'Star Women': Lil Hardin Armstrong, Mary Lou Williams, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Alice Coltrane, Valaida Snow
One of the 'Spiritual as Music' Hours
You can check this Hour our also on donpaulwearerev.com and see more of the ‘Spiirual as Music’ subjecs and shows.
A CLICK HERE will let you listen on Bandcamp. You can Stream in 128 kbps or download in 10-times fuller fidelity with aiff. The difference between ‘em leaps to my ears. Hear such rich and lively music in the fullest format you can!
Lil Hardin of Memphis, Tennessee and Fisk University was playing piano and writing songs with Joe "King" Oliver's Creole Jazz Band in Chicago when Joe sent for young Louis Armstrong. Young Louis was Second Cornet in the Band. Lil at first found Louis to be awkward as well as unschooled. But—some light shining through him and his horn won her over. She'd been writing songs with Joe and on her own. She began to write songs with Louis. Joe’s Creole Jazz Band filled the Palace Gardens with bumping bodies.. Bootleg liquor and champagne overflowed. That Creole Band of Joe’s recorded some of the most expressive and combinative music … dancing on the fly … ever. Lil wrote or co-wrote many of their tunes.
0:00 “Working Man Blues” (Hardin / Oliver) 1923
3:20 ”Tears” (Hardin / Armstrong) 1923
The core band then in 1923: Joe King Oliver cornet, Lil Hardin piano, Johnny Dodds clarinet, Baby Dodds drums-set, Honoré Dutré trombone, Johnny St. Cyr banjo, and Louis Armstrong cornet. Steady, syncopating, surprising MAGIC! Intelligence shared by birds and human beings at our highest.
Lil and Louis married in early 1924. Lil urged him to leave Joe and lead his own band. Louis went to New York and gained a bigger profile with Fletcher Henderson's band. Lil was proud. On Louis' return to Chicago, a Bandleader then, Lil unfurled a banner that read 'The World's Greatest Trumpet Player.
In 1925 and 1927 Louis and Lil were principals in fabled Hot Five and Hot Seven albums. Kid Ory was trombone in the Hot Five of 1925. The 1927 Hot Seven returned Drums-Set to the group, with Baby Dodds, and added Pete Briggs on tuba, and had John Thomas most often on Trombone. In 1928 Earl Hines replaced Lil on piano and Zutty Singleton became the band's drummer.
8:08 ”King of the Zulus” (Hardin) 1925
11:20 “Hotter than Hot” (Hardin / Armstrong) 1927
14:52 “Two Deuces” (Hardin) 1928
17:48 ”Don’t Jive Me” (Hardin) 1928
Lil Hardin Armstrong went back to leading her own band, with Freddie Keppard on trumpet. In 1930, following a visit to New Orleans, she and Louis separated.
Her pen and her orchestrations remain indelible. A woman on piano … What kind of universe ripples forward? 12 of the 79 tracks recorded by Louis-led bands or Orchestras between 1925 and 1929 are written by Lil. Two more she co-wrote with Louis.
From 1936 to 1940 Lil led her Swing Orchestra. She then retired from the music business, becoming a tailor and making a tuxedo for Louis and handsewn shirts--labeled with her mother's first name, Decie--for friends' birthdays.
She resumed occasional performances as a soloist and bandleader, recording for both CBS and Verve in the early 1960s.
At the funeral-service for Louis in July 1971 Lil rode with his last wife, Lucille, in the family-car through Queens, New York. She collapsed the next month while at the piano during a memorial concert for Louis. She died--like him--of a heart attack. Most unfortunately, her letters and unfinished autobiography disappeared from her house.
We'll hear quite a lot of Lil Hardin Armstrong's music and voice in this Hour. We'll hear also Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith. We’ll hear Mary Lou Williams with Andy Kirk's 12 Clouds of Joy in 1929, and as an improvising soloist in 1977. We'll hear bandleader and composer Alice Coltrane in her "Turiya and Ramakrishna" (more than 10,000,000 Youtube views!) of 1970. We'll conclude with a run of Lil's tunes from the 1930s.
Again, we have to wonder at miracles of progress and creation!
Miraculous progress in the arts and society by people of color in particular over the past 125 years ... 20th-century phenoms proceeding into even wider reach and appreciation now…. 10-million Youtube views! Such has got to help everyone!'s health
What worlds did ALICE bring to JOHN and his Peers and Descendants!
The soulful, defiant and witty voices of Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith.
The prodigious Mary Lou Williams (she taught herself to play piano at age THREE) figures ESSENTIALLY in two tunes by Andy Kirk and his 12 Clouds of Joy.
We conclude with three tunes from Lil and her 1930s’ Swing Orchestra and then hear "Patience and Fortitude" by trumpeter and singer Valaida Snow— another intense and valiant ‘Star Woman’ whose talents unfold into mysterious heights.
0:00 “Working Man Blues” (Hardin / Oliver) 1923
3:20 ”Tears” (Hardin / Armstrong) 1923
6:27 Don Paul introduces the ‘Star Women’ series. Many of these creators, performers and/or composers were famous in their times. Many of them are far less well-known now; some are scandalously neglected. All of them made marvelous contributions. Check out Lil Hardin Armstrong and her contributions first of all in this series.
8:08 ”King of the Zulus” (Hardin) 1925
11:20 “Hotter than Hot” (Hardin / Armstrong) 1927
14:52 “Two Deuces” (Hardin) 1928
17:48 ”Don’t Jive Me” (Hardin) 1928
19:35 Overview
20:45 ”Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” 1927 by the woman, MA RAINEY, who transformed show-business by making minstrelsy the kind of Review, circa 1905, that led to the Ziegfield Follies and their like. She and Beethoven were later said to have once unwrapped a bedro
23:33 “Tain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do”, 1923, by Bessie Smith, the artist whose sales most sustained Columbia Records in the middle and late 1920s.
26:43 “What’s Your Story, Morning Glory” Mary Lou Williams. pianist and arranger with Andy Kirk’s 12 Clouds of Joy, 1929.
29:13 ”Mary’s Idea”, 1929.
32:52 “Mary Lou’s Blues” live at Keystone Korner in San Francisco, 1977.
39:25 “Turiya and Ramakrishna”, Alice Coltrane from her 1970 album Ptah, the Daaoud with Pharoah Sanders and Joe Henderson tenor saxophones and alto flutes, Ron Carter bass, and Ben Riley drums-set.
48:42 "My Hi Dee Ho Man” , 1936, Lil Hardin Armstrong with her Swing Orchestra.
51:22 “Brown Gal”
54:12 ”Doin’ the Suzie Q”
57:28 ”Patience and Fortitude”, Valaida Snow vocal and trumpet, 1946, an excerpt on film by this international star, following her imprisonment and abuse in Nazis' Denmark during World War Two.