[78-L] Headstone for James P. Johnson

[Andrea Walsh]

Did I miss it in the article or is there a URl to make donations toward the
headstone?

Andrea

On Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 3:54 PM, Cary Ginell <soundthink at live.com> wrote:

>
> October 6, 2009
> MUSIC REVIEW
> Raising Roof and Headstone for Pioneering Pianist
>
> By BEN RATLIFF
> A definition of righteousness: about 75 people, crammed into the West
> Village club Smalls, watching a series of pianists play James P. Johnson on
> a grand piano in a benefit concert to buy a headstone for his grave.
>
> Like all the other stride-piano soloists of the teens and 1920s, Johnson
> has been lodged in a historical second tier, probably because he’s not known
> for band music and didn’t tour sufficiently.
>
> But he’s the truest passageway from pre-jazz to jazz-as-we-know-it. He was
> a pioneering and powerful solo pianist, a composer of short sketches
> (including “The Charleston,” his era-defining hit, and “Carolina Shout,” his
> finger-buster étude) and extended orchestral works.
>
> Duke Ellington learned “Carolina Shout” from a piano roll and finally met
> Johnson at a concert in Washington in 1921. Afterward they stayed out until
> 10 a.m. “What I absorbed on that occasion,” Ellington wrote later, “might, I
> think, have constituted a whole semester in a conservatory.” He homed in on
> Johnson’s strong, grounding swing and sweet, splashing melodies; to link
> Scott Joplin and Ellington — or even Joplin and Thelonious Monk — you need
> to put Johnson between them.
>
> Johnson died in 1955 fairly isolated after four years of illness, and his
> body lies in an unmarked grave in Maspeth, Queens. The spot was found in
> February by Scott Brown, a Johnson scholar, and the idea was hatched for
> “James P. Johnson’s Last Rent Party,” a daylong blowout of Johnsonia at
> Smalls on Sunday, with historical talks and performances.
>
> The day ended with five hours of solo piano — by 12 performers — and a
> little bit of four-hands playing. Unlike the Harlem rent parties Johnson
> used to play, it wasn’t remotely a competition. Though several pianists
> wrestled with the same material (especially the charging “Carolina Shout”),
> the emphasis was not on besting one another but on beneficially knocking the
> tunes around, treating fairly neglected music like common repertory.
>
> Ethan Iverson, the pianist from the Bad Plus, announced that the beginning
> of his set would be “classical”: an earnest shot at Johnson’s style. He
> played “Carolina Shout” with sensitivity and clarity, keeping the stride
> rhythm steady in the left hand. Then he went off into his own updated,
> posteverything style, full of explicit dissonance, repetition and strange
> dynamics.
>
> “The Charleston” was his killer: it started with deliberately messy tone
> rows, his two hands playing at cross-purposes, the left staccato and slow,
> the right flowing and medium-tempo. Inevitably, and with humor, he finished
> in the song’s proper style.
>
> Mike Lipskin, a pianist based in San Francisco who studied with the stride
> pianist Willie (The Lion) Smith, played stride-piano songs as if they were
> his drinking buddies: his versions of Johnson’s “It Takes Love to Cure the
> Heart’s Disease” and Luckey Roberts’s “Pork and Beans” were rowdy and
> familiar, and he made Johnson’s “If I Could Be With You (One Hour Tonight)”
> mellifluous and lovely, smiling at the audience rather than monitoring the
> difficult variations in his left-hand stride patterns.
>
> The evening’s revelation was Aaron Diehl, a pianist in his mid-20s who has
> played with Wynton Marsalis and Wycliffe Gordon. His style, on “Scaling the
> Blues,” “Over the Bars” and the second movement of Johnson’s “Jazzamine
> Concerto,” was modest, secure and insinuating, with an iron sense of time. A
> few different pianists worked in their own tunes as Johnson tributes; Mr.
> Diehl’s was a slow, gorgeous blues.
>
> Ted Rosenthal and Dick Hyman closed the night. They performed some pieces
> together at the keyboard, including “Twilight Rag”; then Mr. Hyman, one of
> the world’s great specialists in early jazz piano, performed Johnson’s music
> with well-practiced dynamic shifts, elegant and sometimes a bit too showy
> for the circumstances. But complaining is pointless. Mr. Hyman smoothly
> played the entire 10-minutes-plus solo-piano version of Johnson’s
> “Yamekraw,” a rhapsody with classical flourishes and stride interjections.
> Who else does that?
>
>
>
>
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