “Water From an Ancient Well” from the mid-’80s Blackhawk album of the same name. It is a septet, four horns and rhythm.

Don Cherry said:

These songs that he’s written have a feeling that they’re the same type of songs they built the pyramids with. Very old and typical African-Chinese, from the Mongolian. He can make you really aware of this timelessness. He’s planned a school in Swaziland, and Swaziland is where some of the oldest stones have been recovered.1

Carlos Ward, alto flute — Ricky Ford, tenor sax — Charles Davis, baritone sax — Dick Griffin, trombone — David Williams, bass — Ben Riley, drums.

The septet is an unusual combination: flute from Carlos Ward, plus lower instruments that are absolutely Ellingtonian. Charles Davis is prominent in the Harry Carney role on baritone sax, trombonist Dick Griffin delivers surreal growls, Ricky Ford starts his improvisation a la Paul Gonsalves. Both David Williams and Ben Riley are best known as straight-ahead masters of swing, but they play this pop beat like they were born to do it.

The first time I heard Ibrahim’s name was at Kenny Barron trio gig in the ‘80s, when Barron worked with a local rhythm section at the Artists’ Quarter. Barron sent the band away for a tune and played his own solo rhapsody “Song for Abdullah.” Soon enough I owned the Barron album Scratch with a good take of “Song for Abdullah.” However it was the gig that was unforgettable, this glamorous solo piano performance at a small club in the Midwest, a black American paying tribute to a South African.

The blurb:

James P. Johnson and John Coltrane are from different eras, so it is comparatively rare for compositions from each to be placed next to each other. It’s possible they could have met, for many of the circa-1950 NYC jazz musicians knew James P. personally, and Coltrane’s first records with Miles Davis were made in 1955, the year of Johnson’s death.

This unique program is essentially two sets of etudes. Posterity remembers James P. Johnson for composing the anthem of the Jazz Age, “The Charleston,” although the jazz pianists still work on his serious stride piano classics like “Carolina Shout” for they are both very beautiful and very nutritious. It is uncommon for a modern jazz pianist to play James P. In concert; is also uncommon for a solo pianist to tackle themes from John Coltrane, for part of the Coltrane style is a fierce and interactive rhythm section. Iverson treats iconic Coltrane themes as etudes for expanding the possibilities of solo jazz piano, an approach that naturally aligns with the restless exploration of the saxophonist.

I’ll also be playing solo James P. + Coltrane next month at Umbria Jazz Fest on July 9.

The Billy Hart quartet with Nicole Glover, Ben Street, and myself will play Jazz in July at 92NY on Wednesday, July 15.

I will lead a trio with Herman Burney and Nasar Abadey at Blues Alley in Washington D.C. on July 18 and 19 playing the music of Thelonious Monk.

July 31: Walter Smith III and myself will play duo at Arrow Street Arts in Boston, presented by New England Jazz Collaborative.

August 1: Billy Hart quartet with Walter Smith III, Ben Street, and myself at the Newport Jazz Festival.

Amazing story by Aidan Levy in The Nation: “Sonny Rollins Lived to See Justice for His Wrongly Convicted Father.”

Kat Rosenfield: “I Was Canceled Before It Was Cool.” Great article, although very sad to read.

Sam Wiebe: “Collateral and Miami Vice.” Interesting comments about Michael Mann movies. Neither of those two made an impression, but I’m overdue for a rewatch. Hot takes: Heat is overrated; Manhunter is underrated; Thief is rated just the right amount.

I stayed at a place with an interesting instrument. Two videos:

“Heliotrope Bouquet” was composed by Scott Joplin and Louis Chauvin in 1907. (This piano was also apparently last tuned in 1907.)

Bach two-part Invention on the same scruffy piano. (The low “C” doesn’t work, thus I’m playing the one in B minor.)

For Agatha

Ginny Beech was the president of the Serious Agatha Christie Fan Club, based in Bath, with meetings twice a year. The 150+ members had steadfastly voted for Beech to lead the club for two decades not just because she knew the canon better than anybody, but also because she looked quite a bit like Margaret Rutherford, who of course was famous for playing Miss Jane Marple in the rather dated and zany film adaptations from the 1960s. Indeed, Ginny Beech once briefly portrayed Miss Marple onstage for a local production of Murder at the Vicarage at Bath Theatre, where she annoyed the other cast members by attempting to fix what she saw as overreach in the script by Ronald Reginald. (“Flighty” was the word most used by Ginny Beech when discussing the Reginald script in rehearsals.)

In recent years, the Serious Agatha Christie Fan Club had been beset by more and more adaptations. IP was the name of the 21st century game, and the Christie estate seemed to green-light anything and everything through the licensing company Agatha Christie Limited. This was a problem for the Club, for they loved the books, and hated it when Christie’s original text was changed for (in their minds) “no good reason.” You must understand: The Club didn’t even approve of ITV’s well-liked Agatha Christie's Poirot, for every script took “awful” liberties with the original story. A perfect example was the teleplay The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which in the final act devolves into an action thriller with guns. How dare they trample on the masterful internal chess game of the lauded original and replace it with something out of Jason Bourne?

Admittedly, one could approve of David Suchet. Suchet was good casting. It was perfectly acceptable to “see” Suchet (in the mind’s eye) when reading about Hercule Poirot, just as it was acceptable to “see” Rutherford when reading about Jane Marple.

The Club was a united front in terms of deploring all the modern adaptions, but Ginny Beech was the one who took it personally. She authored the letters: A hard copy was sent to the production companies and the text of each letter was also posted to the Serious Agatha Christie Fan Club blog hosted by Wordpress. Some of the younger members of the Club suggested that Ginny Beech move operations from Wordpress to Substack, but Ginny Beech liked Wordpress. It was her first internet platform, and she saw no good reason to change.

The various executives knew all about the Serious Agatha Christie Fan Club. Agatha Christie Limited took no notice, but the executives of each new project spent a few minutes googling their recent forebears, and soon enough found, for example, the rather weighty missive concerning Kenneth Branagh’s A Haunting in Venice, which began with some 1200 words on why Dame Agatha’s original title Hallowe’en Party was better than A Haunting in Venice before proceeding with 37 further numbered examples of major textual distortion.

When tasked with rebooting Hercule Poirot as a young man, the head of Mammoth Screen, Tom Franklin, asked his secretary Gillian Francis what she thought of the Serious Agatha Christie Fan Club. Francis immediately knew what Franklin was talking about, and said, “You could reach out in advance of Hercule. You know, invite them in, show them around the BBC, and try to get ahead of the pushback.”

“Hey, Gillian, that’s a good idea! Ed is really charismatic in person, he will surely warm those old biddies right up. Go ahead and see if they are game for a red-carpet visit.”

As it happened, the email from Gillian Francis to SeriousAgatha@wordpress.net landed the same day as the official announcement.

Ginny Beech was thunderstruck by the picture of Edward Bluemel as Poirot. She seethed and simmered. She wrote a vicious reply to Mammoth’s friendly overture — but, at the last moment, did not hit send. Instead, she got up from the computer to look once again at the modest shrine in her living room: pictures of Agatha Christie, several expensive first editions, even a signed letter. Was there anything to be done to stop this madness?

A week later, 40 members of the Serious Agatha Christie Fan Club met Gillian Francis outside BBC security and were ushered into the nicer of two large reception areas. Tom Franklin and the young star Edward Bluemel were on their best behavior, and they immediately charmed everyone, including apparently Ginny Beech, who blushed when Bluemel came close and took her hand. The two even put their arms around each other and posed for a photo taken by Francis. After presentation of press materials and before the planned Q&A, coffee was served in white mugs branded “BBC.”

Nobody observed Ginny Beech spiking her coffee and saying quietly to herself, “For Agatha!” right before taking a long sip of the bitter brew. She had intended to leap up and accuse Franklin and Bluemel of driving herself to the extreme action of martyring herself on BBC premises, but the arsenic acted too fast. Her throat closed up, she lost consciousness, she slipped to the floor and perished. The poisoned coffee fell to the floor and splattered.

Inspector Ghent had actually never overseen a poisoning investigation. Poisoning happened in murder mysteries — Agatha Christie was the inspector’s favorite, of course — but rarely in real life. He was as surprised as everyone else when he was assigned to look into the curious death at the BBC. Among other oddities, a half-used packet of arsenic was discovered in the jacket pocket of handsome Edward Bluemel. Bluemel denied all knowledge of the arsenic, and why in the world would he want to publicly poison some old lady he had never met?

It was a joyous moment for Inspector Ghent when he put two and two together, for it was a convoluted murder plot straight out of his favorite books! The poison was surely intended for secretary Gillian Francis, seated next to Ginny Beech and drinking coffee from an identical white BBC mug. It turned out Francis had spurned Bluemel’s advances, and there was even a record of reasonably steamy texts in both of their iPhones. Francis first egged Bleumel on before deciding that dating a star was too fraught: This potential liaison was possibly even a fireable offense. It was crime passionnel gone awry, with Bluemel simply misjudging the correct coffee mug.

Despite Ghent’s best efforts, the case fell apart, mainly because Francis and Bleumel actually started dating a week after Ginny Beech’s death. As far as Scotland Yard is concerned, the “murder” remains unsolved.

However, Tom Franklin and Mammoth Screen shelved Hercule, as popular sentiment against endless Christie adaptations — and especially Hercule — rose to a fever pitch with Ginny Beech’s death as the flash point. At the beginning of the most recent meeting of the Serious Agatha Christie Fan Club, the new president Eleanor Oaken opened general remarks with the proclamation, “Ginny Beech did not die in vain.”

Jason Moran plays Duke Ellington
(Bandcamp link)

Moran has been playing his own way and like nobody else since the beginning. The first time I heard him insert a R ‘n B vamp into a standard was on “Body and Soul,” way back in 2002, on his first solo piano album Modernistic. That template continues for some of Plays Duke Ellington, as on the first two tracks, “I Got It Bad and That Ain’t Good” and “Sophisticated Lady.” (Such an approach was also heard in expanded band form on All Rise: A Joyful Elegy for Fats Waller.) Playing a beat like this aligns with the fashionable, the ever-new, the dance. It is not accidental that the cover of Plays Duke Ellington is a picture of glamorous shoes by the pedals of the piano. This is Moran. It is also Duke.

The opening “I Got It Bad and That Ain’t Good” is so smooth and groovy it might suggest Mulgrew Miller in a gospel mood — at least until Moran lets loose with some of his post-Don Pullen flourishes. “Sophisticated Lady” is mostly a vamp: The song is in A-flat, and Moran hangs out in B-flat minor, the ii chord, a favorite place for Moran to hang out — until the end, with a shift to the G major tonality of the bridge, some processed effects, and just one or two notes of the melody. Wow! What the heck did I just listen to?

The Armory Concert from 2016 was a display of virtuoso piano textures almost etude-like in nature. Some of those conceits reappear on Plays Duke Ellington, including a reprise of the heart-stopping blues flourish “South Side Digging.” Another highlight is the central section of “Black and Tan Fantasy,” a long exploration of fully resonant low register sound, a sound verging on pure noise, a sound only available from a concert grand piano.

Yvonne Rogers, The Button Jar
(Bandcamp link)

Kris Davis has stepped down from being President and Artistic Director of Pyroclastic Records; her replacement is Nate Wooley, an excellent choice. It is good that Davis saw this Yvonne Rogers solo album to term before she left, for it is a special release, charismatic and mysterious.

Rogers is part of a new breed of Brooklynites, and I don’t know some of the references, although Jason Moran is a palpable influence. Part of Rogers’s concept is definitely process music, distantly related to old-school minimalism, but now with “new and improved notes” including much dissonance. Quite a lot of the album seems fully-composed, it’s hard to know where the paper stops and the improvisation begins. “Scatter and Sort” has blowing over a swing beat, although the expanded piano texture might recall, say, a polyphonic etude of Ferruccio Busoni. A gorgeous “Cloud Chorale” has something of a Thelonious Monk sweep.

The process style is evident on a well-produced video from the session, “Mismatch.”

Marta Sanchez, For the Space You Left
(Bandcamp link)

I’ve been listening to Marta Sanchez for a long time, in fact I’ve even written liner notes for some of her earlier records. Two years ago I heard the music on For the Space You Left live in concert and was immediately impressed. The gambit is preparation, where the notes are transformed in a deliberate and basic fashion. (From her notes: “All preparations use gentle, non-invasive materials such as paper, Blu-Tack, and tape.”) Sanchez has her own rhythmic feel, that was apparent from the first time I heard her, and the rather stark sounds of this altered universe bring out the groove. It’s an orchestra of drums, but the pitches are certainly discernible, and the classic Sanchez harmonic language (as heard on her quintet records) remains intact.

“Frost Bloom” leads of the album, a good choice, for the composed material is immediately charismatic. While improvising, the fast lines with a faintly ominous atmosphere (and mostly on pitches that are not prepared) may suggest early Geri Allen, especially the solo Allen album Homegrown. The cinematic “Espejos” (“mirrors” in Spanish) on unprepared piano would be good soundtrack material for a modern psychological thriller.

Magda Mayas, Chant
(Bandcamp link)

Substack is turning into a valuable ecosystem for music and its critics. I learned about Magda Mayas from Phil Freeman (“Five Albums You Need to Hear”); the liner notes are by Peter Margasak, who used to cover Chicago and now covers Berlin, where Mayas is based. Margasak’s valuable Substack reviews music from everywhere and concerts closer to his home in Germany.

Chant pairs smoothly with Sanchez’s For the Space You Left, for both deal with prepared piano. However the albums could not be more different, for Sanchez is rhythmic and essentially “jazz” while Mayas is spacious, even “ambient.” I’m going to keep listening to Mayas, this is personal vision of music. The title track is essentially an F major sixth or major seventh chord interacting with C major with a kind of glistening “tack piano” sonority. It goes on for 20 minutes. This is not usually my bag, but when walking though the densest part of the Propect Park “forest” it was just the thing. The other two pieces are a bit more chromatic; at times she’s attempting to get the piano to sound like a clavinet or a Fender Rhodes, and she’s succeeding. The producer, Tony Buck, is also the drummer in the great band The Necks, and he undoubtedly had a significant say in the outlandish studio contraption “Halcyon.”

Marc-André Hamelin Found Objects/Sound Objects
(listing at Hyperion)

A classical piano recital in this overview?? Yes, for two reasons. Marc-André Hamelin plays the first prepared piano work, John Cage’s The Perilous Night from 1944, and listening to Sanchez, Mayas, and Cage back to back taught me something about extreme possibility. And: Hamelin’s worldview is essentially of that of an experimentalist, and while that doesn’t really include jazz per se, a program with a Frank Zappa piece, a Salvatore Martirano fantasia on “Stella by Starlight,” a John Zorn-like collage (John Olwald’s Tip), and his own phenomenal transcription of “Dies Irae” (the last part of the outrageous Hexensabbat) shows the great virtuoso looking over the fence at matters that definitely concern our team.

Indeed, I’m happy to call Yehudi Wyner’s glorious Refrain a modern blues. Who’s with me?

The review in Gramophone by Jed Distler is excellent; I agree with Distler’s take on all the pieces, although I don’t see the need to slight Hamelin’s performance of Stefan Wolpe’s epic Passacaglia (No 4 of Four Studies on basic rows). I know three recordings: the first from David Tudor, the Peter Serkin (which Distler prefers), and now Hamelin. They all have magnificent qualities, and the piece is beyond the beyond. Indeed, this must be one of the very finest atonal pieces in the whole repertoire, at least in terms of blending conventional piano wisdom with something truly relentless in the mathematics. When Hamelin played 92NY earlier this year, the Passacaglia was the highlight. Incredible music.

A scrolling score video exists of a live performance. If you like this, we definitely can be friends:

On Saturday Aaron Diehl and I met up to see Jonathan Paik play an hour-long stream-of-consciousness set at the Jazz Gallery. Jonathan is former student of mine at New England Conservatory, and I can cheerfully state that he was advanced enough that I couldn’t teach him a darn thing. (A video I made of him playing along to Eric Dolphy was appreciated on Twitter.) This year, Jonathan is a 2026 TJG Residency Commission recipient, be sure to attend one of his gigs and see what’s up. Kudos to Rio Sakairi and the Jazz Gallery for giving young talents this kind of boost.

Originally I had planned start this post comparing Jason Moran Plays Duke Ellington to Your Mother Should Know: Brad Mehldau Plays The Beatles. But then I realized that Mehldau’s album was older than I remembered, recorded 2020 and released 2023, and I wanted to keep to albums released in 2026. However, there is definitely a think piece here in Moran/Ellington vs. Mehldau/Beatles if someone else wants to proceed! For now, I just must say how impressed I am with Brad’s bluesy take on “I Saw Her Standing There.” A Dr. John/Brad Mehldau nexus, while unexpected, is most welcome.

Hammett wrote The Maltese Falcon as a potential screenplay and the result was the famous adaptation with Humphrey Bogart. There is a film version of The Glass Key with Alan Ladd but it does not honor Hammett’s complexity. Strangely, Red Harvest has never been adapted…

…However, Miller’s Crossing (1990) from the Coen Brothers is a fairly explicit homage to The Glass Key and Red Harvest. Gabriel Byrne plays the ultimate go-between, Tom Reagan, who barely seems to know whose side he is really on. (“Do you always know why you do things?” Reagan asks at one point.) During the latest rewatch last week I marveled at Albert Finney, who portrays gangster Leo O'Bannon. Finney is a hell of an actor: O’Bannon’s face holds no guile. Every emotion is transparent.

The plot of Miller’s Crossing is exceptional, but even more important than the story is the style. The film is a mood, it is an idiom, it is a singular object.

In writing we call this “voice.” Charles Portis pulled off a rare coup with True Grit (1968), a Western with a voice that is surely all its own. (Miller’s Crossing is a gangster movie unlike any other gangster movie, True Grit is a Western novel unlike any other Western novel.) The narrator is an old woman recounting her great act of revenge when she was 14. It is easy to forget that this is a flashback until Mattie Ross offers one of many sanctimonious asides. The effect can be darkly humorous, as in a few paragraphs describing an actual historical figure, Isaac Parker, the “Hanging Judge.”

I have since learned that Judge Isaac Parker watched all his hangings from an upper window in the Courthouse. I suppose he did this from a sense of duty. There is no knowing what is in a man’s heart.

(…)

For a long time there was no appeal from his court except to the President of the United States. They later changed that and when the Supreme Court started reversing him, Judge Parker was annoyed. He said those people up in Washington city did not understand the bloody conditions in the Territory. He called Solicitor-General Whitney, who was supposed to be on the judge’s side, a “pardon broker” and said he knew no more of criminal law than he did of the hieroglyphics of the Great Pyramid. Well, for their part, those people up there said the judge was too hard and high-handed and too longwinded in his jury charges and they called his court “the Parker slaughterhouse.” I don’t know who was right. I know sixty-five of his marshals got killed. They had some mighty tough folks to deal with.

The judge was a tall big man with blue eyes and a brown billy-goat beard and he seemed to me to be old, though he was only around forty years of age at that time. His manner was grave. On his deathbed he asked for a priest and became a Catholic. That was his wife’s religion. It was his own business and none of mine. If you had sentenced one hundred and sixty men to death and seen around eighty of them swing, then maybe at the last minute you would feel the need of some stronger medicine than the Methodists could make.

Portis is one of my favorites, and True Grit is his most conventional book. What a joy to re-read this timeless classic. While we love Mattie Ross, she is not perfect, and the hooligans she ties in with to get the job done are far worse.

In just over a year, three actors who starred in Buffy the Vampire Slayer have all passed away: Michelle Trachtenberg, Nicholas Brendon, and now Anthony Head, who played Buffy’s watcher, Rupert Giles, called “Giles” by almost everyone else in the show. Giles’s day job was high-school librarian, and I identified strongly with Giles’s “bookish” qualities. (After all, who is the Rupert Giles of jazz if not myself?)

Neither Giles nor Buffy were “flawed heroes,” at least when compared with those that populate Miller’s Crossing or True Grit. However, the showrunner, Joss Whedon, specialized in epic and uncomfortable reversals that cost the players dearly.

Monia Ali wrote a fascinating essay on Whedon’s relationship with fan expectation.

Writers—including Whedon himself—would frequent the boards to take the temperature of fans’ opinions and receive their criticism and praise. This did influence the show, but not in the way one might expect. Writer Jane Espenson said reading what the fans said, “did affect the show sometimes; if we saw that a lot of people had guessed where we were headed, we could change it.”

In present day, executives paying attention to fandom often leads to them bending to their wishes, so it makes sense that you would expect this crew to operate the same way. But that’s not how Whedon operated. In a way, he engaged in reverse fan service, intentionally delivering pain and heartbreak, and was frequently referred to as evil by his fans.

Many of my readers would know Anthony Head not from Buffy but from the more recent hit Ted Lasso (where, in an amusing nod to tradition, his first name was again Rupert). Ted Lasso was great for a season, but then every character became good or understandable. There were no antagonists! Apparently the showrunners started making Lasso while listening to the fans who loved every character — which is no way to go about making a lasting piece of art.

The ending to season two “Lie to Me” (1997), written by Joss Whedon, has a particularly good moment for Anthony Head to deliver a tiny soliloquy.

BUFFY: Lie to me.

GILES: Yes, it’s terribly simple. The good guys are always stalwart and true. The bad guys are easily distinguished by their pointy horns or black hats. And, uh, we always defeat them and save the day. No one ever dies and everybody lives happily ever after.

BUFFY: Liar.

New Yorkers call that area “midtown.” For a long time midtown did not have so many jazz clubs, with one big exception, Birdland on 44th street, where Gianni Valenti books the best and the brightest into not just one but two rooms: Birdland Jazz Club upstairs and Birdland Theater downstairs. Iridium off 51st still has some good jazz but there the emphasis is usually on blues, fusion, and rock guitar, with Les Paul being the Iridium patron saint.

However, it is a new day, and now the district is making a proper bid for the glory years of 52st Street.

During the pandemic various places closed, including the terrific upscale joint the Jazz Standard. My old friend Martin Porter was then working there at the time, and he was keenly aware that Jazz Standard’s demise left a hole in the scene, which really thrived on that sort of sleek and intimate prestige room with all the trimmings. Martin is now part of the team at The Pocket, which opened this past week on 46th street between 6th and 7th avenues, across the street from where Michiko’s/Roberto’s used to be, and around the corner from “new” Steinway hall. The room has a great sound, every seat is close to the band, and there is a full menu.

Last night Walter Smith III was tearing it up with Larry Grenadier and Bill Stewart; this was his TWIO project, where he invites another tenor star up to “battle” for half the set; in this case it was Ben Wendel. Earlier this year I saw the TWIO concept with Dayna Stephens, and in both cases the friendly cutting-contest atmosphere brought out the best in all hands. Serious business, and seriously fun to listen to.

The upcoming roster at The Pocket is pretty extraordinary, including weekly residencies for two of the hottest big bands around: The Mingus Big Band and Arturo O’Farrill and the Afro Latin Orchestra.

A few blocks west on 46th is Spike Wilner’s new club Jazzcultural, between 8th and 9th avenue in the heart of Restaurant Row, right next to the famous piano bar Don’t Tell Mama. I’ve known Spike even longer than Martin; I helped him organize the James P. Johnson “Last Rent Party” at Smalls some years ago, and a bit more recently brought Ron Carter into Mezzrow within a month of Mezzrow’s opening. Smalls, Mezzrow, and now Jazzcultural: Spike is in charge of three jazz clubs in Manhattan, could that be a record? Spike is a true jazz cat and a good player, too, he is headlining Jazzcultural on June 16 for his 60th birthday. Like Wilner’s two other clubs, the emphasis in Jazzcultural is community, with a large area for afternoon jam sessions, a long bar for the hang, and a spacious theatre.

Jazzcultural has only been open a few months but it is clearly already a happening spot for the straight-ahead cognoscenti. The great Louis Hayes was holding it down with his Cannonball Legacy Band under pictures of Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk and the club’s spiritual father, Barry Harris. At 89 Hayes was still cheerfully dealing out classics that Hayes helped make famous such as “Work Song” and “Hi-Fly” with a good band featuring Vincent Herring, Jeremy Pelt, Rick Germanson, and John Webber. Pelt’s solo on “Hi-Fly” was remarkable; I could have listened to whatever lyrical magic was happening at that moment all night long. Herring had microphone duties and told several good jokes. From Herring’s patter I also learned that Rick Germanson was from Wisconsin! I didn’t previously know this crucial geographical detail, and Germanson and I shared a few nice words after. (There are more Wisconsin jazz pianists than may be commonly supposed, including Germanson, myself, Lyle Mays, Joan Wildman, David Hazeltine, Geoff Keezer, Dan Nimmer. I joked to Rick that we really go back to Władziu Valentino Liberace.)

The Pocket website.

Jazzcultural website.

Thanks to the Jazz Journalists Association for selecting Oceans of Time: The Musical Autobiography of Billy Hart as Jazz Book of the Year: Biography or Autobiography.

The book is available through Amazon. Don’t be afraid of leaving a review!

The other contenders were a very strong group:

• Concerto for Cootie: The Life and Times of Cootie Williams
  (University Press of Mississippi), by Steven C. Bowie

• Stomp Off, Let’s Go: The Early Years of Louis Armstrong
  (Oxford University Press), by Ricky Riccardi

• The Master of Drums: Gene Krupa and the Music He Gave the World (Citadel Press) by Elizabeth J. Rosenthal

The full list of other winners in all categories is at the JJA site. Oh: Look at that! Billy Hart is also drummer of the year.

Almost exactly 10 years ago to the day, I wrote this: “In the last month the world has lost two of the three men I admired most on the planet: Sheldon Stryker (my father) and Muhammad Ali. Whoever is running this fucking circus better be taking damn good care of Sonny Rollins.”

Getting an extra decade of Sonny, who died Monday at 95, has, of course, been a gift for which we should all be eternally grateful. Yet I am still devastated by this news. With due respect to the many masters we have lost in recent years, this one is different. More difficult. More momentous. More foreboding. More depressing. Sonny was not only the last of the line descended directly from Charlie Parker’s rib but also the greatest improviser of them all – the absolute essence of the art form: Truth, Justice, and the Blues.

And he modeled an extraordinary life dedicated to the quest for self-improvement, of digging as deeply as possible to see how much more there was to discover, not only about music but about himself. Every time I spoke with him, I learned something about music and life, and he frequently offered me a peek into a veiled corner of jazz history that he had witnessed firsthand, and which remains hidden from view, certainly not in the history books. On a personal note, he said some touchingly gracious things to me in our final conversation late last year that I will cherish forever.

Even before Sonny stopped performing in public in 2012, he had entered a state of grace. A mythical figure in jazz since 1959, when he famously walked away from the limelight for two years of intense study and marathon practice sessions atop the Williamsburg Bridge, Rollins in recent decades evolved into a sage and symbol. He represented the centrality of jazz within American culture and the creative potential of the individual in any human endeavor. No matter what awfulness you woke up to in the morning news, knowing that Sonny Rollins was on the scene made you feel as if our better angels still had a fighting chance.

Jazz will soldier on -- the music will ALWAYS soldier on; but the universe has irrevocably shifted. Sonny’s death creates a hole that will never be filled, a canyon, in fact, that will only grow ever more gaping, mysterious, and unfathomable in the coming years and decades to come.

Back in 2019, Ethan conducted a long two-part interview with me when my book, Jazz from Detroit, was published. We focused on saxophonists in Part 2, and Ethan’s query about Rollins prompted the following exchange.

MS: Greatest improviser ever and my biggest hero of all. I was hanging out once with the trombonist and new-music improviser Jim Staley in Urbana, and he was talking about two basic kinds of jazz soloists. He said there were “editors” and “improvisers.” The first group are people who essentially play what they practice. They are basically lick and pattern players like, say, a Sonny Stitt or Michael Brecker. They move stuff around, but what comes out of their horns is mostly stuff they’ve played before in some fashion. True improvisers, on the other hand, are people who on a consistent basis conjure things out of the language that they’ve never played before. Of course, the lines are blurry in real life. Many players are somewhere in the middle, and people might fall into one camp or the other at different times. But I’ve always found this a valuable prism through which to think about improvisation. No one can spend 100% of their time in the zone of pure, spontaneous creation. But Sonny has spent more time in that zone than anyone else, and that’s why he’s the greatest. I also think he’s the greatest chord change player ever — not because he’s the best at navigating complex harmonic mazes, but because nobody is better at playing standard song forms. It’s the essence of the art form.

Sonny Rollins and a good trio — that’s as solid a definition of jazz as there is. The authority of A Night at the Village Vanguard or The Standard Sonny Rollins makes a lot of fine jazz musicians sound like relative beginners. When Sonny is on, there’s such a dazzling flow of melodic and rhythmic invention, rhyme, surprise, and so many levels of humor, intellectual acumen and expressive emotion. The organic way his ideas develop creates webs of thematic relationships and even lay listeners can sense how everything hangs together. The rhythmic freedom and sheer variety of phrasing are unmatched. I love how he plays with time, creating feelings of suspension; there are moments when he hovers somewhere between single-time and double-time and seems to defy physics, bending the time-space continuum. His sound has a kind of chiseled muscularity, particularly after The Bridge, and he manipulates his tone in myriad ways. And something that took me a long time to understand was the virtuosity of his articulation and how he’s also improvising with how he attacks each note, really popping some to drive the music forward and create more swing.

EI: Do you have a favorite period?

MS: I often say that if I could do anything, it would be to play like Sonny Rollins on a good night in 1965. That’s the ultimate, plus A Night at the Village Vanguard from 1957 — my all-time favorite jazz record. “Old Devil Moon” and “Striver’s Row!”

EI: To get that music in 1965 you kind of need to go to bootlegs, right? Not the studio records.

MS: Yes, although The Standard Sonny Rollins from 1964 is brilliant, top-tier Sonny. “Three Little Words” and “Love Letters” are jaw-dropping improvisations. His first entrance on “Love Letters” comes at the changes from such an odd rhythmic angle, and the opening phrases are so bewildering that he knocks you off balance. Sonny plays more shit in his first eight or 16 bars on “Love Letters” than some cats do in an entire career.

But, yes, the bootleg tapes and videos from Europe from 1965 are on a rarified plane — especially the Paris concert with Gilbert Rovere and Art Taylor, and the Copenhagen concert with Niels-Henning Orsted Pedersen and Alan Dawson. The last 3-½ minutes that Sonny plays on “Oleo” in Copenhagen is some of the purist jazz improvisation ever recorded.

I think it was easy to overlook Sonny’s genius in this period, and maybe it still is. In the mid ‘60s, Miles’ quintet was turning a corner toward Nefertiti. Trane was recording A Love Supreme and Transition and heading toward Ascension. Wayne, Herbie, Bobby Hutcherson, and Sam Rivers were recording classics on Blue Note. Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, and the rest of the avant-garde were making waves. And then there’s Sonny over in the corner still playing “Three Little Words” and “Oleo.” But like Jimmie Lunceford put it: T’ain’t what you do, it’s the way that cha do it – and the way that Sonny did it remains state of the art.

I’ll tell you a quick story. I heard Sonny in Detroit about a decade ago, and I went backstage after the show to say hello. I was waiting by myself outside his dressing room while he did his long cool down. He doesn’t come out for a long time. He continues to play and rest and gradually let his consciousness return to a non-performance state. I’m standing outside his door and at a certain point I hear a piano. It was Sonny playing “Till There Was You.” He also played “Where Are You.” He played through the tunes slowly but basically in time, and he played pretty much exactly like Monk. Minor seconds, spare voicings, whole tone runs, rhythmic displacements, the whole gamut. When Sonny finally came out, the first thing I said to him was: “Is Monk in there?” That put a big grin on his face. But it made me realize something I hadn’t quite thought about before, which is that when players pick up a second instrument, they typically play like their mentors or heroes. Like when you hear Dave Liebman play drums, he plays like Elvin. Chick Corea plays good drums too, but he plays more like Roy Haynes. So, of course Sonny would approach the piano like Monk.

It has long been part-truism and part-cliché that by the early ‘60s, a gulf had opened between his uninhibited live performances and rather staid studio recordings, and that this gap grew evermore pronounced through the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s. This is slippery. On the one hand, yeah, sure, of course. On the other hand, Sonny still made more than his share of great studio records, and, without relitigating the debates over his uneven Milestone discography (1972-2001), I will note that my Desert Island List and Bonus Tracks span 51 years and include studio dates from all periods, official live recordings, concert footage, private tapes, bootlegs, and even a soundcheck in Detroit that remains documented only in the ears of those who were there.

Desert Island Top 10

1. A Night at the Village Vanguard, Nov. 3, 1957, Blue Note. Wilbur Ware, Elvin Jones.

My all-time favorite record. Dazzling flow of spontaneous and witty melodic and rhythmic rhyme from the greatest chord-change player ever. Given a one-artist one-solo challenge for Sonny, I’m taking “Old Devil Moon,” but “Striver’s Row” (“Confirmation” changes) is right there, and so is “Sonnymoon for Two” (blues). The trio is as flexible as a rubber band. I wish this band would have stayed together. EVERYONE wishes this band had stayed together.

2. Paris, Nov. 4, 1965. Gilbert Rovere, Art Taylor.

The most consistently inspired of Sonny’s full concerts on film. Olympian authority understates the case as he segues from song to song, and Rovere and Taylor just try to hang on. The opening “Sonnymoon for Two” is a warmup. But then Sonny’s muse shifts into the highest gear imaginable and he soars through “I Can’t Get Started/Three Little Words/St. Thomas/There Will Never Be Another You/When I Grow to Old to Dream” with feints and parries to others. The extensive go-it-alone, unaccompanied statements transcend. Prime ‘60s Sonny – the weightier sound, blunter attack, less rococo than his ‘50s playing, stream-of-consciousness, loose rhythmic gambits at once elliptical and brusque, playing completely free inside the changes. This is how I always wanted to play.

3. The Standard Sonny Rollins, June 1964, RCA. Jim Hall, Bob Cranshaw, Micky Roker, Herbie Hancock etc.

Sonny’s greatest studio record unfolds not in a series of extended solos but in brief performances, mostly around three minutes, with thrilling improvisations that flash through the music like Roman candles lighting up the sky, before disappearing quickly into the night. Sometimes it’s frustrating – Sonny sounds like he could go forever on “Three Little Words,” before the quick fadeout after just over two minutes. But the content? Holy shit! He distills the entire history of jazz, from Armstrong to the avant-garde, in just three choruses. Pure, crystallized Sonny. “Love Letters” is on the same level. Pro tip: It’s about rhythm.

4. Newk’s Time, Sept. 9, 1957, Blue Note. Wynton Kelly, Doug Watkins, Philly Joe Jones.

Steve Lacy once told me that after Charlie Parker died, Sonny Rollins was “the champion of the world, the strongest, the most interesting, the most swinging saxophonist in the world.” Lacy could have cited this 1957 LP as proof. The rhythm section is hard bop perfection, the program ideal, and the leader gunning for bear: Sonny’s blazing ride on “Tune-Up,” the insanely inspired duet with Philly Joe’s drums on “Surrey With the Fringe on Top,” and, though the ebullient “Blues For Philly Joe” doesn’t get the ink of “Blue Seven,” Sonny’s thematic development is nearly its equal and a lot more fun.

5. Alfie, June 26, 1966, Impulse. Five horns and four rhythm, arranged by Oliver Nelson.

Sonny’s original score for the Michael Caine film (which means Bacharach’s title song is not included). Sonny’s long solo on the cocky, strutting “Alfie’s Theme,” one of his most enduring original compositions, tells you everything you need to know about jazz improvisation and the saxophone. Just the gale force of air he’s pushing through the horn to get the sound he does here is from another planet, and, to paraphrase my friend and fellow saxophonist Jim Sangry, nobody had ever thought like this, much less played like this, before or since. Alfie is also one of Sonny’s most fully realized LPs.

6. The Sound of Sonny, June 11, 1957, Riverside. Sonny Clark, Percy Heath or Paul Chambers, Roy Haynes.

Often overlooked, this sweetheart of a record finds Sonny sounding both relaxed and frisky – and often very funny. Dig his jaunty articulation and stop-time on “The Last Time I Saw Paris,” the curlicue phrasing on “Mangoes,” the sardonic reclamation of the hoary “Toot Toot Tootsie.” The stunning a cappella version of “It Could Happen to You” is the template of a million cadenzas to come. (Forty years ago, I would ape this version of “It Could Happen to You” by playing my own a cappella version on gigs.) Pianist Sonny Clark’s clever comping and liquid phrasing make a strong impression, and Roy Haynes brings the snap-crackle.

7. Saxophone Colossus, June 22, 1956, Prestige. Tommy Flanagan, Doug Watkins, Max Roach.

Sonny’s most widely known LP and for good reason: It marries the highest level of his spontaneous creation with a storyteller expression that speaks to any listener, from jazz newbies to the hippest of the hip. Five bangers in a row: the debut of the irresistible ur-calypso “St. Thomas,” the emotionally deep “You Don’t Know What Love Is,” the speedy, quintessential minor bebop of “Strode Rode,” the playful and ingenious rhyming phrases on “Moritat” (“Mack the Knife”), and the much-analyzed “Blue 7.” So why not a higher ranking? Well, as great as Roach is, he’s a bit stiff at times and not always the best match for Flanagan and Watkins. (Roach’s solos are aces.) I haven’t picked up my alto in decades, but I could still play chunks of Sonny’s solo on “St. Thomas.”

8. Now’s The Time, Jan-Feb 1964, RCA. Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, Roy McCurdy; or Thad Jones, Bob Cranshaw, McCurdy.

This collection of classic jazz originals is about (a) the pleasure of hearing top-shelf Sonny with Hancock and Carter; (b) a one-track glimpse of a tantalizing, what-might-have-been working quartet with Thad Jones, whose spontaneity and bent for thematic improvising would have been a fantastic foil for Sonny; and (c) the sheer expressive strength and power of Sonny’s booming tone, as chiseled as Superman’s muscles. If God ever picked up the tenor, He would sound like this. Favorite track: John Lewis’ immortal “Afternoon in Paris,” where Sonny begins toying with the theme in the second “A” section and morphs slyly into improvising on the last “A.” He doesn’t even play a full solo chorus, but the quartet’s performance is so fulsome, so complete, that it steals the record at just 2 minutes and 43 seconds.

9. Newport Jazz Festival, July 7, 1963, radio broadcast. Coleman Hawkins, Paul Bley, Henry Grimes, Roy McCurdy.

A 38-minute set, three standards: “Remember,” “All the Things You Are,” “The Way You Look Tonight.” A more rewarding tete-a-tete than the studio record Sonny Meets Hawk made about a week later. On the record, Sonny’s avant-garde contrariness sounds willful and halting, but here he’s in the flow – loose, unfettered, free. Sans Hawkins, Sonny slays “Remember” with stabs of concentrated rhythm and stuttering echoes of Berlin’s melody; the percussive thwack of his articulation ricochets off McCurdy’s invigorating chatter. Hawk, always up for adventure, sounds more confident in this environment than the critical discourse typically suggests. Bley and Grimes are perfect fits for Sonny’s freely conceived and beguiling way of abstracting standard tunes in 1962-63.

10. Old Flames, July-Aug. 1993, Milestone. Clifton Anderson, Tommy Flanagan, Bob Cranshaw, Jack DeJohnette, brass quartet arranged by Jimmy Heath on two songs.

Has anyone in jazz ever loved playing standards more than Sonny Rollins? Listen to the care, caress, and tasteful ornaments he brings to phrasing the melodies throughout this set of mostly Great American Songbook staples; the romantic tenderness of his tone; and the way his improvisations bloom in heartfelt expression. “Darn that Dream,” one of two tracks with a brass quartet, is as gorgeous as anything in Rollins’ recorded canon. The short cadenza is a beaut, bringing tears to my eyes every time I hear it.

Bonus Tracks

1. “If Ever I Would Leave You” (What’s New), April 19, 1962, RCA. An extended masterpiece of vivacious thematic improvisation and a sui generis take on the bossa nova craze -- Sonny’s articulation pops like he’s sticking a drum set and melodies emerge as naturally as breathing

2. “Oleo,” Copenhagen, Oct. 31, 1965. From one of Sonny’s finest filmed performances, with Niels-Henning Orsted Pedersen and Alan Dawson. An endless flow of ideas and total control over the horn – overtones! The 3-½ minutes of Sonny’s solo starting eight bars after trading with the drums and ending with NHOP’s bass solo might be the most supernatural burst of jazz improvisation I have ever heard.

3. “There’s No Business Like Show Business” (Work Time), Dec. 2, 1955, Prestige. Sonny’s return to the scene after laying low in Chicago and kicking his drug habit opens with this wild romp. The humorous, staccato punch of Sonny’s first entrance and the flexibility with which he toys with the tune at a supersonic tempo served notice: The Boss is back!

4. “The Freedom Suite” (Freedom Suite), March 7, 1958, Riverside. The organic four-movement suite, a reflection of the nascent Civil Rights Movement, is Sonny’s most impressive compositional achievement. The focused concentration and thematic improvising of the unified trio – Oscar Pettiford and Max Roach at their best – shapes a major statement.

5. “Three Little Words,” Copenhagen, Sept. 6, 1968. At 32 minutes, the most epic version of Sonny’s defining anthem of the 1960s. Sonny solos for 17 minutes straight, then trades 4s with drummer Tootie Heath for another nine minutes, without ever running out of steam or ideas.

6. “Best Wishes” (Road Shows Vol. 1), May 25, 1986, Doxy. A stunner. The most exciting track issued in the four Road Show volumes. Sonny’s fetching 12-bar form yields nine minutes of uninterrupted brilliance; he never ditches the melody, spinning endless variations off its basic riffs. The late Al Foster’s splashy, aggressive swing and unique sound show you why he was a Sonny favorite.

7. “Lover,” Village Gate, July 28, 1962. The three pieces that comprise the celebrated Our Man in Jazz were drawn from 6-½ hours of material, much of it (including this track) either more compelling or more experimental than what made the original record. A tour de force, “Lover” finds Sonny sprinting through the descending chromatic harmony for 18 minutes without ever giving up the baton, balancing form and abstraction. With Don Cherry, Bob Cranshaw, Billy Higgins.

8. “Misterioso” (Sonny Rollins Vol. 2), April 14, 1957, Blue Note. Monk was one of Sonny’s gurus. This classic blues represents the last time they recorded together. Sonny plays a fantasia on the blues and Monk tosses gutbucket shards at him. Both Monk and Horace Silver solo on the same track.

9. “First Moves” (The Cutting Edge), July 6, 1974, Milestone. Sonny’s most convincing entry in the fusion idiom. The heavy funk groove and simple harmony offer Sonny room to roam, which he does while keeping the main riff of the tune front and center. Bob Cranshaw on electric bass and underrated drummer David Lee lay it down.

10. “I’ll Be Seeing You,” Montreal Jazz Festival, June 1982. A lightning strike of inspiration: The 5+ minutes of trading 4s with Jack DeJohnette in his early prime produces some of the purest bebop lines from Sonny post-1968 that I know. Go, go, go!

11. “Little Girl Blue” (Falling in Love with Jazz), August 5, 1989, Milestone. An alternatingly gruff and vulnerable reading of a Rodgers and Hart ballad from one of Sonny’s most satisfying Milestone recordings.

12. “Confirmation,” Sutherland Lounge, Chicago, July 1959. An amazing tape of Sonny stretching out on Charlie Parker’s “Confirmation” for 26 minutes with a young Freddie Hubbard and Chicagoans Jodie Christian, Victor Sproles, and Wilbur Campbell. They start fast and get faster, and Sonny plays a zillion choruses, before Freddie plays exactly one (!) and they go out. Sonny’s sound, stamina, rhythmic obsessions, and phrasing foreshadow his post-Bridge style – he’s already shedding his skin, prepping for the 1960s.

Encore: “Three Little Words,” Music Hall Center for the Performing Arts, Detroit, Oct. 13, 2007. Sonny played Detroit often, and on this occasion, I slipped into the afternoon soundcheck. Sonny walked on stage playing “Three Little Words” without a mic and, swear to God, time-warped back to 1965. He played two minutes or so of breathtaking, bebop-inspired linear melodies filled with clever rhythm and rhyme and with, more or less, his pre-1972 tone. It was thrilling beyond belief, even surreal. There’s no tape, so you’ll have to take my word for it; but I was there and I’ll never forget it as long as I live.

— Mark Stryker

Mark Stryker is the writer and co-producer of the 2025 documentary film The Best of the Best: Jazz from Detroit (streaming on Prime Video, YouTube, Google Play, and Tubi) and the author of the 2019 book Jazz from Detroit (University of Michigan Press).

Critic Doug Ramsey, saxophonist Gary Foster, and trombonist Ryan Porter also passed away last week.

Miles Davis would have turned exactly 100 today.

(I’m considering things I might post for Rollins and Davis, but don’t have them ready yet.)

Coming right up! Ethan Iverson trio with Thomas Morgan and Kush Abadey at new club Jazz Genius.

151 Essex St.

Thursday through Saturday, May 28 - 30, sets at 7 and 9 pm.

Jerry Gray is a name that rarely comes up in conversation but he was a hell of a composer and arranger for both Artie Shaw and Glenn Miller. I’ve always loved the huge hit “String of Pearls,” and can whistle Bobby Hackett’s trumpet solo. The trombone chorale behind Hackett is something else! Gray wrote the whole thing, it is probably his most famous composition. Some of the Miller saxophone scoops are a bit dated today but hey, it was 1942.

Recently I came across two photos of Glenn Miller and Jerry Gray together during wartime. Much to ponder.

Yesterday: guitar tab. Today: A.I.

There was a big blow up about some NY Times “best songwriters” poll. I paid no attention, I know little of this topic, but I am aware that mighty Brad Mehldau pounced with a post praising Billy Joel.

Not long ago a buddy of mine had watched the recent documentaries about Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel. He said that he was surprised, but that he ended up thinking that Billy Joel was a better and more versatile songwriter than Bruce Springsteen. I drew myself up to my full height of 88 black and white keys and declared in a condescending fashion: “Of course you are right, and it comes down to only one thing: Billy Joel plays good piano up and down the full instrument in any key, while poor Bruce has to find his way around always starting from E, A, or D on his guitar.”

Counterpoint one: Henry Kaiser on guitar tab.

Counterpoint two: Joni Mitchell’s Blue is the one of the greatest albums of all time, and she wrote a lot of it on guitar.1

MIRANDA CUCKSON at BARGEMUSIC

Starts tomorrow: duos with Matt Mitchell Saturday, and Jeffrey Mumford chamber music Sunday. Free admission.