Albert Ammons

This year marks the centennial birthday of famed boogie woogie and jazz pianist Albert C. Ammons. Born in Chicago on September 23, 1907, Ammons became one of the best champions of the boogie woogie style. Together with fellow players Pete Johnson and Meade Lux Lewis, he thrilled thousands of audiences at concerts and in nightclubs, on radio broadcasts and phonograph recordings nationwide from the late 1930s through the 1940s. Despite his short life—Ammons was just 42 when he died in 1949—his contribution to the American jazz music scene was immense and helped pave the way for other less well-known black jazz musicians. Christopher Page, author of Boogie Woogie Stomp: Albert Ammons and His Music, notes that of all the boogie players in the 1940s (and there were many), Ammons may have pushed the music to its furthest limits, harmonically and rhythmically. From South Side to Carnegie Hall Ammons grew up on Chicago’s South Side, where he learned to play by watching the keys of player pianos in his own and neighboring apartments. He began his musical career playing rent parties and was influenced by local blues and jazz pianists, such as Jimmy Blythe, Hersal Thomas, Alonzo and Jimmy Yancey, and Clarence “Pinetop” Smith. It was Smith who in the late 1920s popularized boogie-woogie and was reported to have encouraged the young Ammons to “learn and play my music.” During those years and into the 1930s, Ammons played with several Chicago bands and dance orchestras. In 1935, he formed his own five-piece jazz band, the Rhythm Kings, and began earning rave reviews for a popular South Side night spot, Club DeLisa. Ammons and his group also cut four records for the Decca label in 1936; those discs attracted visiting jazz fans, one of them promoter John Hammond. In late 1938, Hammond invited Ammons and fellow Chicago pianist Meade Lux Lewis to New York—along with Kansas City blues shouter Big Joe Turner and his pianist Pete Johnson—to perform at Carnegie Hall on December 23. Sharing the stage with the boogie men were such top gospel and jazz performers as Sister Rosetta Tharpe, clarinetist Sidney Bechet, stride pianist James P. Johnson, bluesman Big Bill Broonzy, and the Count Basie Band. This event became the now-legendary “Spirituals to Swing Concert,” which introduced these musicians to a larger audience and launched them on national careers. The others in the concert performed creditably, but as most reviewers exclaimed, it was the boogie boys who stole the show. Sounding a Blue Note The Carnegie Hall debut led to other concerts, radio broadcasts, and recording sessions for Ammons and the Boogie Woogie Boys, as he, Johnson, Lewis, and Turner came to be known. The concert also led to the opening (in 1939–1940) of two Manhattan nightclubs, Cafe Society Downtown and Uptown, where the Boogie Boys nightly wowed their patrons. Cafe Society Downtown was also the first jazz club in New York to feature black and white musicians performing before integrated audiences. In January 1939, Blue Note, a brand-new jazz label, featured Ammons, Johnson, Lewis, and several other jazz pianists on its first record. By 1941, Lewis and Turner had left to follow separate careers. But for the next four years, Ammons and Johnson at their twin pianos recorded for Victor, played at nightclubs from coast to coast, and were featured with singer Lena Horne in the film short Boogie Woogie Dream. Back in Chicago in 1946, Ammons played in such local night clubs as the Bee Hive and was to record extensively for Mercury, both as soloist and combo leader. In January 1949, he was invited to play at the White House for President Harry Truman’s inauguration; the same month he jammed with the Lionel Hampton band for Decca Records. Illness sidelined Ammons later that year and he died at his home on December 2, 1949.- written by Charles Castnerhttp://albert-ammons.com/page5.html