[Dixielandjazz] Boogie Woogie or Blues

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

That is precisely NOT the question, Herr Alf plays a jumble of blues and boogie material with too many unidiomatic transitions.... 
Blues Piano and Boogie Woogie as exampled by Jimmy Yancey and Meade Lux Lewis, Albert Ammons and Cripple Clarence Lofton is a blues idiom, simplified and cheapened by piano players in the 1940s but later played by Otis Spann, Vern Harrison (as Boogie Woogie Red) and Eddie Boyd (who made some remarkable recordings in Finland near the end of his life.  And a few others can be mentioned.  
The distinction is between pianists of that sort, Sunnyland Slim, too, also referred to as Barrelhouse pianists, where there was some relation among earlier pianists to ragtime, and the general style of Jelly Roll Morton, fast or slow with a uniformity of approach. Roosevelt Sykes was another master -- Monkey Joe Coleman, see the series on the Magpie label !!!  Or DOCUMENT records, not least!
This is quite different from the European and legit. approach of first of all ragtimers, not least on the east coast, and their successors playing the antecedents of Stride Piano, Eubie Blake and Luckey Roberts, and the stride masters, James P. Johnson, Willie "the Lion" Smith, Fatso Wallero, as Ralph Sutton called him, and Hank Duncan, wonderful pianist, whose lighter accent on the left hand seems to have influenced the young Dick Wellstood. I could add such names as Earl Hines and Herman Chittison, and for awareness of blues around Kansas City Pete Johnson and Jay McShann, though arguably not Mary Lou Williams, who could flatten out rhythms and suggest her Little Joe from Chicago had been elsewhere by over-pedalling.  Hines could deliver BOOGIE WOOGIE ON ST. LOUIS BLUES because of his superlative accomplishment, ear and fingers, and Meade Lux Lewis's friend and disciple Bob Sealy delivered a tremendous performance of the Hines number on a CD with various other younger pianists --- but these things are rather of the order of tinges, as in Morton's so-called Spanish Tinge, to the central jazz basis of the music.  Of course a lot of 1940s imitation Boogie Woogie is vacuous trash.  Beat me, Daddy, Eight to the Bar?  Get to the bar before me if you like, as long as you're paying. 
Blues, Barrelhouse and Boogie pianists in the classic succession have damned with no praise the showers of bum showy notes in the mongrelisation of Roosevelt Sykes and Pete Johnson delivered by  Memphis Slim... 
BUt to announce James P. Johnson and Fats Waller performances as Boogie Woogie is like misusing the term "Socialist" with reference to a US presidential candidate, even calling Barry Goldwater a Communist, or Buddy Bolden a bopper.  
Listen. If you don't have a right ear, that's what your left ear is for!
Robert R. Calder   


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