Jimmie

The first man to pay public homage to the late, great jazz pianist, Thomas Wright ("Fats") Waller, who died last week (see p. 70) was just the man to do it. He was Fat's great friend and prime pianistic inspiration, James Price Johnson. Genial, blue-black Jimmie worked out on a Steinway at one of Guitarist Eddie Condon's rousing jazz concerts in Manhattan's Town Hall, played a medley of Fats Waller's tunes including Honeysuckle Rose, Clothesline Ballet, Ain't Misbehavin'. He played them the way Fats would have wanted them played.

Jimmie Johnson should know how. It was he who became Fats's favorite mentor in Chicago in 1921, when Jimmie was 27 and Fats a big stripling of 17. No one has ever given a better description of what happened than Jimmie himself gave last week: "I taught him how to groove, how to make it sweet--the strong bass he had dates from that time. He stuck pretty well to my pattern--developed a lovely singing tone, a lyric, melodic expression, and then too, him being the son of a preacher, he had fervor."

But Jimmie' Johnson's place in jazz history does not depend on Fats Waller. Back in the early '205, when Jimmie made countless pianola rolls for the old Q.R.S. company, his powerful perforations were idolized by the most genuine, undiluted barrelhouse pianists and their admirers. Today he is regarded among them generally as the noblest professor of them all.

Big Giggin'. Son of a New Brunswick, N.J. hardware-store proprietor, Jimmie got started at the piano when he moved to Manhattan and met a ragtimer named Charlie Cherry. Jimmie later sweated over fundamentals with an old-fashioned scales and exercises man. In 1912 easy money ended Jimmie's school days--he started playing in cafes. For the dancing pleasure of the "Geechies," Negroes from around Charleston, S.C. and Savannah, Ga., he worked up his noted Carolina Shout. Near Manhattan's 37th St., in the "Old Tenderloin," he studied under Ablaba, a honkytonk pianist with a "left hand like a walking beam." On that beam he modeled his own "walking bass." By 1920 he had what French jazz enthusiasts are apt to call majesty.

Jimmie formed a band for "gigs" (one-night stands) which was booked through James Reese Europe's Clef Club. He played for debut parties at the Plaza, the Waldorf. He heard what Scott Fitzgerald once described as "a hundred pairs of golden and silver slippers" shuffling "the shining dust." Jimmie began making pianola rolls, often in the same studio with a youngster named George Gershwin.

Jimmie recalls endless gin, playing variations on Tea for Two for days on end, jamming at Harlem's Rhythm Club with youthful Duke Ellington, Art Tatum and Fats Waller, writing a bale of tunes for Broadway producers. He was one of the first jazzmen to go on the air. ("In those days we never got paid--just pats on the back and promises. . . .") By the end of the '203, Jimmie's health had more holes than a piano roll, and he was ready for what he calls his "stormy days."

Emeritus. He and his ex-dancer wife Lily finally bought a small house in Jamaica, L.I. In his weakened condition, he contented himself with a sedentary project--repeated subway rides between Manhattan's Penn Station and Harlem. In 1932, in his Harlem Symphony, he reported some of the things he had heard--or might have heard--Jewish horns at noth Street, Spanish castanets at n6th, Negro basses at 12 5th. Cut down to beer ("my great love is champagne"), ailing with sinus, Jimmie went back to studying music.

These days he gardens, tends a few chickens, visits his wife's family's country place in Pennsylvania's Poconos. There he skis in winter, and in summer, he shyly admits, he likes to "listen to the birds." Lately he has been working on a Negro folk opera Dreamy Kid (based on a one-act play by Eugene O'Neill). Jimmie plays three nights a week in a Jamaica bar & grill. He turns down other offers. "I don't want to be held up by hard and fast rules now--I want to give all my time to my studies."

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