Also, Kid Ory recorded the first-ever recording of Dixieland jazz by an African-American ensemble in Santa Monica, CA for Nordskog in 1921. Quite a year, indeed!
Hey! I just discovered your blog today. I learnt a lot. Thank you very much.
Thank you for posting these, particularly Frank Banta's "Wild Cherries Rag." I have a battered Gennett original on this and am very fond of the flip side, "Cubist." Might you have access to a clean copy of this?
I've just discovered your site and am finding all manner of wonderment, so thank you for creating it.
With best wishes--
Randy Skretvedt
Hi, thanks for the cool post. I have an extensive comment in the pipeline as usual, but for starters, I would like to clear up your bit about "Seminole".
He was not terribly mysterious, nor was that the only name anyone knew him by. His name was Paul Seminole.
I haven't done the research to find his birth and death records, but I believe he was contemporaneous with Donald Lambert (born 1904) and according to a couple sources, Lambert apparently incorporated large doses of Seminole's style into his own playing, which would mean that Seminole was a fantastic pianist (since Lambert, judging by the HOURS of recordings I have of him, the two videos on Youtube, etc etc. CERTAINLY WAS!!!). Apparently, Lambert and Seminole were good friends who worked as a two-piano team sometime in the late 20's or early '30's. (rather remarkable since Lambert couldn't read music)
I also seem to remember that Paul Seminole died about 1932 (Lambert died in 1962), and though he is not known to have made any recordings on the piano (definitely no piano solos, and probably none with a band or singer either), he did make at least one or two recordings as a banjoist with a jazz band.
You see, Paul Seminole had a vaudeville act where he would play piano with one hand, and a stringed instrument (I think either banjo or guitar) with the other. I think he also played xylophone, and probably other percussion as well. He was a talented multi-instrumentalist by all accounts.
I am going to have to do some digging through my literture to get you exact sources of this information, but I am reasonably sure it is at least 75% accurate.
-Andrew
Hey man, to add to this a bit, if you want to hear some white pianists who play REALLY HOT piano circa 1917-1921 and beyond, get the piano rolls of Pete Wendling and J. Russel Robinson.
Your jaw will HIT THE FLOOR!
Their swinging rolls really swing and their straight-8ths rolls make for excellent 8-to-the-bar 1920's rock music!
Wendling and Robinson were both masters of blues playing and made some fantastic blues rolls as well as their fox-trot stuff etc. In fact, before QRS hired any Black pianists to make song rolls of blues (starting with James P. Johnson), Wendling and Robinson were the go-to guys for blues.
Pete Wendling was a popular songwriter and former "song plugger" and vaudville pianist who had gone far enough to make a hit at London's Hippodrome in 1913 where he appeared for quite a long run, honing his craft.
His few extant audio recordings reveal he was just as good a pianist live as on his rolls (minus of course the extra melody line the roll editors would add in the tenor range when his right hand got too jazzy).
I can send you four of his recordings, I'm still looking for the other two. Of course, I have MIDIs of probably over a hundred of his 700+ piano rolls.
J. Russel Robinson should need no introduction, either as a fine classic ragtime composer who introduced large amounts of hot piano playing into his published sheet music ("Dynamite Rag", "That Eccentric Rag" etc), or as a songwriter, or, as W.C. Handy dubbed him, "The white boy with the colored fingers".
Robinson's only known solo piano recordings, made for Rudi Blesh's Circle label in the 1940's, are incredibly scarce, mythically rare, and nearly non-existent. NOT ONE major ragtime authority/writer/expert/record collector I talked to has these records nor knew anyone who does! If YOU know where they are, please contact me ASAP!!!
However, Robinson is heard to great advantage accompanying singer Al Bernard doing their "aural blackface" act, "The Dixie Stars" with Robinson playing damn good ragtime piano! I can send you two of these recordings if you want, and am always looking for more!
Other white pianists of the early '20's who got this stuff really well and played it fantastically include Hilda Myers (who made a lot of rolls for Vocalstyle), Robert Billings (a musical genius who made incredible, futuristic rolls for U.S. and Staffnote) and Roy Bargy (who made rolls for Imperial, Mel-O-Dee, and years later, Ampico).
As the '20s wore on, more and more white pianists started picking up these tricks from the black pianists, creating their own tricks, and honing the style until you get people like Fred Elizalde and Arthur Schutt making fantastic solo recordings and playing true jazz piano by the late '20's, but in their own personal style distinct from the Harlem stride players. (in fact, Schutt's left hand and rhythmic conception compares favorably to that of Earl Hines)
OK, this should do to be getting on with:
from "They All Played Ragtime", pages 195-196:
"Perhaps no two men could better illustrate this love of playing for its own sake than Paul Seminole and Donald Lambert, both born in 1904. Seminole's father was from Florida and true to his name part Indian. The family lived on Sharper Street in Philadelphia. For years father and son did an Indian act in vaudeville. Young Seminole was only five feet tall, slender, brown-skinned, with high cheekbones. He played the guitar left-handed, was a good xylophonist, and as a specialty played the piano with his right hand and the guitar with his left. Paul Seminole, who died in Asbury Park in 1932, was a player whom the greatest of them still remember with something like awe.
Eubie Blake first heard Seminole at Small's cellar place on Fifth Avenue near 135th Street. "If he played a tune twenty thousand times," says Eubie, "it was twenty thousand times different." The drummer, Hurley Diemer, says: "Every style was Seminole's. Just say Seminole and stop." When Seminole was in his early twenties he played with some of Luckey Roberts' society bands and also toured with a vaudeville act called Luckey and His Browns and Blues.
Seminole played a number of New Jersey spots and there met Don Lambert, with whom he formed a two-piano act. Although the part-Indian wizard left no records [false; see my previous comment- AB], his style is in many respects duplicated today in that of Lambert. Lambert, too is a player who inspires awe. [...]"
A couple of guys in New Jersey used to go down to Walt's Tavern in New Jersey to hear Donald Lambert in the late 1950's and early 1960's. They'd lug a reel-to-reel tape recorder with them and capture the full flavor of the bar, usually with the mike shoved right up against the sounding board of the piano, but sometimes far back from the stage so that the horn players in the jam band (who typically ranged from decent to terrible) predominated, with Lambert really audible only when taking a solo.
Also, some days the battery or power supply of the recorder seems to be failing, introducing a lot of wow and flutter, others it is nearly crystal-clear. Some days, the piano is out-of-tune and sounding pretty bad; others it sounds fine. Some days you can hear Lambert has been drinking a lot and is not very accurate; others he is relatively more sober and his playing is on fire. [legend has it, he was completely sober for his 1941 Bluebird recordings on 78]
It is a fascinating mixture, at least 16 CD's worth of material that these gentlemen are presently working on getting cleaned up so it can be issued. I am fortunate that they are friends of the family and so I got a lot of this stuff. These recordings are generally not easy to listen to for the casual listener and non-musician. They are more of a specialist nature, sometimes due to having to filter out a terrible band to hear Lambert's accompanimental genius, or (once or twice) a high-pitched whine on the recording during a piano solo only tune.
To hard-core stride and ragtime piano junkies like me, however, we can do this, it is worth it, and the extra material (or, in many cases, slightly different restatements of tunes he'd play over and over again) is definitely worth it. On at least one tune, he gets even more modern than his four-on-the-floor "modern" left-hand style (that he used from time to time) and starts playing a form of bebop!
None of the currently available recordings of Lambert demonstrate this additional range (nor do they have him playing with a band as he does here, sometimes), but they damn sure demonstrate his fantastic stride style which even nearly scared Art Tatum at one time!
Check out Riccardo Scivales' books and articles for more in-depth analysis of Lambert's piano style and to see (and play) bits of what he was playing, written out as sheet music.
Commenting by HaloScan
