[Dixielandjazz] Boogie pianists

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

Bob Seeley is almost certainly the best around. 
The question about boogie pianists is a little different from that of other pianists or other musicians, since the basis of the music is the attempt to produce music from the piano by various means distinct from orthodox piano playing. The fingering among the self-taught pioneers and indeed those who brought the music to a climax of accomplishment tends to horrify piano teachers, just as Monk did (I suspect he built his music not from the orthodoxy that I gather he had some training in, but from the amateur honky-tonk playing of his father.
I've seen Morton described as a not very good pianist, but the thing about him and about Ammons, Lewis, Yancey et. al is the absolute clarity of the rhythmic outline. Tuts Washington, a younger New Orleans pianist, also played with the same sort of attach. 
There's just a kind of phrasing which is utterly alien to the rhythmic precision of the best boogie playing. It's a sort of thing orthodox piano teachers try to inculcate for the sake of playing music very different from the music where rhythm is primary. 
The thing about the technique where rhythm is primary is that it tends to great distinctiveness but reastricts repertoire. If you want to discuss who is the best, you have the problem that the very best boogie performances may come from people with small repertoires. The technique which militates against good boogie playing, and against primacy of rhythm, is intended to establish a certain versatility. 
Bob Seeley, great! But as in a lot of fields you might find that there are three or four at a level clear of everybody else, and when you look for a fifth best there are suddenly not three or four but twenty or thirty candidates. 
Then again, in terms of a higher standard applicable to historical performers, some youngsters might not be terribly good, and might even have come at the music through the crude medium popularised in the 1940s. 
There is another reference on the web to for instance Jerry Lee Lewis playing boogie with added guitar etc. 
Well, no. In his and a number of other cases the other instruments just fill in things missing from the piano part. Very scrawny what he plays, even when using his foot or not quite rescuing the odd phrase two-fisted piano-player into  respectable intelligibility. He did use his fists, literally, but crudely...