There are too many jazz tributes in New York this fall. Next month, Birdland hosts its 10th annual Django Reinhardt festival. Iridium has scheduled tributes to Miles Davis, Lee Morgan, Art Blakey and Jaco Pastorius over the next three months. These stars may be long gone, but they are still bankable. Whatever happened to developing new talent?
The Small’s Rent Party is different. Mr. Wilner had little trouble filling the bill with great pianists who offered their services for free. Some of these other departed jazz greats may have led tragic lives. But at least they had proper burials.
It’s telling that some of the pianists who will pay tribute to him at Small’s sound a bit apprehensive about performing his music. Mr. Wilner, who is 43, was steeling himself to play the master’s “Carolina Shout,” which Mr. Ellington learned note for note from a player piano roll to prove himself a cutting-edge player.
“It’s a very tricky piece to play,” Mr. Wilner said. “You are really thinking like a drummer because with your left hand, you have a constant steady 4/4 going, and with your right hand, you are playing a syncopated rhythm, and it’s a sophisticated, multipart piece. You have seven or eight different sections. It starts in G and ends up in C. It’s like all the styles of [stride piano] are represented here. “
“I’ll probably be nervous as hell playing it in front of all those piano players,” he added. “But I’m going to do it anyway.”
Mr. Iverson, 35, was practicing Mr. Johnson’s “A Flat Dream.” “I’m not really a really great stride pianist,” he confessed. “That is the understatement of the year. But it’s not how well I’m compared to guys like Dick Hyman. It’s just a short set, but I want to pay homage and think about James P. that day, and getting him a fucking headstone, for Christ’s sake!”
Mr. Hyman, who actually met Mr. Johnson and sat in with his band decades ago, was considering the challenge of being the last batter in the lineup of this seven-and-a-half-hour event that begins at 1:30 p.m. and stretches into the evening. “I’m going to try some of the lesser-known things because with a program of 10 guys before me, I don’t want to be repeating whatever they played,” he said.
The esteemed 81-year-old pianist, who has recorded more then 100 albums under his own name, planned to play some of Mr. Johnson’s ambitious concert works like Yamekraw: A Negro Rhapsody and Jazzamine Concerto. He will also play four-handed versions of some of Mr. Johnson’s tunes with the pianist Ted Rosenthal.
In other words, these guys will all be pushing each other. This is the way Mr. Johnson would have wanted it. He was the king of the New York piano players. He kept his crown until Art Tatum, a pianist with superhuman technique, arrived from Toledo, Ohio, and cut Mr. Johnson, Mr. Waller and a third New York stride legend, Willie “The Lion” Smith, in a fabled 1933 competition.
Even after that, Mr. Johnson never stopped believing he and his fellow New Yorkers were a cut above the rest of them.
“The other sections of the country never developed the piano as far as the New York boys did,” he sniffed in 1952. “Only lately have they caught up.”
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