[Dixielandjazz] PAT Flowers and Willie Mabon

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

I should continue my comments on the Italian book club Boogie LP.

I mentioned Lloyd Glenn, who might be a little obscure (one of his arrangements with Don Albert was a favourite record of Jimmy Rushing's, but not one feels for the excruciating vocal)
Sam Price should be well known,  McShann too, though too often mistaken for a bluesman -- he could play blues wonderfully well as an Oklahoman musically educated in Kansas City -- and the late John Farrell seemed never to have heard the story that Milt Buckner developed his locked hands approach because his hands were too small to play in more conventional style.  Milt played stride piano for Farrell when he went along to one of the latter's gigs. 

Like Milt, Pat Flowers was from Detroit, but was it would seem classically trained, and if you want a faster more accurate stride pianist you will probably labour in vain, to judge from the Flowers recordings collected on the Classics label, including Waller material not least from a Waller memorial broadcast which also featured James P. Johnson. Black and Blue went looking for musicians who like Flowers had not been recorded or had not gigged other than locally in decades.  I've not heard the later Flowers material.  I do have the Gene Rodgers set on Black and Blue, in a modernish style decades after the intro to Hawkins's BODY AND SOUL. He did make other recordings, and he turns up in a novelty boogie soundie on YouTube, as well as duetting with an even more prodigious player, I think Dorothy Donegan, on a clip which concludes with them being conducted by Cab Calloway.  

The most moronic confusion between stride or stride-related jazz piano, and boogie and blues, was the SUNDAY TIMES CD of Boogie Woogie with James P. Johnson's photo on front.  

Not to mention Clint Eastwood's reference to FATS WALLER in relation to his decidedly tawdry film about blues piano.  

The fact that somebody in the 1940s came to admire both Waller and Cripple Clarence Lofton is no reason to link the actual music and musicians beyond the narrow context of one schoolboy's listening. Muddy Waters was fine, muddied listening and discussion is just the stuff in wet ditches.

cheers!
Robert R. Calder