new orleans piano players

New Orleans Piano PlayersReview by: Michael AshenfelderNotes, Second Series, Vol. 64, No. 1 (Sep., 2007), pp. 135-137Published by: Music Library AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30163070 .

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Video Reviews 135

tion to and knowledge of avant-garde music is evident in Ear-Walking Woman; it is a care- fully constructed and informative DVD that encourages engaged listening and facili-

tates the continued performance and com- position of works for prepared piano.

TRAVIS D. STIMELING University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

New Orleans Piano Players. DVD. [n.p.]: American Music, 2006; distrb., City Hall Records (San Rafael, CA). AMVD-3. $39.98.

New Orleans Piano Players makes no promises or claims aside from its title. It is solely about a handful of local piano players, most of whom are not very well known outside New Orleans and even then proba- bly only to New Orleans music aficionados or people of a certain age. None are leg- endary in the same sense as Professor Long- hair, James Booker, or Allan Toussaint, though a few may certainly be local leg- ends, and it's debatable how influential any one of them may be.

Given the obscurity of the musicians in New Orleans Piano Players, and the video's uneven production quality, this documentary may be most appropriate as an addi- tion to an exhaustive collection on the history of New Orleans music. If that's the case, then it is indeed fortunate that the producers have captured a few of the performances.

The full story of New Orleans music has yet to be told. It is too vast and too rich to be captured completely, and its influence is immeasurable. The New Orleans musical "feel" is unique and distinctive, and it con- tinues to have an irresistible power to move people to dance. New Orleans drummer John Vidacovitch has described it as like being in a canoe with someone and when they lean one way you instinctively lean the other way to compensate. You are uncon- trollably rocked and you have to move. There are a few such moments in New Orleans Piano Players.

The narrator, Rickie Monie, opens and closes the video playing solo piano. His style is solid and bouncy, filled with the classic nuances of New Orleans piano playing: triplet rolls in the right hand, syncopation, hints of a second-line march, and a barrelhouse feel. Mr. Monie has on-camera comment segments sprinkled throughout the documentary and he is clearly a good educator; all of his comments are tidbits of local music history.

He introduces a segment where former bandleader Harold Defan reminisces about pianist Burnell Santiago as Mr. Defan lis- tens to Santiago's only recording, a scratchy acetate of St. Louis Blues recorded in 1942. Though it is interesting to see Mr. Defan, an aging musician from a bygone era, and watch his reactions, he is not very articulate nor does he offer any value to this segment. It would be more enjoyable to hear the en- tire recording uninterrupted.

Mr. Defan says he could recognize Santiago's style and laughs about how Santiago would imitate a clarinet line on the piano. Mr. Defan says he knew the Santiago family all his life and if Mr. Defan could not get Santiago on piano for a gig, he would take Santiago's brother, Black. He said Santiago had fast fingers, "like elec- tricity, man."

Mr. Defan does not often respond appro- priately to the interviewer's questions. "What do you look for in a New Orleans piano player?" "Look for the chords .. . Burnell would take his (right) hand, make monkeyshining and chord, chord, chord with his left hand."

The interviewer asks about Sadie Good- son, a piano player, and if her style has changed much over the years. Mr. Defan said it had not. Cut to Ms. Goodson, a pe- tite, spry senior citizen, deftly pounding out You Can Depend on Me and another up- tempo song on an upright piano. This is a wonderful segment. She is a strong player and singer, and you can clearly hear ele- ments of ragtime syncopation and barrelhouse bounce in her playing, as well as little hammer-on trills and rolls. Unfortu- nately there is no interview with her.

The next artist, Olivia Shaw, plays on a painfully out-of-tune little organ in her liv- ing room while singing the gospel tune, Tell Him What You Want. When asked about the relation between jazz and gospel, she simply states, "It's syncopation." She has



136 NOTES, September 2007

average chops and her performance is interesting in a primitive folk sort of way but it doesn't shine in the same way Ms. Goodson's does.

Monie then talks about Fats Bichon, a bandleader during the 1930s, as the camera pans over two photographs of Mr. Bichon and, in the background, the filmmakers play a rare recording of Mr. Bichon per- forming an up tempo, boogie woogie ver- sion of the Russian song, Dark Eyes (Ochi chyornye). Bandleader Joe Robichaux gets the same photo-panning treatment as we hear his up-tempo recording of You're Some Pretty Doll. Mr. Robichaux's vocal style against his piano playing is limber and play- ful, not locked into a strict rhythm.

As Monie describes Alton Purnell, we see a few brief clips from a television show of Mr. Purnell playing. In a voiceover, an unidentified person, possibly Mr. Purnell, talks about improvising and about how- for ragtime players-the chords were writ- ten out and played in a ragtime style. He lumps the "chord stuff" with playing "jazz," and separates jazz from ragtime. He could be simply pointing out that good post- ragtime pianists could improvise over the chords, whereas ragtime players did not or could not.

Monie talks about Richard M. Jones, from around 1910, and then introduces a film of Jones from 1952. Either the film sound- track is badly synchronized, or the filmmakers are playing an audio track from a sepa- rate performance; the result is that the audio doesn't synchronize with the visual. This segment might be interesting to diehard fans, but it is distracting otherwise. For example, you can clearly see Mr. Jones's right hand playing octave trills several times through the tune, but you cannot hear any octave trills in the audio recording.

Monie offers no explanation about the out-of-sync clip. And this is one of the few long musical segments, so there's plenty of time to get annoyed by it. Monie quotes Mr. Jones talking about King Oliver, with whom Jones worked. He says that King Oliver "was a good reader and a good technician."

Mr. Jones calls King Oliver "insecure" and relates an anecdote to illustrate his point. A rival musician, Freddie Kepperd, was draw- ing in business across the street from where King Oliver was playing; Mr. Jones was sit-

ting in at the piano when Mr. Oliver barked at him "get in B flat," without naming any specific tune. Mr. Oliver then went out into the street and blew some beautiful music, which drew people out of the other joints up and down the street, after which the crowd poured into the place where King Oliver was playing. Triumphant, King Oliver then said about Mr. Kepperd, "That son of a bitch won't bother me no more."

Monie introduces the Manuel Manetta segment talking about how before WWI there were not many piano players in bands, so piano players played in brothels, where the owners wanted a quieter, refined sound. Monie introduces a home-movie quality color film clip from 1957. As with the Richard Jones film clip, the Manuel Manetta film clip, a vintage ragtime-style piece, is either poorly synchronized or is an audio performance from another time and place and is poorly dubbed to the movie. The movie itself is choppy and grainy with missing frames, while the audio is smooth and continuous. Sometimes Manetta's hands appear to play the same music as that on the audio track and sometimes they don't. It is absorbing to watch a great player play but it is alienating when what you hear is not what the player appears to be playing.

The last segment is very sweet, pianist Billie Pierce playing a jazzed-up blues duet with her trumpeter husband, DeDe. Her eyes are riveted to the video camera as she plays and she rarely looks at her hands. Afterward Ms. Pierce reminisces, says that she was around two years old when she first started to play the piano and she played the blues. Her mother and father both played piano, and she has six sisters and they all play piano too. And all of her sisters' chil- dren play piano, as well as other instruments.

Her style is very representational of the New Orleans style, with many rippling runs in her right hand and a solid bounce in her left, and it is fortunate that the video ends with her. She tells of how her father preferred church music but the kids preferred the blues, and as soon as they heard him come home, they would stop playing blues and switch to something "churchy."

When Ms. Pierce was about ten years old, Ma Rainey, Ida Cox, and Bessie Smith passed through her hometown and per- formed at the Belmont Theater, and the Pierce girls would go down to listen to



Video Reviews 137

them. When Ms. Pierce was about thirteen, Bessie Smith passed through town again, Ms. Smith's piano player got sick, and Ms. Pierce subbed for her for about two weeks. Her memories about that experience are priceless, as are her recollections about playing for the carnival with her sister and her sister later going on the road for twenty-five years.

New Orleans Piano Players touches a little on many different things, scholarly music history, oral history and personal memories, New Orleans musical families, discus-

sions of style, local musical trends, and the

itinerary of working musicians. Yet it never

goes deeply in any one direction. And there are no probing questions, or insights, or instruction offered about the unique New Orleans playing style. For the handful of joyful moments in it, it almost has the

quality of a homemade video, and there- fore may not be for everyone.

MICHAEL ASHENFELDER Library of Congress

Saratoga Lakk- Waltz

NO 50. 3 4 p



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