Lost and Found, Part 4: James P. Johnson, Ella Fitzgerald, Lennie Tristano & Hasaan Ibn Ali

Click the play button to listen

This is the fourth and final hour of recent historic jazz discoveries.

There are some amazing and inspiring stories of jazz sleuths who pulled out all the stops to discover long-lost music. The story of James P. Johnson's lost manuscripts ranks right up there with the most dedicated jazz archeologists. James P. Johnson is best known as the inventor of stride piano and the composer of the singular piece of music that came to symbolize the 1920s in America, "The Charleston." Johnson had aspirations to write "serious" music like his contemporary George Gershwin Several of his orchestral pieces were premiered at Carnegie Hall in the early 1940s, but all of the parts and scores were long gone and there was no existing recording of the Carnegie Hall event After years of searching, the long lost scores were found stored in the attic of his daughter in Riverside, California wrapped in plastic and preserved like an old photo album.

((Lennie Tristano}} was a pianist and teacher who developed a cult like following in the late 40s and 50s. Charlie Parker said "He can play anywhere with anybody. He's a tremendous musician." Many of his never-before-heard home recordings were released in 2022.

Ella Fitzgerald's live recordings have always had a special power that her studio outings lack. A few years ago, the folks at Verve Records were digging through a rediscovered trove of live recordings that Norman Granz had stashed away decades ago. They came across an apparently untouched reel-to-reel, with yellowed Scotch tape still holding the box shut. The tape was of a concert Fitzgerald had given in Berlin.

The pianist Hasaan Ibn Ali made his debut in 1965 at age 33. This session was all we had of this obscure figure. He did record a second album with the saxophonist Odean Pope, but he was arrested for narcotics a few weeks later and the record was never released. Within a few years, Hassan stopped playing in public, and died in a convalescent home in 1981. The master tapes to the album, "Metaphysics," were destroyed in a fire, but a monoaural "safety" backup was recently found.

Comments