Business Blast

pianoFORTEpianoFORTE! this weekend and my James P. Johnson videos

Saturday:

Concert is at Klavierhaus, Saturday June 14, at 7:30. Beth Levin will be playing Mendelssohn, and Kathleen Supové will be playing her own music + Tom Flahery and Randall Woolf. $15 at the door, benefit for the ACLU.

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I'll be playing James P. Johnson including "Keep Off the Grass," "Snowy Morning Blues," "The Mule Walk," "Worried and Lonesome Blues," "Jingles," "Blueberry Rhyme," and "You've Got To Be Modernistic."

Two of my best YouTube videos are of James P. Johnson repertoire. “The Charleston” is from years ago at Smalls, part of the marathon concert The Last Rent Party, where we raised money for James P. Johnson’s tombstone. (The anonymous lowercase comment, “sounds great. just like the original” is a superb troll.)

During the pandemic, I spearheaded a project where Aaron Diehl, Sullivan Fortner, Mathis Picard, and I all played “Carolina Shout” online. (Here, as a unexpected bonus, the great jazz pianist Richie Beirach quite seriously goes off on me in the comments, and we have a little public back-and-forth.)

The pianoFORTEpianoFORTE! concert is a chance for me to run a suite I’ll be playing all the third week in July for the Mark Morris Dance Group. “You’ve Got to Be Modernistic” is part of Program A at the Joyce Theater. (The Mark Morris concerts will probably sell out.)

Stride piano was an update of ragtime, and heard everywhere in Harlem in the 1920’s. They called James P. Johnson “The Father of Stride Piano,” but he preferred to be known as “The Dean of Jazz Pianists.” Johnson is well-established in the jazz history books for his peerless piano playing, documented on record beginning in 1923, while the general audience remembers him for penning several hit songs, including “If I Could Be With You One Hour Tonight,” “Old Fashioned Love,” "A Porter’s Love Song to a Chambermaid,” and an anthem of the Jazz Age, “The Charleston.”

For the Mark Morris suite “You’ve Got to Be Modernistic,” I transcribed favorite performances and then arranged them to be suitable for any qualified pianist. While there are a few new transitions and endings, the score is generally very close to Johnson’s original recordings, with one drastic exception: His most famous piece, “The Charleston,” has been placed in a meter unknown in social dance, 5/4, an intentionally “modernistic” touch. —Ethan Iverson

In the realm of piano technique, stride piano is its own topic. Since the Last Rent Part 15 years ago, I’ve been working on it. Progress is possible! Playing the suite for Mark Morris—with an uptempo left hand part that is just like James P. (more or less)—is feeling like a final exam.

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When dealing with all this music—and different approaches to all this music—I repeatedly look to Jaki Byard for inspiration. My essay, “The Genius of Jaki Byard,” was posted for his centennial a few years ago.