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James P. Johnson

Title: Victory Stride / Harlem Symphony - The Concordia Orchestra

Label: Nimbus Records

Cat No:NI2745
Format:CD

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James P. Johnson was an astounding musician, arguably the most important black musician in New York during the decade of the 1920s. He is best known in jazz as the Father of Stride Piano, a two-handed, solo piano style that developed out of ragtime and flourished in the Northeast, especially Harlem, during the 1920s as the first true jazz piano idiom. He has influenced many successive jazz musicians, including his students Fats Waller and Duke Ellington. His stride piano composition, ‘Carolina Shout’ is considered bymany to be the first recorded jazz piano solo (1921). Johnson was the first black staff musician for the QRS piano roll company and favorite accompanist of Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters.

As a composer, he scored all or part of at least 16 musical revues during the 1920s. Out of his 1923 Broadway production Runnin' Wild came the tune anddance most closely associated with the entire decade, the ‘Charleston’. Of all his accomplishments, James P. Johnson most wanted to be remembered as a seriouscomposer of symphonic music utilizing African-American musical themes.

Despite little recognition and limited encouragement, James P. Johnson would write two symphonies, a piano and a clarinet concerto, two ballets, two one-act operas and a number of sonatas, suites, tone poems and a string quartet. The pioneering jazz writer Rudi Blesh visited Johnson at his home a few years before Johnson suffered a paralyzing stroke. The composer was happyto show Blesh his scores and play some of the themes for him. Blesh later wrote about his private audition: ‘These are long works with a feeling of breadth and sweep and with a racial pungency that Gershwin missed, and their African rhythms move with a forthright nobility. One feels none of these qualities as borrowed—they all reside in the dark, diminutive composer himself.’

Track Listing for Victory Stride / Harlem Symphony - The Concordia Orchestra
VICTORY STRIDE (1944)
Chris Gekker, trumpet • Lawrence Feldman, clarinetJames Pugh, trombone • Leslie Stifelman, piano

HARLEM SYMPHONY (1932)
CONCERTO JAZZ A MINE (1934)
For piano and orchestra

AMERICAN SYMPHONIC SUITE (1934)
Based on the St. Louis Blues by W.C. Handy

DRUMS - A SYMPHONIC POEM (ca.1942)
CHARLESTON (1923)
Arranged by David Rimelis
Frederick Boothe, Tap dancer

Discovery catalogue available for
James P. Johnson

Victory Stride / Harlem Symphony - The Concordia O

The Original James P. Johnson, 1942-1945