Willie "the Lion" Smith
Willie "the Lion" Smith · Arts & Literature
Stride piano master of Harlem, whose playing Duke Ellington called the greatest influence on all the great jazz pianists; his father, by his own memoir, was Jewish, he made his bar mitzvah at thirteen in Newark and later served as cantor of a Harlem congregation
23 novembre 1893, Goshen, New York, États-Unis — 18 avril 1973, New York, États-Unis
États-Unis
Willie "the Lion" Smith is recognized among Jewish contributors to Arts & Literature — Stride piano master of Harlem, whose playing Duke Ellington called the greatest influence on all the great jazz pianists; his father, by his own memoir, was Jewish, he made his bar mitzvah at thirteen in Newark and later served as cantor of a Harlem congregation
William Henry Joseph Bonaparte Bertholf, who took the surname of his stepfather and became known as Willie the Lion Smith, was one of the masters of Harlem stride piano: with James P. Johnson and Fats Waller he developed, in the clubs and at the rent parties, the style that would be called stride. Duke Ellington said that the Lion was the greatest influence of all the great jazz pianists, that he had a beat that stays in the mind, and in 1939 composed and recorded Portrait of the Lion; he also wrote the foreword to Smith's memoir, Music on My Mind, in 1964.
In that memoir Smith says that his father, Frank Bertholf, an electrician, was Jewish. As a boy he delivered clean laundry for his mother to her clients, among them a prosperous Jewish family who invited him to sit in on their Hebrew lessons on Saturday mornings; he became somewhat conversant in Yiddish, made his bar mitzvah at thirteen in Newark, and later in life served as a Hebrew cantor for a congregation in Harlem.
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Source: Wikipedia — Willie "the Lion" Smith
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Stride piano master of Harlem, whose playing Duke Ellington called the greatest influence on all the great jazz pianists; his father, by his own memoir, was Jewish, he made his bar mitzvah at thirteen in Newark and later served as cantor of a Harlem congregation
Source: Wikipedia — Willie "the Lion" Smith
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