One Last “Rent Party” for The Father of Stride Piano

September 24th, 2009

He may not be a household name, but anyone who’s heard his recordings—or his player-piano rolls—will tell you that James P. Johnson was one of the all-time greats of early jazz piano. Picking up where Scott Joplin left off, he developed “Harlem Stride,” the freewheeling style later popularized by one of his pupils, Fats Waller, and Willie “The Lion” Smith. Johnson was Bessie Smith’s and Ethel Waters’s favorite accompanist. He was also a top songwriter on Broadway, and one of his tunes, “Charleston,” became the defining song of the Roaring Twenties. Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Art Tatum, and Thelonius Monk are just a few of the musicians Johnson influenced. By the 1930s and ’40s, Johnson was composing orchestral works like “Yamenkraw” and “Harlem Symphony,” and a one-act opera, “De Organizer,” done with poet Langston Hughes. But changing tastes and failing health took their toll, and when Johnson died in 1955, he was buried in an unmarked grave at the Olivet Cemetery in Queens, New York....More