Boogie woogie piano jazz - Meade Lux Lewis
November 24th, 2008 | by Tom |Stride was not the only popular jazz piano style in the period from the 1920’s to the 1940’s. If it was the lingua franca of the Harlem rent party, its Chicago counterpart was the rough-edged, blues-based style of boogie-woogie, which reached its zenith a little later than stride, during World War II.
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.
Tags: boogie woogie, fats waller, meade lux lewis, piano jazz