Claude Williams (musician)

Claude Williams

Claude Gabriel "Fiddler" Williams (* 22. February 1908 in Muskogee , Oklahoma ; † 25. April 2004 in Kansas City ) was an American jazz - violinist , guitarist (and occasional singer) of the swing .

Life

Williams was the son of a blacksmith and already played mandolin, cello, banjo and guitar at the age of 10, among others in the band of his brother-in-law Ben Johnson. He got into jazz when he heard Joe Venuti playing in his hometown . In 1927 he was a member of the family orchestra of Doc Pettiford (with his son Oscar Pettiford ) and in the same year with the "Twelve Clouds of Joy" in Tulsa under Terrence Holder (who led the band before Andy Kirk ), with whom he was his in 1928 first recorded and was in New York in 1930. The band pianist Mary Lou Williams arranged some of his compositions. He was also a member of the bands of Kansas CityEddie Cole (in which his brother Nat King Cole also played), Alphonse Trent , George E. Lee (where he remembers Charlie Parker as a tutor) and the predecessor of Freddie Green in the Count Basie band in 1936/7 . Although he led the " Down Beat " polls several times as a guitarist, he left because the impresario for the basie band John Hammond did not like his playing. Since he u. a. For this reason, he was not allowed to play solos with Basie anyway, Williams saw this as a stroke of luck in retrospect. In the legendary jam sessions of Kansas City, his violin style also formed when he had to assert himself in solos against the dominant saxophonists such as Lester Young , Herschel Evans and Ben Webster . Williams played in the 1940s with a WPA band in Michigan, in Chicago with "The Four Shades of Rhythm" and in New York a. a. with the Austin Powell quintet . From 1950 he used electric amplifiers for his violin. In 1951/2 he played in Los Angeles with "Roy Milton's Blues Band" and then moved back to Kansas City. He played u. a. with Buddy Tate , Don Byas (like him from Muskogee), from 1953 in his own combo with Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson and Hank Jones and - in the 1970s - with the Kansas City jazz legend Jay McShann (also from Muskogee, they took together 1972 "The Man from Muskogee" on). As one of the last surviving Kansas City Jazz swing musicians , he made a comeback in the 1980s with appearances on television, the revue "Black and Blue" (1989), concerts at Lincoln Center , Carnegie Hall , several European tours (where "Call for the Fiddler" was written in 1976 at Steeplechase , with Horace Parlan ) and in the White House with Bill Clinton .

Williams was inducted into the Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame in 1989 .

literature

• Kunzler "Jazz Lexicon" 2002

Web links

• Woelfle in the jazz newspaper on the death of Williams
• Biography of Dantzler
• Claude Williams in the Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame in 1989
• Obituary in The Guardian
• University of Missouri

Individual evidence

1. ↑ "if I had stayed with Count, I would have just been playing that ching-ching rhythm guitar for forty years", quoted by Dantzler, see web links
2. ^ Works Progress Administration, Roosevelt's New Deal Job Creation