Mule Walk by James P. Johnson (1)

Our favourite four-year-old mule is now walking again and we can’t think of any better way to celebrate than a modest tribute to the song that gives title to this blog.

By the spring of 1913, James P. Johnson was playing at the Jungles Casino, a cellar on 62nd Street, in the neighbourhood called The Jungles, the Negro section of Hell’s Kitchen and one of the toughest places in NY. The Jungles Casino was officially a dancing school called “Drake’s Dancing Class”, since it was very hard for coloured people to get a dance-hall license. 

He described the venue as “a cellar, without fixings. The furnace, coal, and ashes were still there behind a partition. The coal bin was handy for guests to stash their liquor in case the cops dropped in. There were dancing classes alright, but there were no teachers. The “pupils” danced sets, two-steps, waltzes, schottisches, and “The Metropolitan Glide”, a new step”.

JPJ played for those dances but, instead of playing straight, he broke into a rag in certain places and the younger dancers – mostly from Charleston, South Carolina, and other places in the South – screamed when he “got good to them with a bit of rag in the dance music now and then”, “hollering and screaming until they were cooked”.

That’s how Mule Walk was composed, as breakdown music for such wild and comical dance sets, the more solid and groovy the better. JPJ assimilated those old-country dance tunes and translated them into his own pianistic language, which would result in the foundation of stride piano. In this sense, Mule Walk, Gut Stomp and Carolina Shout, all of them composed in the same period, must be considered a prototype of the stride piano style. However, it is safe to assume that he must have played Mule Walk differently then and in his three recordings from the late 30s and early 40s.

Copyrighted on February 1940 by Bregman, Vocco & Conn, Mule Walk is a three-section composition in B flat with an infectious rhythm that perfectly suits JPJ’s energetic piano playing. Some ragtime player stated a few years ago that Mule Walk is “one of the most prominent examples of stride writing using minimal melodic elements and lots of rhythm”. But a seasoned listener will come to the conclusion that this is not a “primitive” composition, neither are any of JPJ’s performances of the tune. His playing is always enhanced by a fine sense of dynamics and a crystal-clear touch that always draw a melodic quality from the piano, and yet his extraordinary technique and conception in no way inhibit feeling. 

Every stride piano player may have a different composition considered as “the most difficult one” but, unquestionably, Mule Walk is one of the toughest. But, in Mike Lipskin’s words, “the big challenge is probably not so much a particular piece, but how to work within the style, keeping it fresh, inventive and how to maintain a left hand smoothness and relaxation”. A stellar example would be JPJ's Blue Note recording of Mule Walk.

Regarding improvisation on Mule Walk and other stride chestnuts, Grant Simpson comments that “the vehicles I use to solo on are usually standards. When it comes to Carolina Shout or Mule Walk, I find it incredibly difficult to take that tune as only a "frame work" to work within. I can do it as an exercise, but would never want to perform it that way. It's not that I can't, but for some reason it doesn't "feel right" or "sound right" to me. Probably because, when improvising, we are left with two basic choices: harmonic or melodic. I think JPJ dealt with this if you listen to his versions of said Carolina Shout and then listen to If Dreams Come True. I believe the difference is that Carolina Shout, Mule Walk or Keep Off The Gras are primarily harmonically structured. Their ingredients are primarily chordal in structure - even the melodies. When you try to truly improvise on those, you are somewhat restricted to staying within that structure or the piece no longer stays in true stride tradition. When I began to bare down on stride as the fundamental foundation of my playing, I had to change the way I improvised on some tunes. Not standards in which I still keep stride components happening, but the right hand solos are basically clarinet type of lines.”

3rd Annual Arbors Records Invitational Jazz Party - final piano jam

Do you want to try eight-handed piano? That's easy, having Dick Hyman as the master of ceremonies, and Rossano Sportiello, Bernd Lhotzky, Stephanie Trick, Paolo Alderighi, Mike Lipskin et al joining in!



The Sheik Of Araby never sounded so crowded.

Mike Lipskin - Stride Piano Styles

Stride piano master Mike Lipskin's new CD, "Stride Piano Styles" (Buskirk Productions) is now available directly from Mike's website or from CD Baby.

Here's the track list (piano solos unless otherwise indicated):

1. Yesterday (John Lennon – Paul McCartney) 4:15
2. Where Are You? (Harold Adamson – Jimmy McHugh) 5:00
3. Sweetie Dear (Joe Jordan) 4:20
4. Snowy Morning Blues (James P. Johnson) 5:14
5. When Sunny Gets Blue (Jack Segal – Marvin Fisher) 4:46
6. Blue Room (Richard Rodgers – Lorenz Hart ) 3:37
7. It Takes a Little More to Score (Mike Lipskin) 2:29.
8. Lover (Richard Rodgers – Lorenz Hart) 3:36
9. Isn't It a Lovely Day (Irving Berlin) 3:37
10. Keep Smoking That Cigar (Mike Lipskin) 3:20
11. Willow Weep for Me (Ann Ronell) 3:07

with Ruby Braff, cornet; George Barnes, Wayne Wright, guitars:

12. Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams (Ted Koehler – Billy Moll) 2:50
13. If I Could Be With You One Hour Tonight (Johnson – Creamer) 4:17
14. S’Wonderful (George and Ira Gershwin ) 3:39

James P. Johnson's last rent party - reviewed

The James P. Johnson Foundation, the Johnson family and Smalls Club organized an all day “rent party” to raise money to buy a monument to commemorate this great musician who so far rests in peace in an unmarked grave in Maspeth, Queens, Mt. Olivet Cemetery.

The concert took place last Sunday, October 4, at Smalls Jazz Club, and Ben Ratliff has reviewed it for the New York Times. Some excerpts are reproduced here:

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Raising Roof and Headstone for Pioneering Pianist
By BEN RATLIFF
Published: October 5, 2009

"A definition of righteousness: about 75 people, crammed into the West Village club Smalls, watching a series of pianists play James P. Johnson on a grand piano in a benefit concert to buy a headstone for his grave.

(...)

Johnson died in 1955 fairly isolated after four years of illness, and his body lies in an unmarked grave in Maspeth, Queens. The spot was found in February by Scott Brown, a Johnson scholar, and the idea was hatched for “James P. Johnson’s Last Rent Party,” a daylong blowout of Johnsonia at Smalls on Sunday, with historical talks and performances.

The day ended with five hours of solo piano — by 12 performers — and a little bit of four-hands playing. Unlike the Harlem rent parties Johnson used to play, it wasn’t remotely a competition. Though several pianists wrestled with the same material (especially the charging “Carolina Shout”), the emphasis was not on besting one another but on beneficially knocking the tunes around, treating fairly neglected music like common repertory.

Ethan Iverson, the pianist from the Bad Plus, announced that the beginning of his set would be “classical”: an earnest shot at Johnson’s style. He played “Carolina Shout” with sensitivity and clarity, keeping the stride rhythm steady in the left hand. Then he went off into his own updated, posteverything style, full of explicit dissonance, repetition and strange dynamics.

“The Charleston” was his killer: it started with deliberately messy tone rows, his two hands playing at cross-purposes, the left staccato and slow, the right flowing and medium-tempo. Inevitably, and with humor, he finished in the song’s proper style.

Mike Lipskin, a pianist based in San Francisco who studied with the stride pianist Willie (The Lion) Smith, played stride-piano songs as if they were his drinking buddies: his versions of Johnson’s “It Takes Love to Cure the Heart’s Disease” and Luckey Roberts’s “Pork and Beans” were rowdy and familiar, and he made Johnson’s “If I Could Be With You (One Hour Tonight)” mellifluous and lovely, smiling at the audience rather than monitoring the difficult variations in his left-hand stride patterns.

The evening’s revelation was Aaron Diehl, a pianist in his mid-20s who has played with Wynton Marsalis and Wycliffe Gordon. His style, on “Scaling the Blues,” “Over the Bars” and the second movement of Johnson’s “Jazzamine Concerto,” was modest, secure and insinuating, with an iron sense of time. A few different pianists worked in their own tunes as Johnson tributes; Mr. Diehl’s was a slow, gorgeous blues.

Ted Rosenthal and Dick Hyman closed the night. They performed some pieces together at the keyboard, including “Twilight Rag”; then Mr. Hyman, one of the world’s great specialists in early jazz piano, performed Johnson’s music with well-practiced dynamic shifts, elegant and sometimes a bit too showy for the circumstances. But complaining is pointless. Mr. Hyman smoothly played the entire 10-minutes-plus solo-piano version of Johnson’s “Yamekraw,” a rhapsody with classical flourishes and stride interjections. Who else does that?"

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James P. Johnson's last rent party!

James P. Johnson was admitted to Queens General Hospital on November 15, 1955, after having suffered his eighth stroke at home and, on November 17, he died due to a final massive stroke. All the major New York newspapers published his obituary, and he was identified not only as a pianist but also as a prolific composer but, according to Down Beat (December 28, 1955), fewer than 75 persons attended the funeral services at University Chapel in midtown Manhattan two days later.

James P. Johnson, the father of stride piano, composer of The Charleston and The Carolina Shout and one of the founders of modern jazz piano lies, shockingly, in an unmarked grave in Maspeth, Queens, Mt. Olivet Cemetery.

The James P. Johnson Foundation, the Johnson family and Smalls Club have organized an all day “rent party” to raise money to buy a monument to commemorate this great musician. It will take place on Sunday, October 4th beginning at 1:00 PM at Smalls Jazz Club, located at 183 West 10th Street at 7th Avenue.

The afternoon will begin with a symposium by musicologist and Johnson scholar Scott Brown on the life and work of James P. Johnson, followed by Mark Borowsky from the James P. Johnson Foundation and, around 3:00 will then be a steady stream of pianists to play solo piano in tribute to James P. Johnson.

This is the complete schedule:

• 1:00 PM Doors Open


• 1:30 PM Opening Words – Barry Glover and The James P. Johson Society


• 2:00 PM Symposium – James P. Johnson: The Man Who Made The Twenties Roar – Scott E. Brown (this will include an exhibit from The James P. Johnson archive housed at The Rutgers Institute for Jazz Studies)


• 3:00 PM Symposium - James P. Johnson: Invisible Pianist of the Harlem Renaissance – Mark Borowsky


• 4:00 PM J. Michael O’Neal and Natalie Wright


• 4:30 PM John Bunch


• 5:00 PM Tardo Hammer


• 5:30 PM Conal Fowkes


• 6:00 PM Terry Waldo


• 6:30 PM Spike Wilner


• 7:00 PM Ethan Iverson


• 7:30 PM Mike Lipskin


• 8:00 PM Aaron Diehl


• 8:30 PM Ted Rosenthal


• 9:00 PM Dick Hyman

Suggested tax-free donations are $20 with all the proceeds to go to the James P. Johnson Foundation.

Battling the Jersey Rocket

Regarding my post on Willie The Lion Smith, Eubie Blake and Donald Lambert playing at the 1960 Newport Jazz Festival, superb stride pianist Mike Lipskin, who was Eubie's and The Lion's protégé, has written in the Stride Piano Yahoo group:

"The many times I was with Eubie at home, recording a 10 hours interview for the Rutgers Jazz Institute, he would often praise some pianist, and always do so about James P. Johnson, but just as often would talk of others and not praise them. I never heard him go overboard about Jelly Roll Morton or Scott Joplin as pianists, though he liked their compositions.

He loved Luckey Roberts and respected him very much. They were close friends. However, he once commented with a laugh that Luckey "ruined the voice of many singers" by not modulating if their range was in another key, but simply playing down or up one octave.

When he and Willie the Lion were on the bill with Donald Lambert at the Newport Jazz Festival, Lambert performed before they did. Eubie said to Willie "How the hell are we going to follow him?""

That's how even such stride/ragtime masters were scared of battling the Jersey Rocket!