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GREAT BRITAIN! |
Concert Was a Rare Treat Indeed March 7, 2005, Eastern Daily Press Judy Carmichael and Randy Sandke at Norwich Playhouse
To hear the art of stride piano playing practiced in this day and age is rare enough. But to see and hear a very fine woman player brings to a mind a well-known phrase involving the words 'hen' and 'teeth'.
Judy Carmichael, a New Yorker, came to Norwich with a considerable reputation. She left behind an audience gasping at her technique in a style perhaps more demanding than any other when it comes to piano playing.
Stride is a two-fisted technique, in which the left hand pounds out a percussive rhythm, thus largely eliminating the need for a traditional bass/drums accompaniment. Its most famous practitioner was Fats Waller, and it was to the jolly keyboard giant that Ms. Carmichael turned for a big chunk of her material, along with George Gershwin (much of whose material demands this style of playing if done on solo piano).
Warm and communicative between numbers, she was joined by fellow American the trumpeter Randy Sandke, for part of her programme, and the two showed an immediate empathy on numbers like Waller's Keepin' Out of Mischief Now and Gershwin's Lady Be Good.
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Judy Gets Well Into Her Stride
Fats Waller and James P. Johnson were the masters of it, but Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Art Tatum weren't bad either. Nowadays the youthful Jason Moran can do it for a few moments, but Judy Carmichael, bless her, does it all night. We're talking about stride piano, a two-fisted school of solo jazz fast vanishing from the educational syllabus, basically for want of qualified teachers. The times are certainly a-changin' when the bull-necked, iron-wristed heroes of this art must give way to the slim, bubbly blonde who holds today's unofficial championship belt, but there it is.
"She's hugely influenced by Fats Waller, but looks nothing like him," noted Simon Becker, worthy MC and house-pianist of this Knightsbridge club, while introducing her last night. ("She never fluffs a note," he confided earlier. "It's quite humbling.") Sharing the bandstand with her was Randy Sandke, a Chicagoan trumpeter who upheld the Prohibition spirit of stride piano by refusing to compromise his brassy, Armstrong inspired attack. He blew heartily over Judy's rambunctious backing and exchanged four-bar breaks with her as if a four-man rhythm section had been churning along beneath them.
Standards like Love is Just Around the Corner, Keepin' Out of Mischief Now, and You Took Advantage of Me went like clockwork before the set closed with an exuberant version of I Found a New Baby, an upbeat Swing anthem introduced as "Sad adoption song" by the well-meaning interpreter on Judy's recent tour of China. Which reminds me, did you catch those bizarre jazz sound questions on this week's University Challenge? An Ellingtonian ballad ("Swing," declared Paxman), was followed by an Afro-Cuban Gillespie orchestral solo ("Bebop") and Coltrane playing My Favourite Things ("Free Jazz"). All misleading if not downright wrong answers. No wonder the students looked baffled. What is it about jazz and BBC foffins can't get?
Jazz: Judy Carmichael Talks To Our Critic
They would surely have been amused to see the tradition maintained today by a petite Californian blonde. Judy Carmichael is, however, the genuine article, a spirited improviser who was taken under the wing of no less a figure than Count Basie. A man of few words – his speech was as economical as his playing--the bandleader gave his young protegé the simplest of nicknames: "Stride".
There were preconceptions to be overcome along the way. The renowned producer and talent scout John Hammond, mentor to both Billie Holiday and Bruce Springsteen, once invited her to meeting, but then seemed embarrassed and withdrawn when they came face to face. It was only later that Carmichael learnt the truth from Freddie Green (longtime Basie guitarist): Hammond had assumed from her playing that she was black and did not quite know what to make of her.
Her reputation blossomed nevertheless. As well as recordings and tours, she hosts an interview programme on National Public Radio and shows up regularly on Garrison Keillor's wireless institution, A Prairie Home Companion. On her own show she makes a point of enticing no-jazz figures such as E. L. Doctorow, the author of Ragtime, on to the air. By the end of our interview, Carmichael is singing the praises of Doctorow's novel City of God - a rare attempt, she says, to marry literature with the spirit of improvisation.
One of the odder projects she has in mind is a stride-hip-hop collaboration with her friend Tommy Coster Jr., Eminem's keyboard player and co-writer. The mind boggles.
Carmichael's mission, simply put, is to make jazz accessible once again. We may never return to the days when it was the soundtrack to every party, but she knows there is an appetite for the music.
Musicians, she feels, need to learn how to adapt to it. "I think it's a mistake to hope that jazz will be a form of pop music again," she says. "In the States we have a habit of thinking something has to be huge in order to be valid. We have to give up on that notion. The question is, how to make it accessible as an art form.
"I'm always coming across people who say they want to like jazz but don't know how to come into it. Most jazz musicians are so beleaguered because their life is so difficult. We don't make much money, and we're so happy to get a gig that we sometimes don't have the energy to make a joke when we're on the bandstand. Jazz musicians have to be clever about things like programming. I don't think you can just go out there, turn your back on the audience and just do your thing."
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Stride Piano, ragtime's brash young cousin, is a style usually associated with men with gnarled fingers and unlit cigars jammed in their mouth. Seventy years ago, when stride was the lingua franca of jazz, its thunderous chords ringing out at parties across Harlem, the great practitioners of the form were players as colorful as Willie "The Lion" Smith and the master showman Fats Waller. |
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