Stride (music)
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Stride, Harlem Stride, or Stride jazz Piano, is a jazz piano style that evolved partially from ragtime. The left hand may play a four-beat pulse with a single bass note, octave, seventh or tenth interval on the first and third beats, and a chord on the second and fourth beats. Occasionally, the left hand note-chord pattern is reversed, for one or even several beats. Unlike earlier "St. Louis" pianists, stride players often leaped a greater distance with the left hand, played faster, and improvised. However, stride has always been played at slow tempos as well.
The right hand plays melodies, riffs and often contrapuntal lines while the left hand lays down the rhythmic groundwork. Left hand techniques may also include walking bass, either an uninterrupted bass line, or with three single notes and then a chord, again changing the original pattern.
With the long hours that pianists were required to play every night of the week, the development of stride was pushed forward. Popular pieces such as "Maple Leaf Rag" gradually had their melodic lines replaced with various clever riffs, and their bass patterns became more melodic. These versions of the older and current rags were more complex, and they could be freely varied, or improvised. Soon, any march, popular song, and many classical pieces could be played in the stride idiom. Well into the 1920's, however, pianists and listeners still referred to the music as "ragtime" rather than stride or jazz.
Octaves are also used on occasion in the place of single bass notes for a change in tone color. James P. Johnson and Fats Waller are credited with introducing "walking tenths" - where the performer plays tenth intervals that "walk" up or down the keyboard, also in the place of either triad chords or single bass notes.
Another major branch of early jazz piano that is mistaken for Harlem stride took root in New Orleans, where pianists were called "professors." Their style is arguably distant from the more dominant New York school, especially in the more simple right hand and regional repertoire. Jelly Roll Morton's sound is distinguished by his use of sixths in the left hand instead of single notes or tenths. This was part of what gave his playing its noted "New Orleans" flavor.
The name "stride" comes from the left-hand movement "striding" up and down the keyboard. Sustain pedal technique further varies the left hand sound allowing the notes on beats one and three to sustain until the following chord is played.[citation needed]
The style was originated in Harlem during World War I by Luckey Roberts and James P. Johnson, reeping piano devices from other contemporary pianists. It was partially influenced by ragtime, but as a jazz piano idiom, features improvisation, blue notes, and swing rhythms which ragtime did not. The practitioners of "stride" practised a very full jazz piano style that made use of Classical music devices such as arpeggios, musical scales and flourishes. They sometimes engaged in cutting contests to show off their skill.[1]
Other notable stride pianists include Willie "The Lion" Smith, Fats Waller, Art Tatum, Donald Lambert, Cliff Jackson, Eubie Blake, Dick Wellstood, Claude Hopkins, Ralph Sutton, Hank Duncan, Dick Hyman, Don Ewell, and Mike Lipskin.
