Here is the remarkable book we have been waiting for. And “remarkable” is an understatement.
But first, a soundtrack with a double or triple purpose.
James P. Johnson, piano solo, 1939:
James P. in duet (“with cross-talk”) with Clarence Williams, 1931:
A perfect band (Sidney DeParis, Vic Dickenson, Ben Webster, James P., Jimmy Arthur Shirley, John Simmons, Sidney Catlett) 1944:
I thought it necessary to present these three recordings (and there are many more) to place James P. Johnson firmly in readers’ ears. As himself, mind you.
Not as a distant name, “Fats Waller’s teacher,” “didn’t he write CHARLESTON?” or “someone Monk refers to somewhere,” or “failed African-American classical composer,” “pianist who influenced __________ but couldn’t play the blues,” and other easy-to-swallow factoids.
I am also presenting these recordings because they are spectacular, and they are the way I met and was entranced by James P. so many years ago. They would be “desert island discs,” wherever the imaginary desert island might be, except that I have committed them deeply to memory and can hear them in my mental jukebox whenever I care to.
But back to Scott E. Brown’s splendiferous book. I have read less than one-third of its 480 (fairly small-type) pages, but I thought it was a matter of some urgency to let readers know its steadily impressive virtue. I also had no desire to rush through it simply to write this post. As someone says, you don’t have to eat the whole pie to know that the peaches were fresh. Or someone should have said it.
In the past decade, we have begun to see models of jazz biography that are a rebuke to many of the books that have come before. I won’t list the shining examples; I’ve celebrated them in these pages. The older books were hampered by the biographer’s animus or ideological bias, willful ignorance of documented facts, an amateur’s spiteful envy of a successful subject, skating over evidence and preferring the old stories that had been proven untrue. Some of those books might have made gripping television series, relying as they did on sensationalism and victim narratives. But they were inherently both flawed and disrespectful of the people they pretended to celebrate. Decades ago, Joyce Carol Oates called the genre “pathobiograpy,” where a writer lingered over real or invented flaws in a subject’s character or behavior rather than presenting a balanced portrait.
Although those books occasionally presented new evidence amidst their fabrications and pot-stirring, their writers should have studied with Scott E. Brown, for his SPEAKEASIES TO SYMPHONIES has the clarity, honesty, and depth of James P. Johnson’s playing and compositions. This book is the result of Brown’s four decades of study (or sustained fascination) with the life and work of James P., and it is his second book on the subject. And it is a delightfully old-fashioned study, presenting evidence so that we come to admire the subject as the author does.
James P. Johnson was not an easy subject for biography. A quiet, soft-spoken man, he was most happy at the piano keyboard. He loved his family. He was born in New Jersey and had a house in Queens, New York. He never travelled to Europe. He had no criminal record. He seems, at this distance, to be overshadowed by his more glamorous contemporaries, Fats Waller, Bessie Smith, and Willie “the Lion” Smith among others. But what he created remains and glows.
In every instance, every song composed, every theatrical production, all of his longer works, we see Johnson’s essential character, and that is of a man in love with his work, a craftsman concerned with the music more than the fame the music could bring, opportunities that might have brought wider recognition.
The few minutes we have, in bits and pieces, of him speaking and, in one instance, singing, suggest someone uncomfortable with self-promotion. Although his music could be boisterous, he was anything but. Like many of his musical colleagues, he was plagued by illness (a series of strokes rather than addiction or cirrhosis); his life was shorter than it might have been; his recording career is marked by long absences from the studios.
The pervasive racism of the time, both subtle and explicit, has to be acknowledged, even though the book is not ornamented by painful stories of doors, figurative or real, being slammed in Johnson’s face. Brown writes clearly and precisely about this, but he chooses to avoid polemic. However, looking at the imbalance between Johnson’s art and its reception, a reader wonders: had James P. been Caucasian, would we know his name as we do Gershwin’s and Rodgers’? Would we know him for an operetta as celebrated as PORGY AND BESS? Would IF I COULD BE WITH YOU have the same status as THE MAN I LOVE? (Ironically, Gershwin and Johnson knew each other and worked for the same company early on, and there is even the possibility that an unpublished Johnson composition resurfaced as I GOT RHYTHM, which leads me to think of alternate color-blind universes.)
To his credit, Brown also resists the temptation to recast Johnson’s story as that of failure. He does not encourage us to pity James P. for opportunities missed or denied him. When James P. is not in the recording studio, he is on the road with a touring ensemble; he is writing music for a Broadway show; he is part of early sound films; he is at home composing popular songs and one-act operas, librettos by Langston Hughes and Eugene O’Neill. The reader comes away from these pages with the sense of a man diligently moving from one piece of music to the next, not someone lamenting his fate.
Brown’s consistent celebration of his subject’s accomplishments, without effusiveness, is refreshing. It is also a refreshing antidote to the tendency some have to conflate James P. and his most famous pupil, first called “Filthy” because of his unpressed trousers, Fats Waller. Writers have portrayed the two as equally frustrated (and those who take John Hammond at his word can add Fletcher Henderson to that list), artists longing for “serious” work and “serious” acceptance. Fats, perhaps exhausted from life on the road, told an interviewer that he dreamed of giving sermons with a big band in back of him. James P. wanted his longer works to be heard, performed, known. But there is a substantial difference: the reader doesn’t sense that James P. gave in to despair; rather, he reached for the next sheet of manuscript paper.
James P. was not the stereotypical suffering artist. His life was peaceful rather than melodramatic, and those who want their jazz figures to be punctuated by headlines may, at first, find Brown’s book quiet. But that quiet is the steady loving building of a monument, four bars at a time, if readers will forgive the mixed metaphor. We come away from any chapter of this book with an admiration of James P.’s creativity, desire to keep creating, and the tangible art that resulted, with recorded documentation beginning with 1917 piano rolls and ending with 1949 radio performances. (A 1950 concert with Sidney Bechet shows him playing brilliantly, and I hope it will someday be issued.)
This is admittedly an incomplete survey of Brown’s work. But the book is consistently rewarding and readable. I knew his first biography of Johnson well, but my reading of this one has been a series of consistent delighted shocks at the new information he has uncovered, and the way each new bit of news fits into the larger portrait. Brown is a practicing physician rather than a journalist, a professional biographer-for-hire, and his scientific training underlies every page. He doesn’t guess or invent operatic scenarios. He doesn’t invent dialogue. In his decades of research, he has had the enthusiastic cooperation of Johnson’s family, access into every relevant archive.
No one on the planet knows more about James P. than he does, and I cannot imagine another book coming along to make this one obsolete. It is a “scholarly” biography in the best sense of the word, with pages of endnotes and bibliography, but it is entrancing rather than dry. A reader will learn everything there is to know about James P. Johnson and his art, but also so much about the cultural landscape of this nation in the first half of the twentieth century.
And good news: the publisher, University of Mississippi Press, has made the paperback edition of this book available for $35 USD plus shipping. (An e-book is also available.) I don’t often use the word “generous” to apply to publishers, but that price is certainly a gift to readers. Details here.
Thanks to Scott E. Brown, James P. Johnson’s in town. And we can’t help but be glad.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must get back to my reading.
May your happiness increase!
JAZZ LIVES 