Duke Ellington, in TOPS Magazine, 1938

The last 2 months of 1926 marked the moment when Duke Ellington’s music came of age. His band’s debut on the Vocalion record label that November put a marker down that a new jazz voice of maturity and imagination had arrived, with original and creative ideas about how to use a large jazz band, and which raised the question Ellington himself posed about the balance of his work between the “serious composer” and the “swing musician”.

Duke Ellington - Satin Doll

Late 1926 was also the start of Ellington’s regular and long-lived association with the agent, publisher, and sometime songwriter Irving Mills, who was to play a major part in deciding that Ellington would be presented to the world as an jazz artist every bit as much as an entertainer.

By this time, Ellington was already twenty-sever years old and had been active on the New York music scene for some years, establishing himself as a talented stride pianist who accompanied several blues singers on disc. As a bandleader he had played, since 1924, at the Kentucky Club (and its forerunner the Hollywood Club) on West 49th Steet in Manhattan. His recording career as a leader also stretched back to 1924, although his early discs include very little that pointed to to his future artistic and commercial success.

Edward Kennedy Ellington was an urbane, middle-clas African-American from Washington D.C., who had a musical family and had taken piano lessons, but he was largely an autodidact when it came to composition and bandleading.

He had acquired his name “Duke” while working as a teenage soda jerk at the Poodle Dog Cafe in Washington, where his pride in his appearance gave him something of a regular air, which he retained throughout his life.

As a boy, Ellington has more direct contact with the African-American musical world than did Fletcher Henderson, although he came from a similarly comfortable social background. The young Ellington was a regular attendee at Washington’s Howard Theater, where he witnessed many touring vaudeville acts performing a wide range of music.

He also came into contact with visiting pianists like Eubie Blake, Luckey Roberts and James P. Johnson, as well as others who hailed from his hometown, like Claude Hopkins.

Benny Carter & Nat King Cole - Congero Harlequin Bounce

Carter had learned his craft in the band led in Wilberforce, Ohio, by Henderson’s brother Horace, and in early 1928 he spent some months in the orchestra of one of Henderson’s New York rivals, Charlie Johnson.

The hallmarks of his arranging style are to be heard in his first recorded chart, Charleston Is the Best Dance, After all.

In the opening chorus the brass take the lead with a clipped version of the melody over saxophone chords, swapping the lead with Carter’s alto in the channel.

Carter did not stay long with Henderson. After leading his own groups, and briefly joining drummer Chick Webb, he once again followed Don Redman’s footsteps and took his place in McKinney’s Cotton Pickers. Nevertheless, before he left Henderson, he wrote several arrangements which were to point directly toward Henderson’s own mature writing style, of which Keep a Song in Your Soul is perhaps the best.

Carter’s departure coincided with a low point in the Henderson band’s fortunes. A disastrous attempt to feature the band in a revue called Horseshoes, in 1929, had led to the departure of several key musicians, and the band Henderson led in the 1930-31 season involved him recruiting several new players.

Garvin Bushell, from Jazz from the Beginning

A scholarly looking, middle-class chemistry graduate, with a penchant for baseball, Fletcher Henderson was the living antithesis of those primitive qualities held in such high regard by early jazz critics. Although he grew up in the South, Henderson had little to do with the stereotypical image of the African-American laborer picking cotton, which was still the state’s dominant rural industry during his childhood.

As a pianist, he became an adept sight-reader as a child, with a good sense of relative pitch and a broad classical repertoire - all qualities instilled in him by a demanding father - but as a young adult, Henderson had to learn how to play jazz and blues, neither of which came naturally to him.

Fletcher Henderson & his Orchestra - Shake your feet

In the longer term, Henderson’s importance lay in his role as a bandleader, and the way that, in the mid 1920’s, he and his colleagues Don Redman and, later, Benny Carter took forward the innovations of Hickman, Grofé and Whiteman to establish a paradigm for big-band arranging that lasted for the next twenty years.

By 1925, Henderson’s orchestra was the leading African-American big-band in New York, and through its extensive touring, it also established itself on a national basis.

It maintained this position until the end of the 1920’s, and Henderson’s bands of the early 1930’s were also highly regarded, although by that period there was stiff competition from Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway, among others.

Although he arranged some of his band’s very earliest discs himself, Henderson’s own significance as an arranger came much later on, in the 1930’s, when he was writing for other leaders such as Benny Goodman.

Nevertheless, the work of his 1920’s band was a very significant step on the way toward this later writing, which, by paring back his craft to its essentials, became the foundation of the universal sound of the swing era, in a way that the more subtle and varied writing of Duke Ellington, for example, did not.

The more I worked with jazz, the surer I was that its authentic vitality would take root and develop on what I called a symphonic basis.

Paul Whiteman, from Jazz, 1926

Few famous bandleaders have been the cause of more critical controversy than Paul Whiteman. To many Americans in the 1920’s and 1930’s, this avuncular, rotund figure, waving a baton, and with a wry grin under his pencil moustache, personified jazz.

Paul Whiteman Orchestra - Markush Tango 1932

Whiteman was beloved by his musicians, whom he treated fairly and generously. They nicknamed him “Pops” or “Fatho“, and the majority of them shared saxophonist Arthur Rollini’s view that he was “truly a great man with a quick wit”.

By no means everything his band played could be called jazz - from arrangements of the light classics to settings for singers - but particularly in the period from 1927 onward, his big band included in its ranks many of those who have come to be regarded as the finest white soloists in the history of the music, from Bix Beiderbecke and Jack Teagarden to Frank Trumbauer and Jimmy Dorsey.

Further more, his ambition to bring jazz into conjunction with European symphonic music resulted in the composition of George Gerschwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, which, while not jazz itself, draws heavily on aspects of it and is one of the most enduring and universally popular pieces of American concert music of the twentieth century.

Paul Whiteman played the leading role in influencing the kind of arrangements played by such bands of 10 pieces or more

- white and African-American - during the early 1920’s, by supplying a functional and effective pattern for composers and arrangers to follow. His concept of brass and reed sections, and how to voice to parts they played, was the important aspect of his innovation.

Whiteman was successful because he developed his approach at the very time when big bands were making the transition from the instrumentation and ragtime-derived ensemble approach to the modern style of big band typified by Fletcher Henderson, and subsequently, Duke Ellington.

Boogie-woogie piano jazz from Meade “Lux” Lewis

Some stride players took such exception to what they saw as a simplistic variation on the twelve-measure blues that they refused to play it - Fats Waller even including a clause in his contracts that expressly stated he would not perform any kind of boogie-woogie.

But not even Waller could ignore the popularity of the style.

Despite his personal taste, Waller often found himself billed alongside pianists who specialized in the genre. For example, during his 1939 residency at Chicago’s Panther Room, he alternated sets with the formidable team of Albert Ammons, Pete Johnson, and Meade “Lux” Lewis at three piano’s, who called themselfves the “Boogie Woogies“.

Their playing offered a lively cross-section of the various patterns that made up the style, which had emerged onto the national stage during the 1920’s and taken its name from Clarence “Pinetop” Smith’s december 1928 recording of “Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie“.

Boogie-woogie piano goes back further than that, however. Like most other styles in jazz, boogie-woogie is a synthesis of different elements, in this case mainly drawn from piano accompaniments that were developed to back blues singers on the various touring circuits, and also from a rough-and-ready type of African-American solo piano, played for entertainment and dancing in the lumber, turpentine, and railroad camps of the Southern States: Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia and Florida.

This piano style was predominantly blues-based as well, as one of its rural practitioners, Buster Pickens explained:

Up and down the Sante Fe tracks in those days was known as the barrehouse joints. These places were located in the area where the mill was in, and you played all night long in those days. They danced all night long. And the blues was what they wanted ; they didn’t want anything else.

Barrelhouse, was the generic term for a bar, café, or restaurant that provided food, drink, and, once a week or so, dancing as well, for isolated rural communities and labor camps. There was, frequently illicit backroom gambling too.

Earl Hines in action at the piano together with Jackie Byard

Some elements of Hines’s playing reflect the accentuated right-hand technique of other Chicagoan pianist such as Zinky Cohn and Cassino Simpson, neither of whom approached Hines’s virtuoso flair.

His fellow pianist Teddy Wilson aptly summed up Hines’s brilliance both as a soloist and as a band player.

Earl Hines was born, in a suburb of Pittsburgh, into a musical family. His father, Joseph, was cornetist, his mother played the organ, and his sister Nancy was a pianist who went on to lead her own bands. Hines started serious study of the piano when he was only nine, and he left high school to go straight into the band of a local baritone singer called Lois Deppe, who recognized Hines’s talent and organized jobs for him that involved bandleading and directing as well as simply accompanying at the piano.

After a tour with Deppe in 1923, Hines moved to Chicago late the following year. He quickly found work with some of the city’s leading bandleaders, including Carroll Dickerson and Erskine Tate, who provided backing for Louis Armstrong. Consequently, Hines became a regular accompanist for Louis Armstrong, joining his studio recording bands whenever possible and cutting several influential discs with Armstrong’s Hot Five.

His playing was nicknamed the “trumpet” piano style, because his right-hand phrases to some extent mimicked the melodies of the trumpet in early jazz bands, and, to emphasize their melodic content, he played them in octaves.

It seems that Hines was physically well equipped for the piano, with extremely flexible hands and wrists, and he was naturally able to achieve a level of playing that took considerable practice and long experience for others.

Earl Hines reached his mature approach by the late 1920’s, and although he followed the general trend of the 1930’s and 1940’s by adopting a more relaxed approach to rhythm, and playing less on top of the beat, the main change in his work was that its characteristics became more pronounced.

He was also to become a figure of admiration among the musicians who developed the modern jazz of the 1940’s, many of whom passed through the ranks of the big band he began leading in 1928, and which came to full flower in the late 1930’s.

Fats Waller, a great entertainer on the piano - “The Joint is Jumpin”

Famous as much for his gargantuan appetite (for food, drink and female company) as for his musical abilities, Waller’s success as a popular entertainer and singer tended to mask his brilliance as a pianist and organist, let alone as the composer of dozens of tunes, many of which became hit songs.

Nothing better demonstrates the way in which his louche lifestyle contrasted with the refinement of his musical achievements than the story that his own son, when asked at school what his father did for a living, paused for a moment and then said: “He drinks gin”.

Waller’s initial public success was not at the piano at all. He became the first great jazz organist, using the instrument he has begun playing as a consequence of his lay preacher father’s religious work to extend improvisational ideas in jazz. He used imaginative combinations of pipes within an atmospheric style that combined the sacred world of spirituals and gospel with the secular charms of the darkened movie house.

Playing stride piano, Waller not only demonstrated a technical command of the style and immediately identifiable touch that imbued all levels of dynamic, from the quietest tinkle to the loudest fortissimo. He was also one of the most rhythmically subtle of players, and from the late 1920’s until his death, his mere presence in the studio was an almost certain guarantee of swing, relentless momentum, and joyful zest.

During his career, he made over four hundred recordings, but at the heart of his output is a series of piano solos, of which the fifteen different pieces recorded in 1929, four sequels from 1934, his London Suite from 1939, and a final five pieces from 1941 definitively cover almost every aspect of stride.

In them, he also adopted many of the techniques of a style that has traditionally been frowned upon jazz critics - “novelty piano“.

These pianists harnessed an impressive array of technically difficult embellishments to a light ragtime style, albeit without the rhythmic emphasis or harmonic inflections of jazz.

The higher class fellows who played things from the big shows looked down on this music. Nobody thought of writing it down. It was supposed to be the lower type of music, but now it is considered all right. I don’t quite get that part of it”.

Eubie Blake, quoted in Rudi Blesh, Combo USA.

Many promising pianists who went on to become celebrated jazz musicians began their careers on keyboards belonging to neighbors or friends, but ofter their blandishments cajoled proud parents into making sufficient sacrifices to buy an instrument for the family home.

A good example was Eubie Blake. Blake was a significant ragtime and early jazz composer, initially writing formal rag compositions but subsequently turning his band to popular songs. Born in 1883, just over fourteen years after Scott Joplin, Blake continued to perform into his nineties, keeping the traditions of the ragtime era alive well into the second half of the twentieth century.

Ragtime jazz - Eubie Blake: It’s right here for you

In his final years, there was a sense that he was celebrated more because of his longevity than his accomplishments. He died just a few days after his hundredth birthday. Yet his musical achievements were considerable, and he deserves to be reexamined as a significant link in the chain of events that led to the emergence of piano jazz.

At the time Blake composed “Charleston Rag”, he had not learned to write his music down. He memorized the piece, he said, by playing it night after night in cabarets.

He also memorized music written by other ragtime composers, including that of William Turk, who was the father-figure for Baltimore’s ragtime players, and also that of Jess Picket, a gambler and pimp described by Blake as a “gentleman of leisure“.

“He had a love of the great composers of the day such as Ravel, Holst, Schoenberg and Debussy”, wrote saxophonist Bud Freeman, who met him in 1925 and was treated by Bix to an impromptu piano recital of Debussy and Eastwood Lane compositions.

“There came out some new records on Gennett by the Wolverines. When we heard Bix on those we did another flip. How could it be so good? … What a beautiful tone, sense of melody, great drive, poise, everything! He just played lovely jazz and knew how to lead a band”.

In his mature solo’s, the choice of notes veers less toward the the flattened tones of the African-American blues scale than to whole-tone scales or ninth and thirteenth intervals, played wit a clear, bell-like cornet tone. He also adopted an unhurried timing that frequently played key notes or accents slightly behind the beat.

Beiderbecke made a tremendous impression on everyone who heard him in the flesh from the beginning of 1924 onward, when he began working throughout the Midwest with the Chicago-based Wolverines. Eddie Condon, for example, initially heard him playing piano; “For the first time I realized that music isn’t all the same”, he wrote. When he finally heard Beidersbeck’s cornet, “The sound came out like a girl saying yes”.

It was not until Beiderbecke reached the ranks of Jean Goldkette’s big band in late 1924 that the modern jazz listener can hear with any clarity his fresh ideas and confident personality in his first recorded cornet solo with the group, “I didn’t Know”.

The Wolverines in Copenhagen - 1924

Just as Armstrong’s playing matured during the time he was a featured soloist with Henderson, Beiderbecke’s made a similar leap forward in the larger band of Goldkette, with the difference that he was never entirely comfortable as a big-band ensemble player, apparently never mastering the art of sight-reading and, for the most part, relying on his quick and ability as a soloist, while those around him diligently played their parts from the sheet music.

Art Hodes, from Hot man

Chicago and Louis Armstrong
It took the return of Louis Armstrong from New York to create the first substantial body of recordings in jazz history to contain extended virtuoso solos. In his work with King Oliver, both on record and in live performance, Armstrong had retained a deference for his mentor, and in total of just four solo choruses in approximately forty different discs by the Creole Jazz Band, there is little more that a glimpse of the talent that was to emerge over the next couple of years.

His solo career began in earnest while he was in New York in 1924-25, in live appearances and recordings with Fletcher Henderson’s band and on a series of freelance recording dates. Two aspects of Armstrong’s work emerged clearly in this latter group of discs - first, his ensemble playing with Clarence William’s Blue Five, and second, his instrumental blues accompaniments for such singers as Bessie Smith.

Somehow, Armstrong manages the almost impossible feat of continuing to provide a swinging, forceful lead while actually holding the excessive zeal of his rhythm section in check.

What Armstrong brought to small-group jazz was a sense of swing ; a relaxed, yet even more dramatic and original way of interpreting a melody than that of trumpeters like Keppard and King Oliver.

Satchmo’s golden favorites tracklist:

• Jeepers creepers
• A kiss to build a dream on
• Old man mose
• Shadrack
• I can’t give you anything but love
• The whiffenpoof song (baa baa baa)
• La vie en rose
• Someday you’ll be sorry
• Blueberry hill
• On the sunny side of the street
• You rascal you (i’ll be glad when you’re dead)
• When it’s sleepy time down south