Still Roaring

My way was to get a cigar clenched between my teeth, my derby tilted back, knees crossed, and my back arched at a sharp angle against the back of the chair. I'd cuss at the keyboard and then caress it with endearing words; a pianist who growls, hums, and talks to the piano is a guy who is trying hard to create something for himself.

Willie the Lion Smith, 69, has been creating something for himself for more than half a century -- and talking about it as fast as he could play it. With Fats Waller and James P. Johnson dead, he is the last of the great "stride style" pi anists who flourished in Harlem in the '20s and '30s. The style -- so named be cause the left hand shuttles between low notes and midrange chords in an oompah pattern -- draws its riches from ragtime, and it requires a "two-fisted tickler" to make it roll.

Creativity & Brandy. The Lion still qualifies. Last week, during a duo-piano date with Jack Teagarden Alumnus Don Ewell at Manhattan's Village Gate, he rippled off rocking arpeggios and lacy melodies in such original com positions as Echoes of Spring and Passionette; then, in up-tempo drivers like I Found a New Baby and Sweet Georgia Brown, he unleashed his juggernaut left hand to stride and stomp around the lower half of the keyboard while his right hand danced up high in finger-blurring filigrees or punched out syncopated chords. A resplendent showman in his red vest, derby and cigar (which he occasionally chomps in half during the heat of creation, especially when singing), he continues to strike inventive sparks off the keys. "All the time you got to come up with fresh ideas and play the old pieces different," he says. Creativity is part of his formula for longevity, along with brandy and "a good home life."

Born in Goshen, N.Y., to a Jewish father and a Negro-Indian mother, the Lion soaked up the blues songs of Negro work gangs, the gospel shouts of Baptist church services, and later, the honky-tonk music of the Newark, N.J., dives where he danced for pennies as a boy. At eight, he took to the piano and started "beautifying" the hymns he learned from his mother. He went professional at 14, working his way up in a rough saloon world of pimps, pickpockets, conmen and gamblers.

Inspiration & Speakeasies. After serving in the infantry in World War I, where he says he got his nickname for bravery on the French front, he moved into Harlem's musical mainstream. With Waller and Johnson, he soon reigned over the local circuit of speakeasies, raucous rent parties and all-night "carving contests," in which pianists, cheered on by audiences that included many musicians, pulled out their full bag of tricks in attempts to top each other. "Those fellows," says Cornetist Rex Stewart, "were the inspiration of most of the guys on the New York scene, many of whom became greats in the swing world --Benny Carter, Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman."

The stride stylists influenced a line of jazz pianists from Duke Ellington and Count Basic to such modernists as John Lewis and Theolonious Monk. Yet the stride heritage is waning fast, and the Lion is as outspoken on the subject as he is on everything else. "A good many modern pianists," he snorts, "tinkle with their left hand while their right is going nowhere. Modern style, they call it; I call it cheating." But of course he is prejudiced. "There's nothing more beautiful," he believes, "than a two-fisted pianist."

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