Boogie woogie
Boogie-woogie is a solo piano style that originated in the United States in the first decade of the 20th century . The forerunner was the so-called barrelhouse piano , a simple rural piano style in which black blues musicians transferred their style from guitar to piano as early as the middle of the 19th century .
Concept and history
The term appeared three times in the archives of the Library of Congress before 1900 . According to the Oxford English Dictionary , it is the doubling of the word boogie , a family name for a house party. In Hausa and Mandinka , bug or buga means "(drum) to beat"; there is a similar word for "dance" in other African languages. John Tennison, who documented the history of boogie-woogie, sees its emergence in close connection with railroad construction in Texas , where it was first played in the barrel houses of African-American railroad workers in the 1870s. Its rhythm is characterized by the pounding noises of the steam locomotives of the Southern Pacific Railroad , which went up in 1871 on the Texas and Pacific Railway . Tennison goes so far as to identify individual machines of the railway company as the originators of the rhythm. Marshall (Texas) , the then headquarters of Texas and Pacific, where the well-known African-American pianist "Blind Tom" performed several times around 1875, is also officially the birthplace of boogie woogie . This is also confirmed by the writer and journalist Eliott Paul . The style was initially called almost blues . In northeast Texas around 1900 , the young Leadbelly adapted the boogie woogie for the bass.
Characteristics and playing technique
The harmonic sequence essentially corresponds to the blues scheme. In terms of playing technique, the boogie-woogie contrasts the rolling bass of the left hand (often in short, constantly repeated riffs, mostly in dotted rhythm, including the blue notes ) with melodic, blues-oriented off-beat figures of the right hand, those of trills and Tremoli are interspersed.
The piano pedal is typically not used. The tempo is significantly faster compared to the blues and requires some technical skill. With upright pianos , it is usually common to remove the front wall of the instrument while playing so that the strings and the hammer mechanism are clear.
Further spread
With the immigration of blacks to the north of the USA, their music also got there. Boogie-woogie became very popular in Chicago in the 1920s. It remained essentially a solo piano style, only sporadically it was played in larger ensembles.
Boogie-Woogie was particularly popular in the so-called house-rent parties : the apartment owner organized a few bottles of schnapps and a musician and financed his rent with the entrance fee that he demanded from the guests.
The boogie-woogie style continued to develop in the late 1920s, and pianists like Clarence 'Pinetop' Smith and Jimmy Yancey laid the foundation for this music to become popular music for a period of the 1930s and 1940s. The music producer John Hammond , as the organizer of concerts with boogie-woogie pianists, made a significant contribution to this boom. Initially three musicians became famous: Albert Ammons , Pete Johnson and Meade Lux Lewis . A concert by these three pianists in Carnegie Hall in New York in 1938 is considered legendary , and the audience was so ecstatic that the legend goes that the bouncers had to ask some participants down from the chandeliers to which they were all good Mood should have climbed. Only a few years later, in the wake of the general boogie-woogie wave, the actual pioneers became better known. Now other musicians such as Blind John Davis , Champion Jack Dupree , Jay McShann , Sippie Wallace , Little Willie Littlefield and Dorothy Donegan became known as boogie pianists. The child prodigy Frankie "Sugar Chile" Robinson et al. Also enjoyed popularity in the American media . a. with Caldonia .
present
Pianists like Vince Weber , Axel Zwingenberger , Che Peyer , Jörg Hegemann , Nico Brina , Bob Hall , Michael Pewny , Eeco Rijken Rapp , Ray Skjelbred and Silvan Zingg are recognized for their preference for this style and the Swiss Ladyva is also successfully mentioned here . Since 1988, the Hamburg “Fabrik” has held a concert every August 8th as The Hamburg Boogie Woogie Connection , which brings together German and international stars of the boogie woogie and is unique in this form worldwide. Since 2007 top musicians have been meeting in Brunn am Gebirge for three days in June every year.
See also
Web links
- From Ammons to Zwingenberger - a brief history of the boogie woogie piano
- Audio sample of various accompaniments with English explanations on YouTube by Dick Hyman
- Boogie Woogie - Mixture of blues, jazz, ragtime and swing on Prawda water .
Individual evidence
- ↑ John Tennison: Website of the Boogie-Woogie Foundation 2012
- ^ Elliot Paul: That Crazy American Music . 1957, p. 229.