[Dixielandjazz] Ralph Sutton

[Steve Voce]

On 11/12/2010 04:29, Jack Tracy wrote:
Harry Callaghan did not address this thread to me, but I am jumping in briefly to let him know that Ralph Sharon died quite a few years ago.

Jack Tracy


>> ... I'm always confusing Ralph Sutton with Ralph Sharon, who of course has been
>> a mainstay with Tony Bennett lo these many years..
>   		 	   		
> RALPH SUTTON
> Although he had begun classical piano studies when he was nine, Ralph Sutton’s first job was in his father’s construction business.
>    “I remember it was raining – and I mean raining, and there I was putting shingles on a roof. That’s when I decided I’d concentrate on my music.”
>     As the young Sutton unveiled his prodigious piano technique during the Forties the two great stride solo pianists he was to emulate, Fats Waller and James P. Johnson had had their say. Waller died in 1943 and, due to poor health, Johnson’s dexterity diminished as the decade went on. Their contemporaries Willie “The Lion” Smith and Luckey Roberts were also passing into obscurity.
>    “Stride” piano grew from and left behind the early ragtime form. It was a full-bodied music, hustling and fast, which developed mainly in Harlem. Impelled by a driving left hand and a scintillating right, the style required a pianist with great power and ability. The tunes it used were comprehensively composed, but left room for hard-swinging improvisation. Art Tatum could play it better than anyone else could, but since he could play every kind of piano style so well he wasn’t regarded as a stride pianist. Count Basie and Duke Ellington both grew up amongst the stride pianists and it rubbed off on them, too.  Sutton was to make his mark with it, but he was also adept at classic Boogie-Woogie and, as Whitney Balliett remarked, “moved readily between iron-bound stride numbers and Debussy ballads”.
>     When he was twelve Sutton joined the country-style dance band led by his violin-playing father. He learned to play jazz from listening to the radio and to Fats Waller’s records and in December 1942 abandoned his studies at Northeast Missouri State University to join trombonist Jack Teagarden’s band in New York. Teagarden was a great musician, an amiable man and a prodigious drinker. Sutton was later to emulate him in each department. Two months later he was conscripted into the army, rejoining Teagarden soon after Sutton was discharged in 1945. He toured with Teagarden and they played six weeks together at New York’s Famous Door in 1947. During that time Sutton played piano in a weekly radio series devoted to traditional jazz called “This Is Jazz”. Here he attracted the attention of cornettist Wild Bill Davison and bandleader Eddie Condon. When Teagarden broke up his band in 1947 to join Louis Armstrong’s All Stars Sutton worked first with clarinettist Albert Nicholas in a trio at Jimmy Ryan’s and then with trumpeter Max Kaminsky’s band at the Village Vanguard.
>     In July 1948 he became the intermission pianist at Eddie Condon’s Club, and from then on was renowned as an unaccompanied piano player, although he did play occasionally in Condon’s band and later with the World’s Greatest Jazz Band.
>    Condon was at the centre of some of the hardest drinking musicians in history and Sutton joined in with a will. “They flatten their fifths,” Condon said of the Bebop musicians. “We drink ours.” (When Condon and Davison first visited Britain in 1957 they each drank two bottles of Scotch as their foundation for the day). Sutton flew on Condon’s coat tails, and worked with him on television and on radio as well as in the club. He also appeared on Condon’s records and in 1949 began a recording career that was to see him make countless albums under his own name. The most influential was his third, done for Columbia in 1950, which spread his name across the world.
>     Sutton was to become one of the first American jazz musicians to play in Britain after the war. Allowed in by some quirk of the law that barred the rest of them, he was able to give a solo recital at the Royal Festival Hall in June 1952 that was attended by the Queen.
>    A brief booking in San Francisco’s Club Hangover in 1954 gave him a taste for the place, and he finally left Condon in 1956 and moved to live there. He became the intermission pianist at the Club Hangover and worked with local bands, including those led by Bob Scobey and pianist Earl Hines, for whom Sutton deputised. He returned to Condon’s as a guest soloist in 1961 and 1962 and from 1963 became a prime mover in millionaire Dick Gibson’s jazz parties, informal week-ends for paying guests that mixed musicians from different jazz styles. The parties were held in Aspen, Colorado, and Sutton settled there, working regularly at Sunnie’s Rendezvous. The proprietor, Sunnie Anderson, became Sutton’s second wife. The two booked top jazz musicians, usually personal friends, to play at the saloon, and Sutton used it as his base for his tours around the world as a soloist.
>     In November 1968 Sutton became a founder member of The World’s Greatest Jazz Band, founded and named by Gibson. It was based on the musical style of Bob Crosby’s band and two ex-Crosby musicians, trumpeter Yank Lawson and bassist Bob Haggart, were its cornerstones. Despite the pretentious title, the music was magnificent, combining tunefulness, inspiration and technique in its soloists.
>     The normally placid Sutton tired of jibes about the band’s title. On one occasion in Idaho he was being interviewed backstage on tape for radio by a local disc jockey. The usual question fell from the man’s lips.
>     “Isn’t the name for the band pretentious?” he asked.
>     “The name is meant to describe something that a group does or can do. In our case, we do it better than anyone else in the world. We did have another name for the band,” answered Sutton.
>     “What was that?” asked the interviewer.
>     “We were going to call ourselves the Sheep Fuckers, but we decided not to.”
>     The man hastily closed his tape recorder and left.
>     Sutton stayed with the band until he returned to play for six months with clarinettist Peanuts Hucko’s Quartet in Denver in October 1974. He expanded his regular European tours to include Australia and annual visits to Japan, working regularly at a string of festivals across the world. In 1975  James D. Schacter published Sutton’s biography “Piano Man”, revised and enlarged in 1994 as “Loose Shoes: The Story of Ralph Sutton”.
>     He continued to tour as a soloist and in 1980 recorded an outstanding series of albums for the Chazz label in partnerships with Ruby Braff, Kenny Davern and, working at the time as “The Last of the Whorehouse Piano Players”, in duets with Jay McShann.
>     In 1992 Alyn Shipton recorded a three-part series with him that was broadcast on Radio Three under the title “Stride By Stride”. Radio Three also broadcast one of Sutton’s recitals from Bristol.
> Later that year he suffered a stroke that affected his left hand, but he rapidly overcame the problem, also giving up drinking at this time. He continued to visit Britain, climaxing his visits with a tremendous performance with a mainly American pick up group at the 1999 Brecon Jazz Festival.
>   Steve Voce
> Ralph Earl Sutton, pianist: born Hamburg, near St. Louis, 4 November 1922; married (three sons); died Bailey, Colorado, 30 December 2001.
>