Various - Boogie Woogie and Blues Piano (Mosaic Select 30)

Commercial sheet music courtesy the Djll family library.

“At the very bottom of the process of musical development are the howls of the savage; shrill, piercing, and with indefinite pitch. ... Like all folk music, neither boogie woogie nor the blues was created by any one individual. Seemingly, both styles developed from the tribal music of the African savage.”– Sharon Pease, “Boogie Woogie Piano Styles,” 1940. Forster Music Publisher, Inc. (Chicago)

Of the many charming and half-forgotten love-children of the musical genre mixing that emerged during the fertile era of the 1930’s, when jazz music and American popular culture briefly shared the same bed, none had the eventual impact of boogie woogie. Christened with a name that fairly reeked of the world of chippies, cribs, honky-tonks and sporting houses, the boogie woogie style nevertheless enjoyed a brief rage in the early 1940s, faded from national attention and then was reborn, lusty and screaming, in the stomping ivories and honking saxophones under the command of Fats Domino, Little Richard and countless other rock ‘n’ rollers who followed them. It was still showing up decades later, although slowly losing its genetic thread among fuzzbox mutations by the 1970s. Then, during the 1990s, boogie woogie was reanimated and stitched onto that pop music Frankenstein known as “swing and jive,” unwittingly caricatured by pudgy sheiks in goatees and zoot suits, who didn’t seem to know the difference between a Sing, Sing, Sing and a Rocket 88. There’s a special place in Hell on MySpace for them now. But I digress.

The three-disc set Mosaic presents here collects a representative garland of boogie-woogie pianists and small bands recorded between 1935 and 1941, on labels associated with Victor and Columbia. The producers make plain their wish to avoid inclusion of the million-selling big band hits that capitalized on the boogie-woogie craze, such as Tommy Dorsey’s Boogie Woogie and that crushing collision of flag-waving and white hipsteria, The Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy. An impressive selection of important records in the eight-to-the-bar style is included, although completists must search elsewhere for some key omissions. Notable Decca recordings such as Meade Lux Lewis’ Yancey Special fall outside of the producer’s boundaries. And although Lewis laid down the pioneering boogie wax with Honky Tonk Train Blues in 1927, it is the re-recorded 1936 version that’s here; other progenitors such as Pinetop Smith, Champion Jack Dupree, and Wesley Wallace are unrepresented.

The eccentric style of a pianist like Wallace would be valuable in rounding out a collection like this. Not much is known about him, but his 1929 Chicago recording, No. 29 (included in the Riverside History of Classic Jazz) is a fascinating 6/8 train piece with humorously evocative narration and erratically-timed modulations between just tonic and subdominant keys. It’s unlike any other boogie or blues piano piece I’ve ever heard, and hints at the murky origins of the style as reportedly practiced by long-forgotten itinerant musicians who predated the recording age. Like Wallace, the origins of boogie woogie are obscure, probably stretching back into the ragtime era or possibly earlier. In Blesh & Janis’ They All Played Ragtime, Eubie Blake describes a 300-lb character from Baltimore named William Turk who “had a left hand like God…He could play the ragtime stride bass, but it bothered him because his stomach got in the way of his arm, so he used a walking bass instead. I can remember when I was thirteen – this was 1896 – how Turk would play one note with his right hand and at the same time four with his left. We called it ‘sixteen’ – they call it boogie woogie now.” Blake is probably speaking of a steady 8th-note bass in his description of Turk’s style. Turk, who reportedly played in all keys and sometimes in multiple keys (“and the chords still jelled,” recalled Blake), died in 1911. Blake also told of a Boston pianist from the same generation, One-Leg Willie Joseph, who grabbed a national ragtime prize for his rendition of The Stars and Stripes Forever in march, rag, and ‘sixteen’-time. Blake no doubt carried some of this musical DNA into his own work, evidenced by a 1922 recording of Charleston Rag (not the famous Charleston, by James P. Johnson), which sports tricky reverse-boogie walking bass-anchored themes sandwiched between hard-striding ragtime syncopations. I call it “reverse” because Blake shifts the pattern by an 8th note, and all the accents go with it, making the pattern sound backwards.

Practically all jazz and blues pianists of that era were acquainted with boogie woogie, even if they themselves didn’t play it. When the craze took off, many bands and pianists featured at least one boogie woogie number to please the patrons. Jelly Roll Morton, of all people, though such blues styles were too low down to be taken seriously; Earl Hines scored big with Boogie Woogie On St. Louis Blues but otherwise never touched the stuff; Fats Waller reportedly refused requests to play it altogether (although one listen to his 1942 Up Jumped You With Love proves he did play the style at least once). All this discursion is meant to illustrate that genres, then as now, are fluid melting-pot things, at least in the hands of American musicians. And it provides an introduction to the earliest recordings on the Mosaic boogie woogie set, by Cripple Clarence Lofton, made in 1935 (but presented last in the anthology). Lofton, like Cow Cow Davenport and doubtless others forever lost to time, wasn’t too particular about keeping the rag out of his boogie, and vice versa. He had an interesting half-time bass, heard on Strut That Thing, consisting of one bass quarter note on the root of the chord followed by a quarter note on the remainder of the triad, walking this pattern up and down. The result is as much oompah as boogie. Lofton’s five pieces are all vocal blues numbers, tastefully embellished by Big Bill Broonzy’s guitar. Brown Skin Gal features some charming whistling as well. Lofton’s are really proto-boogie pieces, more in the standard blues idiom of the day.

An acknowledged father of boogie woogie is Jimmy Yancey, whose story illustrates the all too common difficulties faced by many African-American musicians. For much of his life he didn’t own a piano, practicing only occasionally at his sister’s house. He lived in Chicago all his life; after early success traveling in vaudeville as a singer and dancer, he went home to a near-invisible musical existence ground out in rent-parties and seedy bar gigs. Yancey’s day job was groundskeeper at Comiskey Park. But with the help of Meade Lux, who recorded Yancey Special (which was then picked up by the Bob Crosby band and made a hit), in 1939 Moe Asch and Victor both tracked down Yancey and brought him into their studios. All the Victors are included in the Mosaic set, along with four sides for Vocalion for a total of seventeen. It’s great to finally have them all in one place and mastered well for CD, for they are stone classics of American music of any era or genre. It’s hard to know where to start digging – every piece is varied in rhythm, key, and mood, offering multitudes of pianistic pleasures. Yancey’s style was pure 12-bar blues with a strong beat, spare and no-nonsense. He didn’t announce his pieces with flashy introductions – on the contrary, many of his records start off seemingly in mid-sentence, catching the listener off-guard. State Street Special is a supreme example of his art. It starts out light and breezy but quickly gets down and funky. Yancey’s bass keeps shifting between about six different figurations, with a fluidity that would be astonishing if it weren’t so fully integrated with the right-hand syncopations, and therefore not attention-calling. For the last couple of choruses Yancey slyly segues into a steady boogie beat, using plenty of space and keeping the dynamics down for the initial chorus before hammering out strident blue-note octaves on top in the second (a variation of an earlier chorus) – suddenly ending with his standard tag-line stop. It’s one perfect performance. Yancey Stomp is a fast rocker with a couple of dazzling breaks in the middle. Five O’Clock Blues delivers a deeply felt meditation (although it doesn’t reach the level of enlightenment of Yancey’s 1951 Atlantic re-recording of the same set of variations under the name Mournful Blues. Like many great musicians, Yancey recycled material as he pleased – 35th And Dearborn and Cryin’ In My Sleep also contain variations of the same choruses.). A couple of times Yancey stumbles momentarily, generating some creative tension, as on Yancey’s Bugle Call, with its skin-of-my-teeth breaks (especially the unissued take). The Vocalions and three of the Victor sides feature Yancey’s vocals, which on the Vocalions are rather oddly formal. Yancey’s enunciation sounds professionally coached, defying our expectations of what low-down blues is “supposed to sound like.” The Victor Cryin’ In My Sleep and Death Letter Blues offer Yancey vocals that sound more “authentic.” (Which brings up a perplexing question: which was indeed the authentic sound of Jimmy Yancey’s voice? Was it the producer at Vocalion who specified a “more legitimate” (i.e., white) vocal sound, or someone at Victor who urged the artist to “black it up?” One could imagine either scenario as a scheme to boost sales, albeit to differently-pigmented audiences. Or, less conspiratorially, is the stilted singing on the Vocalion date – Yancey’s debut on records – the result of opening-night jitters, or a flashback to his vaudeville days?) (Another aside: Yancey had a brother Alonzo, also a pianist, who recorded a few sides in the 1940s. They show him to be solidly in the ragtime school, with scant blues touches.)

Yancey remained clear of the limelight practically all his life. On the other hand, at the crest of the boogie craze, three other black pianists brought authentic boogie woogie to concert halls and high-class clubs in New York. One should not be surprised to see the name John Hammond come into the discussion at this point, for it was he who first presented Meade Lux Lewis, Albert Ammons, and Pete Johnson in New York, opening the 1938 Spirituals To Swing concert at Carnegie Hall (Dan Morgenstern, who wrote the jolly liner notes for the Mosaic package, calls Hammond the “deus ex machina of boogie woogie.” He might well have said “of American popular music in the 20th century.) All three of these “discoveries” of Hammond’s were much more schooled and comprehensive piano players than itinerant bluesmen like Yancey and Lofton. But that didn’t guarantee steady gigs for them – Hammond found Lewis working at a car wash in Chicago, and Ammons and Johnson had been cab-drivers on and off to bring in the bread. After their debut at Carnegie, though, that changed – for a while, anyway. Soon Ammons and Johnson had a duo going at the very democratic Café Society (integrated bandstand and audience) and recordings on big-time labels. Albert Ammons (father of saxophonist Gene) was the earthier and more rhythmically solid of the two – he’s another guy with “a left hand like God.” Ammons has just one solo recording in the set, Shout For Joy (in two takes), which is a peerless example of the boogie woogie style. After a Big Ben chiming intro, the God-hand digs into a timeless boogie figure – anyone acquainted with Dizzy Miss Lizzy will recognize it. Like Lewis and to a lesser extent Pete Johnson, Ammons gives over the last eight bars of each chorus to a standardized cadence that doesn’t vary much on repeats. It’s a common blues form. Contrast this with the “primitive” Yancey, who was less prone to this habit.

Lewis, Johnson and Ammons are all on hand for the two-part Boogie Woogie Prayer, presumably a reprise of the music they had created together just days before at Hammond’s Carnegie Hall concert. It’s a thick, roiling stew of blue pianistics, not terribly varied in texture, locked into three-chord harmony and 12-bar cycling, but one can imagine the impact this relentlessly rhythmic music must have had on your average white audient in 1938. Certainly record producers felt a new kind of freedom, the kind that would soon tool up the dreadful assembly line of Bumble Boogies and Bugle Boys and the rest of that sour ilk. And the public was there to lap it up, along with the fables about African savages and so forth. Whites could enjoy the thrill of being “hip to the jive” while their received notions of Afro-primitivism remained intact.

Eight performances from 1941 by the Ammons-Johnson duo (with discreet drumming) finish out disc one, and they offer seamless, mildly commercialized boogie for the downtown trade. Worth singling out is Cuttin’ the Boogie, an easy-going ramble that showcases the kind of contrapuntal extravaganza the duo could produce. It’s not possible to fully disentangle the two pianists for a who-did-what, but it’s a good bet Ammons is doing most of the bass work. Johnson, a more versatile jazz pianist, handles at least some of the fancy high-register filigrees. In the middle, a thicket of riffs spills from the keys. The duo would gig with dual pianos, but in practice just used one, thus enabling them to work on keeping out of each other’s way. On the records, we get intertwining lines, which, like relay runners, pass the melodic lead off to each other as they cross. It can all get pretty frenetic, as on a fast-tempo number like Boogie Woogie Man. Towards the climax, the groove doubles up as the walking basses run up and down the lower keyboard registers and the riffs pile up like a ten-layer double chocolate cake, thick, rich and bewitching.

Johnson and Ammons get to show a jazzier side on a few sides with swing trumpeter Harry James. On the boogie numbers, James sounds fenced in by the eight-to-the-bar rhythm – his ideas are less adventurous than usual and at times the excitement sounds forced. Things lighten up considerably for the non-boogie pieces; Home James has Johnson fingering in the Teddy Wilson mode in his solos and exchanges with trumpet. The previously unreleased Jesse has Ammons striding forcefully in a minor thing reminiscent of Dark Eyes (as Morgenstern points out; but his pianist attributions for this session don’t agree with the discography. My ears say the latter is correct.).

Pete Johnson’s work with the monumental blues shouter Joe Turner is more representative, and these are essential sides in both their catalogs. Turner worked as a singing bartender in Kansas City, where he and Johnson often performed together in the 1930s. The duo has two pieces on disc one: Goin’ Away Blues has Pete serving up a stride bounce and virtuosic tremolos. Roll ‘Em Pete was their showpiece, and Turner was still belting out “You’re so beautiful baby, but you’ve got to die someday” in 1977 in Chicago (although by that time you could hardly understand the words – as he aged, Big Joe gradually excised consonants from his delivery). Disc two of the Mosaic set opens with Pete Johnson And His Boogie Woogie Boys, a sextet offering sublime slices of Kaycee swinging the blues. Hot Lips Page and Buster Smith (Charlie Parker’s elusive mentor on one of his rare recording dates) make the front line backing Big Joe on four numbers. Cherry Red is a relaxed blues with a delicious ensemble opening and clear, forthright choruses from the singer, while Baby, Look At You again limns the “you’re so beautiful” refrain, at a jumping tempo. Smith breaks out with smooth alto and Page – one of the all-time hot blues instrumentalists – boils away behind a tight mute. Then Johnson takes over and demonstrates bear-like tenacity in his solo, carrying the whole band in the out-choruses. On Jump For Joy, at a similar brisk tempo, Pete gets three stride choruses and demonstrates he could hold his own against any piano player of the day (the magisterial Tatum excepted). Lips sounds especially nasty in the opening to Lovin’ Mama Blues, while Smith backs Turner’s vocal with a natty obbligato. Despite the band’s name, the session doesn’t offer a lot of boogie, but it’s wonderful small-group jazz nonetheless. From the same date comes a curiosity, Café Society Rag (Morgenstern calls it “not a rag, not a blues, but a boogie-flavored romp on jazz changes”). Johnson, Ammons and Lewis are back as a piano trio while Turner calls out the switch-hitters (“Donald Duck swing…better known as Lux!”).

Turner gets in more soulful vocalizing on a couple of pick-up dates from 1940, led by Joe Sullivan and Benny Carter. On Low Down Dirty Shame with the Sullivan group, he’s ably answered by Benny Morton’s trombone and Edmond Hall’s clarinet. Also in the frontline was trumpeter Ed Anderson; little-known now, he gets well-met exposure on two takes of I Can’t Give You Anything But Love. The leader was not known as a boogie pianist but as an effective stride player of the vanilla persuasion; in the event, Sullivan doesn’t shame himself on Low Down Dirty. Carter’s group sounds lush, not surprising given the leader’s silky demeanor as well as the presence of two more horns. Morton is back on trombone, along with Bill Coleman, that most insinuating trumpeter (he deserves more recognition, if anyone does), Georgie Auld on tenor, sounding as always like Ben Webster with a lung removed, and Benny Carter himself on clarinet. Other members of the group were drawn from Carter’s working big band, making it a comfortable, well-balanced session. Mosaic gives us two takes of two tunes each. As Morgenstern notes, Turner doesn’t sound all too comfortable on Beale Street Blues, experimenting on both takes with mic proximity and timbre, clipping off his phrases in an un-swinging way, and getting words scrambled. But then the high-flying Coleman takes wing and all is well again for the nonce.

The rest of disc two is taken up with a grab-bag of small group recordings generated by the boogie woogie craze, mostly performed by superior jazz groups led by Teddy Wilson, Lionel Hampton, and Henry “Red” Allen. Wilson seems an unlikely acolyte to the cause, and A Touch Of Boogie gives a hint as to how much boogie the buyer will get. But after several exemplary swing solos, a full-band flourish announces the plunge into that low-down groove. Lionel Hampton doesn’t waste any time in Munson Street Breakdown (October 1939), a boogie blues with a diminished release à la Air Mail Special. Hampton plays piano and vibes in turn, opening with driving walking-bass on the ivories. Central Avenue Breakdown takes off similarly, but this time Hamp shares the keyboard with Nat “King” Cole, flitting around in the (mostly out of tune) upper register using his patented two-finger technique. This gambit may have represented little more than a vaudevillian trick, but it didn’t sound like anybody else’s piano playing, either, and Hampton managed in similar showpieces to prefigure some bop clichés by several years. (Another Hampton small-group recording from 1939, Sweethearts On Parade, is more profoundly prophetic: In it, Hamp and his men manage to conjure up the kind of perfect in-the-pocket shuffle that practically defined the early rhythm & blues era, complete with booting tenor saxophone (courtesy of Chu Berry).) The third and last Hampton entry, Bouncing At The Beacon, features Hamp’s working LA combo featuring Marshall Royal on alto and Lester Young’s brother Lee on drums. Sir Charles Thompson is given the bass-piano duties while once more the leader tinkles all over the top of the keyboard (with his two fingers, mind you); Royal contributes a not-ready-for-prime-time solo, bristling with odd notes. The two takes of K.K. Boogie from “Red” Allen shows the direction his band was taking in ‘41, from a kind of advanced Dixieland towards a jump band like that of Louis Jordan’s. Kenny Kersey is the pianist here (Yep! – same guy as on Cootie Williams’ 1942 recording of Thelonious Monk’s Epistrophy), jumping in on a galloping bass; when he solos, he drops the boogie in favor of fleet Wilsonian figures.

Finally, Mosaic offers several cuts from the Will Bradley-Freddie Slack-Ray McKinley nexus, and they’re the most blandly commercial sides in the set. Bradley and McKinley waxed a boogie woogie hit early in the craze, Beat Me Daddy (Eight To The Bar) that led to these sides. To be fair, they are very well played, and perhaps it’s unfair to dis them for commercialism, since the music’s equally as far from the kind of sonic oatmeal cooked up by the Kay Kysers and Sammy Kayes of the day as it is from “real” boogie woogie. It’s just that this listener finds nothing so cringe-worthy as white folks doing blackface, or in this instance, blackvoice. Ray McKinley’s singing is especially unfortunate in this regard. The man seemed to have no inhibitions; but then, they tell me he hailed from Texas (and no doubt was raised in Tennessee, as the song goes). He not only does the blackvoice but in falsetto on the first take of Southpaw Serenade. Thankfully, Columbia released the other take. (Right after the war, Ray McKinley hired Eddie Sauter as arranger for his big band and recorded a suite of Sauter’s forward-looking compositions, so I guess I forgive him. Will Bradley, for his part, later became a “serious” composer in thrall to the works of Alban Berg. Who’da thunk it?) Trombonist Bradley takes the interlocutor role to McKinley’s Mista Bones (well, not quite literally) on the novelty Down The Road A-Piece, and the two old boys blithely traffic their “Man, Ise a-goin’s” and “I sho would lak dat’s” while Slack keeps up the rhythm in acceptable fashion. During the bass solo, Slack splashes a few notes on a celesta, followed by McKinley’s whistling (and all that while he plays the drums! Heavens to Betsy!). The listener is treated to three takes of this three-ring circus. I’m not well acquainted with Freddie Slack’s work, but Mosaic’s producers hold him in some regard, having already released a Mosaic Select three-disker of his band from the early 1940s. The guest list looks pretty decent.

There’s one remaining pianist in Mosaic’s anthology I want to mention as a kind of icing on this rich, chocolaty cake, and that is Mary Lou Williams. She arranged a piece for Andy Kirk’s band called Little Joe From Chicago, and subsequently recorded another, entirely different, solo piano piece by the same name, which opens disc three. It’s an enchanting walking-bass boogie all the way, conceived as only Mary Lou Williams could, i.e., far out. For one thing, her walking bass covers more pianistic ground than most, venturing into the middle of the keyboard by the end of chorus three, with descending chromatic thirds on top emphasizing a diminished scale, producing a momentary bitonal crunch. She uses and extends blues changes but ignores any set form – she’s improvising like a jazz player, not a blues player. Then she switches to minor blues changes and confines the bass to a narrower, deeper range, giving the music an evil face. All the way through, her touch, dynamics and figurations are tightly controlled yet swinging and propulsive. The music stays at the same level of rhythmic intensity throughout, never getting too hot or showy. Mary Lou was always cool – and comfortably ahead of the times. Even more than Hampton, she was playing bop-like music when bop was yet to be. Kudos to Mosaic for including this overlooked orphan in this musical family reunion. And let the good times roll.

~ Tom Djll