James P. Johnson – December 15 1943
Eric Thacker - The Complete Edmond Hall / James P. Johnson / Sidney DeParis / Vic Dickenson Blue Note Sessions
It is yet to be fully realized just how influential a jazz figure James Price Johston was. Three 1943 dates produced some of his best playing and have him drawing on his earliest inspirations and looking around for new worlds yet to conquer.
Downbeat – 15 March 1944 – Volume 11 Issue 18
Caprice, a Johnson original, is a real rag played at breakneck tempo and showing traces of the composer's piano-roll background and rent-party history. If there are touches of the classics, there are also evidences of the sporting-house. Improvisation is an interesting development of the boogie theme first associated with Pinetop Smith, the weakest of the six sides yet a worthwhile job all the same. Arkansaw, a tune credited to Spencer Williams and Anton Lada. receives at Johnson's gifted hands its best treatment in many moons. Exceedingly slow and poignant, it makes for outstanding blues piano. Mule Walk, another Johnson composition, is a true stomp in every sense of the word. Jelly-Roll would have loved it, what more can I say?
Illinois Tech Engineer and Alumnus May 1945
It is said that James P. Johnson’ style of piano=playing influenced the late Thomas “Fats” Waller. It is said that James P. Johnson, “lost” for many years, had to be “rediscovered.” (Just as Meade "Lux" Lewis had to be rediscovered, washing cars in a Chicago garage, almost ten years after his recording of “Honky Tonk Train Blues" made him famous. Society is like a child; its attention is easily distracted; it forgets and loses its favorites, then it whoops with joy when they are found again.)
Whatever else they may say James P. Johnson, I know nothing about it. I only know that he plays the piano, and he plays it well. For the past three weeks I have been listening during my moments of leisure to four magnificent 12-inch records of piano solos by James P. Johnson – and I've having a whale of a time.
Mule Walk Stomp
These are the records, issued by Blue Note: "J.P. Boogie” and "Gut Stomp;” "Black Water Blues" and "Carolina Balmoral” ; "Improvisations on Pine Top's Boogie Woogie” and “Caprice Rag"; "Mule Walk Stomp" and “Arkansas Blues” (Blue Note, Nos. 28, 25, 26 27).
"Carolina Balmoral” and "Caprice Rag" are both extremely rapid pieces, calling for a light and fast touch. Like early New Orleans ragtime classics, they are highly reminiscent of and Other European dances. They probably belong, in their original inspiration, to the period in New Orleans in the eighties and nineties when Negro musicians, picking up tunes while serving at white social affairs, brought them home to lick them into in shape in their own way. At least that's the way they sound to me except that as James P. Johnson plays them. much of the original grace of the quadrille has been restored (at triple speed!) at the same time as they are played in "hot" fashion.
Two in Boogie
"J. P. Boogie” gets going in first couple of choruses with what is probably the trickiest boogie bass figure I have heard. It slithers around a slightly punch-drunk garter snake. Then, just at the point when you decide you don’t care where that darned snake is going next, Johnson stops the funny business and settles down to that grim insistence with the left (umbadada, umhadada, umbada, umhadada) that is pure boogie. Meanwhile, of course, the right hand is having a high time wandering whimsically all over the place - which again is pure boogie.
It's to pick our favorites in a group like this, but if some mean fate were to ordain that three of these four records had to be broken, I believe that I would save to the last Johnson's playing of "Arkansas Blues." No, I wouldn't either. Maybe I’d better save “Back Water Blues." I dunno. Maybe I'd better dicker with fate ask her to spare me two records. Better still, I’d better tell her just to go and not bother me or my records any more.
Session Information
James P. Johnson, piano.
WOR Studios, NYC, December 15, 1943
BN782, Arkansaw Blues, Blue Note 27, BLP 7011;
BN783, Caprice Rag, Blue Note 26, BLP 7011
BN784, Improvisation On Pine Top's Boogie Woogie, Blue Note 26
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