Jazz Articles about Clipper Erickson

Clipper Erickson: My Cup Runneth Over: The Complete Piano Works of R. Nathaniel Dett

by C. Michael Bailey
March 3, 2016

It is infrequent that I hear music by an unfamiliar composer that is so fantastically beyond anything I have heard before that when it happens, I am convinced of the Divine. So it is with the piano music of one R. Nathaniel Dett (1882-1943). Dett was an African-American polymath who was the first black to graduate from Oberlin College with a BA in piano and composition in 1908 and then achieved a Master's Degree from the Eastman School of Music ...