Fats Waller was a name familiar to me. If you mentioned his name I would immediately recollect, perhaps the most famous, photo of him, the one where he is sitting at an upright piano, wearing a cockeyed hat and smoking a cigarette. I also knew that his most famous track was the classic, Aint Misbehavin'.
However I was unaware of the actual style of his playing. I assumed that he played an early form of boogie woogie but in fact his style is very much Harlem Stride. He was a student of James P Johnson, who we looked at in the previous post. I have heard it argued though that Waller took the stride piano form to a higher level. He was a formidable musician but in his favour was his immense showmanship. This is apparent in the songs and records that he left us. I love the humour that jump out of the songs. It sounds like he was having the time of his life (and he probably was considering that he was partial to having a bottle of gin on his piano).
His entire catalogue is worth checking out, but here are a few choice cuts. Handful of Keys. This song exemplifies Fats Waller's technique.
Honeysuckle Rose. A great example of Fats' sublime piano playing infused with his tongue in cheek delivery.
The Joint Is Jumpin'. It's Friday night in 1920's Harlem.
As mentioned in a previous post The Great Migration saw many people move from the south to such cities as Chicago, L.A. and New York. By the mid 1920s a movement known as the Harlem Renaissance had taken hold and was to prove to be a major influence in the progression of jazz music. The biggest impact that I have seen seems to be the birth of the Harlem Stride Piano style. By this time the main proponent of the instrument was Jelly Roll Morton, who was influenced by rag piano but who infused it with what he called the “Spanish tinge”. James P. Johnson would also prove to be a highly influential figure in the development of jazz piano.
With the cultural explosion that came with the Harlem Renaissance there was the rise of popular night clubs and rent parties in the city. Places like The Savoy, The Cotton Club and The Apollo Theatre. The movement also created a new black middle class who wished to distance themselves from the rural sounds of “Dixie” jazz and so they turned to music that was more piano orientated. Johnson was quick to latch onto this and composed many pieces that are revered in jazz circles even today. He is widely regarded as the “father” of stride piano. He composed The Charleston, perhaps the definitive dance piece that represents the Jazz Age and the Roaring Twenties.
I’m not a piano player but I have learned that stride piano is so called because it is the left hand that “strides” up the piano in a busy fashion using a boom-chick-boom-chick motion combined with a complex right hand. The idea of using the alternating left hand pattern typical of ragtime as a foundation over which new melodies could be improvised is the basis of stride piano. The stride pianist generally makes more liberal use of blues harmonies in his music than does the ragtime composer. (source:)
Here is James P. Johnson playing one of his famous songs, Snowy Morning Blues.
Following on from my last post on Bix Beiderbecke, my omission of Frankie Trumbauer has becoming glaring. Bix it seems would always outshine his friend due to his notoriety. However their work together deserves mentioning. The wonderful sax solo at the beginning of Singin' The Blues was from "Tram" and the two were seemingly inseparable.
Here is a nice essay from the Red Hot Jazz website. The piece comes from the liner notes of a 78rpm record from 1947, written by George Avakian, himself a jazz record producer of some note.
By the mid 1920’s the jazz age had firmly taken hold. Phonograph records and the explosion of radio began to influence musicians outside of Chicago and New York, regardless of race – cornetist, Bix Beiderbecke being a great example of this.
Listening to the music that Bix recorded in the late 20’s is like listening to a soundtrack for a whole decade. The music is eerily familiar. Maybe it is because of the use of the songs in so many subsequent films.(Singing The Blues in Woody Allen’s Bullets Over Broadway and Blackboard Jungle, most famously.) However I feel the reason goes deeper. In listening to the songs you can hear the influence the music was to have over the big band era that was to come in the next decade. The crooner becomes popular around this time, (Bing Crosby sang on some songs that Bix played on). Even further than that, it could be said that, the music was highly influential over the “cool jazz” scene decades later. You know this music. It is intrinsicly complex and derives some influence from classical music as well as the hot jazz scene at the time.
The music is markedly different from the Hot Five and Seven recordings made at the same time by Louis Armstrong. And therein lies a lot of criticism. Many it seems have argued that the white bandleaders of the day made the music in a way that was less edgy – more mainstream and accessible. Akin to how Bill Haley and The Comets took the music of RnB and sanitised it to a certain degree to make it more accessible to white middle class America in the 50’s. I personally would disagree with this view. I believe the music has stood the test of time.
Bix himself is a source of controversy in jazz circles in relation to how important his contribution was to the history of jazz. He died young and was largely unknown at that point. Hence the Beiderbecke Romantic Legend and the “Young Man With A Horn” stories. No musical genre is without its legends but I think Bix Beiderbecke’s music stands up with the music that I’ve listened to from this era. His approach is very different from Louis Armstrong’s but no less potent for that. As a guitar player I like to think I can recognise great tone when I hear it.
Singin' The Blues, perhaps the most famous recording he was involved with, nicely demonstrates the collision of the hot New Orleans jazz and a sweet romantic sound.
The following songs are, I think, are a good representation of the Bix Beiderbecke sound. Of course this is only a snippet and I look forward to delving into the other recordings he made.
"Louis Armstrong was probably the greatest musician that ever lived...one note implies that if he wanted to he could play ten billion notes, but just one simple note is a beautiful thing." (Flea)
It's been a while since my last post. The main reason for the break is that I have spent a lot of the time researching the early music of Louis Armstrong (definitely pronounced with an s, not Lou-ee.) And quite frankly I have been overwhelmed. I simply had no clue as to the extent of this man's influence, not only over jazz, but over 20th century popular music as a whole. My personal impressions of him were formed when I was growing up. I had an image of the classic Louis Armstrong, the vaudevillian-esque performer with the deep husky voice. I remember the countless commercials/advertisements that have used his later music, including "We have all the time in the world" and "Wonderful World." This was, embarrassingly, the extent of my knowledge of the man and his music.
So it was with some frustration that I first listened to his Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings. These were Louis Armstrong's first solo recordings made for the Okeh label in Chicago between 1925 and 1929. I say frustration because I cannot believe it has taken me this long to listen to some music that is so clearly iconic. These records clearly illustrate a turning point. They are the link between the old style "dixie" jazz and all other forms of jazz that came after.
This isn't the first time that we have come across Louis Armstrong's work. I first mentioned him in this blog when I looked at the music of his mentor, Joe "King" Oliver. Those recordings of the Creole Jazz Band are clearly in the old classic New Orleans style - each of the main instruments overlapping behind the main melody. Louis Armstrong changed all that. The opening blast of West End Blues (an Oliver composition) announces the new style.
What I found particularly striking about these recordings was how fresh his playing sounds. We are still talking about a fairly primitive period in terms of sound recording and the music has that "crackly" 1920's feel. Yet Armstrong's trumpet playing sounds like it could have been recorded yesterday, such is its clarity. As mentioned there was a lot more emphasis on the soloing ability of the musicians and obvious improvisation (check out Struttin' With Some Barbecue). Potato Head Blues employs a stop time solo which was light years ahead of its time and something that rock musicians later employed - think Led Zeppelin's Whole Lotta Love.
Lonnie Johnson was brought in for some of the recordings. Again, a musician that I have heard of through interviews with BB King and Mark Knopfler but I am ashamedly ignorant of in terms of his music. However his guitar playing jumps out of the tracks I'm Not Rough and Hotter Than That. In the latter song there is a wonderful call and response with Armstrong scatting to Johnson's guitar. The duet with Earl Hines in the song Weather Bird is also superb (although not part of the Hot Five sessions)
It is something of an understatement to say how superb these songs are. Yet it should be noted that the Hot Five and Hot Seven line-ups never performed live. The sessions were fairly informal in nature (as evidenced in the track A Monday Date) However, the influence the music was to have over the future of jazz is, in my opinion, obvious.
Click here for a great documentary from NPR regarding Louis Armstrong's early career.
“There was this club, too, that we played at, the Twenty-Five Club. That was about 1912, 1913; and all the time we played there, people were talking about Freddie Keppard. Freddie, he had left New Orleans with his band and he was traveling all over the country playing towns on the Orpheum Circuit. At the time, you know, that was something new and Freddie kept sending back all these clippings from what all the newspapermen and the critics and all was writing up about him, about his music, about his band. And all these clippings were asking the same thing: where did it come from? It seems like everyone along the circuit was coming up to Freddie to ask about this ragtime. Especially when his show, the Original Creole Band, got to the Winter Gardens in New York...that was the time they was asking about it the most. Where did it come from? And back at the Twenty-Five these friends of Freddie's kept coming around and showing these clippings, wanting to know what it was all about. It was a new thing then.” (Sidney Bechet)
A number of events culminated in the space of a few years that helped to shape the direction of the music. Moves were made to close Storyville when the U.S. entered World War 1 in 1917. The Great Migration saw the movement of a million or so to the west coast and into larger northern cities, in particular Chicago. Finally the "Noble Experiment" of Prohibition ushered in the era of the jazz age in the 1920s. Enter the age of illicit liqour, speakeasies and the gangster. Jazz music was to provide the soundtrack for this drama. Moving the music away from its home had an effect on the style. This is where improvisation came to the fore - perhaps, it has been suggested, because the musicians felt more comfortable experimenting with the music in front of people with untrained ears.
The Lincoln Gardens, or The Royal Gardens, became a place synonomous with the music. It was here that Bill Johnson (who had earlier summoned Freddie Keppard to the west coast) established the Original Creole Band, that later became King Oliver's band. With this came the arrival of Louis Armstrong to Chicago and Bix Biederbecke shortly after. With the opening of the first commercial radio station in 1920 and the increased popularity of vinyl records, jazz music was about to go viral across the country,
