James P. Johnson
James P. Johnson |
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James P. Johnson (James Price Johnson, also known as Jimmy Johnson, born February 1, 1894, died November 17, 1955) was an American pianist and composer. A pioneer of the stride style of jazz piano, he was a model for Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Art Tatum and Fats Waller. Johnson composed many hit tunes including "Charleston" and "Carolina Shout" and remained the acknowledged king of New York jazz pianists until he was dethroned c. 1933 by the recently arrived Art Tatum. His influence and success is often overlooked.
Biography
Johnson was born on February, 1, 1894, in New Brunswick, New Jersey. The proximity to New York 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. In 1908 his family moved to the San Juan Hill (near where Lincoln Center stands today) section of New York City. With perfect pitch and excellent recall he was soon able to pick out on the piano tunes that he had heard.
Johnson grew up listening the ragtime of Scott Joplin and always retained links to the ragtime era, playing Joplin's "Maple Leaf", as well as the more modern (according to Johnson) and demanding, "Euphonic Sounds". Johnson, like Joplin, when the royalties from his compositions made him financially secure, pursued a lifelong ambition of writing orchestral works.
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 superb player piano roll recordings 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 - 1927. During this period he met George Gershwin who was also a young piano-roll artist at Aeolian.
Johnson honed his craft, playing night after night, catering to the egos and idiosyncracies 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 Johnson " ...made you want to sing until your tonsils fell out."
As his piano style continued to evolve, his 1921 phonograph recordings of "Harlem Strut", "Carolina Shout" and "Keep off the Grass" were among the first jazz piano solos to be put onto record. The majority of his phonograph recordings of the 1920's and early 1930's were done for Black Swan (founded by Johnson friend W.C. Handy, where William Grant Still served in an A & R [Artist and Repertoire] capacity) and Columbia.
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Photography by William P. Gottlieb.
In the depression era, Johnson's career slowed down somewhat. As the opportunties to record and perform live music were limited by the harsh econmic realities of the time, the cushion of a modest but steady ijncoe from his 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. Although by this time he was an established composer, with a significant body of work, as well as a member or ASCAP, he was nonetheless unable to secure the financial support that he sought from either the Rosenwald foundation, or a Guggenheim fellowship, both of which he received endoremnt for from the 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 rise of independent jazz labels 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 his friend 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 1940. When he returned to the public eye his style was less clean and precise though his technique was still formidable. 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. He recorded for jazz labels including Asch, Black and White, Blue Note, Commodore, Circle, and Decca. 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.
Johnson permanently retired from performing after suffering a severe, paralyzing stroke in 1951. He died four years later in Jamaica, New York and is buried in Mt 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 his friend, the producer and impresario John Hammond.[1]
Legacy
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,[2] 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 1930's, 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 apex of the Harlem Stride piano style, an evolution of East Coast ragtime infused with elements of the blues. His "Carolina Shout" was a standard piece for every 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. Eubie Blake played a somewhat less rhythmically developed style of East Coast ragtime than Roberts or Johnson, a transitional figure between classic ragtime and the hard-swinging, more harmonically advanced style of the stride pianists).
Harlem Stride is distinguished from ragtime by several essential characteristics: Ragtime introduced sustained syncopation into piano music but stride pianists introduced 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. In public performance stride pianists either used variations on popular songs of the day or pieces within the idiom specially composed by its main performers.
Johnson's musical legacy is present in the body of work of the more famous Fats Waller as well as scores of other pianists who were influenced by him, such as Donald Lambert, Pat Flowers, Joe Turner, Cliff Jackson, Hank Duncan, Claude Hopkins, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Don Ewell, Johnny Guarnieri, Dick Hyman, Dick Wellstood, Ralph Sutton, Neville Dickie, Mike Lipskin, Jim Turner, Chris Hopkins and Butch Thompson.
The current generation of stride pianists includes both European and American musicians. Arguably the finest, perhaps on par with the greats of the genre, such as Johnson, Waller, Don Ewell, and Johnny Guarnieri, is the French pianist, Louis Mazetier. What makes him all the more remarkable, is the fact that he plays as an albeit very serious and time consuming hobby, since, by day, he is a gainfully employed radiologist. His stongest influence among the old time pioneers is undoubtedly the reclusive Donald Lambert of Newark, NJ, who was remarkable not only in the sense that he was illiterate in both word and music. The German, Bernd Lhotzky, is a conservatory trained musician, who draws much of his inspiration from the late Ralph Sutton. Stephanie Trick is a recent university music graduate, who is developing as a stride stylist at a remarkably fast rate.
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 issues a James P. Johnson 32 cent commemorative postage stamp.[3]
| 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[4] |
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. James P. Johnson's Last Rent Party took place at Wilner's Greenwich Village venue, Small's Jazz Club
Film scores
Johnson's compositions as a film score were used in a number of movies, which were compiled from previously written musical compositions. Partial list includes:[5]
Discography
- 1950: Jazz, Vol. 1: South Folkways Records
- 1953: Jazz, Vol. 7: New York (1922-1934) Folkways
- 1953: Jazz, Vol. 9: Piano Folkways
- 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: Toe Tappin' Ragtime Folkway
- 1977: Early Ragtime Piano Folkways
- 1981: Striding in Dixieland Folkways
- 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
Re-issues
Multiple CDs of Johnson's recordings have been reissued. The French Chronogical(sic) Classics series includes six discs devoted to Johnson. The Decca CD, Snowy Morning Blues, contains 20 sides done for the Brunswick and Decca labels, between 1930 and 1944. This CD includes an 8 tune, Fats Waller Memorial set, and 2 solos, "Jingles", and "You've Got to be Modernistic", which arguably demonstrate the best of 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 lead by himself as well as Edmond Hall and Sidney DeParis) were made available in a collection issued by Mosaic Records. The largest, and probably the best 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 erudite criticism of the musical selections by the noted contemporary stride pianist Dick Wellstood, and the musicologist, Willa Rouder . Johnson was also a premier piano roll artist, recording approximately 60 rolls between 1917 and 1927. Many of these 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
- ^ This appeared in Down Beat under the title Talents of James P. Johnson Went Unappreciated and is reproduced in its entirety on the website of the James P. Johnson Foundation.
- ^ Internet Broadway Database
- ^ James P. Johnson Commemorative postage stamp
- ^ The ASCP Jazz Wall of Fame list
- ^ Filmography: James P. Johnson
Schiff, David: A Pianist with Harlem on His Mind, New York Times, 2/16/1992
Further reading/Listening
- Schiff, David: A Pianist with Harlem on His Mind, New York Times, 2/16/1992 ( A portrait and review of the repremier 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. (Part of a series of published by the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University. A definitive study, this remains the only book length biography of this hugely important figure. It began as Dr. Brown's senior thesis at Yale ' 82, 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 # 174, www.jazzhotbigstep.com, 2004 (produced by Dave Radlauer, with guest, Mark Borowsky,M.D., James P. Johnson Foundation)
- Celebrating James P. Johnson, Jazz Rhythm Programs #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 James P. Johnson and Langston Hughes' operetta, De-Organizer. Long thought to have been lost, a score of singing parts was discovered by the noted 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, Ph.D., Mark Borowsky, M.D., 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
- The James P. Johnson Foundation For Music and The Arts
- James P. Johnson Discography at Smithsonian Folkways
- Institute of Jazz Studies page on the James P. Johnson archival collection housed there
- Institute of Jazz Studies Fats Waller Centennial Conference