A little stride

[ted]

"Walking and Swinging" (Mary Lou Williams)
"Carolina Shout" (James Johnson)

My stride tends to be a little slower than that of most players. For me, this type of music demands unusually acute attention to accents and fingering. I do not like to risk losing its profound rhythmic subtlety in a blur of virtuosic speed and noise.

[pianistimo]

you ARE a free man.  this is nice to end the night with! 

[tds]

nice music, ted. thank you

[mwhite]

Very nice, Ted.  I didn't expect to hear stride piano in the Audition Room.  Are you familiar with Judy Carmichael?  She specializes in stride.
Mike White

[preludium]

After a long day's work these recordings put a smile on my face. I really like this stuff. Do you do the arrangements yourself based on a lead sheet, play after a CD or do they come as complete scores? The way you bring out all these jingle ornaments sounds really authentic. In the 2nd tune you are before the beat quite often, and I don't mean the syncopes. And in the last third of the tune there are bars where half a beat seems to be dropped at the end. Is it supposed to sound that way? Anyway, on the speaker of my laptop it sounds really honky-tonk -- I could smell all the smoke and the whiskey... 

[ted]

Thanks for the comments. No, I have never heard of Judy Carmichael but I shall soon find her.

What a perceptive ear you must have, preludium, to be able to analyse rhythm like that. I am afraid that I do not have a clue, when playing rhythmic music, what I am doing in terms of either bars or beats. Sometimes I don't have a clue, at least at the conscious level, what notes I am playing or why I am playing them ! Probably yet another reason why I am not a musician. As long as I, and hopefully a few others, enjoy my peculiar sounds, I guess it doesn't matter that much.

[thalbergmad]

A complete and absolute joy, especially "walking and swinging". This is "go to bed happy music" played magnificently.

I would rather like to hear more.

Congrats.

Thal

[ted]

Thank you, Thal. Williams, I have always felt, was a very special piano personality, unjustly overshadowed by her more forceful and feted contemporaries. Her solo playing has a wonderful delicacy and rhythmic insight unmatched in the twentieth century.

Yes, various people here are giving me beans about not playing and recording more of this sort of stuff. I have no excuse, as people with better ears than mine have made a plethora of accurate transcriptions in recent years, all of which I have taken pains to acquire.

[ted]

preludium:

Sorry I missed your question. Williams transcribed a few of her own pieces. The ones I have came from my father and date from the thirties, I think. Johnson made several recordings of his Carolina Shout and many transcriptions are available, some more accurate than others. In any case, I never try to copy precisely what these masters played. I have not hesitated to deviate from their recordings and stick in bits of my own; to a certain extent I think the idiom calls for it.

[preludium]

Thanks for the info. I searched a bit and found this site with a few transcriptions:

https://www.ratical.org/piano4all/transcriptions.html

I'll definitely try some of them soon.

[ted]

Thanks for the link. Sadly, Williams seems to have left us far fewer scores and solo recordings than other improvisers such as Morton, Waller and Tatum have.

[whynot]

Nice!  What a pleasure.  The second tune was not missing any half-beats.  The beats shifted between hands more in that section, which could give that impression, but it was all there.  Sweet.

[ted]

I am pleased you like it, Whynot. I believe the traditional name for the effect in question is an "interrupted" pattern. Johnson was indeed the first pianist to do it but others soon began to copy him. It creates an illusion, very enjoyable, of the whole metre being suddenly shifted backwards or forwards. To start with, people made sure the total bars and beats evened out but as time went on the necessity of doing that waned, and even Johnson himself ended up playing sections which did not total the "correct" number, or even a whole number of beats. We are so familiar with additive rhythms now that we wonder what the fuss was about but it was a big deal when he first did it.