Johnson, James P(rice) (New Brunswick, NJ, 1 Feb 1894 - New York, 17 Nov 1955)

Pianist and composer

He first learned music from his mother, singing songs at the piano. In 1908 the family settled in New York, where Johnson was exposed to ragtime, blues, show music, and the classical piano virtuosos of the day. He took lessons with Bruto Giannini, and also learned from such contemporary ragtime pianists as Abba Labba (Richard McLean) and Eubie Blake, who stimulated him to develop an orchestral approach to the keyboard. By 1913 he had begun to work at clubs in the black section of Hell's Kitchen in New York known as "The Jungles," where laborers from the South danced most of the night to the accompaniment of solo piano. It was in these dance halls that Johnson developed many of the rhythmically driving shout pieces for which he later became famous. In 1917 he published the first of some 200 songs, Mama's Blues and Stop it, Joe, and recorded his earliest piano rolls.

In the 1920s Johnson's career flourished. He recorded a series of inspired solo performances of his own compositions, beginning in 1921 with The Harlem Strut, Carolina Shout (his best-known work for piano), and Keep off the Grass, and culminating in 1930 with Jingles and You've Got to be Modernistic. It was virtuoso pieces of this sort that he played in competitive cutting contests with his contemporaries, and he soon came to be regarded as the best of the Harlem pianists. He recorded with many blues singers of the day, notably Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters. In 1923 Johnson wrote his first Broadway musical, Runnin' Wild, which ran for 213 performances; its score included the successful songs Old Fashioned Love and The Charleston. He continued, with mixed success, to write for the Broadway stage throughout his career, producing more than a dozen scores. At the same time he began composing large-scale orchestral works based loosely on classical models and incorporating elements of jazz. The first of these, Yamekraw, a piano rhapsody, was orchestrated by William Grant Still and was performed in Carnegie Hall in 1927 with Fats Waller as soloist. The following year Waller and Johnson collaborated on the revue Keep Shufflin', each man composing different songs. They also performed on two pianos for the show and during its intervals, and subsequently recorded as the Louisiana Sugar Babes (with Jabbo Smith and Garvin Bushell from the pit band), Waller playing organ in contrast to Johnson's piano.

During the Depression Johnson turned his attention increasingly to the composition of large-scale works. He wrote his Harlem Symphony in 1932, followed by a piano concerto, Jassamine, in 1934 and Symphony in Brown in 1935; De Organizer, a one-act "blues opera" with a libretto by Langston Hughes, received one performance at Carnegie Hall in 1940. A true assessment of this music is hampered by the loss of many of the scores, but some commentators have questioned the success of Johnson's orchestral compositions.

With the revival of traditional jazz in the late 1930s and 1940s, Johnson began again to appear frequently in clubs and concerts, and to take part in recording sessions. He led a recording band for the Blue Note label, and in 1947 performed in the radio series "This is Jazz." Details of his final years are sketchy. He suffered several minor strokes in the 1940s, and a major one in 1951 which left him incapacitated until his death.

Despite his great versatility, Johnson's main contribution was as a jazz pianist. He perfected the style known as stride piano, which infused the midwestern ragtime of Scott Joplin and his contemporaries with elements of jazz, blues, and popular song, as well as greatly increasing the demands on the pianist. Johnson's stride pieces share with ragtime a more or less composed, multistrain format and an oom-pah bass figure. However, he often makes use of broken 10ths and other deviations in the left hand, while his right-hand patterns depart from the stereotyped syncopations and broken chord melodies of ragtime (both of these features are evident in Carolina Shout). Furthermore, he never repeats strains without varying them. Perhaps most importantly, the rhythmic feel of his style is more relaxed and closer to the swing of jazz than to the even eighth-notes of ragtime. At the same time he generates more rhythmic intensity by using shifts of register, riffs, and blues-like clusters in the treble to imitate the call-and-response patterns of black church music. It is this rhythmicization of his musical ideas that, by allowing for variation and improvisation, lies at the heart of the new freedom of his style. Thus, like his New Orleans contemporary Jelly Roll Morton, Johnson developed a viable jazz piano style by fusing the diverse musical influences of his youth. He exercised a major influence on succeeding generations of jazz pianists, from his friend and pupil Fats Waller through Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Art Tatum, and Teddy Wilson to modern players such as Erroll Garner, Jaki Byard, and Thelonious Monk.

Willa Rouder

The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, © Macmillan Reference Ltd 1988