Word: tonk
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...once and future jazz. A season's billboard reads like an arpeggio of jazz excitement: Teddy Wilson, Benny Carter, Charles Mingus, Count Basie, Thelonius Monk, Milt Hinton, Cootie Williams, Maynard Ferguson, Buddy Rich, Stan Getz, Earl Hines, Herbie Hancock, Dizzy Gillespie. They are playing blues, bop, jazz rock, honky tonk and ethereal moondust. The newest jazz center is in SoHo lofts, where young audiences gather to hear warm, contrapuntal, richly melodic explorations. "We never repeat," says Sam Rivers, founder of Studio Rivbea. "For three hours straight, ideas keep flourishing...
...looks like just another neighborhood ice cream parlor. There's a honky-tonk piano in one corner and Swedish ivy and wandering jews hang from the ceiling. You can put granola or wheat germ on your natural carob fudge ice cream. The manager, Jeff Lessard, whom everyone just calls Jeff, is an easygoing, non-professional-looking fellow who seems to have taken lessons from Steve, over in Somerville...
...enough that the sheet music of Maple Leaf Rag, published in 1899, sold more than a million copies and made the son of a former slave well-to-do almost overnight. Not for Scott Joplin. As a youth he may have earned his living playing honky-tonk piano by night in a string of saloons and bordellos in the South and Midwest. But what few realized was that he was expertly tutored in harmony, counterpoint and the works of the classical masters...
After his mother's death, and one argument too many with his father about learning a trade, the boy left home for good at age 14 to become a honky-tonk pianist. It was the only trade he cared about. No doubt Joplin could play "ragged time," as it was first called because of its bouncing bass and syncopated right hand, as bumptiously as the next man. But by the time he began writing his rags down in the late 1890s, they had obviously become objects of care, even personal meaning...
Hint of Passion. At 25, Parsons was already a star of longhair country, who was stretching folk material across thudding rock rhythms. Emmylou had a gift for penetrating to the heart of a lyric. Parsons taught her to sing honky-tonk ballads like his Sin City, and soon invited her to Los Angeles to do back-up harmonies for his albums (GP and Grievous Angel). When Parsons died in 1973, she was personally and professionally devastated. "Gram turned me on to root country, to George Jones with his East Texas twang," she says. "I still try to learn Gram...