Jump to content

Mosaic's forthcoming James P. Johnson set


Recommended Posts

  • Replies 71
  • Created
  • Last Reply

Top Posters In This Topic

Lester , , , then James P. . . . good things ahead for we who wait.

 

Lester , , , then James P. . . . good things ahead for we who wait.

Is Lester first?  When? 

As things stand now, the Johnson will be out first.  I think Lon simply meant the order in which we've learned of these sets.

Edited by ghost of miles
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Right. The older set was all Sony-owned.  This one is Universal.  Mosaic never mixes those two.  Scott wrote me once that neither label will license if the other is involved.

 

gregmo

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 1 month later...

Now on the site: link.

Scott Wenzel's email:

One of the early Mosaic sets, our ninth release in fact, of which I still hold as a prized part of my collection is the 4CD/6LP collection of Edmond Hall, James P. Johnson, Sidney DeParis and Vic Dickenson Blue Note sessions. It's a fulfilling grab bag of trad and swing that was recorded by Alfred Lion during those beginning years of Blue Note. Highlights of that set for me are the solo and band sides of the man who had brought jazz piano from ragtime to a swinging new concept - James P. Johnson. In addition to these later, but still inventive JPJ recordings, I had known and loved his earlier Columbia solo efforts, the Frank Newton and Mezz Mezzrow Bluebird sessions and even the Decca sides with Eddie Condon (read on dear Mosaic friend as those cuts are now also a part of the Mosaic catalog). 
 

So it comes to no surprise that it is a pleasure to announce a set of James P. Johnson recordings (from mostly Columbia and Victor masters) on Mosaic that encompass more than two decades of trend setting musical activity from this true giant of the genre. We look upon rightful jazz innovators such as Louis, Benny, Bird, Miles, Monk and Trane as re-inventing the jazz wheel. Well, one such individual who without question needs to be in that same world is James P. 

Take, for example, something I find to be one of the more notable moments of these sessions. It's JPJ's remarkable ability to turn an accompanists' role for a blues or vaudeville singer into a work of art. If you could remove the vocal (and you really wouldn't want to anyway as these singers include Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters and Ida Cox) you will find that the way he accompanies these singers is a breath of genius and could even be enjoyed as separate piano solos. 

And he is as engaging an accompanist as he is as a sideman for small group and, obviously, as a soloist. All pianists, whether they realize it or not, owe a debt to JPJ and here are some of his seminal recordings from the very start of his recording career to 1943. I can't urge you enough to absorb these cornerstone masterpieces that will undoubtedly prove that these recordings are musically brilliant sounds to be heard, enjoyed and savored by new generations. 
- Scott Wenzel

Blurb from the website:

He wrote "Charleston." You know, that song you hear anytime you ever see anyone dancing the Charleston. 

He was Bessie Smith's and Ethel Waters' favorite accompanist, with a particular knack for throwing in beguiling fills he conceived in the moment, much to the singers' delight. 

He was a surrogate father and teacher to Fats Waller. Try getting any notice for yourself after taking that showman under your wing! 

But first and foremost, James P. Johnson was one of the most important, if not THE most important, stride pianists, a style that developed in New York in the 1920s and the first music that sounds like what we call jazz. It was more rhythmically complex than anything before it. More harmonically challenging. More exuberant and crafty. Stride was also more than the music. It was a challenge to the musicians who gathered at Harlem cutting contests determined to conquer its intricacies, and to conquer each other. And because of its invitation to create and improvise, it was a platform at last for self-expression. 

Johnson also wrote popular and theatrical music, symphonies, concertos, ballets, operas, plus a wide number of smaller pieces like sonatas and a string quartet. In fact, his wide interests and talents gave reason for some to call him a jazz sell-out, and discount his contributions. For decades, Johnson was all but forgotten. 

Mosaic, The Antidote to "Forgotten!" 

Mosaic first presented James P. Johnson in the record company's earliest years, that focused on the six sessions he recorded for Blue Note. (That set is sold out, and never to be released again.) But there has never been a comprehensive set that chronicles James P. Johnson's contributions to jazz from the beginning of his career, almost from the beginning of jazz itself. Until now.  

"Classic James P. Johnson Sessions 1921- 1943" compiles all the sessions led by Johnson originally released on OKeh, Columbia, Bluebird, Victor, Signature, Pathe and Vocalion, plus sideman sessions where he solos significantly or contributes something noteworthy. On six CDs, it shines the light on every facet of his talent, including his stunning work with blues singers such as Bessie Smith, Lavinia Turner, Ethel Waters, Ida Cox and more. 

James P. Johnson was fortunate to come along at a time when music was in transition, born into a family that encouraged his musical gifts. 

The Birth of Stride 

He was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1894, and as a child learned his first simple piano songs from his mother. A later move to New York exposed him to real musicians and to formal classical training, which Johnson pursued for decades into his adult life. 

Willie "The Lion" Smith. Ragtime was popular. Johnson added his influences. As a boy, he used to watch from the top of the stairs as his mother and her Southern relations performed "ring shouts" in the living room. He added some of those distinctive rhythms. Also, he incorporated what he called "concert effects," a technique that employed a lot more of the piano than ragtime used, to fill out the sound and make it more orchestral. 

A word or two on the distinction between ragtime and stride, to underscore what every player in jazz owes to Johnson: 

Ragtime vs. Stride 

Ragtime was earlier. It was primarily a repertoire of songs composed, learned, and performed. Ragtime's broken, ragged rhythm pointed to future musical innovations that would be called jazz because syncopation was at the heart of it, but ragtime was neat and tidy, and the piano needed to be freed before jazz could develop. 

Stride was that next important step. It was louder and faster, more aggressive. Still largely a piano music, stride used the whole keyboard, not just the middle four octaves, as performers "walked" up and down the keys with the left hand. There was still that "oom-pah" bass line, derived from black march music and layered with counter rhythms, typical of music from African roots. But stride was less controlled and less structured than ragtime - more jazz-like - in all ways. If ragtime was a repertoire, stride was a way of playing. You could play popular music of the day in stride. You could play songs from musicals in stride. And you could improvise. That was the big one. Stride allowed more danger and personality. And while many stride pianists played their own signature figures over and over, improvisation was something James P. was particularly known for. 

He was especially appreciated by singers he accompanied, who loved the way he punctuated the lyrics. The very first Johnson recordings where you can actually hear the piano were made with Lavinia Turner, and they are on this Mosaic set. On another Lavinia Turner session, he places something new and original in every vocal break. 

You'll also find his very first recording of "Carolina Shout," which became a staple of the stride tradition. You can hear echoes of rags and dance-oriented pieces that were popular, the call-and-response of ring shout, and other borrowings, but the improvisation and sheer breadth of his expression was completely unknown before him. 

He made 14 sides and a movie with Bessie Smith, including her most famous piece, "Back Water Blues." He wasn't known especially for blues, but what Johnson was doing was laying down the rulebook for all jazz accompanists that followed him. 

An Experimental Session 

Included also are "Snowy Morning Blues," one of Johnson's most successful recordings, as well as a session by the Louisiana Sugar Babes, which was really Johnson, Fats Waller at the organ, Jabbo Smith on cornet, and Garvin Bushell on clarinet, alto saxophone, and bassoon. Bushell and Smith were in the pit orchestra of the show "Keep Shufflin'" with Waller and Johnson, and these recordings have attained nearly legendary status for the rare opportunity to hear the creators of the music performing the tunes, with experimental instrumentation, recorded in a venue (the former Trinity Baptist Church in Camden) known for its exceptional sound quality. 

There are so many gems on this set, far too many to list here, including solo work, ensemble work, Johnson accompanying singers by himself and with ensembles, small band sessions, and well as his important work as a sideman with King Oliver, Clarence Williams, Teddy Bunn and Spencer Williams, Mezz Mezzrow, and more. 

The package comprises 158 tracks, including eleven never before released. Our exclusive Mosaic booklet features a session-by-session analysis by Scott Brown and many photos that are rare and delightful to see. There is also the most complete discography ever of James P. Johnson's important early work. 

Sadly, most of his compositions in the classical style are completely lost. We are extremely proud of our opportunity to present his jazz recordings for an audience determined to preserve his legacy.

Discography here

Edited by crisp
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Allen is right -- that annotator's distinction between Stride and ragtime is batshit. As a partial antidote,  from the liner notes to a Donald Lambert LP, here is Dick Wellstood on stride:

Stride piano, according to Dick Wellstood

 
I would like to say, first, that I don't like the term "stride" any more than I like the term "jazz". When I was a kid the old-timers used to call stride piano "shout piano", an agreeably expressive description, and when once I mentioned stride to Eubie Blake, he replied, "My God, what won't they call ragtime next?" Terms, terms. Terms make music into a bundle of objects - a box of stride, a pound of Baroque -. [Donald] Lambert played music, not "stride", just as Bach wrote music, not "Baroque". Musicians make music, which critics later label, as if to fit it into so many jelly jars. Bastards.

Having demurred thus, may I say that stride is indeed a sort of ragtime, looser than Joplin's "classic rag", but sharing with it the marchlike structures and oom-pah bass. Conventional wisdom has it that striding is largely a matter of playing a heavy oom-pah in the left hand, but conventional wisdom is mistaken, as usual. Franz Liszt, Scott Joplin, Jelly Roll Morton, Earl Hines, Teddy Wilson, Erroll Garner and Pauline Alpert all monger a good many oom-pahs, and, whatever their other many virtues, none of them play stride.

To begin with, stride playing requires a certain characteristic rhythmic articulation, for the nature of which I can only refer you to recordings by such as Eubie Blake, Luckey Roberts, James P. Johnson, Fats Waller, Willie "The Lion" Smith and Donald Lambert. The feel of stride is a kind of soft-shoe 12/8 rather than the 8/8 of ragtime, and though the left hand plays oom-pahs, the total feeling is frequently an accented four-beat rather than the two-beat you might expect. For instance, the drummer Jo Jones once told me that when Basie played stride he would play a soft four on his bass drum, accenting, however, the first and third beats. This would be perfect. A straight four is too confining; a simple two makes you seasick. At any rate, the characteristic rhythms of stride are provided by the right hand, not the left. It is possible to play an otherwise impeccable stride bass and ruin it by playing inappropiate right hand patterns. By pulling and tugging at the rhythms of the left, the right hand provides the swing.

Now, if the right hand is to be able to do this, the left hand must be, not only quasi-metronomic, but also totally in charge. The propulsion, what musicians nowadays call the "time", must always be in the left hand. This is what Eubie Blake means when he says, "The left hand is very important in ragtime". To a non-performer, the lefthand dominance probably seems either unimportant or self-evident, but it is the crux of a successful stride performance. If, in the heat of the battle, the time switches to the right hand (because perhaps of a series of heavily accented figures), leaving the left hand merely to wag, then the momentum goes out of the window. The left hand must always be the boss and leave the right hand free to use whatever vocalized inflections the player desieres.

Stride bass is not just any old oom-pah, either. The bass note, the "oom", should be in the register of the string bass, a full two octaves or more below middle C -- an octave or so lower than was used by Joplin or Morton. And the "pah" chord is usually voiced around middle C -- one or two inversions higher than Joplin or Morton (here, as elsewhere, I'm referring strictly to [Donald] Lambert-style fast stride and am also generalizing wildly, of course). Moreover, the bass note is ideally a single note, not an octave, except in certain emphatic passages. The use of an octave would shorten the stretch between bass note and chord, and it is this wide stretch that gives stride its full sound. The wide stretch means that the player can activate the overtones of the piano by pedalling technicques unusable by Joplin or Morton, the denser texture of whose playing would have been unbearably muddied by the sophisticated pedalling of, say, Waller.

Stride bass lines move in scalar patterns, too. Ragtime stuck largely to roots and fifths, with most of the scalar motion in the tenor parts, but stride pianists, having more room in the bass, can walk up and down scales in a way that is very difficult in the shorter span of the earlier pianists.

One can also use in the left hand what pianists called in my youth "back beats", where one disrupts the rhythm temporarily by playing oom-pah, oom-pah, oom-oom-pah, oom-pah, oom-oom-pah, and so on. With luck it comes out even, without sounding like one of Leonard Bernstein's early works.

To stride is to have patience, not to be in a hurry to get things over with. Lambert could play pieces in which the melody would allow a harmonic change perhaps only every four bars, requiring his left hand to pump patiently away for what seems like hours. And the late Ben Webster was an ardent stride pianist, whose pet piece was a version of "East Side, West Side" in long meter with lots of left hand, to with: (East!)-oom-pah, oom-pah, (Side!)-pah, oom-pah, oom-pah, oom-pah, (West!)-pah, oom-pah, oom-pah, oom-pah, (Side!)-pah, oom-pah, oom-pah, oom-pah, and so on, ad infinitum, ad wolgast. Fantastic patience!

If all this sounds rather difficult and complicated, you may be sure that it is. In a world full of pianists who can rattle off fast oom-pahs or Chick Corea solo transcriptions or the Elliot Carter Sonata, there are perhaps only a dozen who can play stride convincingly at any length and with the proper energy (...)"
 
P.S. About that mysterious "ad wolgast"in the next to last paragraph. Wellstood is horsing around; Ad Wolgast is not another Latin phrase but the name of a topnotch lightweight boxer of the early 20th Century.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Yeah, thanks for sharing Wellstood's notes. Never read those before.

I love his liner notes to Earl Hines' Quintessential, Continued LP.

"Behold Earl Hines, spinner of yarns, big handed virtuoso of the black dance, con man Earl Hinesextraordinaire, purveyor of hot sauce. Behold Earl Hines, Jive King, boss of the sloppy run, the dragged thumb, the uneven tremolo, Minstral of the Unworthy Emotion, King of Freedom. Democratic Transcendent, his twitchy, spitting style uses every cheesy trick in the piano-bar catalog to create moving cathedrals, masterpieces of change, great trains of tension and relaxation, multi-dimensional solos that often seem to be about themselves or other solos—’See, here I might have played some boogie-woogie, or put this accent here, or put this accent there, or this run here, that chord there…or maybe a little stride for you beautiful people in the audience…’Earl Hines, Your Musical Host, serving up the hot sauce."

A different sort of writing here, of course. But clearly the man had a way with words. 

Pretty good piano player too! ;) 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 11/17/2015, 3:51:57, mjzee said:

Thanks mjzee!  I must be getting even older and blinder than I thought.  I was particularly interested in the Panassie Sessions (which I still have on an ancient RCA Victor Vintage LP).  Looks like one unissued take from those sessions will appear.

 

gregmo

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.

×
×
  • Create New...