I read Julian Dyer's piece on stride with great interest, as I have
a particular weakness for this most macho of jazz piano styles.  There
can be little doubt that the South Side Chicago school, exemplified by
black players like Jimmy Blythe, had a major influence on the evolution
of stride.

Julian suggested that Blythe was primarily a boogie pianist; with
the greatest of respect I totally disagree with him.  It is true that
Blythe occasionally employed left hand boogie figures, but so did James
P.  Johnson and Fats Waller -- no serious stride piano aficionado would
mention those two names and boogie in the same breath.

I seem to remember that it was during the 1970s when John Malone
asked me to cut some piano rolls for release on the Play-Rite label.
Having completed a few it became horribly clear that I was expected
to churn out pop garbage, so I ended the association (and still await
my cheque!).

John is a brilliant engineer but knows almost nothing about music.
(Not an insult, simply a statement of fact).  One day I half-jokingly
told him that he should get people like Ralph Sutton and Johnny
Guarnieri to come out to the Play-Rite factory and put down some tracks
on the recording piano; a few months later they did!

Tragically, the master rolls were "edited", and completely ruined, by
an amateur who neither knew nor cared anything about the stride idiom.
The production copies were a cruel parody of the originals.  Luckily
I managed to sneak some unedited Guarnieri material out of the factory
before the butcher got to them!

For my money, J. Lawrence Cook was responsible for some of the best
stride piano rolls ever released.  He played a major production role
in the legendary QRS sessions by James P. Johnson and Fats Waller, and
cut numerous rolls under his own name, many of them dreary Tin Pan
Alley potboilers.  However Cook's huge QRS output included some pretty
impressive stride ("12th Street Rag", for instance), the like of which
I have yet to hear on other contemporary American labels.

John Farrell
stridepiano@email.msn.com

 [ Jimmy Blythe also appears on phono records with jazz bands; the
 [ style agrees with the nickelodeon and piano rolls he made, and
 [ it's surely distinctive.  I simply call it, "South Side Chicago
 [ Style," and I love it!   -- Robbie