SOUND PROJECTIONS
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
SUMMER, 2020
VOLUME EIGHT NUMBER THREE
BRIAN BLADE
Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:
GIGI GRYCE
(May 16-22)
CLARK TERRY
(May 23-29)
BRANFORD MARSALIS
(May 30-June 5)
ART FARMER
(June 6-12)
FATS NAVARRO
(June 13-19)
BILLY HIGGINS
(June 20-26)
HANK MOBLEY
(June 27-July 3)
RAPHAEL SAADIQ
(July 4-10)
INDIA.ARIE
(July 11-17)
JOHN CLAYTON
(July 18-24)
MARCUS MILLER
(July 25-31)
JAMES P. JOHNSON
(August 1-7)
https://www.allmusic.com/artist/james-p-johnson-mn0000142860/biography
https://www.allmusic.com/artist/james-p-johnson-mn0000142860/biography
James P. Johnson
(1894-1955)
Artist Biography by Scott Yanow
One of the great jazz pianists of all time, James P. Johnson
was the king of stride pianists in the 1920s. He began working in New
York clubs as early as 1913 and was quickly recognized as the
pacesetter. In 1917, Johnson began making piano rolls. Duke Ellington learned from these (by slowing them down to half-speed), and a few years later, Johnson became Fats Waller's teacher and inspiration. During the '20s (starting in 1921), Johnson began to record, he was the nightly star at Harlem rent parties (accompanied by Waller and Willie "The Lion" Smith)
and he wrote some of his most famous compositions during this period.
For the 1923 Broadway show Running Wild (one of his dozen scores), Johnson
composed "The Charleston" and "Old Fashioned Love," his earlier piano
feature "Carolina Shout" became the test piece for other pianists, and
some of his other songs included "If I Could Be with You One Hour
Tonight" and "A Porter's Love Song to a Chambermaid."
Ironically, Johnson, the most sophisticated pianist of the 1920s, was also an expert accompanist for blues singers and he starred on several memorable Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters recordings. In addition to his solo recordings, Johnson led some hot combos on records and guested with Perry Bradford and Clarence Williams; he also shared the spotlight with Fats Waller on a few occasions. Because he was very interested in writing longer works, Johnson (who had composed "Yamekraw" in 1927) spent much of the '30s working on such pieces as "Harlem Symphony," "Symphony in Brown," and a blues opera. Unfortunately much of this music has been lost through the years. Johnson, who was only semi-active as a pianist throughout much of the '30s, started recording again in 1939, often sat in with Eddie Condon, and was active in the '40s despite some minor strokes. A major stroke in 1955 finished off his career. Most of his recordings have been reissued on CD.
https://musicians.allaboutjazz.com/jamespjohnson
James P., Lucky Roberts, Willie (The Lion) Smith, and the Beetle (Stephen Henderson), were familiar figures around “The Jungle” (on the fringe of San Juan Hill in the west 60s when this older Negro district was thriving before 1920.) They followed in the footsteps of Jack The Bear, Jess Pickett, The Shadow, Fats Harris, and Abba Labba.
Here and in the later uptown Harlem, the house rent parties flourished and the boys who could tinkle the ivories were fair haired. Willie The Lion recalled those days for Rudi Blesh as follows: “A hundred people would crowd into one seven-room flat until the walls bulged. Plenty of food with hot maws (pickled pig bladders) and chitt'lins with vinegar, beer, and gin, and when we played the shouts everybody danced.” Long nights of playing piano at such festivities gave James P. plenty of practice at the keyboard.
There were two younger jazz pianists who followed Jimmy Johnson around during these Harlem nights. One was young Duke Ellington, fresh from Washington, and the other was James P.'s most noted pupil, the late Fats Waller. The latter cherished the backroom sessions with James P., Beetle, and The Lion.
From about 1915 to the early '20s, James P. made many piano rolls for the Aeolian Company and then became the first Negro staff artist for the QRS piano roll firm in 1921. It was in this connection that he met and became friendly with the late George Gershwin, and ultimately helped him write the music for several shows. Around late 1922 Johnson left the piano roll field to make phonograph records. His first waxing was also probably the first jazz piano solo on records. This was the Victor pressing of “Bleeding Heart Blues.”
Most of Johnson's playing was solo, but through the years there were periods of considerable length when he served bands in the piano chair. He played for some time with the famed James Reese Europe's Hell Fighters at the Clef Club in Harlem.
Johnson's composing activities are as noteworthy as his piano style. In the '30s he wrote a long choral work, “Yamecraw,” which was made into a movie short starring Bessie Smith. Other serious works of his include “Symphonie Harlem”; “Symphony in Brown”; “African Drums” (symphonic poem); “Piano Concerto in A-Flat” (which he performed with the Brooklyn Symphony); “Mississippi Moon”; Symphonic Suite on St. Louis Blues; and the score to “De Union Organizer (with a Langston Hughes libretto).
One of Johnson's most famous and best known tunes was “If I Could Be With You One Hour Tonight,” written in 1926, the year he was accepted for membership in ASCAP. Jazz fans will recall “Old Fashioned Love,” “Porter's Love Song (to a Chamber Maid),” “Charleston, Carolina Shout,” “Caprice Rag,” “Daintiness,” “The Mule Walk,” and “Ivy.”
J.P. at one time or another made records for every major label, with the exception of the two youngest-Capitol and Mercury-and many of his older sides have been reissued. Most of his sides are found under his own name, but there are miscellaneous dates where a jazz band called him in to handle the important piano chore. He recorded with McKinney's Cotton Pickers on Victor and was selected by Hughes Panassie on the Frenchman's sessions at Victor during a visit to the U.S. The Hot Record Society picked James P. for their Rhythmaker record date in 1939.
James P. Johnson was one of the great jazz pioneers and his contributions take an important place among the jazz classics.
James P. Johhnson died in New York on Nov. 17, 1955.
Source: James Nadal
https://riverwalkjazz.stanford.edu/program/runnin-wild-biography-james-p-johnson
Only a few pop tunes in the twentieth century have launched a dance
craze as wild as “The Charleston,” a tune that still evokes images of
Jazz Age flappers and Charlie Chaplin silent movies, bathtub gin and The Great Gatsby. The
gentle genius who wrote “The Charleston”—James P. Johnson—remains all
but invisible today and is rarely remembered by anyone except a handful
of musicians. “The Charleston” was Johnson’s big hit, but he wrote many
far more ambitious compositions.
Joining The Jim Cullum Jazz Band to pay tribute to this almost-forgotten legend are piano master Dick Hyman and William Warfield, a star of theater and film. Dick Hyman first met and performed with James P. in Greenwich Village in the 1950s; Hyman went on to study and perform Johnson’s work for decades. William Warfield recreates the atmosphere of 1920s New York in his portrayal of James P. Johnson, using Johnson’s own words, excerpted from an interview by Tom Davin titled, “This is Our Story of The Father of Harlem Stride Piano, and first published in Jazz Review magazine.”
James P. Johnson is the musical genius most often credited with originating the uniquely East Coast style of piano playing known as “Stride.” In his lifetime, Johnson composed and recorded jazz tunes, show music, movie scores and major symphonic works. Johnson was the first black artist to breakthrough the color barrier and cut his own piano rolls for a major label. The great singer Ethel Waters said of him, “All the licks you hear now originated with James P. Johnson—and I mean all the hot licks that ever came out of Fats Waller and the rest of the hot piano boys; they’re all faithful followers and protégées of that great man, Jimmy Johnson.”
Before World War I, in the first decade of the century, a piano could be found in almost every home in America. At the time, it was as common to own a piano, as it is to have a television set or Internet access, today. Most people couldn’t imagine living without one. Newspaper ads pitched pianos with the hard sell, “What is a home without a piano?” A good piano player was always popular; after all not everyone who owned a piano could play it well.
James Price Johnson was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey in 1894. He grew up to be an unassuming man with a gentle disposition. He had perfect pitch and a powerful left hand; he was a quick learner at the piano and he practiced hard. Johnson said he would spend hours playing piano in a dark room to become completely familiar with the keyboard. He would sometimes put a bed sheet over the keyboard and force himself to play difficult pieces through the covering in order to develop his sense of touch. Some of these tales may be apocryphal, but Johnson’s originality and virtuosity stand out over a century later.
James P. Johnson recalled his early life:
“When we lived in Jersey City I was impressed by my older brother’s friends. They were real ‘ticklers,’ cabaret and ‘sportin’ house’ players. They were my heroes. They led what I thought was a glamorous life; they were welcome everywhere because of their talent. If you could play piano, you went from one house to another. Everybody made a fuss about you. They fed you ice cream and cake, all sorts of food and drinks. In fact some of the biggest men in the profession were known as the biggest eaters. At an all-night party you started eating at 1:00 AM, had another meal at 4:00 AM, and sat down to eat again at 6:00 AM. Many of us suffered later because of the eating and drinking habits started in our younger socializing days. But that was the life for me when I was seventeen.
“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 a coat like a coachman’s—blue double-breasted fitted to the waist and with long skirts. We’d wear a light pearl-grey Hamburg hat set at a rakish angle, then a white silk muffler and a white silk handkerchief. Some carried a gold-headed cane. Players would start off sitting down, waiting for the audience to quiet down, then they’d do a run up and down the piano of scales and arpeggios, or if they were real good they might play a set of modulations, very off-hand as if there was nothing to it. Some ‘ticklers’ would sit sideways at the piano, cross their legs and go on chatting with friends nearby. It took a lot of practice to play this way. Then without stopping the smart talk or turning back to the piano, he’d attack without warning, smashing right into the regular beat of the piece. That would knock them dead.”
“We moved from Jersey City to New York in 1908 when I was 14 and still going to school in short pants. We lived on 99th
Street in Manhattan, and I used to go to a cellar run by a fellow named
Souser. He was a real juice hound. They had a four or five-piece band
there, but after 2:00 AM they pulled the piano out to the middle of the
floor and Souser would play terrific rags. Times he’d let me play, and I
hit the piano until 4:00 AM. I kept my schoolbooks in the coal bin
there, and I went to school after a little sleep.
“In the same year, I was taken to Baron Wilkins’ place in Harlem. Another boy and I let the legs of our short pants down to look grown-up and we 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 ‘Jelly Roll Blues.’ I remember he wore a light brown Melton overcoat with a three-hole hat to match it. He had two girls with him.
“In Jersey City I heard good piano from all parts of the South and West, but I heard real ragtime when we came to New York. Most East Coast playing was based on Cotillion dance tunes, stomps, drags and ‘set-dances.’ They were all country dance tunes, like my ‘Carolina Shout.’”
“In New York, a friend taught me real ragtime. His name was Charley Cherry. We played Joplin, then I copied him, then he corrected me. When I went to Public School #69 I was allowed to play for the assembly and for the minstrel shows put on there. In New York, I got to hear a lot of good music for the first time. Victor Herbert and Rudolph Friml were popular, and I used to go to the old New York Symphony concerts. A friend of my brother who was a waiter used to get theater tickets from its conductor (Josef Stransky) who came to the restaurant where he worked. That was when I first heard Mozart, Wagner, Beethoven and Puccini. The full symphonic sounds made a big impression on me.
“The other sections of the country never developed the piano as far as the New York boys did. The people in New York were used to hearing good piano played in concerts and cafes. The ragtime player had to live up to that standard. They had to get orchestral effects, sound harmonies, and all the techniques of European concert pianists who were playing their music all over the city. New York ‘ticklers’ developed the orchestral piano—full, round, big, widespread chords in tenths, a heavy bass moving against the right hand. The other boys from the South and the West played in smaller dimensions like thirds played in unison. We wouldn’t dare do that, because in New York the public was used to better playing.”
By 1912 Johnson was making a living playing piano for rent parties
and cabarets in a tough neighborhood in Manhattan where Lincoln Center
is today. Johnson soon rose to prominence in the highly competitive
world of New York piano players, who were inventing a new form that came
to be known as “stride piano.” This solo piano style combined the
strong left hand of Boogie-Woogie with the lyrical right-hand arpeggios
of ragtime.
Johnson was well established in the relatively small world of Harlem Stride Piano by the 1920s, when he took a talented teenager by the name of Fats Waller under his wing, gave him piano lessons and a home away from home. Fats Waller’s bubbling show-biz personality captured the imagination of the nation, and he soon became swept up in the bright light of fame and fortune. A deep bond of affection remained between the two giants of stride piano until Waller’s death at an early age. Johnson’s influence can be readily heard in the Waller tune “Smashing Thirds,“ performed here by Dick Hyman and The Jim Cullum Jazz Band.
In the 1920s Johnson accompanied top stars like Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters. He toured Europe with the Plantation Revue, and in 1923 composed the score for a hit Broadway show, Runnin’ Wild. Two hit tunes came out of this show: The title tune, “Runnin’ Wild,” is often widely played by jazz and string bands today, and “The Charleston.” Johnson recalled first seeing the Charleston danced at a dive called the Jungles Casino in New York in 1913. Johnson recalls:
“The Jungles was just a cellar without fixings. The people who came…were mostly from Charleston, South Carolina. Most of them worked…as longshoremen or on the ships. They danced hollering and screaming until they were cooked. They kept up all night or until their shoes wore off, most of them after a heavy day’s work on the docks. The Charleston was a regulation cotillion step without a name. While I was playing for these Southern dancers I composed a number of “Charlestons”—eight in all, all with that damn rhythm. One of these later became my famous “Charleston” on Broadway.
Willie “The Lion” Smith was one of the formidable stride piano players James P. Johnson faced in the hot competition of “cutting contests” at Harlem clubs and parlors in the 1920s. Johnson said “The Lion” earned his nickname fighting on European battlefields in World War I. But “The Lion” claimed it was James P. Johnson who gave him the moniker. To prove the point, “The Lion” took to calling James P., “The Brute.” In turn, Smith and Johnson joined forces to come up with a nickname for their young protégé Fats Waller; they called him “Filthy.” “Fingerbuster“ is an aptly named virtuoso piece by “The Lion,” which he undoubtedly used at “cutting contests” to establish his dominance. Here, Dick Hyman takes it at its intended prestissimo tempo.
In 1917 James P. Johnson cut the first in a series of historic piano rolls for the Aeolian and QRS Music Roll companies. Three years later in 1920, Johnson met George Gershwin while both artists were making piano rolls at a hundred dollars a session. These two great figures of American music came from vastly different backgrounds—separated by enormous racial barriers, but they shared a mutual ambition to write “serious” music on large American themes. Both continued to study classical music while playing and composing jazz and popular tunes. Gershwin was a great admirer of Johnson, and the rest of the Harlem piano men, and Gershwin frequently crossed the race barrier to hear them play. George Gershwin acknowledged his high esteem for Johnson and the enormous influence Johnson’s work had on his own by including the “Charleston” theme in his Concerto in F.
In 1928, four years after Gershwin presented his first serious work Rhapsody in Blue, Johnson debuted his first symphonic work in concert at Carnegie Hall with Fats Waller at the piano. Yamekraw, a Negro Rhapsody is dedicated to a black community near Savannah, Georgia called Yamekraw. You can hear strains of down-home blues, stomps, church meetings and spirituals in this ambitious work. Our show features a rare recording of the piece, performed by the composer himself, followed by the band’s original arrangement for The Jim Cullum Jazz band and Dick Hyman.
More about the music on this show:
“A-flat Dream“ dates from 1939, and is performed here as a Dick Hyman/John Sheridan duet. The tune starts off with a boogie-woogie bass line in the first section, and switches to a more typically Johnsonesque texture.
“Ain’tcha Got Music?” and “You’ve Got to Be Modernistic” are both examples of what Johnson refers to as a broad “orchestral” style of stride piano, heard here filled out in arrangements created by John Sheridan for Dick Hyman and The Jim Cullum Jazz Band. A further example of the “orchestral style is “Caprice Rag,“ performed as a two-piano Hyman/Sheridan duet here. Johnson’s “Snowy Morning Blues“ is given a meditative solo reading by Dick Hyman, evoking a feeling true to its title.
Photo credit for homepage image: James P. Johnson, public domain.
Text based on Riverwalk Jazz script by Margaret Moos Pick ©1997
https://www.songhall.org/profile/James_P_Johnson
Composer and pianist James Price Johnson, the father of stride piano, was born on February 1, 1891 in New Brunswick, New Jersey. He attended New York public schools and received private piano study. His professional debut as a pianist came in 1904. In the early 1910’s, Johnson worked as a pianist in summer resorts, theatres, films and nightclubs before forming his own band in 1920, called the Clef Club. The Clef Club toured throughout Europe with the vaudeville show Plantation Days.
Returning to the States, Johnson was the accompanist for such renowned singers as Bessie Smith, Trixie Smith, Mamie Smith, Laura Smith andn Ethel Waters. In the 1930’s, he took his stride style to the movie screen and composed scores for films including Yamacraw.
The stride style that influenced such legends as Duke Ellingon and Fats Domino, stresses a strong "swinging" bass while moving in a "stride fashion" with a single treble melody. Introduced in 1924 with "The Charleston", combined Ragtime syncopation and the smooth progression of jazz with livelier upbeat rhythms and a swinging bass that helped usher in the next decade's genre.
Johnson’s discography is equally distributed with serious works as well as hit jazz standards. His works include “Symphonic Harlem”, “Symphony in Brown”, “African Drums”, “Piano Concerto in A-flat”, “Mississippi Symphonic Suite on St. Louis Blues”, “Yamacraw”, “City of Steel”, “De Organizer”, “Dreamy Kid”, “Kitchen Opera”, “The Husband”, “Manhattan Street Scene” and “Sefronia’s Dream.”
His popular catalog includes the hit songs “Old Fashioned Love”, “Don’t Cry Baby”, “Charleston”, “If I Could Be With You One Hour Tonight”, “Stop it Joe”, “Mama and Papa Blues”, “Hey, Hey”, “Runnin’ Wild”, “Porter’s Love Song to a Chambermaid”, “Snowy Morning Blues”, “Eccentricity Waltz”, “Carolina Shout” and “Keep Off the Grass”.
A member of the League of Composers and the NAACC, Johnson composed primarily by himself but did have a few collaborations with lyricists including Mike Riley, Nelson Cogane and Cecil Mack.
James P. Johnson died in New York City on November 17, 1955, however the stride musical style he introduced continues to reinvent music of every genre.
https://syncopatedtimes.com/james-p-johnson-forgotten-musical-genius/
Piano professionals required a specific set of ostentatious accessories in order to be taken seriously. A dramatic silk-lined overcoat was integral to the presentation of a modern major piano professor. Removed with a flourish, the garment was placed with great ceremony to display the plush silk lining: “We used to wear . . . a coat like a coachman’s — blue double-breasted fitted to the waist and with long skirts. We’d wear a light pearl-grey Homburg hat set at a rakish angle, then a white silk muffler and a white silk handkerchief.”
When the Student is more dramatically visible than the Teacher, even
the most influential mentor and guide might become obscure. James Price
Johnson, pianist, composer, arranger, and bandleader, has become less
prominent to most people, even those who consider themselves well-versed
in jazz piano. He was a mentor and teacher — directly and indirectly —
of Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Art Tatum. “No James P.,
no them,” to paraphrase Dizzy Gillespie. But even with memorable
compositions and thirty years of recording, he has been recognized less
than he deserves.
Fats Waller eclipsed his teacher in the public eye because Waller was a dazzling multi-faceted entertainer and personality, visible in movies, audible on the radio. Fats had a recording contract with the most prominent record company, Victor, and the support of that label — he created hit records for them — in regular sessions from 1934 to 1943. Tatum, Basie, and Ellington — although they paid James P. homage in words and music — all appeared to come fully grown from their own private universes. Basie and Ellington were perceived not only as pianists but as orchestra leaders who created schools of jazz composition and performance; Tatum, in his last years, had remarkable support from Norman Granz — thus he left us a series of memorable recordings.
Many of the players I’ve noted above were extroverts (leaving aside the reticent Basie) and showmanship come naturally to them. Although the idea of James P., disappointed that his longer “serious” works did not receive recognition, retiring to his Queens home, has been proven wrong by Johnson scholar Scott Brown (whose revised study of James P. will be out in 2017) he did not get the same opportunities as did his colleagues. James P. did make records, he had club residencies at Cafe Society and the Pied Piper, was heard at an Eddie Condon Town Hall concert and was a regular feature on Rudi Blesh’s THIS IS JAZZ . . . but I can look at a discography of his recordings and think, “Why isn’t there more?” Physical illness accounts for some of the intermittent nature of his career: he had his first stroke in 1940 and was ill for the last years of his life.
There will never be enough. But what we have is brilliant. And the reason for this post is the appearance in my mailbox of the six-disc Mosaic set which collects most of James P.’s impressive recordings between 1921 and 1943. (Mosaic has also issued James P.’s session with Eddie Condon on the recent Condon box, and older issues offered his irreplaceable work for Blue Note — solo and band — in 1943 / 44, and the 1938 HRS sides as well.)
Scott Brown, who wrote the wise yet terse notes for this set, starts off by pointing to the wide variety of recordings Johnson led or participated in this period.
And even without looking at the discography, I can call to mind sessions where Johnson leads a band (with, among others, Henry “Red” Allen, J. C. Higginbotham, Gene Sedric, Al Casey, Johnny Williams, Sidney Catlett — or another all-star group with Charlie Christian, Hot Lips Page, Lionel Hampton on drums, Artie Bernstein, Ed Hall, and Higginbotham); accompanies the finest blues singers, including Bessie Smith and Ida Cox, is part of jivey Clarence Williams dates — including two takes of the patriotic 1941 rouser UNCLE SAMMY, HERE I AM — works beautifully with Bessie Smith, is part of a 1929 group with Jabbo Smith, Garvin Bushell on bassoon, Fats Waller on piano); is a sideman alongside Mezz Mezzrow, Frank Newton, Pete Brown, John Kirby, swings out on double-entendre material with Teddy Bunn and Spencer Williams. There’s a 1931 band date that shows the powerful influence of Cab Calloway . . . and more. For the delightful roll call of musicians and sides (some never before heard) check the Mosaic site here.
(On that page, you can hear his delicate, haunting solo BLUEBERRY RHYME, his duet with Bessie Smith on her raucous HE’S GOT ME GOING, the imperishable IF DREAMS COME TRUE, his frolicsome RIFFS, and the wonderful band side WHO?)
I fell in love with James P.’s sound, his irresistible rhythms, his wonderful inventiveness when I first heard IF DREAMS COME TRUE on a Columbia lp circa 1967. And then I tried to get all of his recordings that I could — which in the pre-internet, pre-eBay era, was not easy: a Bessie Smith accompaniment here, a Decca session with Eddie Dougherty, the Blue Notes, the Stinson / Asch sides, and so on. This Mosaic set is a delightful compilation even for someone who, like me, knows some of this music by heart because of forty-plus years of listening to it. The analogy I think of is that of an art student who discovers a beloved artist (Rembrandt or Kahlo, Kandinsky or Monet) but can only view a few images on museum postcards or as images on an iPhone — then, the world opens up when the student is able to travel to THE museum where the idol’s works are visible, tangible, life-sized, arranged in chronology or thematically . . . it makes one’s head spin. And it’s not six compact discs of uptempo stride piano: the aural variety is delicious, James P.’s imagination always refreshing.
The riches here are immense. All six takes of Ida Cox’s ONE HOUR MAMA. From that same session, there is a pearl beyond price: forty-two seconds of Charlie Christian, then Hot Lips Page, backed by James P., working on a passage in the arrangement. (By the way, there are some Charlie Christian accompaniments in that 1939 session that I had never heard before, and I’d done my best to track down all of the Ida Cox takes. Guitar fanciers please note.) The transfers are as good as we are going to hear in this century, and the photographs (several new to me) are delights.
Hearing these recordings in context always brings new insights to the surface. My own epiphany of this first listening-immersion is a small one: the subject is HOW COULD I BE BLUE? (a record I fell in love with decades ago, and it still delights me). It’s a duo-performance for James P. and Clarence Williams, with scripted vaudeville dialogue that has James P. as the 1930 version of Shorty George, the fellow who makes love to your wife while you are at work, and the received wisdom has been that James P. is uncomfortable with the dialogue he’s asked to deliver, which has him both the accomplished adulterer and the man who pretends he is doing nothing at all. Hearing this track again today, and then James P. as the trickster in I FOUND A NEW BABY, which has a different kind of vaudeville routine, it struck me that James P. was doing his part splendidly on the first side, his hesitations and who-me? innocence part of his character. He had been involved with theatrical productions for much of the preceding decade, and I am sure he knew more than a little about acting. You’ll have to hear it for yourself.
This, of course, leaves aside the glory of his piano playing. I don’t think hierarchical comparisons are all that useful (X is better than Y, and let’s forget about Z) but James P.’s melodic improvising, whether glistening or restrained, never seems a series of learned motives. Nothing is predictable; his dancing rhythms (he is the master of rhythmic play between right and left hands) and his melodic inventiveness always result in the best syncopated dance music. His sensitivity is unparalleled. For one example of many, I would direct listeners to the 1931 sides by Rosa Henderson, especially DOGGONE BLUES: where he begins the side jauntily, frolicking as wonderfully as any solo pianist could — not racing the tempo or raising his volume — then moderates his volume and muffles his gleaming sound to provide the most wistful counter-voice to Henderson’s recital of her sorrows. Another jaunty interlude gives way to the most tender accompaniment. I would play this for any contemporary pianist and be certain of their admiration.
I am impressed with this set not simply for the riches it contains, but for the possibility it offers us to reconsider one of my beloved jazz heroes. Of course I would like people to flock to purchase it (in keeping with Mosaic policy, it is a limited edition, and once it’s gone, you might find a copy on eBay for double price) but more than that, I would like listeners to do some energetic reconstruction of the rather constricted canon of jazz piano history, which usually presents “stride piano” as a necessary yet brief stop in the forward motion of the genre or the idiom — as it moves from Joplin to Morton to Hines to Wilson to Tatum to “modernity.” Stride piano is almost always presented as a type of modernized ragtime, a brief virtuosic aberration with a finite duration and effect. I would like wise listeners to hear James P. Johnson as a pianistic master, his influence reaching far beyond what is usually assumed.
I was happy to see James P. on a postage stamp, but it wasn’t and isn’t enough, as the Mosaic set proves over and over again. I would like James P. Johnson to be recognized as “the dean of jazz pianists”:
Listen closely to this new Mosaic box set six compact discs worth of proof that the genius of James P. Johnson lives on vividly.
Today, February 2, is the birthday of James P. Johnson (1894-1955), who developed stride piano as an art form within an art form. In his time, piano cutting contests were proving grounds—most often in Harlem apartments—where competing pianists showed their stuff. If James P was playing, their stuff was likely not to be good enough. Johnson’s most famous composition was “Carolina Shout,” a test of a pianist’s swing, power and rhythm. He recorded it several times. Many pianists, critics and jazz historians consider this 1921 version his best:
Reprinted from old DTM; originally posted September 2009, slight updates 2010 and 2014, major edit 2015, latest version 2019.
PDF:
Carolina Shout
Listen:
Audio Player
himself only played it like this the once. One of the most important aspects of the real Harlem Stride tradition is to take the basic material and make it your own.
There were two long interviews with James P. Johnson, one with the
Library of Congress in 1938, and one with Tom Davin in the early 1950’s.
One would hope that they would be generally available someday. Part of
the Davin can be found in The Jazz Review.
In 1986 Scott E. Brown produced the only book-length study. James P. Johnson: A Case of Mistaken Identity still has the most detailed biographical information. (Reportedly a new edition with updated information is in the works.) Brown sought to place Johnson’s vast output in context of his era, hence his provocative title.
A Case of Mistaken Identity also contains a complete discography by Robert Hilbert.
Frank H. Trolle’s Father of the Stride Piano is two small pamphlets: a poorly-edited collection of minor biographical/musicological essays and a discography which was superseded by Hilbert’s.
John Howland’s 2009 volume Ellington Uptown: Duke Ellington, James P. Johnson, and the Birth of Concert Jazz goes into fascinating detail about the gestation of Johnson’s best known concert work, Yamekraw: A Negro Rhapsody. There’s also a good deal on the Harlem Symphony and some other Johnson orchestral works. The default companion CD to this music is Victory Stride, which I cautiously recommend.
Yamekraw is like all that Franz Liszt orchestra music that nobody plays: unprofessional and repetitive. By all means, Johnson and Liszt scholars should know this music (and there needs to be more Johnson scholars!) but contemporary enthusiasm for Johnson’s work would be better directed into making every college piano major learn “Carolina Shout” than into asking our major orchestras to program Johnson’s symphonic work. (We don’t want the average concert-goer leaving the hall thinking, “Well, Gershwin really was better than James P., because Rhapsody in Blue is obviously better than Yamekraw.” This is a superficial and Eurocentric reading of the situation.)
Other good information on Johnson scattered about in different places:
Black Bottom Stomp: Eight Masters of Early Jazz and Spreadin’ Rhythm Around: Black Popular Songwriters, 1880-1930 are both by David A. Jasen and Gene Jones. If you are interested in ragtime or early jazz piano you’ve come across Jasen’s name.
Black Bottom Stomp is just terrific. Jasen and Jones seem to get it just right all the time. Their prose style is also wonderfully smooth and occasionally even humorous. Spreadin’ Rhythm Around is excellent as well: This is the best source on Johnson’s significant career as a songwriter for shows.
Henry Martin has a chapter in The Oxford Companion to Jazz called “Pianists of the 1920s and 1930s.” There’s just a couple of pages on Johnson but it’s a rare example of someone trying to make sense of how the printed page interfaces with the records.
The Time-Life Giants of Jazz LP box on James P. Johnson is excellent. The extensive notes on the music are by the vastly knowledgeable Dick Wellstood, who at this point has gotten over his early claims that Johnson didn’t play the blues. (He does manage to get in a dig at boogie-woogie, though, Wellstood’s least favorite piano style.) He collaborates with Willa Rouder, and the solid biographical section is by Frank Kappler. (The Giants of Jazz boxes often have valuable booklets.)
—
[CODA: two sections from 2009 that can’t be changed since they were written in advance of the original Smalls Rent Party and at this point are somewhat “historical”: Annie Kuebler and Ed Berger have died, Aaron Diehl is well-known, and so on.]
—
Last week Aaron Diehl (who’s also playing the Last Rent Party) and I
visited the Dana Library at Rutgers University which houses the
Institute of Jazz Studies. I met Dan Morgenstern briefly and Ed Berger
showed us a few of the treasures. Here is Berger’s photo of me holding
Ben Webster’s saxophone while Aaron holds Don Byas’s:
Barry Glover, the grandson in charge of James P. Johnson’s estate, has generously given all of Johnson’s own music collection to the Institute. Glover also has given permission for serious parties to look through and photocopy at will. Annie Kuebler was our helpful guide through boxes and boxes of well-organized Johnson music.
I know that both Aaron and I were overwhelmed with what was there; afterwards we both were grey and exhausted, just trying to deal with the intensity of the experience.
(Aaron sorts out one copy of the Yamekraw rhapsody for each of us.)
One of the things we were looking for was unusual solo piano music to play on Sunday. Aaron was already learning a movement from the Jazz-a-mine Concerto from the record, so he grabbed a holograph of that piece in Johnson’s own handwriting. (He wasn’t sure if he was going to be ready to play it in a week, but what a help to find the score!) (UPDATE: Aaron did play it, extremely well.)
I found a charming drawing-room piece called “Theme in Two Voices” published in 1944. It’s next door to somebody like Anton Rubinstein or Cécile Chaminade—certainly it’s just as good—and I bet Johnson would have gotten a kick out of me playing that surprise at the Last Rent Party.
I don’t know Aaron well, but he turned up in my masterclass one day playing James P. Johnson, and when I asked Loren Schoenberg who I should take a stride piano lesson with he suggested “Aaron Diehl.” Aaron hasn’t really recorded much yet, but you can hear his flawless rendition of another Harlem test piece, Luckey Roberts’s “Ripples of the Nile,” on his MySpace page.
There was a piano next door to the archive. Regrettably, Aaron not only turned out to be as good a sight-reader as me (this almost never happens) but also played a version of “Carolina Shout” that was way better than mine. I can’t really ask Aaron for a lesson—he’s 13 years younger than me, for chrissake—but he gave me one that afternoon anyway. Aaron’s “Carolina Shout” was fluid, improvised, and personal; in comparison, mine was a laborious recreation. (I also got to play it for Fred Hersch on Monday, who made the astute observation that I was playing at one dynamic only, just like the piano roll I was learning from. Obviously, human pianists must use dynamics. I’m trying to get it together but there’s no doubt I’m going to be on the slow side of the “Shout” at the Last Rent Party.)
We don’t know who will play what on Sunday—probably many people won’t play Johnson at all, which is perfectly fine—but that afternoon at IJS Aaron and I enjoyed the fantasy of how awesome it would be to hear everybody play “Carolina Shout.” Just think, if all jazz pianists had to sit in front of each other and play the “Shout”…that would change some things right quick!
I’m definitely going back to IJS once in a while, and I seriously encourage others to explore it as well. The Johnson archive is just a fraction of what they have. More info and contact information is available at the IJS website.
https://sites.temple.edu/performingartsnews/2020/01/27/stride-the-art-of-james-p-johnson/
As one of myriad styles falling under the
rubric of jazz, stride is fundamentally an expression of the African
American experience. James P. Johnson (1894-1955) pioneered the solo piano style while composing and performing in Harlem during the 1920s. What follows is a brief sketch of the conventions, innovations, and social contexts that produced it.
Stride derives primarily from ragtime in form and content. Tunes comprise three or four independent, sixteen-bar sections or strains. The initial strain features the theme in the tonic; subsequent strains variously treat the original material or present new ideas. Sections collectively called the “trio” modulate to closely related keys, typically the subdominant. Introductions and interludes of four or eight measures are common. Regarding content, left-hand stride patterns follow traditional dances in duple meter, notably the march and polka. Hence the bass often alternates between low notes and midrange chords; the former imitates the tuba while the latter mimics the higher brass and woodwind instruments of marching bands, creating the oom-pah sound associated with folk music.
However, stride represents an evolutionary step in the lineage of jazz, placing greater demands on the performer. The harmonic rhythm and tempo are faster than those of ragtime. Stride also exploits the full range of the instrument. Finally, the style employs an array of pianistic devices, e.g., rapid scale passages, trills, and turns, suggesting that knowledge of classical idioms would be beneficial if not requisite to stride proficiency.
Johnson infused blue notes and call-and-response gestures into stride. Furthermore, the rhythmic feel of his style was more relaxed than ragtime, approximating swing. Heard in the paradigmatic stride piece “Carolina Shout,” these elements allowed Johnson to connect meaningfully with his auditors at clubs and dance halls, many of whom migrated from the Deep South:
“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 (which they danced with a lot of spieling), 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 until their shoes wore out—most of them after a heavy’s day’s work on the docks.”
Johnson also cultivated the style while performing at rent parties in Harlem. Held in apartments, these informal gatherings enabled working-class tenants to raise additional money for rent by charging admission. Here we see the music of Johnson providing a modicum of relief in material as well as nonmaterial ways.
We invite you to join us on Wednesday, February 12, to hear stride performances by the studio of Charles Abramovic. In addition to works by Johnson, the program will feature those of his contemporaries, Thomas “Fats” Waller, Jelly Roll Morton, and Zez Confrey.
Consult the following sources for more information:
Barnhart, Bruce. “Carolina Shout: James P. Johnson and the Performance of Temporality.” Callaloo 33, no. 3 (Summer 2010): 841-856.
Berlin, Edward A. “Ragtime.” Grove Music Online. 16 Oct. 2013; Accessed 26 Jan. 2020. https://www-oxfordmusiconline-com.libproxy.temple.edu/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-1002252241.
Martin, Henry. “Balancing Composition and Improvisation in James P. Johnson’s ‘Carolina Shout.’” Journal of Music Theory 49, no. 2 (Fall 2005): 277-299.
Robinson, J. Bradford. “Stride.” Grove Music Online. 2001; Accessed 20 Jan. 2020. https://www-oxfordmusiconline-com.libproxy.temple.edu/grovemusic/view/10.1093
/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000026955.
Rouder, Willa. “Johnson, James P(rice).” Grove Music Online. 2001; Accessed 24 Jan. 2020. https://www-oxfordmusiconline-com.libproxy.temple.edu/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000014409.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Gary Sampsell is a second-year PhD student in the Music Studies program at Boyer College. His research interests include the musical culture of baroque-era Saxony and Austro-German reception of early music in the nineteenth century.
https://collection.cooperhewitt.org/videos/1108906257/
James P. Johnson: Harlem Symphony (1932)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License.
Keyboard reduction of the piece (PDF)
Recording
"Authenticity" is a word one bandies about at one's risk these days, since abundant doubt has been cast on who
is qualified to decide what is authentic in terms of whose music. Yet the Harlem Symphony of James P. Johnson
(1894-1955) has long fascinated me as a jazzman's contribution to the classical repertoire. Many, many composers,
both white (Aaron Copland, George Gershwin, Leonard Bernstein) and black (William Grant Still, Florence Price,
William Dawson) have written orchestral works which introduced jazz and blues idioms into European conventions.
But the Harlem Symphony stands out as a jazz and blues piece, by one of the outstanding stride pianists at the
peak of his career, that fits its materials into classical forms without much compromising their character.
Johnson was trained in classical music, of course, since in his youth classical music was virtually the only
kind in which tuition could be found. And he follows the classical formulas - but almost perfunctorily, simply
making the requisite key changes, never distorting the style he's most familiar with to put on classical airs.
The result is a piece that fills out a classical architecture, but sounds honest, fun, unpretentious - and not
divided in its allegiances.
My source for this analysis is the orchestral manuscript I found in the Jazz Institute Archive at Rutgers University. There are discrepancies between this score and the performance conducted by Marin Alsop on the Nimbus label, especially in the first movement. Arguably the score is improved by the changes made, but I don't know who is responsible for them.
Oddly, pages C and D (mm. 9-16) are omitted from the recording, and they do seem a little out of place.
They are labeled "Train," and are clearly meant to evoke the subway train beginning to take off, partly (mm. 13-14)
with a steady beat on a drum with wire brushes.
The first theme might be taken to be that played by just the strings in the following example, with their motive of thirds and fourths moving by half-steps - specifically, chromatic appoggiaturas moving to the chord tones of the harmony. However, the added wind notes above do contribute to the melody, and are difficult to separate out.
Remarkably, the first violins' melody employs ten of the twelve notes in the chromatic scale, despite the
economy of notes and the simplicity of the harmony. The B section part of this theme is a horn solo accompanied
by chords going around the circle of fifths, after which the first theme is repeated again, though this time
with the flutes echoing similar eighth-note gestures. Oddly, the recording repeats both A and B sections,
though the score does not call for it.
The transition from the first key area to the section is one of the briefest and most functional since the
mid-eighteenth century. A clarinet plays two phrases (mm. 41-44), the first arpeggiating I-V-I in D, the second
V-V7-V/IV in C, and then we're in F major.
The derivation of the second theme from the first is impressively clever. Like the first theme, this one precedes almost every triad in the harmony with an appoggiatura chord a half-step lower, but the rhythm is sped up and irresistibly syncopated. The first theme's initial motive is an eighth-note moving to the tonic: here it becomes a quarter-note moving to the dominant scale degree. Also, the scoring for a chorus of clarinets is taken from jazz orchestration - one can hardly imagine a classical composer announcing a new theme in parallel chords by three of the same instrument.
Like the main theme, this subordinate one also has a middle verse after which it returns:
And I particularly admire that in the repeat of the second theme, Johnson changes one note to approach
the cadence from a different half-step.
The repeat of the theme is immediately followed by a colorful chord progression bringing the exposition
to a close in F. Clarinets and strings in dotted rhythms open the development with an immediate move to Db,
the rhythm intended to convey a pictorial effect that Johnson labels "Lady Shoppers - gossiping."
One imagines the humor was better appreciated in 1932.
In mm. 75-85 a rhythmicized chord progression thick with tritones descending by half-step leads to a dominant pedal on A. The subordinate theme enters in the key of D now (mm. 86-93), poco piu mosso and with a countermelody soaring high above in the piccolo. Its final D chord becomes a dominant, and forthwith the first theme is stated in G (mm. 94-101), by the trumpets and trombones using cup mutes and the latter echoing the former. To end the development, the brass syncopate their way through a simple chord progression (Bb7-Eb, B7-E, C7-F, F7, mm. 102-111), pausing at the end for a wry figure in the trombones clearly labeled "Bus Horn."
The opening of the recapitulation is labeled "7th Ave Promenade." The first theme is played in Bb by the
tutti orchestra (mm. 112-119). A tumultuous transition of syncopated dominant chords descending by half-steps,
and marked Presto, acts as transition to the subordinate theme, now played in Bb and also tutti, the tempo
marked "a tempo" and "slower" (mm. 130-140). A staccato piccolo line rings out above the orchestra. (Neither
theme includes its middle section nor is repeated in the recap.) An expectant series of augmented triads then
rises by half-step, and the opening introductory theme returns "grandioso" in the trombones to close the movement.
Second movement: Song of Harlem (April in Harlem)
There are two themes, between which the transitions comprise mostly short, sequential motives over standard modulatory progressions. The first theme is stated in the oboe at the outset, and returns in the strings at m. 60, both times in Bb. I give here not only the melody, in the middle staff (and the repeat of the first four measures is written out, sans repeat signs), but also the pizzicato string chords that accompany the first statement, plus Johnson's chord symbols for the guitar part, which is not specifically notated (except for occasional melodic notes). One can see, then, along with the major and minor triads which tend to anchor the downbeats, Johnson's use of whole-tone type chords, either augmented triads or tritone-plus-major third. The chord symbols suggest more notes in the guitar than are present in the strings - for instance, F7+5 for Eb-A-C#, and Bb9 for D-Ab-C. On the top staff are given the parallel major thirds in the flute which fill in each cadence.
The appearance of the blues third Db in m. 10 creates an expectation, I think, that the melody will be a
twelve-bar blues, but Johnson adds a fourth phrase that repeats the blues third and ends a little more
ambiguously. The following transition is eight bars long, but Johnson elides the last measure of the
sixteen-bard theme with the first measure of the transition for an odd-number count: a rather Mozartean
touch.
The second theme is labeled in the score "Harlem Love Song." It is an expansive thirty-two bars in length, alternating between winds and strings every eight bars. The style is grand Swing Era ballroom at its most cinematic, pausing on climaxes at sharped-fifth dominants and full of lush dominant major ninths. I provide here the guitar symbols notated by Johnson, but they don't account for the lushness of certain chords.
A perfunctory four-measure modulation returns us to the first theme, which, now in the strings, is a little
more emphatically accompanied by much the same elements. The following transition starts out similar in rhythm
to the analogous transition in the exposition, but two measures of chords stretch this passage out to nine
measures (another odd-numbered macro-rhythm, and I can't imagine Johnson wasn't conscious of his balanced
asymmetries). The last four measures of the transition seem poised to introduce a new tune, but instead merely
return to the Harlem Love Song, now in the Bb tonic and more lushly orchestrated.
A four-measure coda threatens to end quietly at first, but ascends to a lush, Swing Era cadence with a
sharped-fifth dominant and a trill figure dropping to the added sixth. One can imagine so many 1940s movies
coming to a dramatic close with this phrase.
Third movement: The Night Club
The movement starts with a hesitant, atmosphere-setting twelve-bar introduction, moving from Eb major with
an added sixth to a Db dominant major ninth and back.
The first theme, in the violins, is sixteen bars, the last of which is diverted to a V7 of Bb, and the tune
is restated in Bb in the trumpet, and it is clear that the eighth-notes must be swung. Comparison of the two
consecutive versions how much freedom Johnson treats his melody with - as, in jazz, why would the trumpet play
it the same way the strings do?
In fact, the trumpets replace the third phrase with a comedic reference to the I-VI-II-V that runs through
the harmony.
The sixteen-bar transition that begins at m. 45 begins each half with a faux-dramatic passage of diminished
seventh chords and dominants before relaxing each time into the dotted note texture prevalent earlier.
This leads to another statement of the first theme similar to the first, but in the upper winds. The bridge
to the trio is an eight-measure pedal on Eb using jazzy syncopated chords to prepare for the Ab-major of the trio.
In mm. 85-132 the trio theme is repeated three times in varying orchestrations. Unlike the first theme, it begins more anxiously on the IV chord (V7/ii, actually) rather than on the tonic. This example from the second statement shows how thick Johnson's orchestration becomes, with the theme here once again in the trio of clarinets. Even more striking are the stride piano patterns in the strings, showing that at this point Johnson was simply orchestrating the piano style he spent his life playing.
The third appearance of the trio theme turns to V7 of C just at the end, and over a VI-II-V-I in the low
strings comes the most bracing section of the work: a back and forth of glissandos between the winds and strings,
sometimes in both directions at once. No transcription could give the passage its due as well as the manuscript can.
The glissando section leads into a pair of sixteen-bar melodies on the by-now-familiar harmonic pattern,
the first riotously orchestrated in a call-and-answer pattern.
The second is similar, but in tutti chords, and interrupted at the end, in time-honored Swing Era fashion,
by a couple of piccolo cadenzas, before a dramatic final cadence with an augmented dominant.
Fourth Movement: Baptist Mission
The theme is introduced at a languid largo tempo, with some of the lushest chromatic harmonization of the entire work.
From here on the tempo quickens considerably for most of the rest of the movement, introducing a bass
ostinato that will run through the first five variations.
Variation I (mm. 16-35) simply states the hymn in a solo horn with a simplified string accompaniment.
Variation II (mm. 36-51) puts the theme back in the strings, enlivened by periodic figures in the oboes.
Variation III (mm. 52-67) has the theme in the trumpet, while a clarinet plays a countermelody with a jazzy
flat fifth (Db). The ostinato is taken over, with similarly bluesy harmonies, by the entire string section.
Variation IV (mm. 68-83) returns the theme to the strings a bassoon and trombone, with rippling arpeggios in chords in the flutes and clarinets.
Variation V (mm. 84-99), upping the energy level, has the theme in the oboes, accompanied by the strings and lower brass in jazz chords. The three trumpets punctuate it with syncopated figures.
Variation IV (mm. 100-127) is labeled "The Prayer," and takes the tempo down considerably. A dotted bluesy
figure moves from the bassoon to the clarinet to the trumpet, as though different voices in the congregation
are calling out.
The theme and ostinato start up again in m. 113, played by the winds and brasses.
Variation VII (mm. 128-143) picks up the tempo to a quick two-step, and a note in the score indicates this brief variation is to be repeated, as though this were an afterthought. The trombone plays the theme as the strings sweep downward over and over through the ostinato. The focus, though, is a bluesy figure in the trumpets.
At m. 144 the Finale begins. A quick introduction goes through V/ii and V/VII chords to Bb, the second time
turning to a German sixth and landing on a dominant. The entire movement has been in G minor, but at m. 158 the
theme starts up and modulates, going into a Bb dominant and stating part of the theme in Eb minor. It makes its
way to Bb minor, and them moves chromatically to a D dominant at m. 170. The final seven measures precipitously
reinstate G minor over a chromatic bass line, and rise to a triumphant Picardy third.
Copyright 2019 Kyle Gann
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1894-1955 James P. Johnson was the finest popular pianist of his time, the seminal creator of the stride style bridging ragtime and jazz, the composer of “The Charleston,” and the creator of long-form classical works that incorporated African American motifs. His influence on every key jazz musician who followed is incalculable, as was his “soundtrack for the Roaring 20s.”
Johnson was soon a regular among the “piano professors” who performed at cabarets, bordellos, and rent parties in the San Juan Hill area of the west 60s near New York City’s famed Hell’s Kitchen. He first learned from, and then became the rising star among, such colorfully nicknamed piano “ticklers” as Abba Labba, Lucky Roberts, Willie The Lion, The Beetle, and Jack The Bear. As he became increasingly accomplished and prominent, a younger generation became protégés to him. These included a young Duke Ellington and Fats Waller who would go on to popularize the “stride” style that Johnson pioneered. This style was a bridge between its predecessor, ragtime, and its ultimate successor called jazz. It featured a two-count left hand with a great degree of improvisational freedom in the right hand, combined with polyrhythmic syncopation; and Johnson’s exceptional talent and technique lent itself to the form. In the words of black musical theater great James Weldon Johnson, “It was music of a kind I had never heard before….”
Beginning in approximately 1915 and continuing until the advent of the phonograph record in the early 1920s, Johnson became a prolific maker of hundreds of piano rolls for player pianos. Legend holds that Fats Waller learned all of Johnson’s improvisations by laying his fingers on the piano’s depressed keys as the roll operated the instrument. Johnson was the first African American staff performer for the Chicago-based QRS Company, publisher of piano rolls, in 1921, where he met and befriended George Gershwin. The two master composers would ultimately collaborate on several shows. That same year, Johnson wrote the first of some 200 songs he would compose over the course of his career. Early successes included the up-tempo “Carolina Shout” of 1921 and “The Harlem Strut,” as well as the more introspective “Blueberry Rhyme” and “Snowy Morning Blues.” In addition to his solo performing and recording career, Johnson was featured in several ensembles, and became the accompanist of choice for such blues divas as Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters. In 1922, he began making 78 rpm records, and is credited with the first recorded jazz piano solo in that format on “Bleeding Heart Blues.”
Rounding out his broad range of achievement, Johnson also composed for 16 musical shows including 1923’s Runnin’ Wild, and he continued writing popular tunes with great success. He was accepted for membership in the American Society for Composers and Authors in 1926, in which year he wrote one of his most famous and popular songs, “If I Could Be with You One Hour Tonight.” But it was “The Charleston” that remains his best-known composition. The song was probably written in 1913, and debuted with Runnin’ Wild 10 years later. The song launched the dance fad of the same name, went on to become the “soundtrack for the Roaring 20s,” and has endured as the iconographic music of that exuberant era. Johnson was also responsible for the black review Keep Shufflin’, co-written with his former student Fats Waller in 1928.
Despite ill health due to occasional strokes, Johnson continued performing in clubs with small swing groups and such collaborators as Eddie Condon through the 1940s, and recording for virtually every major label. A serious health-related episode forced him into retirement in 1951, and he died in New York on November 17, 1955. He was elected by a jazz critics poll into the Down Beat Hall of Fame in 1992, acknowledging his seminal contribution to the creation of modern music in all forms. In 1994, much of his symphonic music was found and recorded by the Concordia Orchestra and performed live in concert. His direct influence can be heard in the work of Waller, Ellington, Count Basie, Art Tatum, Teddy Wilson, and more contemporary players such as Erroll Garner and Thelonious Monk; but in a real sense, everybody’s fingers have followed James P. Johnson’s.
Johnson grew up listening to the ragtime of Scott Joplin and always retained links to the ragtime era, playing and recording Joplin's "Maple Leaf Rag",[8] as well as the more modern (according to Johnson) and demanding "Euphonic Sounds", both several times in the 1940s. Johnson, who got his first job as a pianist in 1912, decided to pursue his musical career rather than return to school. From 1913 to 1916 Johnson spent time studying the European piano tradition with Bruto Giannini.[9] Over the next four to five years Johnson continued to progress his ragtime piano skills by studying other pianists and composing his own rags.[9]
In 1914, while performing in Newark, New Jersey with singer Lillie Mae Wright, who became his wife three years later, Johnson met Willie Smith. Smith and Johnson shared many of the same ideas regarding entertainers and their stage appearance. These beliefs and their complementary personalities led the two to become best friends. Starting in 1918, Johnson and Wright began touring together in the Smart Set Revue before settling back in New York in 1919.[9]
Before 1920 Johnson had gained a reputation as a pianist on the East coast on a par with Eubie Blake and Luckey Roberts and made dozens of player piano roll recordings initially documenting his own ragtime compositions before recording for Aeolian, Perfection (the label of the Standard Music Roll Co., Orange, NJ), Artempo (label of Bennett & White, Inc., Newark, NJ), Rythmodik, and QRS during the period from 1917 to 1927.[10] During this period he met George Gershwin, who was also a young piano-roll artist at Aeolian.[11]
Johnson was a pioneer in the stride playing of the jazz piano. "Stride piano has often been described as an orchestral style and indeed, in contrast to boogie-woogie blues piano playing, it requires a fabulous conceptual independence, the left hand differentiating bass and mid-range lines while the right supplies melodic issues." Johnson honed his craft, playing night after night, catering to the egos and idiosyncrasies of the many singers he encountered, which necessitated being able to play a song in any key. He developed into a sensitive and facile accompanist, the favorite accompanist of Ethel Waters and Bessie Smith. Ethel Waters wrote in her autobiography that working with musicians such as, and most especially, Johnson "...made you want to sing until your tonsils fell out".
As his piano style continued to evolve, his 1921 phonograph recordings of his own compositions, "Harlem Strut", "Keep Off the Grass", "Carolina Shout", and " Worried and Lonesome Blues " were, along with Jelly Roll Morton's Gennett recordings of 1923, among the first jazz piano solos to be put onto record. Johnson seemed to be at his finest when he attacked the piano as if it were a drum set. These technically challenging compositions would be learned by his contemporaries, and would serve as test pieces in solo competitions, in which the New York pianists would demonstrate their mastery of the keyboard, as well as the swing, harmonies, and improvisational skills which would further distinguish the great masters of the era.
The majority of his phonograph recordings of the 1920s and early 1930s were done for Black Swan (founded by Johnson's friend W.C. Handy, where William Grant Still served in an A&R capacity) and Columbia. In 1922, Johnson branched out and became the musical director for the revue Plantation Days. This revue took him to England for four months in 1923. During the summer of 1923 Johnson, along with the help of lyricist Cecil Mack, wrote the revue Runnin' Wild. This revue stayed on tour for more than five years as well as showing on Broadway.
In the Depression era, Johnson's career slowed down somewhat. As the
swing era began to gain popularity within the African-American
communities, Johnson had a hard time adapting, and his music would
ultimately become unpopular. The cushion of a modest but steady income
from his composer's royalties allowed him to devote significant time to
the furtherance of his education, as well as the realization of his
desire to compose "serious" orchestral music. Johnson began to write for
musical revues, and composed many now-forgotten orchestral music
pieces. Although by this time he was an established composer, with a
significant body of work, as well as a member of ASCAP,
he was nonetheless unable to secure the financial support that he
sought from either the Rosenwald Foundation or a Guggenheim Fellowship;
he had received endorsement for each from Columbia Records executive and
long-time admirer John Hammond.
The Johnson archives include the letterhead of an organization called
"Friends of James P. Johnson", ostensibly founded at the time
(presumably in the late 1930s) in order to promote his then-idling
career. Names on the letter-head include Paul Robeson, Fats Waller, Walter White (President of the NAACP), the actress Mercedes Gilbert and Bessye Bearden, the mother of artist Romare Bearden.
In the late 1930s Johnson slowly started to re-emerge with the revival
of interest in traditional jazz and began to record, with his own and
other groups, at first for the HRS label. Johnson's appearances at the Spirituals to Swing concerts at Carnegie Hall in 1938 and 1939 were organized by John Hammond, for whom he recorded a substantial series of solo and band sides in 1939.
Johnson suffered a stroke (likely a transient ischemic attack) in August 1940. When Johnson returned to action, in 1942, he began a heavy schedule of performing, composing, and recording, leading several small live and groups, now often with racially integrated bands led by musicians such as Eddie Condon, Yank Lawson, Sidney de Paris, Sidney Bechet, Rod Cless, and Edmond Hall. In 1944, Johnson and Willie Smith participated in stride piano contests in Greenwich Village from August to December. He recorded for jazz labels including Asch, Black and White, Blue Note, Commodore, Circle, and Decca. In 1945, Johnson performed with Louis Armstrong and heard his works at Carnegie Hall and Town Hall. He was a regular guest star and featured soloist on Rudi Blesh's This is Jazz broadcasts, as well as at Eddie Condon's Town Hall concerts and studied with Maury Deutsch, who could also count Django Reinhardt and Charlie Parker among his pupils.
In the late 1940s, Johnson had a variety of jobs, including jam sessions at Stuyvesant Casino and Central Plaza, as well as becoming a regular on Rudi Blesh's radio show. In 1949 as an 18-year-old, actor and band leader Conrad Janis put together a band of aging jazz greats, consisting of James P. Johnson (piano), Henry Goodwin (trumpet), Edmond Hall (clarinet), Pops Foster (bass) and Baby Dodds (drums), with Janis on trombone.[12] Johnson permanently retired from performing after suffering a severe, paralyzing stroke in 1951. Johnson survived financially on his songwriting royalties while he was paralyzed. He died four years later in Jamaica, New York and is buried in Mount Olivet Cemetery in Maspeth, Queens. Perfunctory obituaries appeared in even The New York Times. The pithiest and most angry remembrance of Johnson was written by John Hammond and appeared in Down Beat under the title "Talents of James P. Johnson Went Unappreciated".
1928 saw the premier of Johnson's rhapsody Yamekraw, named after a black community in Savannah, Georgia. William Grant Still was orchestrator and Fats Waller the pianist as Johnson was contractually obliged to conduct his and Waller's hit Broadway show Keep Shufflin. Harlem Symphony, composed during the 1930s, was performed at Carnegie Hall in 1945 with Johnson at the piano and Joseph Cherniavsky as conductor. He collaborated with Langston Hughes on the one-act opera, De Organizer. A fuller list of Johnson's film scores appears below.
Harlem Stride is distinguished from ragtime by several essential characteristics: ragtime introduced sustained syncopation into piano music, but stride pianists built a more freely swinging rhythm into their performances, with a certain degree of anticipation of the left (bass) hand by the right (melody) hand, a form of tension and release in the patterns played by the right hand, interpolated within the beat generated by the left. Stride more frequently incorporates elements of the blues, as well as harmonies more complex than usually found in the works of classic ragtime composers. Lastly, while ragtime was for the most part a composed music, based on European light classics such as marches, pianists such as Waller and Johnson introduced their own rhythmic, harmonic and melodic figures into their performances and, occasionally, spontaneous improvisation. As the second generation stride pianist Dick Wellstood noted, in liner notes for the stride pianist Donald Lambert, most of the stride pianists of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s were not particularly good improvisers. Rather, they would play their own, very well worked out, and often rehearsed variations on popular songs of the day, with very little change from one performance to another. It was in this respect that Johnson distinguished himself from his colleagues, in that (in his own words), he "could think of a trick a minute". Comparison of many of Johnson's recordings of a given tune over the years demonstrates variation from one performance to another, characterised by respect for the melody, and reliance upon a worked out set of melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic devices, such as repeated chords, serial thirds (hence his admiration for Bach), and interpolated scales, on which the improvisations were based. This same set of variations might then appear in the performance of another tune.
On September 16, 1995 the U.S. Post Office issued a James P. Johnson 32-cent commemorative postage stamp.[14]
Unmarked since his death in 1955, his grave was re-consecrated with a
headstone paid for with funds raised by an event arranged by the James
P. Johnson Foundation, Spike Wilner and Dr. Scott Brown on October 4,
2009.[16]
Johnson's complete Blue Note recordings (solos, band sides in groups led by himself as well as Edmond Hall and Sidney DeParis) were issued in a collection by Mosaic Records. The largest anthology of Johnson's recordings was compiled in the Giants of Jazz series by Time-Life Music. This three-LP collection contains 40 sides recorded from 1921 to 1945, and is supplemented with extensive liner notes, including a biographical essay by Frank Kappler, and criticism of the musical selections by Dick Wellstood, and the musicologist, Willa Rouder. Many of Johnson's approximately 60 piano rolls, recorded between 1917 and 1927, have been issued on CD on the Biograph Label. A book of musical transcriptions of Johnson's piano roll performances of his own compositions has been prepared by Dr. Robert Pinsker, to be published through the auspices of the James P. Johnson Foundation.
Porter, Lewis. "Deep Dive: Putting Louis Armstrong in Context". Wbgo.org. Retrieved April 21, 2020.
"James P. Johnson | American composer and pianist". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved April 21, 2020.
Schiff, David (February 16, 1992). "POP MUSIC; A Pianist With Harlem on His Mind". Nytimes.com. Retrieved April 21, 2020.
"James P. Johnson | American composer and pianist". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved May 14, 2017.
Garraty, John Arthur; Carnes, Mark Christopher; Societies, American Council of Learned (January 1, 1999). American national biography. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780195206357.
Jasen, David A.; Jones, Gene (October 11, 2013). Black Bottom Stomp: Eight Masters of Ragtime and Early Jazz. Routledge. ISBN 9781135349356.
Banfield, William C. (January 1, 2004). Black Notes: Essays of a Musician Writing in a Post-album Age. Scarecrow Press. p. 166. ISBN 9780810852877.
Berlin, Edward A. (January 11, 1996). King of Ragtime: Scott Joplin and His Era. Oxford University Press. p. 56. ISBN 9780195356465.
"Oxford AASC: Johnson, James P." Webcache.googleusercontent.com. Retrieved May 22, 2017.
"James P. Johnson". Redhotjazz.com. Archived from the original on November 16, 2006. Retrieved May 22, 2017.
Peyser, Joan (2006). The Memory of All that: The Life of George Gershwin. Hal Leonard Corporation. p. 59. ISBN 9781423410256.
Uhl, Jim (September 2002). "For Conrad Janis, Acting and Jazz Share the Spotlight". Maria and Conrad Janis.
Runnin' Wild at the Internet Broadway Database
Meddings, Mike. "James P. Johnson and Jelly Roll Morton First Day Cover". Monrovia Sound Studio. Retrieved December 22, 2014.
"ASCAP 2007 Jazz Wall of Fame". American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. Retrieved December 22, 2014.
JAMES P. JOHNSON
Ironically, Johnson, the most sophisticated pianist of the 1920s, was also an expert accompanist for blues singers and he starred on several memorable Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters recordings. In addition to his solo recordings, Johnson led some hot combos on records and guested with Perry Bradford and Clarence Williams; he also shared the spotlight with Fats Waller on a few occasions. Because he was very interested in writing longer works, Johnson (who had composed "Yamekraw" in 1927) spent much of the '30s working on such pieces as "Harlem Symphony," "Symphony in Brown," and a blues opera. Unfortunately much of this music has been lost through the years. Johnson, who was only semi-active as a pianist throughout much of the '30s, started recording again in 1939, often sat in with Eddie Condon, and was active in the '40s despite some minor strokes. A major stroke in 1955 finished off his career. Most of his recordings have been reissued on CD.
https://musicians.allaboutjazz.com/jamespjohnson
James P. Johnson
Back during the heyday of ragtime piano (pre-1920), James P. had
become a part of the famed “Harlem music scene,” and was contributing to
the distinctive Harlem piano style that differed melodically and
harmonically from classic ragtime. Conventional ragtime had syncopation
but lacked polyrhythm. James P. developed a strong and solid walking
bass with his left hand and a rhythmic exciting treble with his right.
His music flowed at an even tempo with considerable syncopation between
the two hands. He superimposed conflicting rhythms in solos of
symmetrical beauty.
James Price Johnson was born in New Brunswick, N.J., in 1894. His mother taught him rags, blues, and stomps as soon as he was able to handles the keys on the parlor upright. When Jimmy reached 9 years of age, he started lessons with Bruto Giannini, a strict musician from the old country, who corrected his fingering but didn't interfere with his playing of rags and stomps.
The Johnson family moved into New York City when Jimmy was 12, and early in his teens he became the “piano kid” at Barron Wilkin's Cabaret in Harlem. It was at Barron's that he met Charles L. (Lucky) Roberts from whom he derived his brilliant right hand. Later his solid bass was inspired by the work of Abba Labba, a “professor” in a bordello. Through the years James P. kept up his studying, and in the 1930s he began the study of orchestral writing for concert groups.
James Price Johnson was born in New Brunswick, N.J., in 1894. His mother taught him rags, blues, and stomps as soon as he was able to handles the keys on the parlor upright. When Jimmy reached 9 years of age, he started lessons with Bruto Giannini, a strict musician from the old country, who corrected his fingering but didn't interfere with his playing of rags and stomps.
The Johnson family moved into New York City when Jimmy was 12, and early in his teens he became the “piano kid” at Barron Wilkin's Cabaret in Harlem. It was at Barron's that he met Charles L. (Lucky) Roberts from whom he derived his brilliant right hand. Later his solid bass was inspired by the work of Abba Labba, a “professor” in a bordello. Through the years James P. kept up his studying, and in the 1930s he began the study of orchestral writing for concert groups.
James P., Lucky Roberts, Willie (The Lion) Smith, and the Beetle (Stephen Henderson), were familiar figures around “The Jungle” (on the fringe of San Juan Hill in the west 60s when this older Negro district was thriving before 1920.) They followed in the footsteps of Jack The Bear, Jess Pickett, The Shadow, Fats Harris, and Abba Labba.
Here and in the later uptown Harlem, the house rent parties flourished and the boys who could tinkle the ivories were fair haired. Willie The Lion recalled those days for Rudi Blesh as follows: “A hundred people would crowd into one seven-room flat until the walls bulged. Plenty of food with hot maws (pickled pig bladders) and chitt'lins with vinegar, beer, and gin, and when we played the shouts everybody danced.” Long nights of playing piano at such festivities gave James P. plenty of practice at the keyboard.
There were two younger jazz pianists who followed Jimmy Johnson around during these Harlem nights. One was young Duke Ellington, fresh from Washington, and the other was James P.'s most noted pupil, the late Fats Waller. The latter cherished the backroom sessions with James P., Beetle, and The Lion.
From about 1915 to the early '20s, James P. made many piano rolls for the Aeolian Company and then became the first Negro staff artist for the QRS piano roll firm in 1921. It was in this connection that he met and became friendly with the late George Gershwin, and ultimately helped him write the music for several shows. Around late 1922 Johnson left the piano roll field to make phonograph records. His first waxing was also probably the first jazz piano solo on records. This was the Victor pressing of “Bleeding Heart Blues.”
Most of Johnson's playing was solo, but through the years there were periods of considerable length when he served bands in the piano chair. He played for some time with the famed James Reese Europe's Hell Fighters at the Clef Club in Harlem.
Johnson's composing activities are as noteworthy as his piano style. In the '30s he wrote a long choral work, “Yamecraw,” which was made into a movie short starring Bessie Smith. Other serious works of his include “Symphonie Harlem”; “Symphony in Brown”; “African Drums” (symphonic poem); “Piano Concerto in A-Flat” (which he performed with the Brooklyn Symphony); “Mississippi Moon”; Symphonic Suite on St. Louis Blues; and the score to “De Union Organizer (with a Langston Hughes libretto).
One of Johnson's most famous and best known tunes was “If I Could Be With You One Hour Tonight,” written in 1926, the year he was accepted for membership in ASCAP. Jazz fans will recall “Old Fashioned Love,” “Porter's Love Song (to a Chamber Maid),” “Charleston, Carolina Shout,” “Caprice Rag,” “Daintiness,” “The Mule Walk,” and “Ivy.”
J.P. at one time or another made records for every major label, with the exception of the two youngest-Capitol and Mercury-and many of his older sides have been reissued. Most of his sides are found under his own name, but there are miscellaneous dates where a jazz band called him in to handle the important piano chore. He recorded with McKinney's Cotton Pickers on Victor and was selected by Hughes Panassie on the Frenchman's sessions at Victor during a visit to the U.S. The Hot Record Society picked James P. for their Rhythmaker record date in 1939.
James P. Johnson was one of the great jazz pioneers and his contributions take an important place among the jazz classics.
James P. Johhnson died in New York on Nov. 17, 1955.
Source: James Nadal
https://riverwalkjazz.stanford.edu/program/runnin-wild-biography-james-p-johnson
Program: 100
Runnin' Wild: A Biography of James P. Johnson
James P. Johnson. Photo in public domain.
Joining The Jim Cullum Jazz Band to pay tribute to this almost-forgotten legend are piano master Dick Hyman and William Warfield, a star of theater and film. Dick Hyman first met and performed with James P. in Greenwich Village in the 1950s; Hyman went on to study and perform Johnson’s work for decades. William Warfield recreates the atmosphere of 1920s New York in his portrayal of James P. Johnson, using Johnson’s own words, excerpted from an interview by Tom Davin titled, “This is Our Story of The Father of Harlem Stride Piano, and first published in Jazz Review magazine.”
Dick Hyman
James P. Johnson is the musical genius most often credited with originating the uniquely East Coast style of piano playing known as “Stride.” In his lifetime, Johnson composed and recorded jazz tunes, show music, movie scores and major symphonic works. Johnson was the first black artist to breakthrough the color barrier and cut his own piano rolls for a major label. The great singer Ethel Waters said of him, “All the licks you hear now originated with James P. Johnson—and I mean all the hot licks that ever came out of Fats Waller and the rest of the hot piano boys; they’re all faithful followers and protégées of that great man, Jimmy Johnson.”
Before World War I, in the first decade of the century, a piano could be found in almost every home in America. At the time, it was as common to own a piano, as it is to have a television set or Internet access, today. Most people couldn’t imagine living without one. Newspaper ads pitched pianos with the hard sell, “What is a home without a piano?” A good piano player was always popular; after all not everyone who owned a piano could play it well.
James Price Johnson was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey in 1894. He grew up to be an unassuming man with a gentle disposition. He had perfect pitch and a powerful left hand; he was a quick learner at the piano and he practiced hard. Johnson said he would spend hours playing piano in a dark room to become completely familiar with the keyboard. He would sometimes put a bed sheet over the keyboard and force himself to play difficult pieces through the covering in order to develop his sense of touch. Some of these tales may be apocryphal, but Johnson’s originality and virtuosity stand out over a century later.
William Warfield. Photo courtesy of Riverwalk Jazz.
“When we lived in Jersey City I was impressed by my older brother’s friends. They were real ‘ticklers,’ cabaret and ‘sportin’ house’ players. They were my heroes. They led what I thought was a glamorous life; they were welcome everywhere because of their talent. If you could play piano, you went from one house to another. Everybody made a fuss about you. They fed you ice cream and cake, all sorts of food and drinks. In fact some of the biggest men in the profession were known as the biggest eaters. At an all-night party you started eating at 1:00 AM, had another meal at 4:00 AM, and sat down to eat again at 6:00 AM. Many of us suffered later because of the eating and drinking habits started in our younger socializing days. But that was the life for me when I was seventeen.
“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 a coat like a coachman’s—blue double-breasted fitted to the waist and with long skirts. We’d wear a light pearl-grey Hamburg hat set at a rakish angle, then a white silk muffler and a white silk handkerchief. Some carried a gold-headed cane. Players would start off sitting down, waiting for the audience to quiet down, then they’d do a run up and down the piano of scales and arpeggios, or if they were real good they might play a set of modulations, very off-hand as if there was nothing to it. Some ‘ticklers’ would sit sideways at the piano, cross their legs and go on chatting with friends nearby. It took a lot of practice to play this way. Then without stopping the smart talk or turning back to the piano, he’d attack without warning, smashing right into the regular beat of the piece. That would knock them dead.”
East Harlem, 1905.
ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.
“In the same year, I was taken to Baron Wilkins’ place in Harlem. Another boy and I let the legs of our short pants down to look grown-up and we 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 ‘Jelly Roll Blues.’ I remember he wore a light brown Melton overcoat with a three-hole hat to match it. He had two girls with him.
“In Jersey City I heard good piano from all parts of the South and West, but I heard real ragtime when we came to New York. Most East Coast playing was based on Cotillion dance tunes, stomps, drags and ‘set-dances.’ They were all country dance tunes, like my ‘Carolina Shout.’”
Okeh record label.
“In New York, a friend taught me real ragtime. His name was Charley Cherry. We played Joplin, then I copied him, then he corrected me. When I went to Public School #69 I was allowed to play for the assembly and for the minstrel shows put on there. In New York, I got to hear a lot of good music for the first time. Victor Herbert and Rudolph Friml were popular, and I used to go to the old New York Symphony concerts. A friend of my brother who was a waiter used to get theater tickets from its conductor (Josef Stransky) who came to the restaurant where he worked. That was when I first heard Mozart, Wagner, Beethoven and Puccini. The full symphonic sounds made a big impression on me.
“The other sections of the country never developed the piano as far as the New York boys did. The people in New York were used to hearing good piano played in concerts and cafes. The ragtime player had to live up to that standard. They had to get orchestral effects, sound harmonies, and all the techniques of European concert pianists who were playing their music all over the city. New York ‘ticklers’ developed the orchestral piano—full, round, big, widespread chords in tenths, a heavy bass moving against the right hand. The other boys from the South and the West played in smaller dimensions like thirds played in unison. We wouldn’t dare do that, because in New York the public was used to better playing.”
James P. Johnson early PR photo. Courtesy of artistdirect.com.
Johnson was well established in the relatively small world of Harlem Stride Piano by the 1920s, when he took a talented teenager by the name of Fats Waller under his wing, gave him piano lessons and a home away from home. Fats Waller’s bubbling show-biz personality captured the imagination of the nation, and he soon became swept up in the bright light of fame and fortune. A deep bond of affection remained between the two giants of stride piano until Waller’s death at an early age. Johnson’s influence can be readily heard in the Waller tune “Smashing Thirds,“ performed here by Dick Hyman and The Jim Cullum Jazz Band.
In the 1920s Johnson accompanied top stars like Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters. He toured Europe with the Plantation Revue, and in 1923 composed the score for a hit Broadway show, Runnin’ Wild. Two hit tunes came out of this show: The title tune, “Runnin’ Wild,” is often widely played by jazz and string bands today, and “The Charleston.” Johnson recalled first seeing the Charleston danced at a dive called the Jungles Casino in New York in 1913. Johnson recalls:
Charleston sheet music
“The Jungles was just a cellar without fixings. The people who came…were mostly from Charleston, South Carolina. Most of them worked…as longshoremen or on the ships. They danced hollering and screaming until they were cooked. They kept up all night or until their shoes wore off, most of them after a heavy day’s work on the docks. The Charleston was a regulation cotillion step without a name. While I was playing for these Southern dancers I composed a number of “Charlestons”—eight in all, all with that damn rhythm. One of these later became my famous “Charleston” on Broadway.
Willie “The Lion” Smith was one of the formidable stride piano players James P. Johnson faced in the hot competition of “cutting contests” at Harlem clubs and parlors in the 1920s. Johnson said “The Lion” earned his nickname fighting on European battlefields in World War I. But “The Lion” claimed it was James P. Johnson who gave him the moniker. To prove the point, “The Lion” took to calling James P., “The Brute.” In turn, Smith and Johnson joined forces to come up with a nickname for their young protégé Fats Waller; they called him “Filthy.” “Fingerbuster“ is an aptly named virtuoso piece by “The Lion,” which he undoubtedly used at “cutting contests” to establish his dominance. Here, Dick Hyman takes it at its intended prestissimo tempo.
Willie “The Lion” Smith.
In 1917 James P. Johnson cut the first in a series of historic piano rolls for the Aeolian and QRS Music Roll companies. Three years later in 1920, Johnson met George Gershwin while both artists were making piano rolls at a hundred dollars a session. These two great figures of American music came from vastly different backgrounds—separated by enormous racial barriers, but they shared a mutual ambition to write “serious” music on large American themes. Both continued to study classical music while playing and composing jazz and popular tunes. Gershwin was a great admirer of Johnson, and the rest of the Harlem piano men, and Gershwin frequently crossed the race barrier to hear them play. George Gershwin acknowledged his high esteem for Johnson and the enormous influence Johnson’s work had on his own by including the “Charleston” theme in his Concerto in F.
In 1928, four years after Gershwin presented his first serious work Rhapsody in Blue, Johnson debuted his first symphonic work in concert at Carnegie Hall with Fats Waller at the piano. Yamekraw, a Negro Rhapsody is dedicated to a black community near Savannah, Georgia called Yamekraw. You can hear strains of down-home blues, stomps, church meetings and spirituals in this ambitious work. Our show features a rare recording of the piece, performed by the composer himself, followed by the band’s original arrangement for The Jim Cullum Jazz band and Dick Hyman.
More about the music on this show:
“A-flat Dream“ dates from 1939, and is performed here as a Dick Hyman/John Sheridan duet. The tune starts off with a boogie-woogie bass line in the first section, and switches to a more typically Johnsonesque texture.
“Ain’tcha Got Music?” and “You’ve Got to Be Modernistic” are both examples of what Johnson refers to as a broad “orchestral” style of stride piano, heard here filled out in arrangements created by John Sheridan for Dick Hyman and The Jim Cullum Jazz Band. A further example of the “orchestral style is “Caprice Rag,“ performed as a two-piano Hyman/Sheridan duet here. Johnson’s “Snowy Morning Blues“ is given a meditative solo reading by Dick Hyman, evoking a feeling true to its title.
Photo credit for homepage image: James P. Johnson, public domain.
Text based on Riverwalk Jazz script by Margaret Moos Pick ©1997
https://www.songhall.org/profile/James_P_Johnson
Inductee: James P. Johnson
Enriched the jazz vocabulary and wrote dozens of jazz hits of 1920s and 30s.
In the mid 1920s, dances such as the Fox Trot, The Shimmy, The Black Bottom and The Varsity were sweeping America. One dance in particular epitomized America during this decade: “The Charleston”, written by James P. Johnson, the father of stride piano.
In the mid 1920s, dances such as the Fox Trot, The Shimmy, The Black Bottom and The Varsity were sweeping America. One dance in particular epitomized America during this decade: “The Charleston”, written by James P. Johnson, the father of stride piano.
Composer and pianist James Price Johnson, the father of stride piano, was born on February 1, 1891 in New Brunswick, New Jersey. He attended New York public schools and received private piano study. His professional debut as a pianist came in 1904. In the early 1910’s, Johnson worked as a pianist in summer resorts, theatres, films and nightclubs before forming his own band in 1920, called the Clef Club. The Clef Club toured throughout Europe with the vaudeville show Plantation Days.
Returning to the States, Johnson was the accompanist for such renowned singers as Bessie Smith, Trixie Smith, Mamie Smith, Laura Smith andn Ethel Waters. In the 1930’s, he took his stride style to the movie screen and composed scores for films including Yamacraw.
The stride style that influenced such legends as Duke Ellingon and Fats Domino, stresses a strong "swinging" bass while moving in a "stride fashion" with a single treble melody. Introduced in 1924 with "The Charleston", combined Ragtime syncopation and the smooth progression of jazz with livelier upbeat rhythms and a swinging bass that helped usher in the next decade's genre.
Johnson’s discography is equally distributed with serious works as well as hit jazz standards. His works include “Symphonic Harlem”, “Symphony in Brown”, “African Drums”, “Piano Concerto in A-flat”, “Mississippi Symphonic Suite on St. Louis Blues”, “Yamacraw”, “City of Steel”, “De Organizer”, “Dreamy Kid”, “Kitchen Opera”, “The Husband”, “Manhattan Street Scene” and “Sefronia’s Dream.”
His popular catalog includes the hit songs “Old Fashioned Love”, “Don’t Cry Baby”, “Charleston”, “If I Could Be With You One Hour Tonight”, “Stop it Joe”, “Mama and Papa Blues”, “Hey, Hey”, “Runnin’ Wild”, “Porter’s Love Song to a Chambermaid”, “Snowy Morning Blues”, “Eccentricity Waltz”, “Carolina Shout” and “Keep Off the Grass”.
A member of the League of Composers and the NAACC, Johnson composed primarily by himself but did have a few collaborations with lyricists including Mike Riley, Nelson Cogane and Cecil Mack.
James P. Johnson died in New York City on November 17, 1955, however the stride musical style he introduced continues to reinvent music of every genre.
James P. Johnson: Forgotten Musical Genius
- October 18, 2019
The music of early Jazz piano player James P. Johnson, the creator of Harlem Stride Piano, is explored in this award-winning production. Actor Peter Coyote reads from Johnson’s recollections and Mark Borowsky expertly traces his career, sharing insights gleaned from a lifetime studying this overlooked American genius.
James P. Johnson in publicity for a 1945 Carnegie Hall concert.
James Price Johnson (1894-1955) should be hailed as one of the greatest composers, jazz musicians and songwriters of American music. Yet despite vast achievements, he remains largely unknown to general audiences.
Johnson was the foremost proponent of Harlem Stride piano and an absolute master of the keyboard with perfect pitch. Laying the cornerstone of jazz piano before 1920, his Stride keyboard style transformed Ragtime into Jazz, strongly influencing pianists Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Art Tatum, and Thelonious Monk. His protege Fats Waller recalled learning more in his first afternoon with James than the previous 10 years.
Johnson’s list of collaborators is a who’s who of eraly Jazz and Blues: Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, King Oliver, Sidney Bechet, Eddie Condon. He was in great demand throughout the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s for recordings as a soloist, accompanist to singers or band pianist. A sober, disciplined, middle-class, church-going family man, he only superficially resembled the larger-than-life personalities of the era’s flamboyant piano professionals.
Johnson cut some 55 piano rolls for a half-dozen companies, the finest of their kind. His “Charleston” was the signature tune of the Roaring Twenties. He made hundreds of records for the most important labels of his time, which today confirm his exceptional composing, arranging and pianistic skills that were equal to masters of any musical tradition.
Jersey City Origins
Johnson circa 1940.
Johnson was raised in Jersey City, New Jersey on, in his own words “an old-time honky tonk street.” His first informal job was playing piano in a bordello. Though at the tender age eight he was an innocent who was unaware of the true circumstances.
Located at the convergence of rail lines, Jersey City was a collecting node for African American piano players from the South and Midwest. They were local celebrities on which young James modeled his personal style, recalling: “When we lived in Jersey City I was impressed by . . . real ‘ticklers,’ cabaret and ‘sportin’ house’ players. They were my heroes. They led what I thought was a glamorous life; they were welcome everywhere because of their talent. If you could play piano, you went from one house to another. Everybody made a fuss about you. They fed you ice cream and cake, all sorts of food and drinks.”
Ragtime in The Jungles
At age 14, Johnson’s family moved to the tough San Juan Hill neighborhood of New York on Manhattan Island (located about where Lincoln Center stands today). Nearby was The Jungles — a rowdy entertainment area and nexus of musical currents where young James hung out. Before long, he would be playing for dancers at the famed Jungles Casino where he conceived “The Charleston.”
According to Johnson, The Jungles district contained a superlative collection of ivory ticklers who had developed a unique ragtime piano style heard nowhere else. Drawn by work in the plentiful cabarets, theaters and entertainment houses of New York City these piano professionals were flamboyant characters. Each had a distinctive personal style and bag of tricks, each competing to outdo the others in skill, personal flair or swagger.
Though Ragtime was the dominant musical form, in his youth Johnson also heard popular songs, folk and rural music, ethnic dances from the Southeastern United States and remnants of West African ring-shout dances. Importantly, The Jungles was not far from the “legitimate” music of Carnegie Hall, the New York Philharmonic and the top vaudeville palaces of the land.
Johnson said: “The ragtime player had to . . . get orchestral effects, sound harmonies, and all the techniques of European concert pianists who were playing their music all over the city. New York ‘ticklers’ developed the orchestral piano — full, round, big, widespread chords in tenths, a heavy bass moving against the right hand.”
Young James flourished in this rich stew of influences, developing his own piano style. He began a professional career in the Summer of 1912 — in a rickety cabaret just off the beach at Far Rockaway, Queens.
Transition from Ragtime to Stride Piano
The term ‘stride’ derives from the left-hand keyboard bass line – which ‘strides’ from a chord near middle-C to a low note an octave or two below middle-C. Curiously, it’s the right-hand figures that create the characteristic rhythmic signature and swing of Stride by pushing or pulling on the rhythms of the left-hand and utilizing a wide range of pianistic devices, some borrowed from classical performance. Transitioning from Ragtime to Jazz, Johnson perfected and exemplified the Harlem Stride method.
Unlike Ragtime from which it evolved, Stride was both a written and improvised form, transmitted aurally. James P. conveyed it directly to his protégé Fats Waller who became the best-known practitioner of Harlem Stride, developing his own distinctive style. Pianist Art Tatum advanced Stride further, adding ornamental runs, dazzling arpeggios and a more sophisticated harmonic vocabulary.
Like Johnson, many of these piano artists didn’t even need to see their fingers while playing. They looked around casually conversing with friends or followers while performing or played separate melodies simultaneously with left and right hands.
Stride was generally paced much quicker than Ragtime piano; Johnson often produced dizzying cascades of notes at lightning speed with unsurpassed accuracy. By 1920 his “Carolina Shout” was a jazz piano staple and mastering it was a requirement for any aspiring stride musician.
Flamboyant Style
Johnson c. 1927.
Johnson developed a vast repertoire and reputation, becoming affluent and stylish thanks to royalties from sales of his piano rolls and sheet music. Flaunting the flashy couture expected of his profession, he cultivated a wardrobe of about 25 suits, 15 pairs of custom-made shoes, two dozen silk shirts, silk handkerchiefs, and a gold or silver-knobbed cane.
Piano professionals required a specific set of ostentatious accessories in order to be taken seriously. A dramatic silk-lined overcoat was integral to the presentation of a modern major piano professor. Removed with a flourish, the garment was placed with great ceremony to display the plush silk lining: “We used to wear . . . a coat like a coachman’s — blue double-breasted fitted to the waist and with long skirts. We’d wear a light pearl-grey Homburg hat set at a rakish angle, then a white silk muffler and a white silk handkerchief.”
African American Overachiever
Jam session in New York City 1943 with Wilbur de Paris (trombone), Frank Jackson (reeds), Cozy Cole (drums) and Al Mott (bass). Gjon Mili photographer.
James P. Johnson was one of the grand geniuses of American music in multiple dimensions. Several of his 230 popular songs, like “Old Fashioned Love,” became American standards.
His creative partners were the cream of African American cultural overachievers: pianist and impresario Eubie Blake, tunesmith and publisher W.C. Handy and symphonic composer William Grant Still. He composed a one-act blues opera with Langston Hughes, poet-laureate of the Harlem Renaissance.
Johnson created, wrote or collaborated on more than a dozen Black musicals and stage revues that were landmarks of African American theater: Keep Shufflin’, Messin’ Around, Swingin’ the Dream, Shuffle Along and Meet Miss Jones. His greatest theatrical success was “Runnin’ Wild” (1923) which produced his two most durable hits — “The Charleston” and “(If I Could Be with You) One Hour Tonight” — providing him lifelong income.
Not yet satisfied, he sought training in classical keyboard technique, music theory, harmony and orchestration. Johnson wrote concertos, suites, symphonies and tone poems — composing 19 orchestral works altogether. Some were played at Carnegie Hall as early as 1928. Others were never performed nor published in his lifetime.
Dean of the Jazz Piano
By the mid-1930s Johnson was vigorously engaged in songwriting and arranging, performing, recording and appearing on radio. He waxed about 400 tunes as a piano soloist, accompanist, bandleader or sideman. In New York City he was featured at John Hammond’s Spirituals to Swing concerts at Carnegie Hall in 1938-39, at Café Society Downtown and was widely respected among his musical peers
Johnson at the opening of his show, “Sugar Hill” in 1949. Floyd Levin/Time-Life.
In the early 1940s Johnson suffered a mild stroke (most likely a transient ischemic attack), the first of several. Nonetheless, he continued working a heavy schedule — performing, recording, leading combos, enjoying some measure of recognition and fleeting national fame.
The death of his protégé and dear friend Fats Waller in late 1943 severely depressed Johnson. He went into private mourning for months, before recording eight Waller tunes for Decca in 1944.
During the late 1940s, Johnson was featured at prestigious jazz clubs and heard regularly on the radio show of Rudi Blesh. Throughout the 1940s he was paired up with Dixielanders and New Orleans veterans for recording sessions or radio and television broadcasts with Eddie Condon.
Symphonic Aspirations
Johnson on the Eddie Condon TV show with drummer Zutty Singleton, trumpet player Oran “Hot Lips” Page and Condon.
It’s clear that from the start Johnson tried to fuse jazz with traditional European classical music, seeking over and over again to create a blend. At first, he borrowed or adapted classical themes and motifs: “From listening to classical records and concerts, I would learn concert effects and build them into blues and rags. . . I’d make an abrupt change like I heard Beethoven do in a sonata. Once, I used Liszt’s ‘Rigoletto’ concert paraphrase as an introduction to a stomp.”
Johnson retired from performing for a while following the economic collapse of 1929. Seeking broader musical horizons, he took formal training in classical piano technique and mastered music theory, counterpoint, and harmony.
His “Harlem Symphony” was completed in 1932. Shortly afterwards “Symphony in Brown” was copyrighted though never published. “Jassamine Concerto” and “American Symphonic Suite” received smatterings of performance and publication.
Johnson penned his dramatic symphonic poem “Drums” for the 1932 show, Harlem Hotcha, later orchestrated as “Those Jungle Drums” with lyrics by Langston Hughes. Lost for 40 years, the score has been restored and recorded in recent decades.
“Yamekraw: A Negro Rhapsody”
A rhapsody-concerto for piano and orchestra, “Yamekraw” was a creative achievement blending the classical piano concerto format with black musical idioms. The full-scale score was arranged by African American composer William Grant Still. It was dedicated to Yamecraw, a picturesque waterfront district on the outskirts of Savannah, Georgia.
Exuberant and visionary, this was Johnson’s most ambitious and successful orchestral work. “Yamekraw” fused symphony orchestra with Jazz, Blues, Stomps and Gospel themes. The first composition of its kind by an African American composer, it premiered at Carnegie Hall with Fats Waller soloist in 1928 just a few years after “Rhapsody in Blue” by his good friend George Gershwin. It was recorded in recent decades by soloist Marcus Roberts with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra (Sony Classical, 1995).
“Yamekraw” was performed again at Carnegie Hall by Johnson in 1945 for a program featuring several of his symphonic works. He waxed a masterful solo piano rendition on four 78 rpm record sides in 1944.
For decades Johnson wrote to conductors and patrons seeking sponsorship for performance of his other large scores and extended works. Sadly, he received only rejections.
Honoring Forgotten Genius
US Postage stamp; mid-1930s Johnson band; on the Eddie Condon Show (Condon foreground); Blue Note, 1944.
A paralyzing stroke in 1951 ended Johnson’s performing career. When he died in 1955, his passing was barely noted. But James P. is not forgotten.
America has slowly come to recognize Johnson’s genius. He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970 and ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) in 2007. His personal papers and scrapbooks are preserved in the Rutgers University Libraries. A century after his birth Johnson’s portrait appeared on a United States Postage stamp in a set with nine other jazz greats.
James P. Johnson’s native talent was incubated and nurtured in a rich American melting pot. Foundational to Jazz and American popular music, his effervescent keyboard style, pioneering Black musicals, popular songs, and symphonic works propelled African American music into the modern era.
James P Johnson takes a Bow c 1949 (Photo Credit: Tony Nichols from Black Star)
Great thanks to guest narrator Peter Coyote, and Mark Borowsky for his expert insights. Thanks to Hal Smith for assistance.
Sources and further reading:
Black Bottom Stomp: Eight Masters of Ragtime and Early Jazz, Jasen, David A. and Jones, Gene, Routledge, 2002
James P. Johnson: A Case of Mistaken Identity, Brown, Scott E., Scarecrow Press, 1992
James P. Johnson, Giants of Jazz, liner notes booklet, Kappler, Frank, Time Life Books, 1981
LINKS:
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Dave Radlauer is a six-time award-winning radio broadcaster presenting early Jazz since 1982. His vast JAZZ RHYTHM
website is a compendium of early jazz history and photos with some 500
hours of exclusive music, broadcasts, interviews and audio rarities.
Radlauer is focused on telling the story of San Francisco Bay Area
Revival Jazz. Preserving the memory of local legends, he is compiling,
digitizing, interpreting and publishing their personal libraries of
music, images, papers and ephemera to be conserved in the Dave Radlauer
Jazz Collection at the Stanford University Library archives.
THE TRIUMPHS OF JAMES P. JOHNSON
James P. Johnson, Marty Marsala, Danny Barker, 1946, by Charles Peterson
Fats Waller eclipsed his teacher in the public eye because Waller was a dazzling multi-faceted entertainer and personality, visible in movies, audible on the radio. Fats had a recording contract with the most prominent record company, Victor, and the support of that label — he created hit records for them — in regular sessions from 1934 to 1943. Tatum, Basie, and Ellington — although they paid James P. homage in words and music — all appeared to come fully grown from their own private universes. Basie and Ellington were perceived not only as pianists but as orchestra leaders who created schools of jazz composition and performance; Tatum, in his last years, had remarkable support from Norman Granz — thus he left us a series of memorable recordings.
Many of the players I’ve noted above were extroverts (leaving aside the reticent Basie) and showmanship come naturally to them. Although the idea of James P., disappointed that his longer “serious” works did not receive recognition, retiring to his Queens home, has been proven wrong by Johnson scholar Scott Brown (whose revised study of James P. will be out in 2017) he did not get the same opportunities as did his colleagues. James P. did make records, he had club residencies at Cafe Society and the Pied Piper, was heard at an Eddie Condon Town Hall concert and was a regular feature on Rudi Blesh’s THIS IS JAZZ . . . but I can look at a discography of his recordings and think, “Why isn’t there more?” Physical illness accounts for some of the intermittent nature of his career: he had his first stroke in 1940 and was ill for the last years of his life.
There will never be enough. But what we have is brilliant. And the reason for this post is the appearance in my mailbox of the six-disc Mosaic set which collects most of James P.’s impressive recordings between 1921 and 1943. (Mosaic has also issued James P.’s session with Eddie Condon on the recent Condon box, and older issues offered his irreplaceable work for Blue Note — solo and band — in 1943 / 44, and the 1938 HRS sides as well.)
Scott Brown, who wrote the wise yet terse notes for this set, starts off by pointing to the wide variety of recordings Johnson led or participated in this period.
And even without looking at the discography, I can call to mind sessions where Johnson leads a band (with, among others, Henry “Red” Allen, J. C. Higginbotham, Gene Sedric, Al Casey, Johnny Williams, Sidney Catlett — or another all-star group with Charlie Christian, Hot Lips Page, Lionel Hampton on drums, Artie Bernstein, Ed Hall, and Higginbotham); accompanies the finest blues singers, including Bessie Smith and Ida Cox, is part of jivey Clarence Williams dates — including two takes of the patriotic 1941 rouser UNCLE SAMMY, HERE I AM — works beautifully with Bessie Smith, is part of a 1929 group with Jabbo Smith, Garvin Bushell on bassoon, Fats Waller on piano); is a sideman alongside Mezz Mezzrow, Frank Newton, Pete Brown, John Kirby, swings out on double-entendre material with Teddy Bunn and Spencer Williams. There’s a 1931 band date that shows the powerful influence of Cab Calloway . . . and more. For the delightful roll call of musicians and sides (some never before heard) check the Mosaic site here.
(On that page, you can hear his delicate, haunting solo BLUEBERRY RHYME, his duet with Bessie Smith on her raucous HE’S GOT ME GOING, the imperishable IF DREAMS COME TRUE, his frolicsome RIFFS, and the wonderful band side WHO?)
I fell in love with James P.’s sound, his irresistible rhythms, his wonderful inventiveness when I first heard IF DREAMS COME TRUE on a Columbia lp circa 1967. And then I tried to get all of his recordings that I could — which in the pre-internet, pre-eBay era, was not easy: a Bessie Smith accompaniment here, a Decca session with Eddie Dougherty, the Blue Notes, the Stinson / Asch sides, and so on. This Mosaic set is a delightful compilation even for someone who, like me, knows some of this music by heart because of forty-plus years of listening to it. The analogy I think of is that of an art student who discovers a beloved artist (Rembrandt or Kahlo, Kandinsky or Monet) but can only view a few images on museum postcards or as images on an iPhone — then, the world opens up when the student is able to travel to THE museum where the idol’s works are visible, tangible, life-sized, arranged in chronology or thematically . . . it makes one’s head spin. And it’s not six compact discs of uptempo stride piano: the aural variety is delicious, James P.’s imagination always refreshing.
The riches here are immense. All six takes of Ida Cox’s ONE HOUR MAMA. From that same session, there is a pearl beyond price: forty-two seconds of Charlie Christian, then Hot Lips Page, backed by James P., working on a passage in the arrangement. (By the way, there are some Charlie Christian accompaniments in that 1939 session that I had never heard before, and I’d done my best to track down all of the Ida Cox takes. Guitar fanciers please note.) The transfers are as good as we are going to hear in this century, and the photographs (several new to me) are delights.
Hearing these recordings in context always brings new insights to the surface. My own epiphany of this first listening-immersion is a small one: the subject is HOW COULD I BE BLUE? (a record I fell in love with decades ago, and it still delights me). It’s a duo-performance for James P. and Clarence Williams, with scripted vaudeville dialogue that has James P. as the 1930 version of Shorty George, the fellow who makes love to your wife while you are at work, and the received wisdom has been that James P. is uncomfortable with the dialogue he’s asked to deliver, which has him both the accomplished adulterer and the man who pretends he is doing nothing at all. Hearing this track again today, and then James P. as the trickster in I FOUND A NEW BABY, which has a different kind of vaudeville routine, it struck me that James P. was doing his part splendidly on the first side, his hesitations and who-me? innocence part of his character. He had been involved with theatrical productions for much of the preceding decade, and I am sure he knew more than a little about acting. You’ll have to hear it for yourself.
This, of course, leaves aside the glory of his piano playing. I don’t think hierarchical comparisons are all that useful (X is better than Y, and let’s forget about Z) but James P.’s melodic improvising, whether glistening or restrained, never seems a series of learned motives. Nothing is predictable; his dancing rhythms (he is the master of rhythmic play between right and left hands) and his melodic inventiveness always result in the best syncopated dance music. His sensitivity is unparalleled. For one example of many, I would direct listeners to the 1931 sides by Rosa Henderson, especially DOGGONE BLUES: where he begins the side jauntily, frolicking as wonderfully as any solo pianist could — not racing the tempo or raising his volume — then moderates his volume and muffles his gleaming sound to provide the most wistful counter-voice to Henderson’s recital of her sorrows. Another jaunty interlude gives way to the most tender accompaniment. I would play this for any contemporary pianist and be certain of their admiration.
I am impressed with this set not simply for the riches it contains, but for the possibility it offers us to reconsider one of my beloved jazz heroes. Of course I would like people to flock to purchase it (in keeping with Mosaic policy, it is a limited edition, and once it’s gone, you might find a copy on eBay for double price) but more than that, I would like listeners to do some energetic reconstruction of the rather constricted canon of jazz piano history, which usually presents “stride piano” as a necessary yet brief stop in the forward motion of the genre or the idiom — as it moves from Joplin to Morton to Hines to Wilson to Tatum to “modernity.” Stride piano is almost always presented as a type of modernized ragtime, a brief virtuosic aberration with a finite duration and effect. I would like wise listeners to hear James P. Johnson as a pianistic master, his influence reaching far beyond what is usually assumed.
I was happy to see James P. on a postage stamp, but it wasn’t and isn’t enough, as the Mosaic set proves over and over again. I would like James P. Johnson to be recognized as “the dean of jazz pianists”:
Listen closely to this new Mosaic box set six compact discs worth of proof that the genius of James P. Johnson lives on vividly.
Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters...
James P. Johnson And “Carolina Shout”
Today, February 2, is the birthday of James P. Johnson (1894-1955), who developed stride piano as an art form within an art form. In his time, piano cutting contests were proving grounds—most often in Harlem apartments—where competing pianists showed their stuff. If James P was playing, their stuff was likely not to be good enough. Johnson’s most famous composition was “Carolina Shout,” a test of a pianist’s swing, power and rhythm. He recorded it several times. Many pianists, critics and jazz historians consider this 1921 version his best:
Dozens of pianists have recorded “Carolina Shout” in the century or so
since James P. wrote it. You’ll find many of their versions on this YouTube page.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Doug is a recipient of the lifetime achievement award of the Jazz
Journalists Association. He lives in the Pacific Northwest, where he
settled following a career in print and broadcast journalism in cities
including New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle,
Portland, San Antonio, Cleveland and Washington, DC. His writing about
jazz has paralleled his life in journalism.
James P. Johnson
AUDIO: <iframe src="https://www.npr.org/player/embed/4541412/150768726" width="100%" height="290" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" title="NPR embedded audio player"></iframe>
DO THE M@TH
In Search of James P. Johnson
This essay was originally prompted by “The Last Rent Party,” a
gala that raised money used to purchase James P. Johnson a tombstone,
who until then was buried in an unmarked grave in Queens. (“The Last
Rent Party” was held at Smalls and spearheaded by Spike Wilner.)
The 2015 edit was connected to Johnson’s election into the Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame at JALC.
In 2019, I’m still working on “Carolina Shout.”
At the end of the essay, a few sections from 2009 are retained unedited.
Prelude 1: The Piano Rolls
The Musée Mécanique in
San Francisco is a good place to learn about the raw power of early
piano rolls. There’s not much jazz in the building, but there’s plenty
of novelty music that has a dollop of ragtime and a stiff kind of
cheerful swing. It’s absolutely “pop music.” After you watch the keys
dance their jangly tune, you immediately want to stick in another
quarter and make it go again.
James P. Johnson is still revered as one of the very greatest among the small group of collectors who devote themselves to historical piano rolls. At least one commentator thinks that his twenties-era recordings “were a side issue” to his rolls, since the rolls sold better.
New York players improved their beat when musicians from New Orleans, Chicago, and Kansas City brought swinging information to them. Johnson got to hear Jelly Roll Morton in 1911 when Morton visited New York. This was one of Johnson’s most important formative experiences, but later on he said Morton wasn’t a very good musician. James P.’s student Duke Ellington went even further, saying that “Jelly Roll Morton played piano like one of those high school teachers in Washington.” Morton must have been a rare character indeed to get everybody so mad at him.
For the modern listener, Morton’s relaxed and groovy solo recordings from 1923 might be a better introduction to 1920’s jazz piano than James P. Johnson. They certainly make for an interesting comparison: after listening to a lot of Morton, James P. seems like an express train, and after listening to a lot of James P., Jelly Roll seems awfully slow.
I’m a Northerner myself, and I might take Johnson’s records over Morton’s if forced to chose. James Dapogny’s book of Morton transcriptions is the best of its kind. We need a Dapogny-type to tackle James P. Johnson.
“Harlem Strut” (9/21). Original works of Harlem stride are modeled on ragtime, with a sequence of themes like AABBCCDD. (Late in life James P. recorded Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag” and “Euphonic Sounds” with Harlem embellishment added.) “Harlem Strut” is in cheerful C major, with an especially twisty F major section to take it home. His piano roll version made the following year makes for an interesting comparison.
In most Afro Cuban music, there is a staggered beat called “clave” that requires unyielding consistency and precision. The ride cymbal beat of any good jazz drummer is related to clave.
In stride piano, the left hand’s “oom-pah” is like that clave or ride cymbal beat.
While there are examples of “oom-pah” in Chopin, Liszt and Brahms, you don’t need to groove for European piano music. In stride piano, clave is essential. James P. Johnson will always be one of the finest examples of the stride “feel.”
“Keep Off the Grass” (10/21) F Major. Part of the real Harlem stride style is how full the right hand is against the “oom-pah” below. A constant constellations of double notes (and sometimes chords) brassily sing on top. 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 quite Monkish in nature.
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 them as provocative today. In 1921, though, I’m pretty sure James P. would have meant those chain sequences to mean uncertainty and perhaps even sadness, the tear beneath the smile.
“Carolina Shout” (10/21). This is Johnson’s finest recording of his most famous instrumental piece. David Jasen makes the astute observation that the themes get funkier as they go along. (See below for my transcription.)
The next six pieces from 1923 are very different in style. It’s almost like James P. is making an album of “piano roll blues,” since they are mostly 12-bar forms and have the kind of constant chattering repetition common to most piano rolls. It’s a lovely set of records that perhaps lack the immediate impact of the first three Harlem stride pieces.
It’s great blues playing, although not everyone thinks so. In the only full-length book on Johnson, Scott E. Brown notes, “Johnson’s effectiveness as an interpreter of the blues is somewhat in dispute.”
In 1958, Dick Wellstood wrote in the Jazz Review:
Art Hodes gave his take in the liner notes to an Edmond Hall reissue (the track is 1943’s “Blues at Blue Note”). Hodes is inside the community, and his criticism has less authoritarian sting:
The original sheet music to these three songs are in different styles directly correlating to Johnson’s interview above. “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.
Schuller’s (and Wellstood’s) claim that “He played his blues very much the way he would play a show or pop tune” is terribly misguided. Johnson knew what the blues was and used it for specific reasons. The point is not to listen to Johnson for what he didn’t have (say, a Jimmy Yancey sensibility) but for what he did.
“Weeping Blues” (6/23) C major blues. 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) E-flat. 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) C major. A blues in feeling but not in form, although it comes close. Again the “piano roll triplets.”
“Bleeding Hearted Blues (7/23, comp. Austin) Eb blues. Johnson’s right hand owns this one with big chords and aggressive punches throughout.
“Scouting Around” (8/23) A-flat blues. The final two selections from this set are not vocal numbers, but mixtures of novelty piano, Harlem Stride, and black folklore. The conceit in “Scouting Around” is the “break” which begins every chorus. Eventually Johnson modulates to D-flat and explores some harmonic subtleties.
“Toddlin’” (8/23) E-flat blues. The loping right hand figures seem quite connected to the “novelty piano” style. Here Johnson breaks up the 4/4 stride into 3/4 and 5/4, a famous effect.
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. (Morton did this too.)
“Snowy Morning Blues” (7/27) G major. Perhaps James P. Johnson’s finest melody in his best recording. Black folklore and American pop song are blended together to perfection.
“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.
2014: Collin Van Ryn, in response to this post, got interested in James P. and transcribed “Feelin’ Blue.
** “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 ends with two cheeky bars of major.
“What Is This Thing Called Love?” (1/30, comp. Porter). The only familiar standard Johnson recorded in his prime years demonstrates how differently jazz musicians in 1930 thought about pop songs then they did later. Johnson plays the verse and bases his improvisations closely on the melody. If you look at Cole Porter’s published sheet music you can see exactly where Johnson is coming from.
“You’ve Got to Be Modernistic” (1/30) A-flat. For Johnson, “Modernistic” means the whole tone scale and the corresponding augmented triad. This in the Confrey “novelty” tradition (Eubie Blake’s “Troublesome Ivories” is another possible reference) 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 heart-stopping.
The next solo session is from nine years later.
“If Dreams Come True” (6/39, comp. Goodman/Sampson) Fast C major. 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.” This track also offers one of the most fabulous aspects of Johnson’s late style, “displaced bells” in the right hand: 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 early, ragtime-style piece in F major. However, by this point, James P.’s phrasing is relaxed indeed. 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. Perhaps he wrote this just because he knew how popular boogie was at the time?
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) B-flat stomp. This seems to be a folkloric “ring dance” or something else 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. (Hear the trombones in the last 8 bars?)
“Blueberry Rhyme” (6/39) F major. One of Johnson’s prettiest pieces, reminiscent of “Snowy Morning Blues” but slower and sadder. Wonderful ornamentation in the melody.
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’s 1920 again. For jazz historians, everything James P. recorded is important by default, especially unusual items like the extended composition “Yamekraw,” the Cuban-influenced “The Dream” and a Harlemized “Euphonic Sounds.”
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 strangely, most of the other music is just not well known, and seemingly never assessed as a discrete body of work.
The songs are mostly blues or blues-inflected pop, but careful listening actually shows great variety, 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 the solos do. He was veteran of countless shows and revues and knows just how to take care of the soloist.
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.
So you want to learn “Carolina Shout” yourself. What is it, exactly?
Johnson recorded the “Shout” eight times, four of which are fairly well known and “official.”
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 live bootlegs at Carnegie Hall in 1938 for a 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 radical. There’s clearly no one way that Johnson played “Carolina Shout.” (There’s also a Johnson-led band recording.)
In Black Bottom Stomp, David Jasen argues convincingly that the second piano roll is “the one that mattered.” Waller, Ellington and others learned this version by slowing the mechanism down. A fairly accurate transcription of the second roll was made by the late John Farrell.
Jasen also reproduces the cover page of Johnson’s own first published score of “Carolina Shout.” I haven’t seen it, but based on Johnson’s flimsy published versions of “You’ve Got To Be Modernistic” and “Jingles,” the published score to “Carolina Shout” would probably not be that helpful. Jasen says the published scores were simplified for the amateur. Morton’s published scores were also “simplified for the amateur.” Perhaps for serious jazz pianists like Johnson and Morton, writing out what they actually played was also too time consuming, especially when they were going to change it a bit next week anyway.
Scott E. Brown has sent me what James P. actually filed with the Library of Congress. I’ll reproduce a fragment of it here.
Bill Kirchner showed me an early published band arrangement of “Carolina Shout” that corresponds to both this chart and Johnson’s band recording in 1921.
More helpful is the transcription of the 1944 version of “Carolina Shout” by Dick Meares and David Le Winter for the folio Piano Solos by James P. Johnson. Also included in the same folio are some of the other duets with drums, “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.
It’s an imperfect score, but the Meares/Le Winter version of “Carolina Shout” has been frequently heard in concert after this folio was republished in the Hal Leonard collection Jazz, Blues, Boogie and Swing. There was no mention of it being a transcription in the Hal Leonard edition, so it’s easy to assume that this is Johnson’s own score. This version is easily identifiable by having the first theme in the right hand an octave lower than the 1920’s versions; also by the tripletly melodic variation Johnson plays in the second A. There also a great chorus of “displaced bells,” the highlight of this later performance.
(For those looking for more Johnson sheet music: The tantalizing folio James P. Johnson’s Piano Jazzfest with “A Flat Dream,” “Blueberry Rhyme,” “Lonesome Reverie,” “Mule Walk Stomp,” “Fascination,” and “Gut Stomp” are also transcriptions, this time by Sam Meade. Overall Meade’s are worse than those of Meares/Le Winter. However, the six unrecorded boogies in Jimmy Johnson’s Boogie Woogie look like James P’s own finished work, not transcriptions.)
Here’s my transcription of the first recording. Thanks to Dan Schmidt and Matthew Guerrieri for fixing several notes and general input.
The 2015 edit was connected to Johnson’s election into the Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame at JALC.
In 2019, I’m still working on “Carolina Shout.”
At the end of the essay, a few sections from 2009 are retained unedited.
Prelude 1: The Piano Rolls
James P. Johnson is still revered as one of the very greatest among the small group of collectors who devote themselves to historical piano rolls. At least one commentator thinks that his twenties-era recordings “were a side issue” to his rolls, since the rolls sold better.
Prelude 2: North vs. South
A fundamental part of Johnson’s art is “feel.” Compared to recordings
of George Gershwin or Zez Confrey playing the piano, Johnson is far
more advanced, far more swinging.New York players improved their beat when musicians from New Orleans, Chicago, and Kansas City brought swinging information to them. Johnson got to hear Jelly Roll Morton in 1911 when Morton visited New York. This was one of Johnson’s most important formative experiences, but later on he said Morton wasn’t a very good musician. James P.’s student Duke Ellington went even further, saying that “Jelly Roll Morton played piano like one of those high school teachers in Washington.” Morton must have been a rare character indeed to get everybody so mad at him.
For the modern listener, Morton’s relaxed and groovy solo recordings from 1923 might be a better introduction to 1920’s jazz piano than James P. Johnson. They certainly make for an interesting comparison: after listening to a lot of Morton, James P. seems like an express train, and after listening to a lot of James P., Jelly Roll seems awfully slow.
I’m a Northerner myself, and I might take Johnson’s records over Morton’s if forced to chose. James Dapogny’s book of Morton transcriptions is the best of its kind. We need a Dapogny-type to tackle James P. Johnson.
Studio Solo Recordings, 1921-1939
The Johnson discography begins with three of the greatest examples of Harlem Stride.“Harlem Strut” (9/21). Original works of Harlem stride are modeled on ragtime, with a sequence of themes like AABBCCDD. (Late in life James P. recorded Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag” and “Euphonic Sounds” with Harlem embellishment added.) “Harlem Strut” is in cheerful C major, with an especially twisty F major section to take it home. His piano roll version made the following year makes for an interesting comparison.
In most Afro Cuban music, there is a staggered beat called “clave” that requires unyielding consistency and precision. The ride cymbal beat of any good jazz drummer is related to clave.
In stride piano, the left hand’s “oom-pah” is like that clave or ride cymbal beat.
While there are examples of “oom-pah” in Chopin, Liszt and Brahms, you don’t need to groove for European piano music. In stride piano, clave is essential. James P. Johnson will always be one of the finest examples of the stride “feel.”
“Keep Off the Grass” (10/21) F Major. Part of the real Harlem stride style is how full the right hand is against the “oom-pah” below. A constant constellations of double notes (and sometimes chords) brassily sing on top. 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 quite Monkish in nature.
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 them as provocative today. In 1921, though, I’m pretty sure James P. would have meant those chain sequences to mean uncertainty and perhaps even sadness, the tear beneath the smile.
“Carolina Shout” (10/21). This is Johnson’s finest recording of his most famous instrumental piece. David Jasen makes the astute observation that the themes get funkier as they go along. (See below for my transcription.)
The next six pieces from 1923 are very different in style. It’s almost like James P. is making an album of “piano roll blues,” since they are mostly 12-bar forms and have the kind of constant chattering repetition common to most piano rolls. It’s a lovely set of records that perhaps lack the immediate impact of the first three Harlem stride pieces.
It’s great blues playing, although not everyone thinks so. In the only full-length book on Johnson, Scott E. Brown notes, “Johnson’s effectiveness as an interpreter of the blues is somewhat in dispute.”
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.Just barely in his unmarked grave, Johnson’s legacy was already being judged as wanting by white musicians rather overconfident in their assessment of early black jazz players.
Art Hodes gave his take in the liner notes to an Edmond Hall reissue (the track is 1943’s “Blues at Blue Note”). 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.Perhaps James P.’s blues were most influenced by W. C. Handy. 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.Johnson’s “Worried and Lonesome Blues” is from Shufflin’ Around, a popular revue that followed the smash Runnin’ Wild. Runnin’ Wild had produced two of Johnson’s biggest hits, “The Charleston” and “Old-Fashioned Love.”
(…)
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 and were played all the time.
(…)
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.
The original sheet music to these three songs are in different styles directly correlating to Johnson’s interview above. “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.
Schuller’s (and Wellstood’s) claim that “He played his blues very much the way he would play a show or pop tune” is terribly misguided. Johnson knew what the blues was and used it for specific reasons. The point is not to listen to Johnson for what he didn’t have (say, a Jimmy Yancey sensibility) but for what he did.
“Weeping Blues” (6/23) C major blues. 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) E-flat. 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) C major. A blues in feeling but not in form, although it comes close. Again the “piano roll triplets.”
“Bleeding Hearted Blues (7/23, comp. Austin) Eb blues. Johnson’s right hand owns this one with big chords and aggressive punches throughout.
“Scouting Around” (8/23) A-flat blues. The final two selections from this set are not vocal numbers, but mixtures of novelty piano, Harlem Stride, and black folklore. The conceit in “Scouting Around” is the “break” which begins every chorus. Eventually Johnson modulates to D-flat and explores some harmonic subtleties.
“Toddlin’” (8/23) E-flat blues. The loping right hand figures seem quite connected to the “novelty piano” style. Here Johnson breaks up the 4/4 stride into 3/4 and 5/4, a famous effect.
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. (Morton did this too.)
“Snowy Morning Blues” (7/27) G major. Perhaps James P. Johnson’s finest melody in his best recording. Black folklore and American pop song are blended together to perfection.
“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.
2014: Collin Van Ryn, in response to this post, got interested in James P. and transcribed “Feelin’ Blue.
The next session is one of James P.’s most famous, and features a truly terrifying amount of piano playing.
** “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 ends with two cheeky bars of major.
“What Is This Thing Called Love?” (1/30, comp. Porter). The only familiar standard Johnson recorded in his prime years demonstrates how differently jazz musicians in 1930 thought about pop songs then they did later. Johnson plays the verse and bases his improvisations closely on the melody. If you look at Cole Porter’s published sheet music you can see exactly where Johnson is coming from.
“You’ve Got to Be Modernistic” (1/30) A-flat. For Johnson, “Modernistic” means the whole tone scale and the corresponding augmented triad. This in the Confrey “novelty” tradition (Eubie Blake’s “Troublesome Ivories” is another possible reference) 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 heart-stopping.
The next solo session is from nine years later.
“If Dreams Come True” (6/39, comp. Goodman/Sampson) Fast C major. 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.” This track also offers one of the most fabulous aspects of Johnson’s late style, “displaced bells” in the right hand: 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 early, ragtime-style piece in F major. However, by this point, James P.’s phrasing is relaxed indeed. 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. Perhaps he wrote this just because he knew how popular boogie was at the time?
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) B-flat stomp. This seems to be a folkloric “ring dance” or something else 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. (Hear the trombones in the last 8 bars?)
“Blueberry Rhyme” (6/39) F major. One of Johnson’s prettiest pieces, reminiscent of “Snowy Morning Blues” but slower and sadder. Wonderful ornamentation in the melody.
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’s 1920 again. For jazz historians, everything James P. recorded is important by default, especially unusual items like the extended composition “Yamekraw,” the Cuban-influenced “The Dream” and a Harlemized “Euphonic Sounds.”
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 strangely, most of the other music is just not well known, and seemingly never assessed as a discrete body of work.
The songs are mostly blues or blues-inflected pop, but careful listening actually shows great variety, 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 the solos do. He was veteran of countless shows and revues and knows just how to take care of the soloist.
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.
In Search of “Carolina Shout”
There are well over a hundred recordings of “Carolina Shout,”
including Fats Waller, Willie the Lion Smith, Art Hodes, Duke Ellington,
Dick Wellstood, and Marcus Roberts. Stephanie Trick’s recent YouTube
videos are fabulous.So you want to learn “Carolina Shout” yourself. What is it, exactly?
Johnson recorded the “Shout” eight times, four of which are fairly well known and “official.”
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 live bootlegs at Carnegie Hall in 1938 for a 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 radical. There’s clearly no one way that Johnson played “Carolina Shout.” (There’s also a Johnson-led band recording.)
In Black Bottom Stomp, David Jasen argues convincingly that the second piano roll is “the one that mattered.” Waller, Ellington and others learned this version by slowing the mechanism down. A fairly accurate transcription of the second roll was made by the late John Farrell.
Jasen also reproduces the cover page of Johnson’s own first published score of “Carolina Shout.” I haven’t seen it, but based on Johnson’s flimsy published versions of “You’ve Got To Be Modernistic” and “Jingles,” the published score to “Carolina Shout” would probably not be that helpful. Jasen says the published scores were simplified for the amateur. Morton’s published scores were also “simplified for the amateur.” Perhaps for serious jazz pianists like Johnson and Morton, writing out what they actually played was also too time consuming, especially when they were going to change it a bit next week anyway.
Scott E. Brown has sent me what James P. actually filed with the Library of Congress. I’ll reproduce a fragment of it here.
Bill Kirchner showed me an early published band arrangement of “Carolina Shout” that corresponds to both this chart and Johnson’s band recording in 1921.
More helpful is the transcription of the 1944 version of “Carolina Shout” by Dick Meares and David Le Winter for the folio Piano Solos by James P. Johnson. Also included in the same folio are some of the other duets with drums, “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.
It’s an imperfect score, but the Meares/Le Winter version of “Carolina Shout” has been frequently heard in concert after this folio was republished in the Hal Leonard collection Jazz, Blues, Boogie and Swing. There was no mention of it being a transcription in the Hal Leonard edition, so it’s easy to assume that this is Johnson’s own score. This version is easily identifiable by having the first theme in the right hand an octave lower than the 1920’s versions; also by the tripletly melodic variation Johnson plays in the second A. There also a great chorus of “displaced bells,” the highlight of this later performance.
(For those looking for more Johnson sheet music: The tantalizing folio James P. Johnson’s Piano Jazzfest with “A Flat Dream,” “Blueberry Rhyme,” “Lonesome Reverie,” “Mule Walk Stomp,” “Fascination,” and “Gut Stomp” are also transcriptions, this time by Sam Meade. Overall Meade’s are worse than those of Meares/Le Winter. However, the six unrecorded boogies in Jimmy Johnson’s Boogie Woogie look like James P’s own finished work, not transcriptions.)
Here’s my transcription of the first recording. Thanks to Dan Schmidt and Matthew Guerrieri for fixing several notes and general input.
PDF:
Carolina Shout
Listen:
Audio Player
himself only played it like this the once. One of the most important aspects of the real Harlem Stride tradition is to take the basic material and make it your own.
Further Reading (and a quick note about the Formal Works)
In 1986 Scott E. Brown produced the only book-length study. James P. Johnson: A Case of Mistaken Identity still has the most detailed biographical information. (Reportedly a new edition with updated information is in the works.) Brown sought to place Johnson’s vast output in context of his era, hence his provocative title.
A Case of Mistaken Identity also contains a complete discography by Robert Hilbert.
Frank H. Trolle’s Father of the Stride Piano is two small pamphlets: a poorly-edited collection of minor biographical/musicological essays and a discography which was superseded by Hilbert’s.
John Howland’s 2009 volume Ellington Uptown: Duke Ellington, James P. Johnson, and the Birth of Concert Jazz goes into fascinating detail about the gestation of Johnson’s best known concert work, Yamekraw: A Negro Rhapsody. There’s also a good deal on the Harlem Symphony and some other Johnson orchestral works. The default companion CD to this music is Victory Stride, which I cautiously recommend.
Yamekraw is like all that Franz Liszt orchestra music that nobody plays: unprofessional and repetitive. By all means, Johnson and Liszt scholars should know this music (and there needs to be more Johnson scholars!) but contemporary enthusiasm for Johnson’s work would be better directed into making every college piano major learn “Carolina Shout” than into asking our major orchestras to program Johnson’s symphonic work. (We don’t want the average concert-goer leaving the hall thinking, “Well, Gershwin really was better than James P., because Rhapsody in Blue is obviously better than Yamekraw.” This is a superficial and Eurocentric reading of the situation.)
Other good information on Johnson scattered about in different places:
Black Bottom Stomp: Eight Masters of Early Jazz and Spreadin’ Rhythm Around: Black Popular Songwriters, 1880-1930 are both by David A. Jasen and Gene Jones. If you are interested in ragtime or early jazz piano you’ve come across Jasen’s name.
Black Bottom Stomp is just terrific. Jasen and Jones seem to get it just right all the time. Their prose style is also wonderfully smooth and occasionally even humorous. Spreadin’ Rhythm Around is excellent as well: This is the best source on Johnson’s significant career as a songwriter for shows.
Henry Martin has a chapter in The Oxford Companion to Jazz called “Pianists of the 1920s and 1930s.” There’s just a couple of pages on Johnson but it’s a rare example of someone trying to make sense of how the printed page interfaces with the records.
The Time-Life Giants of Jazz LP box on James P. Johnson is excellent. The extensive notes on the music are by the vastly knowledgeable Dick Wellstood, who at this point has gotten over his early claims that Johnson didn’t play the blues. (He does manage to get in a dig at boogie-woogie, though, Wellstood’s least favorite piano style.) He collaborates with Willa Rouder, and the solid biographical section is by Frank Kappler. (The Giants of Jazz boxes often have valuable booklets.)
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[CODA: two sections from 2009 that can’t be changed since they were written in advance of the original Smalls Rent Party and at this point are somewhat “historical”: Annie Kuebler and Ed Berger have died, Aaron Diehl is well-known, and so on.]
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The James P. Johnson Archive at IJS
Barry Glover, the grandson in charge of James P. Johnson’s estate, has generously given all of Johnson’s own music collection to the Institute. Glover also has given permission for serious parties to look through and photocopy at will. Annie Kuebler was our helpful guide through boxes and boxes of well-organized Johnson music.
I know that both Aaron and I were overwhelmed with what was there; afterwards we both were grey and exhausted, just trying to deal with the intensity of the experience.
(Aaron sorts out one copy of the Yamekraw rhapsody for each of us.)
One of the things we were looking for was unusual solo piano music to play on Sunday. Aaron was already learning a movement from the Jazz-a-mine Concerto from the record, so he grabbed a holograph of that piece in Johnson’s own handwriting. (He wasn’t sure if he was going to be ready to play it in a week, but what a help to find the score!) (UPDATE: Aaron did play it, extremely well.)
I found a charming drawing-room piece called “Theme in Two Voices” published in 1944. It’s next door to somebody like Anton Rubinstein or Cécile Chaminade—certainly it’s just as good—and I bet Johnson would have gotten a kick out of me playing that surprise at the Last Rent Party.
I don’t know Aaron well, but he turned up in my masterclass one day playing James P. Johnson, and when I asked Loren Schoenberg who I should take a stride piano lesson with he suggested “Aaron Diehl.” Aaron hasn’t really recorded much yet, but you can hear his flawless rendition of another Harlem test piece, Luckey Roberts’s “Ripples of the Nile,” on his MySpace page.
There was a piano next door to the archive. Regrettably, Aaron not only turned out to be as good a sight-reader as me (this almost never happens) but also played a version of “Carolina Shout” that was way better than mine. I can’t really ask Aaron for a lesson—he’s 13 years younger than me, for chrissake—but he gave me one that afternoon anyway. Aaron’s “Carolina Shout” was fluid, improvised, and personal; in comparison, mine was a laborious recreation. (I also got to play it for Fred Hersch on Monday, who made the astute observation that I was playing at one dynamic only, just like the piano roll I was learning from. Obviously, human pianists must use dynamics. I’m trying to get it together but there’s no doubt I’m going to be on the slow side of the “Shout” at the Last Rent Party.)
We don’t know who will play what on Sunday—probably many people won’t play Johnson at all, which is perfectly fine—but that afternoon at IJS Aaron and I enjoyed the fantasy of how awesome it would be to hear everybody play “Carolina Shout.” Just think, if all jazz pianists had to sit in front of each other and play the “Shout”…that would change some things right quick!
I’m definitely going back to IJS once in a while, and I seriously encourage others to explore it as well. The Johnson archive is just a fraction of what they have. More info and contact information is available at the IJS website.
Thanks again to Spike Wilner for making it happen.
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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. (jamespjohnson.org) 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 OpenSome heavy hitters on this list. I’m particularly nervous about meeting Mike Lipskin, the “Terror of San Francisco,” who is flying in just for this event. Given the time slots, I guess there’s no way he can avoid hearing me play. (Watch Lipskin play “Fascinatin’ Rhythm” on YouTube, especially after two minutes in: That’s the real stride left hand, ladies and gents.) Terry Waldo is Eubie Blake’s chronicler+NY legend and Dick Hyman plays Johnson with the best of them. (Watch Hyman play “You’ve Got to Be Modernistic” on YouTube.) Spike himself is great, and…well, I’m sure everybody’s great.
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
https://sites.temple.edu/performingartsnews/2020/01/27/stride-the-art-of-james-p-johnson/
Stride: The Art of James P. Johnson
Beyond the Notes
A Celebration of Stride and Novelty Piano
Wednesday, February 12th, 12:00PM -12:50PM
Featuring Dr. Charles Abramovic and his studio Light refreshments served. Boyer recital credit given.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Wednesday, February 12th, 12:00PM -12:50PM
Featuring Dr. Charles Abramovic and his studio Light refreshments served. Boyer recital credit given.
James P. Johnson
Stride derives primarily from ragtime in form and content. Tunes comprise three or four independent, sixteen-bar sections or strains. The initial strain features the theme in the tonic; subsequent strains variously treat the original material or present new ideas. Sections collectively called the “trio” modulate to closely related keys, typically the subdominant. Introductions and interludes of four or eight measures are common. Regarding content, left-hand stride patterns follow traditional dances in duple meter, notably the march and polka. Hence the bass often alternates between low notes and midrange chords; the former imitates the tuba while the latter mimics the higher brass and woodwind instruments of marching bands, creating the oom-pah sound associated with folk music.
However, stride represents an evolutionary step in the lineage of jazz, placing greater demands on the performer. The harmonic rhythm and tempo are faster than those of ragtime. Stride also exploits the full range of the instrument. Finally, the style employs an array of pianistic devices, e.g., rapid scale passages, trills, and turns, suggesting that knowledge of classical idioms would be beneficial if not requisite to stride proficiency.
Johnson infused blue notes and call-and-response gestures into stride. Furthermore, the rhythmic feel of his style was more relaxed than ragtime, approximating swing. Heard in the paradigmatic stride piece “Carolina Shout,” these elements allowed Johnson to connect meaningfully with his auditors at clubs and dance halls, many of whom migrated from the Deep South:
“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 (which they danced with a lot of spieling), 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 until their shoes wore out—most of them after a heavy’s day’s work on the docks.”
Johnson also cultivated the style while performing at rent parties in Harlem. Held in apartments, these informal gatherings enabled working-class tenants to raise additional money for rent by charging admission. Here we see the music of Johnson providing a modicum of relief in material as well as nonmaterial ways.
We invite you to join us on Wednesday, February 12, to hear stride performances by the studio of Charles Abramovic. In addition to works by Johnson, the program will feature those of his contemporaries, Thomas “Fats” Waller, Jelly Roll Morton, and Zez Confrey.
Consult the following sources for more information:
Barnhart, Bruce. “Carolina Shout: James P. Johnson and the Performance of Temporality.” Callaloo 33, no. 3 (Summer 2010): 841-856.
Berlin, Edward A. “Ragtime.” Grove Music Online. 16 Oct. 2013; Accessed 26 Jan. 2020. https://www-oxfordmusiconline-com.libproxy.temple.edu/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-1002252241.
Martin, Henry. “Balancing Composition and Improvisation in James P. Johnson’s ‘Carolina Shout.’” Journal of Music Theory 49, no. 2 (Fall 2005): 277-299.
Robinson, J. Bradford. “Stride.” Grove Music Online. 2001; Accessed 20 Jan. 2020. https://www-oxfordmusiconline-com.libproxy.temple.edu/grovemusic/view/10.1093
/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000026955.
Rouder, Willa. “Johnson, James P(rice).” Grove Music Online. 2001; Accessed 24 Jan. 2020. https://www-oxfordmusiconline-com.libproxy.temple.edu/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000014409.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Gary Sampsell is a second-year PhD student in the Music Studies program at Boyer College. His research interests include the musical culture of baroque-era Saxony and Austro-German reception of early music in the nineteenth century.
https://collection.cooperhewitt.org/videos/1108906257/
"You’ve Got To Be Modernistic," James P. Johnson (1930)
What is this?
James P. Johnson is, without question, the father of Harlem Stride piano. Harlem Stride piano playing evolved out of ragtime, with the left hand playing an alternation of a bass note on beats one and three and a chord on beats two and four. The right hand typically performed inventive, often virtuosic melodies. Many New Yorkers had a piano at the turn of the twentieth century in their sitting rooms. Along with his recording of “Carolina Shout,” Johnson’s recording of “You’ve Got To Be Modernistic” from 1930 was decidedly modern—forward thinking, propulsive, energizing, and innovative. Text by James Saltzman, Faculty, Manhattan School of Music
http://www.folkways.si.edu/james-p-johnson/youve-got-to-be-modernistic-2/jazz-ragtime/music/track/smithsonian https://www.kylegann.com/JohnsonHarlem.html
Analysis by Kyle Gann
All score reductions by the author
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License.
Recording
My source for this analysis is the orchestral manuscript I found in the Jazz Institute Archive at Rutgers University. There are discrepancies between this score and the performance conducted by Marin Alsop on the Nimbus label, especially in the first movement. Arguably the score is improved by the changes made, but I don't know who is responsible for them.
First movement: Penn Station (Subway Ride)The first movement is titled "Penn Station" in the manuscript (though as "Subway Ride" on the recording), and has some descriptive titles marking certain sections to show what they are depicting. The first four pages Johnson evidently considered an introduction; they are labeled A through D, and the fifth page is marked as page 1. The piece opens with a grand, lumbering bass theme that will return at the end of the first movement.
Introduction -- mm. 1-8
Introduction to Train -- mm. 9-16
Exposition -- mm. 17-74
Development -- mm. 74-111
First theme in Bb -- mm. 17-40
---- Transition -- mm. 41-45
Second theme in F -- mm. 46-74
Transition ("Lady Shoppers") -- mm. 74-85Recapitulation (7th Ave. Promenade) -- mm. 112-152
Second theme in D -- mm. 86-93
First theme in G -- mm. 94-101
---- Harmonic transition -- mm. 102-111
First theme in Bb -- mm. 112-119
---- Transition -- mm. 120-129
Second theme in Bb -- mm. 130-140
---- Transition -- mm. 141-144
Recap of introduction -- mm. 145-152
The first theme might be taken to be that played by just the strings in the following example, with their motive of thirds and fourths moving by half-steps - specifically, chromatic appoggiaturas moving to the chord tones of the harmony. However, the added wind notes above do contribute to the melody, and are difficult to separate out.
The derivation of the second theme from the first is impressively clever. Like the first theme, this one precedes almost every triad in the harmony with an appoggiatura chord a half-step lower, but the rhythm is sped up and irresistibly syncopated. The first theme's initial motive is an eighth-note moving to the tonic: here it becomes a quarter-note moving to the dominant scale degree. Also, the scoring for a chorus of clarinets is taken from jazz orchestration - one can hardly imagine a classical composer announcing a new theme in parallel chords by three of the same instrument.
In mm. 75-85 a rhythmicized chord progression thick with tritones descending by half-step leads to a dominant pedal on A. The subordinate theme enters in the key of D now (mm. 86-93), poco piu mosso and with a countermelody soaring high above in the piccolo. Its final D chord becomes a dominant, and forthwith the first theme is stated in G (mm. 94-101), by the trumpets and trombones using cup mutes and the latter echoing the former. To end the development, the brass syncopate their way through a simple chord progression (Bb7-Eb, B7-E, C7-F, F7, mm. 102-111), pausing at the end for a wry figure in the trombones clearly labeled "Bus Horn."
Second movement: Song of Harlem (April in Harlem)
Exposition -- mm. 1-59Johnson's second movement is titled Song of Harlem in the manuscript, though on the recording it is called "April in Harlem" - probably a sly reference to the popular Vernon Duke song "April in Paris" that appeared the same year as the symphony. This is in a type of slow-movement form common in the 18th-century called sonata without development, meaning that the second theme of the exposition is transposed to the tonic in the recapitulation, though the two sections are not separated by a development section; Johnson clearly knew his classical repertoire.
Recapitulation -- mm. 60-119
First theme in Bb -- mm. 1-16
---- Transition -- mm. 17-23
Harlem Love Song in F -- mm. 24-55
---- Transition -- mm. 56-59
First theme in Bb -- mm. 60-75
---- Transition -- mm. 76-84
Harlem Love Song in Bb -- mm. 85-115
Coda -- mm. 116-119
There are two themes, between which the transitions comprise mostly short, sequential motives over standard modulatory progressions. The first theme is stated in the oboe at the outset, and returns in the strings at m. 60, both times in Bb. I give here not only the melody, in the middle staff (and the repeat of the first four measures is written out, sans repeat signs), but also the pizzicato string chords that accompany the first statement, plus Johnson's chord symbols for the guitar part, which is not specifically notated (except for occasional melodic notes). One can see, then, along with the major and minor triads which tend to anchor the downbeats, Johnson's use of whole-tone type chords, either augmented triads or tritone-plus-major third. The chord symbols suggest more notes in the guitar than are present in the strings - for instance, F7+5 for Eb-A-C#, and Bb9 for D-Ab-C. On the top staff are given the parallel major thirds in the flute which fill in each cadence.
The second theme is labeled in the score "Harlem Love Song." It is an expansive thirty-two bars in length, alternating between winds and strings every eight bars. The style is grand Swing Era ballroom at its most cinematic, pausing on climaxes at sharped-fifth dominants and full of lush dominant major ninths. I provide here the guitar symbols notated by Johnson, but they don't account for the lushness of certain chords.
First section -- mm. 1-84Johnson's third movement, "The Night Club," is a Harlem dance as scherzo. Look at all the section measure numbers up to 164, and you can see they're all divisible by four: this is a scherzo you can dance to. Johnson labels the second section "Trio," but what follows it, contrary to classical practice, is not a repeat of the first section. The first section moves from Bb quickly to Eb, and the Trio is in Ab, but the remainder of the piece is in C. The entire piece, though, is imbued with what jazzers call "Rhythm changes" (after Gershwin's song "I've Got Rhythm") - the chords VI-II-V-I. In fact, the deployment of this progression subtly differentiates the first and second halves. Until m. 84, every new theme starts on a I chord followed by vi-II-V in half-notes. From the start of the trio on, each new theme starts on a VI chord (V7/ii in classical terms), and moves through II, V, and I on whole notes, and this continues to be so in the final section in C major. Beginning each new phrase on V7/ii in the second half adds a new urgency to the music (you never know whether it's the beginning of a new modulation), and seems to up the craziness level of the dance a little. Johnson clearly knew how to exploit such subtleties.
Introduction -- mm. 1-12Trio -- mm. 85-148
First theme in Bb, strings -- mm. 13-28
First theme varied in Eb, trpt -- mm. 29-44
---- Transition -- mm. 45-60
First theme in Eb -- mm. 61-76
----Transition -- mm. 77-84
Second theme in Ab -- mm. 85-100Third section - mm. 149-186
Second theme in Ab -- mm. 101-116
Second theme in Ab -- mm. 117-132
Glissandos in C -- mm. 133-140
Glissandos in C -- mm. 141-148
First theme in C -- mm. 149-164
Second theme in C -- mm. 165-178
Coda -- mm. 179-186
In mm. 85-132 the trio theme is repeated three times in varying orchestrations. Unlike the first theme, it begins more anxiously on the IV chord (V7/ii, actually) rather than on the tonic. This example from the second statement shows how thick Johnson's orchestration becomes, with the theme here once again in the trio of clarinets. Even more striking are the stride piano patterns in the strings, showing that at this point Johnson was simply orchestrating the piano style he spent his life playing.
Fourth Movement: Baptist Mission
Theme -- mm. 1-15The fourth movement, Baptist Mission, is a theme and variations on a characteristic blues hymn. From the facts that it remains in G minor until almost the end, the theme is actually little varied, and that differences among the early variations are mostly decorative, one could conclude that it is a superficial example of the genre, but this is far from the case. As in a fervent revival meeting, the relative constraint of the first five variations allows a tremendous emotional momentum to build gradually, and after a momentary pause for prayer in Variation VI, the breaking loose in the denouement is all the more exciting in contrast to the first half's relative restraint. This is not a conventional theme and variations, but one that uses the repetitive variation form to build an effective dramatic trajectory.
Var. I Allegro moderato -- mm. 16-35
Var. II -- mm. 36-51
Var. III -- mm. 52-67
Var. IV -- mm. 68-83
Var. V -- mm. 84-99
The Prayer - Var. VI -- mm. 100-127
Var. VII -- mm. 128-143
Finale -- mm. 144-157
Allegro -- mm. 158-177
The theme is introduced at a languid largo tempo, with some of the lushest chromatic harmonization of the entire work.
Variation II (mm. 36-51) puts the theme back in the strings, enlivened by periodic figures in the oboes.
Variation IV (mm. 68-83) returns the theme to the strings a bassoon and trombone, with rippling arpeggios in chords in the flutes and clarinets.
Variation V (mm. 84-99), upping the energy level, has the theme in the oboes, accompanied by the strings and lower brass in jazz chords. The three trumpets punctuate it with syncopated figures.
Variation VII (mm. 128-143) picks up the tempo to a quick two-step, and a note in the score indicates this brief variation is to be repeated, as though this were an afterthought. The trombone plays the theme as the strings sweep downward over and over through the ostinato. The focus, though, is a bluesy figure in the trumpets.
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by BHS
1894-1955 James P. Johnson was the finest popular pianist of his time, the seminal creator of the stride style bridging ragtime and jazz, the composer of “The Charleston,” and the creator of long-form classical works that incorporated African American motifs. His influence on every key jazz musician who followed is incalculable, as was his “soundtrack for the Roaring 20s.”
Classical and Rag
Johnson was born in 1894 in Brunswick, New Jersey. His parents had migrated from the south, bringing with them a rich dance and musical tradition. He received his initial musical training from his mother, beginning as soon as his fingers could manipulate the keys on the family’s parlor upright piano. This was followed by strict instruction in classical technique from a local teacher, Professor Bruto Giannini, who fortunately did nothing to diminish Johnson’s interest in southern-style rags and stomps. When Johnson reached 14 years of age, his family moved to New York City. There, he began lessons with ragtime piano great Eubie Blake. He played his first professional gig at age 18 in Coney Island, reportedly at a sporting house where he played continuously for two hours.Johnson was soon a regular among the “piano professors” who performed at cabarets, bordellos, and rent parties in the San Juan Hill area of the west 60s near New York City’s famed Hell’s Kitchen. He first learned from, and then became the rising star among, such colorfully nicknamed piano “ticklers” as Abba Labba, Lucky Roberts, Willie The Lion, The Beetle, and Jack The Bear. As he became increasingly accomplished and prominent, a younger generation became protégés to him. These included a young Duke Ellington and Fats Waller who would go on to popularize the “stride” style that Johnson pioneered. This style was a bridge between its predecessor, ragtime, and its ultimate successor called jazz. It featured a two-count left hand with a great degree of improvisational freedom in the right hand, combined with polyrhythmic syncopation; and Johnson’s exceptional talent and technique lent itself to the form. In the words of black musical theater great James Weldon Johnson, “It was music of a kind I had never heard before….”
Beginning in approximately 1915 and continuing until the advent of the phonograph record in the early 1920s, Johnson became a prolific maker of hundreds of piano rolls for player pianos. Legend holds that Fats Waller learned all of Johnson’s improvisations by laying his fingers on the piano’s depressed keys as the roll operated the instrument. Johnson was the first African American staff performer for the Chicago-based QRS Company, publisher of piano rolls, in 1921, where he met and befriended George Gershwin. The two master composers would ultimately collaborate on several shows. That same year, Johnson wrote the first of some 200 songs he would compose over the course of his career. Early successes included the up-tempo “Carolina Shout” of 1921 and “The Harlem Strut,” as well as the more introspective “Blueberry Rhyme” and “Snowy Morning Blues.” In addition to his solo performing and recording career, Johnson was featured in several ensembles, and became the accompanist of choice for such blues divas as Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters. In 1922, he began making 78 rpm records, and is credited with the first recorded jazz piano solo in that format on “Bleeding Heart Blues.”
Serious Works
By this time, Johnson was considered the finest pianist on the East Coast, the exemplar of the Harlem piano style, and “The Father of Stride Piano,” nicknamed The Brute by his peers. He also continued his more formal studies including orchestral composition. By some accounts, his greatest aspiration was to compose “serious” music based on African American themes; and by all historical accounts, he was successful in this regard, although the works have largely disappeared. Composer and musicologist Gunther Schuller later cited Johnson’s long-form works as using “…basic Negro musical traditions that emulated roughly Liszt’s approach in his ‘Hungarian Rhapsodies.’” Johnson’s “Yamekraw: a Negro Rhapsody” premiered at Carnegie Hall in 1928, and was also filmed as a short starring Bessie Smith. He performed his “Piano Concerto in A-flat” with the Brooklyn Symphony, and also composed the concerto “Jassamine.” His score for the 1940 one-act opera De Organizer was set to a libretto by Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes, and other works included the symphonic poem “African Drums,” the string quartet “Spirit of America,” “Mississippi Moon,” “Harlem Symphony,” the “Symphonic Suite on St. Louis Blues,” and at least one ballet.Rounding out his broad range of achievement, Johnson also composed for 16 musical shows including 1923’s Runnin’ Wild, and he continued writing popular tunes with great success. He was accepted for membership in the American Society for Composers and Authors in 1926, in which year he wrote one of his most famous and popular songs, “If I Could Be with You One Hour Tonight.” But it was “The Charleston” that remains his best-known composition. The song was probably written in 1913, and debuted with Runnin’ Wild 10 years later. The song launched the dance fad of the same name, went on to become the “soundtrack for the Roaring 20s,” and has endured as the iconographic music of that exuberant era. Johnson was also responsible for the black review Keep Shufflin’, co-written with his former student Fats Waller in 1928.
Despite ill health due to occasional strokes, Johnson continued performing in clubs with small swing groups and such collaborators as Eddie Condon through the 1940s, and recording for virtually every major label. A serious health-related episode forced him into retirement in 1951, and he died in New York on November 17, 1955. He was elected by a jazz critics poll into the Down Beat Hall of Fame in 1992, acknowledging his seminal contribution to the creation of modern music in all forms. In 1994, much of his symphonic music was found and recorded by the Concordia Orchestra and performed live in concert. His direct influence can be heard in the work of Waller, Ellington, Count Basie, Art Tatum, Teddy Wilson, and more contemporary players such as Erroll Garner and Thelonious Monk; but in a real sense, everybody’s fingers have followed James P. Johnson’s.
James P. Johnson
Biography
Johnson was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, United States.[4] The proximity to New York City meant that the full cosmopolitan spectrum of the city's musical experience, from bars, to cabarets, to the symphony, were at the young Johnson's disposal. Johnson's father, William H. Johnson, was a store helper and mechanic while his mother, Josephine Harrison was a maid.[5] Harrison was a part of the choir at the Methodist Church and was also a self-taught pianist.[5] Johnson later cited the popular African-American songs and dances he heard at home and around the city as early influences on his musical taste. In 1908, Johnson's family moved to the San Juan Hill (near where Lincoln Center stands today) section of New York City and subsequently moved again to uptown in 1911.[6] With perfect pitch and excellent recall he was soon able to pick out on the piano tunes that he had heard.[7]Johnson grew up listening to the ragtime of Scott Joplin and always retained links to the ragtime era, playing and recording Joplin's "Maple Leaf Rag",[8] as well as the more modern (according to Johnson) and demanding "Euphonic Sounds", both several times in the 1940s. Johnson, who got his first job as a pianist in 1912, decided to pursue his musical career rather than return to school. From 1913 to 1916 Johnson spent time studying the European piano tradition with Bruto Giannini.[9] Over the next four to five years Johnson continued to progress his ragtime piano skills by studying other pianists and composing his own rags.[9]
In 1914, while performing in Newark, New Jersey with singer Lillie Mae Wright, who became his wife three years later, Johnson met Willie Smith. Smith and Johnson shared many of the same ideas regarding entertainers and their stage appearance. These beliefs and their complementary personalities led the two to become best friends. Starting in 1918, Johnson and Wright began touring together in the Smart Set Revue before settling back in New York in 1919.[9]
Before 1920 Johnson had gained a reputation as a pianist on the East coast on a par with Eubie Blake and Luckey Roberts and made dozens of player piano roll recordings initially documenting his own ragtime compositions before recording for Aeolian, Perfection (the label of the Standard Music Roll Co., Orange, NJ), Artempo (label of Bennett & White, Inc., Newark, NJ), Rythmodik, and QRS during the period from 1917 to 1927.[10] During this period he met George Gershwin, who was also a young piano-roll artist at Aeolian.[11]
Johnson was a pioneer in the stride playing of the jazz piano. "Stride piano has often been described as an orchestral style and indeed, in contrast to boogie-woogie blues piano playing, it requires a fabulous conceptual independence, the left hand differentiating bass and mid-range lines while the right supplies melodic issues." Johnson honed his craft, playing night after night, catering to the egos and idiosyncrasies of the many singers he encountered, which necessitated being able to play a song in any key. He developed into a sensitive and facile accompanist, the favorite accompanist of Ethel Waters and Bessie Smith. Ethel Waters wrote in her autobiography that working with musicians such as, and most especially, Johnson "...made you want to sing until your tonsils fell out".
As his piano style continued to evolve, his 1921 phonograph recordings of his own compositions, "Harlem Strut", "Keep Off the Grass", "Carolina Shout", and " Worried and Lonesome Blues " were, along with Jelly Roll Morton's Gennett recordings of 1923, among the first jazz piano solos to be put onto record. Johnson seemed to be at his finest when he attacked the piano as if it were a drum set. These technically challenging compositions would be learned by his contemporaries, and would serve as test pieces in solo competitions, in which the New York pianists would demonstrate their mastery of the keyboard, as well as the swing, harmonies, and improvisational skills which would further distinguish the great masters of the era.
The majority of his phonograph recordings of the 1920s and early 1930s were done for Black Swan (founded by Johnson's friend W.C. Handy, where William Grant Still served in an A&R capacity) and Columbia. In 1922, Johnson branched out and became the musical director for the revue Plantation Days. This revue took him to England for four months in 1923. During the summer of 1923 Johnson, along with the help of lyricist Cecil Mack, wrote the revue Runnin' Wild. This revue stayed on tour for more than five years as well as showing on Broadway.
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James P. Johnson, Fess Williams, Freddie Moore, Joe Thomas 1948. Photography by William P. Gottlieb.
Johnson suffered a stroke (likely a transient ischemic attack) in August 1940. When Johnson returned to action, in 1942, he began a heavy schedule of performing, composing, and recording, leading several small live and groups, now often with racially integrated bands led by musicians such as Eddie Condon, Yank Lawson, Sidney de Paris, Sidney Bechet, Rod Cless, and Edmond Hall. In 1944, Johnson and Willie Smith participated in stride piano contests in Greenwich Village from August to December. He recorded for jazz labels including Asch, Black and White, Blue Note, Commodore, Circle, and Decca. In 1945, Johnson performed with Louis Armstrong and heard his works at Carnegie Hall and Town Hall. He was a regular guest star and featured soloist on Rudi Blesh's This is Jazz broadcasts, as well as at Eddie Condon's Town Hall concerts and studied with Maury Deutsch, who could also count Django Reinhardt and Charlie Parker among his pupils.
In the late 1940s, Johnson had a variety of jobs, including jam sessions at Stuyvesant Casino and Central Plaza, as well as becoming a regular on Rudi Blesh's radio show. In 1949 as an 18-year-old, actor and band leader Conrad Janis put together a band of aging jazz greats, consisting of James P. Johnson (piano), Henry Goodwin (trumpet), Edmond Hall (clarinet), Pops Foster (bass) and Baby Dodds (drums), with Janis on trombone.[12] Johnson permanently retired from performing after suffering a severe, paralyzing stroke in 1951. Johnson survived financially on his songwriting royalties while he was paralyzed. He died four years later in Jamaica, New York and is buried in Mount Olivet Cemetery in Maspeth, Queens. Perfunctory obituaries appeared in even The New York Times. The pithiest and most angry remembrance of Johnson was written by John Hammond and appeared in Down Beat under the title "Talents of James P. Johnson Went Unappreciated".
Composer
Johnson composed many hit tunes in his work for the musical theatre, including "Charleston" (which debuted in his Broadway show Runnin' Wild in 1923,[13] although by some accounts Johnson had written it years earlier, and which became one of the most popular songs of the "Roaring Twenties"), "If I Could Be With You (One Hour Tonight)", "You've Got to Be Modernistic", "Don't Cry, Baby", "Keep off the Grass", "Old Fashioned Love", "A Porter's Love Song to a Chambermaid", "Carolina Shout", and "Snowy Morning Blues". He wrote waltzes, ballet, symphonic pieces and light opera; many of these extended works exist in manuscript form in various stages of completeness in the collection of Johnson's papers housed at the Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey. Johnson's success as a popular composer qualified him as a member of ASCAP in 1926.
1928 saw the premier of Johnson's rhapsody Yamekraw, named after a black community in Savannah, Georgia. William Grant Still was orchestrator and Fats Waller the pianist as Johnson was contractually obliged to conduct his and Waller's hit Broadway show Keep Shufflin. Harlem Symphony, composed during the 1930s, was performed at Carnegie Hall in 1945 with Johnson at the piano and Joseph Cherniavsky as conductor. He collaborated with Langston Hughes on the one-act opera, De Organizer. A fuller list of Johnson's film scores appears below.
Pianist
Along with Fats Waller and Willie 'The Lion' Smith ('The Big Three'), and Luckey Roberts, Johnson embodies the Harlem Stride piano style, an evolution of East Coast ragtime infused with elements of the blues. His "Carolina Shout" was a standard test piece and rite of passage for every contemporary pianist: Duke Ellington learned it note for note from the 1921 QRS Johnson piano roll. Johnson taught Fats Waller and got him his first piano roll and recording assignments.
Harlem Stride is distinguished from ragtime by several essential characteristics: ragtime introduced sustained syncopation into piano music, but stride pianists built a more freely swinging rhythm into their performances, with a certain degree of anticipation of the left (bass) hand by the right (melody) hand, a form of tension and release in the patterns played by the right hand, interpolated within the beat generated by the left. Stride more frequently incorporates elements of the blues, as well as harmonies more complex than usually found in the works of classic ragtime composers. Lastly, while ragtime was for the most part a composed music, based on European light classics such as marches, pianists such as Waller and Johnson introduced their own rhythmic, harmonic and melodic figures into their performances and, occasionally, spontaneous improvisation. As the second generation stride pianist Dick Wellstood noted, in liner notes for the stride pianist Donald Lambert, most of the stride pianists of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s were not particularly good improvisers. Rather, they would play their own, very well worked out, and often rehearsed variations on popular songs of the day, with very little change from one performance to another. It was in this respect that Johnson distinguished himself from his colleagues, in that (in his own words), he "could think of a trick a minute". Comparison of many of Johnson's recordings of a given tune over the years demonstrates variation from one performance to another, characterised by respect for the melody, and reliance upon a worked out set of melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic devices, such as repeated chords, serial thirds (hence his admiration for Bach), and interpolated scales, on which the improvisations were based. This same set of variations might then appear in the performance of another tune.
Legacy
James P. Johnson may be thought of as both the last major pianist of the classic ragtime era and the first major jazz pianist. As such, he is considered an indispensable bridge between ragtime and jazz. Johnson's musical legacy is also present in the body of work of his pupil, Thomas "Fats" Waller, as well as scores of other pianists who were influenced by him, including Art Tatum, Donald Lambert, Louis Mazetier, Pat Flowers, Cliff Jackson, Hank Duncan, Claude Hopkins, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Don Ewell, Johnny Guarnieri, Dick Hyman, Dick Wellstood, Ralph Sutton, Joe Turner, Neville Dickie, Mike Lipskin, and Butch Thompson.
Honors and recognitions
Two Romare Bearden paintings bear the name of Johnson compositions: Carolina Shout, and Snow(y) Morning.
On September 16, 1995 the U.S. Post Office issued a James P. Johnson 32-cent commemorative postage stamp.[14]
| Year Inducted | Title |
|---|---|
| 1970 | Songwriters Hall of Fame |
| 1973 | Down Beat Jazz Hall of Fame |
| 1980 | Big Band and Jazz Hall of Fame |
| 2007 | ASCAP Jazz Wall of Fame[15] |
Film scores
Johnson's compositions as film scores were used in a number of movies, which were compiled from previously written musical compositions. A partial list includes:
Album discography
- 1950: Jazz, Vol. 1: South – Folkways Records
- 1953: Jazz, Vol. 7: New York (1922–1934) – Folkways
- 1953: Jazz, Vol. 9: Piano – Folkways
- 1957: Happy harlem: James P. Johnson Quartet with other artists (Lil Armstrong, The Lion's Jazz Band, and The Spirits of Rhythm) - Guilde du Jazz (French Label- 10")
- 1960: Jazz of the Forties, Vol. 1: Jazz at Town Hall – Folkways
- 1961: A History of Jazz: The New York Scene – Folkways
- 1964: The Piano Roll – Folkways
- 1966: The Asch Recordings, 1939 to 1947 – Vol. 1: Blues, Gospel, and Jazz – Folkways
- 1973: The Original James P. Johnson – Folkways
- 1974: James P. Johnson 1921–1926 – Olympic Records
- 1974: Toe Tappin' Ragtime – Folkways
- 1977: Early Ragtime Piano – Folkways
- 1981: Striding in Dixieland – Folkways
- 1981: Giants of Jazz: James P. Johnson – Time-Life (three-record box set)
- 1996: The Original James P. Johnson: 1942–1945, Piano Solos – Smithsonian Folkways
- 2001: Every Tone a Testimony – Smithsonian Folkways
- 2008: Classic Piano Blues from Smithsonian Folkways – Smithsonian Folkways
CD re-issues
Multiple CDs of Johnson's recordings have been reissued. By far, the most complete CD collections of James 's work, including alternate takes, has been produced in the last 15 years by Michael Cuscuna and his group at Mosaic Records, based in Connecticut. The Blue Note sessions are discussed below. Classic James P. Johnson Sessions, 1921 - 1944, includes all of James P's piano solos, band sides, and blues accompaniments, done during this period, for the major commercial labels, exclusive of Decca / Brunswick, and RCA Victor. James P. is also featured prominently in Mosaic re-issues of the Commodore label ( under Max Kaminsky's name ) and the HRS label ( Pee Wee Russells's Rhythm Makers ). The French Chronological Classics series includes eight discs devoted to Johnson, and cover the period from 1921 - 1947. The Decca CD, Snowy Morning Blues, contains 20 sides done for the Brunswick and Decca labels, between 1930 and 1944. This CD includes an eight-tune Fats Waller Memorial set, and two solos, "Jingles", and "You've Got to be Modernistic", which demonstrate Johnson's hard swinging stride style. The LP, and CD, Father of the Stride Piano, collects some of Johnson's best recordings for the Columbia family of labels, done between 1921 and 1939. It includes "Carolina Shout", "Worried and Lonesome Blues", and "Hungry Blues" (from De Organizer).Johnson's complete Blue Note recordings (solos, band sides in groups led by himself as well as Edmond Hall and Sidney DeParis) were issued in a collection by Mosaic Records. The largest anthology of Johnson's recordings was compiled in the Giants of Jazz series by Time-Life Music. This three-LP collection contains 40 sides recorded from 1921 to 1945, and is supplemented with extensive liner notes, including a biographical essay by Frank Kappler, and criticism of the musical selections by Dick Wellstood, and the musicologist, Willa Rouder. Many of Johnson's approximately 60 piano rolls, recorded between 1917 and 1927, have been issued on CD on the Biograph Label. A book of musical transcriptions of Johnson's piano roll performances of his own compositions has been prepared by Dr. Robert Pinsker, to be published through the auspices of the James P. Johnson Foundation.
References
- Ratliff, Ben (October 5, 2009). "Raising Roof and Headstone for Pioneering Pianist". The New York Times. p. C1.
Further reading and listening
- Schiff, David: A Pianist with Harlem on His Mind, The New York Times, February 16, 1992 (A portrait and review of the re-premier of Johnson's Harlem Symphony, among other works, as realized by conductor Marin Alsop, pianist Leslie Stifleman, and The Concordia Orchestra.)
- Scott E. Brown, A Case of Mistaken Identity: The Life and Music of James P. Johnson, Scarecrow Press, 1984. ISBN 0810818876 (Part of a series published by the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University. This remains the only book-length biography of Johnson. It began as Dr. Brown's senior thesis at Yale, 1982, and was expanded into book form while he was in medical school. An updated edition is in preparation. It is supplemented with an extensive pre-CD era discography by Robert Hilbert.)
- Good Buddies: Waller and Johnson, Jazz Rhythm Program No. 174, www.jazzhotbigstep.com, 2004 (produced by Dave Radlauer, with guest, Mark Borowsky, James P. Johnson Foundation)
- Celebrating James P. Johnson, Jazz Rhythm Programs No. 137 138, 139, www.jazzhotbigstep.com, 2003 (produced by Dave Radlauer, with guest, Mark Borowsky, James P. Johnson Foundation)
- Todd Mundt Show, Radio Program, NPR, January 2, 2003 (Includes a 25-minute interview with Mark Borowsky of the James P. Johnson Foundation and a discussion about the discovery and performance of Johnson and Langston Hughes' operetta, De-Organizer. Long thought to have been lost, a score of singing parts was discovered by the University of Michigan jazz pianist and scholar, Prof James Dapogny. Dapogny's restoration was performed in 2003, followed in 2006 by a Dapogny restored version of "Dreamy Kid".)
- Fats Waller and James P. Johnson: Student/Teacher, Protege/Master, Colleagues/Best Friends. Lecture, by Dr. Mark Borowsky, Dr. Robert Pinsker, James P. Johnson Foundation. Fats Waller Centennial Conference, Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, May 8, 2004.
- From Joplin to Blake to Johnson: A Ragtime Triple Play. Lecture, by Robert Pinsker, Mark Borowsky, James P. Johnson Foundation. Sutter Creek Ragtime Festival, August 2002
External links
- James P. Johnson on RedHotJazz.com Biography with RAM files of many of James P. Johnson's historic recordings
- James P. Johnson on BlueBlackJazz.com
- James P. Johnson: A Composer Rescued – The story of the discovery of "Victory Stride" and James P. Johnson's other lost symphonies by Leslie Stifleman
- Institute of Jazz Studies page on the James P. Johnson archival collection housed there
- James P. Johnson Collection Music Manuscripts Institute of Jazz Studies, Dana Library, Rutgers University, Newark, NJ.
- James P. Johnson Collection Programs, Scripts and Books Institute of Jazz Studies, Dana Library, Rutgers University, Newark, NJ.
- Institute of Jazz Studies Fats Waller Centennial Conference
- "In Search of James P. Johnson" by Ethan Iverson
- James P. Johnson at Find a Grave
- James P. Johnson at the Internet Broadway Database
james p. johnson perfect pitch.
james p Johnson scott Joplin Maple Leaf.
james p johnson met george gershwin aeolian.
JAMES P. JOHNSON
One of the great jazz pianists of
all time, James P. Johnson was the king of stride pianists in the
1920s. He began working in New York clubs as early as 1913 and was
quickly recognized as the pacesetter. In 1917, Johnson began making
piano rolls. Duke Ellington learned from these (by slowing them down to
half-speed), and a few years later, Johnson became Fats Waller’s teacher
and inspiration. During the ’20s (starting in 1921), Johnson began to
record, he was the nightly star at Harlem rent parties (accompanied by
Waller and Willie “The Lion” Smith) and he wrote some of his most famous
compositions during this period. For the 1923 Broadway show Running
Wild (one of his dozen scores), Johnson composed “The Charleston” and
“Old Fashioned Love,” his earlier piano feature “Carolina Shout” became
the test piece for other pianists, and some of his other songs included
“If I Could Be with You One Hour Tonight” and “A Porter’s Love Song to a
Chambermaid.”
Ironically, Johnson, the most sophisticated pianist of the 1920s, was also an expert accompanist for blues singers and he starred on several memorable Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters recordings. In addition to his solo recordings, Johnson led some hot combos on records and guested with Perry Bradford and Clarence Williams; he also shared the spotlight with Fats Waller on a few occasions. Because he was very interested in writing longer works, Johnson (who had composed “Yamekraw” in 1927) spent much of the ’30s working on such pieces as “Harlem Symphony,” “Symphony in Brown,” and a blues opera. Unfortunately much of this music has been lost through the years. Johnson, who was only semi-active as a pianist throughout much of the ’30s, started recording again in 1939, often sat in with Eddie Condon, and was active in the ’40s despite some minor strokes. A major stroke in 1955 finished off his career. Most of his recordings have been reissued on CD. ~ Scott Yanow
Ironically, Johnson, the most sophisticated pianist of the 1920s, was also an expert accompanist for blues singers and he starred on several memorable Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters recordings. In addition to his solo recordings, Johnson led some hot combos on records and guested with Perry Bradford and Clarence Williams; he also shared the spotlight with Fats Waller on a few occasions. Because he was very interested in writing longer works, Johnson (who had composed “Yamekraw” in 1927) spent much of the ’30s working on such pieces as “Harlem Symphony,” “Symphony in Brown,” and a blues opera. Unfortunately much of this music has been lost through the years. Johnson, who was only semi-active as a pianist throughout much of the ’30s, started recording again in 1939, often sat in with Eddie Condon, and was active in the ’40s despite some minor strokes. A major stroke in 1955 finished off his career. Most of his recordings have been reissued on CD. ~ Scott Yanow
