Happy #Jazz birthday to Joshua Redman, Joe Sample, Sadao Watanabe, Jason Lindner & we celebrate James P. Johnson who some consider recorded the first jazz piano solo. He was an important transitional figure between ragtime and jazz piano styles. His style became known as Stride. As a boy, Johnson studied Classical music and Ragtime. He started playing professionally in a sporting house, and then progressed to rent parties, bars and vaudeville. He eventually became known as the best piano player on the East Coast and was widely utilized as an accompanist on over 400 recordings and from 1916 on, produced hundreds of piano rolls under his own name. He backed up many of the Classic Blues singers of the 1920s, such as Ida Cox, Ethel Waters and Bessie Smith. He wrote several musical revues, including Running Wild and Plantation Days and his 1928 collaboration with his former piano student Fats Waller, Keep Shufflin. His song Charleston from Running Wild was one of the best known and most widely recorded songs of 1920s. Other hits included Old Fashioned Love and If I Could Be With You (One Hour Tonight). Johnson composed several symphonic works, which include Yamecraw: A Negro Rhapsody (1928), Tone Poem (1930), Symphony Harlem (1932), a symphonic version of W.C. Handys St. Louis Blues (1937), and the one-act opera De Organizer (1940), with lyrics by Langston Hughes. None of his symphonic works were very popular and have seldom been performed. Johnson is generally considered the Father of the Stride piano, and was a major influence on some of Jazzs great pianists such as Duke Ellington, Fats Waller and Thelonious Monk.
Posted on: Sat, 01 Feb 2014 05:46:53 +0000
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