Joe Venuti

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Giuseppe "Joe" Venuti (probably born September 16, 1903 in Philadelphia , Pennsylvania, † August 14, 1978 in Seattle , Washington ) was an American jazz musician and violinist .

Live and act

The date and place of birth are not secured. Venuti himself long claimed that he was born on September 1, 1904 on a ship when his parents were crossing from Italy to the USA. Joachim-Ernst Berendt suspected that he wanted to conceal a birth in Italy at the beginning of his career, when that was not good for a career for a jazz musician in the USA. Carlo Bohländer states in his jazz guide that Venuti denied that he was born on March 19, 1894 in Lecco on Lake Como , as some claim , while April 4, 1898 was given as the date of birth elsewhere. But he also points out that he was known for his jokes. According to his birth certificate, he was born to Reclam's jazz leader in Philadelphia, the son of Italian immigrants. According to Marcus Woelfle , he was born on December 3, 1894 in Malgrate , Italy.

He started his first engagement in 1923 with guitarist Eddie Lang . With the duo with guitar, which was very unusual for the instrumentation at the time, Venuti was very successful; In 1926 he and Lang recorded key documents of early jazz in a duet (later LP Stringing The Blues ). It can be seen as his merit that the violin has established itself as a jazz instrument in Chicago jazz . After his first engagements with Red Nichols and Jean Goldkette , he played with Paul Whiteman from 1927 . He subsequently worked with Frank Trumbauer , Frank Signorelli , Benny Goodman , Jack Teagarden , Tommy Dorsey , Jimmy Dorsey , the Boswell Sisters , Roger Wolfe Kahn and most of the major white jazz musicians of the late 1920s and early 1930s. With his Blue Four and Harold Arlen as singers, he had his first hit in the Billboard Top 30 with the song "Little Girl" recorded for Columbia .

After a successful guest appearance in England in 1934, he toured with his own band (including Herb Geller ) for two decades , and then performed with small groups in the clubs of Los Angeles , Las Vegas and Seattle. In 1968 he was heard with great success at the Newport Jazz Festival .

Venuti developed a new technique to be able to play all four strings of the violin at the same time. In the so-called loose bow fiddle technique , he detached the holder from the frog of the bow and placed the bow hair over the four strings and passed the bow stick under the instrument. The violin itself was wedged between the bow hair and the bow stick, which enabled the creation of up to four-part sounds. The piece Four String Joe , composed by Venuti and Lang in 1927, refers to this playing technique.

He was the first jazz musician who gave jazz a chamber music character. He made a decisive contribution to the development of the small bands (combos), which later play a major role in bebop. His violin playing can be described as clarinet-like. He had a powerful style of playing, preferred higher registers, pentatonic runs, used blues effects.

Its articulation is noise-free with a smooth, undisturbed tone in various horizontal stroke types, without the trace of a tone approach that would be reminiscent of the tone, especially of brass instruments. The proximity to European art music , the classical training is still recognizable here. However, we find a number of jazz characteristics in his playing, such as: B. blue notes, accent shifts (the frequently used three-way shift over groups of four, which is also known as "secondary rag" from ragtime ), ternary phrasing and of course improvisation as such, make his style clearly jazz. From a jazz point of view, his early recordings are still Chicago style, while later recordings contain elements of swing.

Discography (selection)

Chart positions
Explanation of the data
Singles
Little girl
  US 4th 1931 (6 weeks)
Beale Street Blues
  US 20th 1932 (1 week)
Jig Saw Puzzle Blues
  US 19th 1933 (1 week)
Stop, look and listen
  US 5 1935 (6 weeks)
Twenty-Four Hours a Day
  US 7th 1935 (5 weeks)
title year Label
Stringing The Blues 1926 Australia
The Daddy of the Violin 1973 SABA / MPS
Joe & Zoot (with Zoot Sims ) 1974 chiaroscuro
Gems 1975 Concord Jazz

Very few of Venuti's numerous recordings are available on CD.

collection

literature

Web links

Commons : Joe Venuti  - collection of images, videos and audio files

References and comments

  1. ↑ Reclams Jazzführer 1989 and Barry Kernfeld (eds.) New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, Macmillan 1996. The date of birth and the place are disputed. It is also 1904, 1898 or March 19 (in Lecco), September 16, 1894 (Lecco) (Feather, Gitler, Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz, Oxford UP 1999, alternatively they give September 16, 1903 in Philadelphia) or Cited December 3, 1894 (in Malgrate near Lecco). Church documents should be available for the latter date.
  2. ^ Joachim-Ernst Berendt: The jazz book . 2001, p. 469. According to Berendt, he came from Lake Como.
  3. ↑ Reclams Jazzführer, Reclam 1989, p. 323
  4. ↑ Reclams Jazzführer, 1989, p. 323
  5. ↑ Marcus Woelfle, Joe Venuti, Jazzzeitung, 2004/03 . Thereafter, Venuti carried out his own research in 1971 during a stay in Italy for several years, but allegedly could not find anything. According to Woelffle, the date of birth was found in Malgrate in the church book in 1894, but Venuti denied it to the authors of Reclam's jazz guide.
  6. ↑ All plates 78er. Individual references for US Billboard: 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
personal data
SURNAME Venuti, Joe
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Venuti, Giuseppe
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American jazz musician and violinist
DATE OF BIRTH uncertain: September 16, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH unsure: Philadelphia , Pennsylvania , United States
DATE OF DEATH August 14, 1978
Place of death Seattle , Washington , United States