The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #121107 Message #2645275
Posted By: Azizi
31-May-09 - 10:11 PM
Thread Name: Paul Whiteman-King of Jazz?
Subject: RE: Paul Whiteman-King of Jazz?
Art, a jazzman's wife getting angry at him? Never happen.
:o)
**
Moving right along, and speaking about the King of Jazz, check out this excerpt from Jazz Masters of New Orleans:
"After Bunk Johnson's death, Louis Armstrong disclaimed that he had been "his teacher" and declared that Joe Oliver was still his idol and "the King". But New Orleans players knew that Bunk was in no formal sense Armstrong's "teacher", and if Armstrong had learned basic lessons from Oliver, nevertheless Armstrong had heard Johnson, followed him and tried to emulate him, his tone, his vibrato, his ideas, as Armstrong himself said. They declared that Armstrong's first recorded solo, on Canal Street Blues with Oliver, came from Johnson's blues playing. And they knew, more importantly perhaps, that Bunk Johnson had brought an important technical knowledge of music, of the cornet, of harmony (particularly inverted and diminished chords) into New Orleans jazz at an early stage. And they knew that the more relaxed, legato phrasing of Armstrong, of Buddy Petit, and of Oliver himself when he was using it rhythmically reached back, not so much to Buddy Bolden and Freddy Keppard, but to the tradition of the second cornet founded by Bunk.
"If it wasn't for Louis Armstrong", a New Orleans musician has remarked, "everybody would be phrasing like Henry Busse". If it hadn't been for Bunk Johnson, one might add, perhaps Louis Armstrong would too."