Bennie Moten

This article explains the Kansas City pianist. For the New York bassist see Benny Moten .

Chart positions Explanation of the data

Singles

South   R&B 12 1925 (1 week) Kansas City Shuffle   R&B 18th 1927 (1 week) Moten stomp   R&B 16 1928 (2 weeks) South   R&B 10 1929 (4 weeks)   R&B 22nd 1944 (1 week)

Benjamin "Bennie" Moten (born November 13, 1894 in Kansas City , Missouri , † April 2, 1935 ibid) was an American jazz pianist and band leader.

Live and act

1894-1929

Benny Moten, 1925

Moten learned the piano from his mother, a pianist; he played tenor horn in the town's youth orchestra, which was directed by Dave Blackburn, and learned the further musical basics with Charles T. Watts and Thomas "Scrap" Harris, who came from the circle of Jelly Roll Morton . Before graduating from Lincoln High School , he left to pursue a career in music. Moten was an excellent stride pianist, performing in the small clubs along 18th Street in Kansas City. Together with Major N. Clark Smith, Dan Blackburn and Charles T. Watts, he helped establish the local music protection association Local 627 - founded in 1917.

In 1918 he founded the BB & D. Orchestra (a ragtime trio; the name stands for the first letters of the band members) with Dude Langford on drums and Baley Hancock as singer. The band thrived under Moten's direction, played in the Panama Club of Kansas City, and was very popular.

In 1922 he founded his first band under his own name. In this Bennie Moten Orchestra , Thamon Hayes played the trombone, Willie Hall on the drums, Woody Walder on the tenor saxophone and clarinet, Sam "Banjo Joe" Tall on the banjo and Lammar Wright on the cornet. In 1923 the first recordings for the Okeh label took place through the agency of the producer Winston Holmes . He made a total of fourteen recordings for the label from 1923 to 1925 (e.g. Crawdad Blues , Elephant's Wobble , which were among the first recordings of Kansas City Jazz , earlier recordings by George E. Lee have not been published) and some additional recordings the blues singers Ada Brown and Mary Bradford .

As an experienced businessman, Moten managed Paseo Hall in Kansas City from 1924 and opened it to the Afro-American public. Moten and his eight-piece band (in 1924 he expanded his sextet to include Harry Cooper on cornet and Harlan Leonard on alto saxophone and clarinet) performed in this huge dance hall twice a week. The expansion made it possible for Moten to split the band's horns into two wind instruments. From 1925 they were the leading band in Kansas City, which Moten steadily expanded into a traditional big band. Don Byas claimed to have worked with him as a teenager around 1927.

In 1928 Moten's band, which had grown to eleven musicians, recorded the Lafayette Theater and the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem . The dancers liked the style because it differed from Fletcher Hendersons and Duke Ellingtons in its slow pounding style ( stomp ). Right from the start, Moten had anticipated a chance against Chick Webb , Henderson and the big bands and pursued the goal of making his orchestra just as successful.

Especially interesting, he looked at the Blue Devils of Walter Page , the at jazz historians as the best band of the Kansas City style counted. In particular, he lacked strong singers (like Jimmy Rushing with the Devils ) and soloists in his band that stood out. After he brought some former Blue Devils musicians ( Hot Lips Page , Count Basie , singer Jimmy Rushing and trombonist and guitarist Eddie Durham ) into his band in 1929 , there was a dispute in his band because he was firing long-term members. and some more of his musicians left him. Thamon Hayes founded his own band, which competed with the help of Jesse Stone Moten's group and even beat them in a 1932 “cutting contest”.

1930-1935

Count Basie , who persuaded Moten to give him his place at the piano in order to better take care of the orchestra's management, gave the band a special character. Basie says he also wrote arrangements for the band in which the blues was given more weight. From the end of 1931 other star soloists joined the band, in particular Ben Webster and the alto saxophonist and clarinetist Eddie Barefield , as well as the former Blue Devils boss Walter Page . Moten bought arrangements from Benny Carter and Horace Henderson for the east coast tour in the winter of 1931 , switched from “two beat” to “four beat” (the then unusual walking bass from Walter Page on double bass) and thus experienced a catastrophic defeat against Kansas City Rockets by Thamon Hayes at the traditional musicians' ball in May 1932. Their east coast tour in 1932, where they were poorly received by the audience, was comparatively unsuccessful. In December 1932 they made legendary recordings with Victor ( Toby , Moten Swing , Lafayette , Prince of Wales and others) in a dejected mood , from which Moten was absent. According to McCarthy, almost all of the arrangements for this last recording, written by Eddie Durham with the assistance of Eddie Barefield, along with most of the star soloists from 1929 and 1931, such as Webster, Durham, Basie, Hot Lips Page and Barefield, were able to implement them, the decisive factor that Bennie Moten is remembered today as a central figure in Kansas City jazz .

1933 was a difficult year for the band, although new musicians were added from the disbanded Original Blue Devils . a. Buster Smith and Lester Young . For a short time, Moten got himself in 1934. George E. Lee as co-director, because he believed his entertainer skills would benefit him. Other musicians left: The band Count Basie and His Cherry Blossom Orchestra , founded in 1933 , also included Herschel Evans and Jimmy Rushing as singers. In the same year they went to Little Rock , Arkansas with Basie without Moten . Basie's band gradually broke up. The popularity of the Moten Band in Kansas City was now better and Moten secured the band a performance in Denver shortly before his death . Moten's tragic death ended this stage of Kansas City jazz. He underwent a light routine operation ( tonsillectomy , removal of tonsils ), in which the surgeon injured a vein through malpractice - Moten bled to death.

After his death, his nephew Buster initially led the “Orchestra”, to which Basie also belonged for a few days, but then gave up. Count Basie founded his own orchestra with the Barons of Rhythm in 1935 , drawing on many of Motens' former musicians. The compositions "Moten Swing" (1932) and "South" are attributed to Moten. Basie said Moten Swing was his and Durham's. Before leaving Moten's Band, Durham had written a whole set of arrangements at his request and was later angry to hear them again with Basie (according to Durham's own account, One O Clock Jump as Blue Ball .)

literature

• Albert McCarthy: Big Band Jazz . Berkley Publishing, 1977, p. 134 ff.

Web links

• Bennie Moten at Red Hot Jazz
• Bennie Moten at Club Kaycee
• Bennie Moten's Kansas City Orchestra (1929–1932)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ All plates 78er. Individual references for US Billboard Black: Gerhard Klußmeier: Jazz in the Charts. Another view on jazz history. Liner notes and booklet for the 100 CD edition. Membrane International, ISBN 978-3-86735-062-4 .
2. ^ Gunther Schuller : Early Jazz. Its roots and musical development . Oxford 1986, p. 283. Frank Driggs , Chuck Haddix: Kansas City Jazz: From Ragtime to Bebop - A History . Oxford 2006, ISBN 0-19-530712-7 , p. 43.
3. ↑ ^{a b c d} Bennie Moten . In: Local 627 and the Mutual Musicians Foundation: the Cradle of Kansas City Jazz . 2005
4. ^ Frank Driggs , Chuck Haddix: Kansas City Jazz: From Ragtime to Bebop - A History . Oxford 2006, ISBN 0-19-530712-7 , p. 109ff.
5. ^ McCarthy: Big Band Jazz . 1977, p. 137.
6. ^ Frank Driggs , Chuck Haddix: Kansas City Jazz: From Ragtime to Bebop - A History . Oxford 2006, ISBN 0-19-530712-7 , pp. 135f.
7. ^ Albert McCarthy: Big Band Jazz . Berkley Publishing, 1977, p. 203. It refers to an interview with Durham