[Dixielandjazz] James P. Johnson Headstone Party.

[Stephen G Barbone]

NY TIMES - October 6, 2009 - By Ben Ratliff

Raising Roof and Headstone for Pioneering Pianist


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?