Release Date: 02 January 2003
Label: Naxos - Jazz Legends / Naxos Jazz Legends
Packaging Type: Jewel Case
No of Units: 1
Barcode: 636943266526
Genres: Jazz
Description
TEDDY WILSON Vol.2 Original 1935-1937 RecordingsIn Teddy Wilson elegance and understatement combined with rhythmic strength and accuracy to make him one of the greatest of the jazz piano impressionists. Technically immaculate, his style derived in part from Earl Hines and, influenced by Art Tatum, he was a forerunner of bop and post-War cool. Born Theodore Shaw Wilson in Austin, Texas, on 24 November 1912 he was raised in Tuskegee, Alabama, where his academic, middle-class parents were both teachers (his mother, who taught English, was the librarian at Tuskegee Institute where his father was Head of History) and as a child he was nurtured, via records, on a diet which ranged from Caruso and McCormack to Bessie Smith. The youthful Teddy also received a thorough grounding in ragtime and classical music, the latter applied to some extent against the grain and while he studied oboe (and later violin at Tuskegee and music theory at Talladega College), his first love was always the piano. In 1928, in Chicago, he heard the Henderson Brothers, McKinney’s Cotton Pickers and King Oliver and the following year, already eager to shrug off his classical shackles and make a name for himself in jazz, fled to Detroit where he was soon playing with Speed Webb and other local outfits. By 1930 he had joined Milt Senior’s band in Toledo and later travelled with him to Chicago (his base from 1931 where he also worked variously with Louis Armstrong, Erskine Tate, Jimmie Noone and Art Tatum) and in 1933 he was heard on radio in a broadcast with the William Moore band by promoter and recording scout John Hammond. Hammond brought Wilson to New York to join ‘The Chocolate Dandies’, a small studio band fronted by Benny Carter whose line-up included Chu Berry and Mezz Mezzrow and in October, with this outfit, Teddy recorded his first four sides, for Decca. From 1934 until mid-1935 Wilson was pianist-arranger to a fourteen-piece led by Willie Bryant (he recorded with this group first, for Victor, in January 1935). A brief informal stint with Benny Goodman followed and, again initially through Hammond’s influence (‘… man of destiny … Wilson was perhaps the first man I met in jazz whom I thought I could really help …’), Teddy was destined soon to be a participant in the birth of ‘chamber jazz’. As a founder-member of the Goodman Trio, the first integrated mini-ensemble of the Swing Era, he played alongside Goodman and Gene Krupa and later, in the Quartet, vibraphonist Lionel Hampton and was among the first black musicians to enjoy equal billing with white artists. Although in live performance he was normally assigned to small ensemble features within the band, or intermission piano, and seldom if ever featured with the full orchestra, on records his fluent, pulsating piano lent structure and rhythm to the Trios and Quartets. As Hampton recalled (in Hamp, his 1989 autobiography) ‘There were good reasons why Ben
Tracklisting
Various
Waller, Fats
Waller, Fats
Venuti, Joe
Vaughan
Various Artists
Various
Various
Teddy Wilson
Teddy Wilson
Teddy Wilson
Teddy Wilson
Teddy Wilson
Teddy Wilson
Teddy Wilson
