SHAW MEETS THE LION
How'd I hear Willie the first time? I was walking along Harlem one night as a kid, about 19, I just got to New York uh waiting for a local 8O2 card. It took 6 months. They wanted to keep musicians out of New York. The work wasn't that plentiful. So, I had to wait 6 months without working at all except sneaking out playing a job way out in left field somewhere—left field Long Island and uh so was walking around Harlem looking for a place to play just to keep my chops up so I had my case with me. Horns, alto, and clarinet. And I turned around the corner, I think it was 134th street and there was a little canopy, a club, a tiny little club. I didn't know it was a club, just downstairs, a basement place.

And there was this piano coming out and it was quite different from anything I ever heard. A little bit like hmmm, what's his name, Jimmy Johnson. A lot like that, ragtime in a way. […] And I thought who is that? And I started listening, listening and finally fascinated. And I thought, ooo that guy, who that it I don't know. So, I stood there and waited. And uh after a while the guy came out. The music stopped and the guy came out. And I've written about this in a story called, "Snow White and Harlem."

The name of the boy is Snow, the name of Willie, Eddie White, the Tiger, instead of Willie the Lion Smith. [reading] So, this guy came out and I talked to him. I said, who's that piano player, he's a bitch. So, the guy said you're looking at him. So, I said you're the guy that played that piano? So, he's says yeah. So, we get talking a little bit and he says gotta horn there? I said, that's right. He says, watcha got? So, I says let me come down and play a little bit. Can I join? He says, sure come on in. So, I walked in it was a very strange experience. I was the only white guy in the place. And I felt very self-conscious about it but after a while it was all right. They had this old, scarred piano, upright piano with a cigar, ashtray on its upper keys. [stops reading]

The works, the top-front of the piano was missing. All you could see was hammers. It wasn't a good piano. He sure made it sound good. He knew what he was doing. So, I sat in with him and uh it was a very exhilarating experience. I've written about it in some length in the story. But it's hard to explain that in words. I mean you get up into a certain place and it becomes a kind of experience that cannot be transmitted through language. So, when he, when he came down, when he had been playing for a, when he came down he had been playing stuff I knew way over my head. Well, that was the effect he had on me cause he had been doing things I had not heard before.

And I was trying to stretch out to meet that, and emulate, and over, ya know, to look over. Well, it was an interesting experience. I learned a lot. But then I'd go back there all the time. And he let me, ya know, he got to know me. We got to know each other pretty well.

He was very nice to me. And he liked what I played. He said ya know, where did you learn to play like that kid? You blow purty good, he'd say, purty, purty good. It was Willie and I'd say, well ya know, I was around Chicago and I played this guy and I told him about Bix and about [Frankie]Teschemacher and all the people I had met.

So, that was Willie. He asked me who do I listen to? Well, then I said Pops Whiteman, Armstrong and Bix. Ya know about Bix, ya know about Trumbauer?. Actually it's a funny thing people ask me who my influences. Most of them are piano players. Art Tatum. When I was in Toledo I'd sit down with him. I would sit in with him all the time. I'd go from Cleveland up there and play with him and um. Art was strange as any guy. When I saw saw Art later, many years later. I hadn't seen him in maybe 10-12 years. Um, I walked into walked into the ? one night he was playing there and as you know he was pretty blind.

So, I walked up to him after a set and I was as far away from as I am from oh maybe 10 feet away, maybe 5 feet away. I said how you doin? He said, Artie Shaw? I said how did you  know. He said I could hear your voice man. He had tremendous ears. Well, that's part of playing, ya know. Good ears, ears like a rabbit. They say a guy could hear grass grow. Well, I had ears like that.

That had to be one of the fastest left hands that I ever knew. He would talk about guys that when I was a kid. He would listen to him. And I guess he learned the same way everybody else says. In those days you don't have schools, it was osmosis. You listened to enough people and you picked up a little here, a little there. […] You made a lot of little fragments of other people's playing. And playing you put them together in a combination and it was only your own. If you were able to escape the forces and get out on your own and then you got to go on your own. Willie had done that. So he had played a lot of clubs before I knew him, he had played in medicine shows, back way back. So, he knew what was going on but when I heard him he was a pretty finished product.

ON WILLIE’S "ARROGANCE"
Later he got a little uh I guess the word is arrogant. He gave a kind of arrogance. He gave off a kind of it was arrogance earlier, he was a very sweet guy. But he looked, he played something and he'd look at you like, like uh, ya know, catch that man ya know and it was good. It was good for me. I learned a great deal from him.

[Would he try to intimidate other pianists?] Oh, he would do that. Yeah, Willie, that's part of what they called his arrogance. It wasn't arrogance, it was really forthrightness which the first time I played he said Hey you play pretty good boy, pretty good. Where you learned to play like that? Where you play ? like that? Well, ya know for a young kid that's disconcerting…

WILLIE AND BUDD FREEMAN
A lot of people actually would come up to him and he scared people. He scared Bud Freeman. Bud, Bud was kind of arrogant guy. He thought he knew what he was doing. And Bud'd look at him and say, Hey what'd that man, what's that? Come on, come on man. (laugh) Bud couldn't handle that. Bud was a very interesting player by the way, very good. But he couldn't quite cope with Willie's forthrightness.

WILLIE’S SOUND
It's very strange ‘cause in our day, in that day, the epitome of corn was Guy Lombardo. Guess who thought it was one of his favorite bands? Armstrong. Well, see what people don't understand is that Guy Lombardo had a great band for the twenties. So, it never changed. They said we [should] never change our music. Well, that's like saying Mr. Ford is still making the model T. It's a good car but you know, you grow. They didn't grow. And Guy Lombardo the same thing. But Willie did. He changed, he grew. He listened to other people. But in a sense he was always Willie Smith. He didn't sound like anybody else.

And nobody I know of sounded like him. I said to James P. Johnson […] one of the great ones. But Willie didn't sound at all like him. I don't know where he came from. Well, if you're good, you do what you do. And you hear from other people but you finally come up with your own thing, whatever it is. So, that's what happened to him, good player.

WILLIE’S BEAT
Willie did have one helluva beat on piano. It was his own. He had a, he had a tempo, what do you call it, beat. The repetition of that tempo, that time within there. Time as opposed to tempo. Willie had that. […] He would do a lot of hucking [vocalizing] in between. Huck, huck, huck, huck..off beat. Ducka, ducka, ducka....and you could hear it's like a drum, like a drum dropping bombs. He was a very interesting guy to play with.

For me it was, I've never seen anything like it. Never heard anything like. First time I heard him play it really floored me. But I got with it pretty soon. I found it was very exhilarating, very, very exciting.

HOW TO PRESERVE JAZZ
I keep telling people and they say what would you tell people if you want to preserve this music we love what we call jazz? What would be your advice if you were the emperor? I said, very simple, two words, pay attention. Nobody pays much attention you know.

WILLIE’S TIMELESS STYLE
…No, well he didn't play the blues. Willie didn’t play what we call today's jazz. He played in a period of his time. But what it was was almost timeless. It's still good. It'll always be good, like Mozart will always be good. It doesn't matter what period it was. Very few people understand this…

ON WILLIE’S EXPERIENCE WITH SONG PUBLISHERS
Difficult, almost impossible. I don't know how ihe got published. I used to tell him. There were things he'd play like that "Echo of Spring," which has been published. I'd say, Willie, can't you get that on paper? He'd say yeah I got it on paper but nobody would listen, couldn't get publishers. Stop and think about it, there was very little market for that. Who could play the left hand versus the right hand? Three and four all the time. Who could do that? So, most right people wanted to hear "When Francis dances with Me, Hully Gee" - that's what they wanted to hear. And those were down at the five and ten cent stores - you could buy them. In those days, you went to the 5 and 10. There was a girl playing the tune. They were terrible tunes but that's what you had.

American music has grown in spite of everything. Somehow this plant grew up. It should have been a dandelion instead of which it became a gorgeous orchard. Strange business.

AT PODS & JERRY’S (THE CATEGONIA CLUB)
Some of the other people sitting in at that time were Eddie Condon, Davie Tough, Davie was always around, Budd Freeman was around, George Wettling. I'm trying to think of who else. A lot of Chicago guys. Joe Sullivan was around. He'd sit in. There was a little place where you could go.

[During the day] we were playing, by that time I got lucky. I got a job at CBS and the radio and the staff, well that music was atrocious. But it was a livelihood and there was no where else to go. Where were you gonna go? Whose bands were there? Vince Lopez, and uh I don't know any of the other guys. Awful. What's his name? Glee club. Um, the Chicago guy with his brother, famous. Waring? That was what you did if you wanted to make a living in music. I worked with a band named Irving Aronson's, man. Whoo, unbelievable music. If you could call it music.

Don't forget Willie was playing for black audiences too. And they would put up with much more than whites cause they had better, sharper ears. It was up to then, more or less their music. Jazz was their music. It wasn't ours. There was no room for whites in that. Whites had no patience for that kind of music. We'd play jazz they'd look at you what are you doing, where's the melody.

WILLIE AS AN ARTIST
Well, Willie was an artist. He was always trying something else. Oh and his style always consisted of something else. I can't see that he was consciously trying to be different. He was different. And it's like what makes Ted Williams a better baseball player than somebody else? […] It's a very strange business. It's not a mistake that these guys get as good as they are. They are freaky. They are different.

You're asking me about Willie's reputation. Uh, he became more aware of that later when he was picked up by the jazz intellectuals. Up till then Willie was a very natural guy. He was his own person, he played at that place, Pod's and Jerry's, made a living and did the best he could. He wasn't concerned with being an artist. He was concerned with playing the piano. Later they became, you know, they carried him into these places and will you play this and show him that and he developed a certain amount of uh,self-consciousness about it. I felt sorry for him. I wish he hadn't.

ON BEING WILLIE’S PROTEGE
He was a much nicer guy [than his reputation suggested]. He didn't have a concern. When I met him he was wide open and we hit it off immediately. He liked me and I liked him. We got along well, and we had an affinity in our playing. Uh, I listened hard to what he did and I tried to do the equivalent of that with my alto and clarinet. Mostly alto in those days. Clarinet was all alone up there. I played both when I was with him. I remember I would sit down in a chair and he'd sit at the chair near the piano. He'd put my case down there and put the horns on it and then he'd say Ok this is a piano solo. We're going to do piano alone. So, you know come in whenever you want.

So he'd say now ok, and I'd play. And we'd come to a certain place, he'd say two more choruses and we're going out. So, that's how we'd play. It was no show. It was no big deal. We were playing for each other. Or, whoever was around. […] I played with whoever was around. Willie'd sit in too. I even when up and sat in the Cotton Club with Duke. I got to know Johnny Hodges and Johnny'd want to take a day off, or a set off so I'd sit down and play. This was when they weren't doing the show. They had this big, elaborate floorshow. And Willie was my open sesame. He took me all over Harlem. He was known, he was known all over the place. And it was like having a, I mean a protege. So, it was a privileged place to be. I didn't know that. But as I say it was a big introduction for me into that world, Harlem. I didn't know anybody in Harlem until I met Willie. He was the first guy that was uh paid me any attention and the later when he'd say Artie, my boy, my boy, my boy, I didn't know I was his boy. I was playing. He was playing.

ON BEING IN HARLEM [IN THE EARLY THIRTIES
Harlem was a great place back then. It was not politicized. They didn't hate whites at that time, or if they did, I wasn't aware of it. But I was up there every night, almost. It was the only place to go to play the kind of music you cared about. So, you'd go from the Savoy, they used to call it "the Track." It was a long, narrow place, the ballroom. Savoy to Cotton Club to Connie's, to Smalls, Paradise, all these joints. And all these little places. The Shim-Sham place, I remember that and Dicky Well's - all right in a little cluster. Oh, and Pods and Jerry's. So, it was a world, a little world of its own.

"WILLIE HATED CATEGORIES"
I never had much use for those terms like stride or walk or, didn't mean anything. There were only two kinds of music, good and bad. And good was good and it was different and every player had its own way of doing it. But I never believed much of that. I mean for example, take Louis Armstrong, he was one of us. Bix, was what he was. But they weren't the same. But they were very good. And they couldn't have been more antithetical to each other. But Louis liked Bix, Bix liked Louis. I mean like I said, nobody played like em yet.

And you see the other thing that people don't understand too much about that kind of music is, you're not listening too much to the things the guys are doing, the idioms. You're listening to the sound of the horn or the piano. A certain sound comes out of that. Art Tatum had a sound on piano. Fats had sound on the piano. No one was thinking it. Today you go in a room and there's lots of cloning going on. Everybody sounds like Charlie Parker or a derivative of Charlie Parker. It's not good. Charlie didn't sound like anybody else.

Who’s better? James Johnson, or Willie? Better? I don't know. Now Willie could never do what James Johnson did. And Johnson could never do what Willie did. So, it's like uh Horowitz versus Jay Heifetz. They're both as good as you could get at what they did. And if you get as good as you can get that's it. Where are you going from there? They measure you for a box when you get as good as you can get.

He [Willie] like I hated categories. And he was a musician. A musician plays music, other people name it. People talk to me about talent, my talent and I can't even discuss that. That's what it is, whatever it is. I mean I made the records. The jury's in on me. I can't talk about that anymore. You know ooh, you're a genius. I don't know what that word means. I did things though in a world had never done before. I know that Willie did things that no one had done before. That's all you can do. The best you can is that. Be who you are as well as you can do that.

[What do you remember about Willie’s own compositions in the Thirties?]
Well, you're talking now almost 75 years ago. I can remember Echo Spring and I can't remember much else. But I do know he played some very nice what we use to call, tasty things. The nice feel. They weren't like anybody else. His music that he wrote was very different. But that's much, much earlier. It's very hard to remember. You know, I suppose if I have been playing with guys like Mozart, I would have a tough time remembering the Haffner symphony.

ON BEING SURE OF YOURSELF
Well, if I could put it in simple terms, I was 19 in pretty high form and I recognized a man [Willie] who was pretty much, pretty much in control of himself, pretty sure of what he was doing. And there was a certain assuredness that came out of him that I recognized and aimed at. That was for me something to try to get at. To learn how to be as sure of yourself as he was. He was that.

Well, that's what being sure of yourself is. Being able to do what you do best. And do it your own way and not have any need to feel in anyway construed? about. You know you're good. You say to somebody hey that's good, and you say, yeah I know. Not too many people say that you know. If people tell me about a record I made and think it's a good one and they say that's a great record, I say, yeah I know. It was meant to be. What else could it be? Be surprised if it wasn't.

SPEAKING IN YIDDISH
…He [Willie] did speak a little Yiddish. And I asked him where that came from and he said, well he believed in that religion. He didn't know that I was Jewish. I didn't tell him that. But I was very surprised because his [business] card was in Yiddish characters and uh (laugh) it was very incongruous, you know. But in those days you always had the suspicion that maybe they were trying not to be regarded as black. In other words, black wasn't even the word in those days, it was colored. And colored was déclassé. So, maybe it was a little of that.

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WILLIE THE LION AND THELONIUS MONK
At any rate, there was one young guy [at James P. Johnson’s house] who was about my age I figured and he was indeed and his name was Thelonius Monk. […] Willie had Monk, after he had shown me up pretty well, I mean just to show he didn't have any generation bias, he said Monk come on over here and play something. Well, Thelonius Monk in those days was trying to play like Art Tatum so he was kind of running up and down like I was. Willie stopped him, "I told you play your thing. Don't play Tatum. We got a Tatum already." […]

And he was encouraging Monk to, to do just that. To, I mean, speak your own piece, say your own thing. Never mind what somebody else does. And he, he was very proud of the fact that he had come up in that stride period and his playing was unlike anybody else's. In those days he was doing harmonic substitutions that were far beyond what James P. Johnson was doing. No reflection on James P. it was just a different approach. I mean he was using harmonic variations and really setting the pace for some of the things that Monk was going to try to do.

ON WILLIE THE LION’S STYLE
Well, listen, he was the epitome of that style, but he went beyond that style. And he went beyond the style in that he was much more harmonically adventurous than some of his colleagues. There were others who did things like that, but he had his own way. He was, he loved melody and he was always conscious of playing little melodies with his left hand. And doing things that that uh sort of tied the music together in a way that was very personal. So harmonically, melodically, and rhythmically he was doing things that showed a very personal approach to each of those elements.

He really was unique, but he appropriated things from other people's playing that he found useful. For instance, Eubie Blake did things that he liked. […] James P. Johnson was solely influential in getting jazz musicians of that time, especially pianists to think along European classical uh terms. Scott Joplin had already laid the foundation, and so had Jelly Roll Morton, laid the foundation of utilizing forms that were from opera. Forms that were from Mozart or from classical works that they were aware of.

And so they were very adamant about using the form and not letting the form dictate the content. So that they would take a 16 bar melody and use that as the first theme. They would then do another melody which may be 16 or 32 bars and that would be the second movement if you will. And it was a short version of long form.

INFLUENCES ON WILLIE THE LION
Well, you have to recognize that the musicians that were in that group all came under the influence of James Reese Europe. James Reese Europe was very adamant about playing some of the classical music of the time. People who worked with him at that time, Will Marion Cook, Will Vodery. Many of those people had classical training. Will Marion Cook was a classical violinist. So they knew and had performed, they were trained as concert artists and concert composers. Composers of concert music. So they knew the forms, they knew the music, they knew the great masters of Europe. […] And so that music was in the air in New York. You heard people in the cabarets playing what they call light classical music in those days.

This was all a part of what Willie the Lion heard. And when they played, though New York was quite prejudiced in those days, many musicians like Willie played downtown...

WILLIE THE LION’S “ARROGANCE”
Willie the Lion was a person who realized that he was better than many of the people who he worked alongside. He tried to share that knowledge with many people, but his personality was very much like Jelly Roll Morton in that respect. I mean he was always, he wasn't above telling you "I'm the best guy around. I mean I can do things other people other people can't do." And he was right. I mean, but people just didn't want people to do that you know[laughs]. And so that got in the way a little bit I think. People tended to take what he said with a grain of salt rather than listening to him and seeing that he could back up everything he said.

WILLIE THE LION AS A COMPOSER
Willie the Lion thought of himself as a composer. I think he took uh, inspiration from the success of Eubie Blake and some of the other ragtime pianists who wrote beautiful melodies. […] Lucky Roberts wrote the kind of thing that Willie liked to write and they were friends. And he could see around him uh with the people from the various groups that were put together by James Reese Europe, that there was a melodic strain that he could tap into. So he thought of himself as a real composer uh who played the piano. And was very disappointed I'm sure in not getting wider circulation of his compositions.

THE "ORCHESTRAL" STYLE OF STRIDE
The piano in their hands was an orchestra. You heard everything you needed to hear. You heard the melody, the rhythm, the harmony. And you heard colors. This was one of the big things about Willie's playing. If you listen to his melodies you hear these little colors going along. I mean, this is what Ellington got from him. To hear counter melody.

Something's going on you hear this little counter-melody and it's kind of you say "what is that?" A chord, that would, that on first hearing, "you say what? what is, oh, yeah, that's alright." 'Cause he would resolve it. But he'd catch your ear. Those kinds of colors were orchestra colors. Those were the kinds of things, an arranger or a composer who wrote for orchestras would put a clarinet in to do this, or to put a trombone over here to do that.

THE LION AND MONK AT NEWPORT
We had at, by that time, had done a couple of things for George Wien. We had done, the Newport Jazz Festival had on every year would have many pianists, throughout the two or three days of the festival. So I convinced George that we should do what I called a workshop of pianists. I said "you've got all these great pianists. You've got Dave Brubeck, you've Earl Hines, you've got Duke Ellington, you've got Willie the Lion Smith," 'cause Willie was on that show.

[…] On the occasion that we did the first one we had Willie the Lion on the first part. He came out and played "Tea for Two," his version. On the second part, Thelonius Monk came out and played Tea for Two in tribute to Willie the Lion. Now the people who wrote about this, Downbeat and other magazines, didn't, couldn't see that Willie was standing in, you know just, out, you know, onstage but off to the side.

And Monk was playing to him. Like this, he was playing like… you know. And he literally was playing Tea for Two to his mentor you know and having a lot of fun with it you know. "Look here, you know hell, you know all these years you've been on my case now check this out" […] I mean Willie was egging him on. He was applauding and saying "yeah yeah kid you are really, that's what I'm talking about."

And it was it was one of the most heartwarming things that I've ever seen having been the recipient of a mentor, of the gifts of a mentor like that and for a guy to sit down there and talk to his mentor from the piano and say "hey thanks a lot." you know, I mean [laughs].

STRIDE PIANISTS
Now, most of those pianists, in the stride period, of, or orchestral period of James P, […] learned to play in every key. They learned to play whatever they could do in any tempo. So they mastered the instrument. Now it doesn't matter what kind of fingering you use, or what you're doing if you're getting the sound, that is a personal sound. If you're moving people in a musical sense so they want to dance or they want to sing or they feel emotional about something you've just played. That's the bottom line.

It's not whether you're reading the music or you learned in some specific way. They learned from one another. They learned, they shared their information. They learned from jam sessions, from cutting sessions from all kinds of things and they listened to everything. Their ears were remarkably, were really remarkably trained I should say, because they could hear things that today I don't have to hear. I mean […] I can hear uh a record and I can play the record over and over and over. And there it is for me to learn. They didn't have that.

"BEAUTIFICATION"
When Willie the Lion told me that I could improve my playing by beautifying my line what he was trying to tell me was that I could play more melodically that I could play more lyrically. I could make the piano sing. I mean that's really what he had in mind when he made those kinds of statements. And he had in mind very clearly singing, or the kind of uh sound that one could make on a wind instrument as opposed to an instrument which is struck. And so it had a, had a great deal to do with your touch, how you use the pedal and how you did things in addition to the manner in which you construct a line. THE RAGTIME LABEL
Willie hated to be called a ragtime or stride pianist. Because he knew that the things that he was doing was continuing with me other pianists of my generation, who were aware of what he was doing and had profited by his experiments. And uh, it wasn't just Monk, it was many others who realized that he was special. And this sustained him in some extent, to some extent. Because uh this wasn't lip service. […] I would always acknowledge him and say uh how special he was even though the audience may or may not, in that particular club, may not have been aware of his importance, you know.

And uh, he liked that because you know uh his feeling was okay so the press doesn't know, and people who write about it, but at least these kids that I brought up know, you know so you know that's okay.

EXPLORING DIFFERENT STYLES
[…] He investigated a lot of different ways of doing things. He listened to things and say "oh this is the way Rachmaninoff did something I can do this. Here's something I heard on the radio, Paul Whiteman, oh yeah, I don't know where it came from but this is a good idea" and you know. And he took all of that information and processed it in his own way uh put it into his style which was totally different all these others, from everybody. Each person had his own what they what Eubie used to call "tricks." […] It was a different kind of off-balance rhythm. He could do all that. And do it very well, but he had other things, that, harmonically, uh uh that were sort of his trademark.

And so if you're going move these inner voices in a certain way then hey, you're talking about old Willie the Lion, you're not talking about James P. I mean there's no disrespect to anybody. It's just that this person did that, another person did this and someone else did.. And they prided themselves on their individuality.

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ON THE SOLO PIANO AND CLASSICAL TRADITIONS IN WILLIE’S PLAYING
Willie the Lion came out of a tradition, first of all of solo piano playing. He was not the sort of pianist who developed later on who would expect to have a bass and drum and guitar playing along with him. He was very independent and even when later on he played with rhythm sections, he acted as though he was all by himself. He went on his own way very forcefully.

He was always a solo pianist. Another strand of tradition for the Lion was that he and his colleague James P. Johnson, prided themselves on being knowledgeable about classical music, and it shows in their playing. And they made a big distinction between what they played and what for example, blues and boogie-woogie pianists at that time, played. There was no question that Willie the Lion was a much more classically trained performer.

He knew his background and it shows in his pieces as well. You can hear in the things that he composed, that he characteristically played, you can hear all kinds of little references to, well, Victor Herbert, Percy Grainger, Souza, light classical things of this sort. […] I think that Willie must have known a piece called Country Gardens which was extremely popular in those days as a concert piece. Percy Grainger's piece. Which goes like this [plays] ..

I see a lot, some amusing relations of this little piece to uh some things like Willie would do in his piece Morning Air. [plays] And I see another little similarity in a piece of Willie's called Passionette. [plays]

When Willie does this kind of passage which reminds me of those old, uh, salon pieces and songs having something to do with fairies dancing in the glen, it reminds me of Percy Grainger and it reminds me in general of that sort of entirely non-jazz background which I think that he understood and rather prided himself on knowing.

His things are pretty. They are, his harmonies are you might say old-fashioned even in his time and they had almost nothing to do with the blues, which made him very different even from James P. Johnson with whom I guess he was most similar. But he never, that I can recall, played anything like [plays boogie-woogie riff]. Nothing, nothing like that. Nothing with a blues mode or that kind of time. I think it was, it was a matter of deliberate choice that he wanted to go in the direction of what he called, what he considered more "classical" sort of playing.

Then I think that he was also influenced or at any rate shared in the same sort of music that was on the air in those days, as this piece by Zez Confry which is similarly pretty and has the same kind of chords. It's called Novelette. [plays]

I hear a synthesis of various strands of music in the Lion's work. I hear ragtime and I hear the sort of stride piano that he shared with James P. Johnson, but I also hear people like Percy Grainger, Zez Confry. I think some of the tunes might be reminiscent of Victor Herbert. All of these things which I would call light classical music of the time.

In other words, I don't think that you would find Beethoven or Debussy exactly. Although sometimes you hear the whole tone tricks that a lot of people were fooling around with which came out of Debussy. Yes, I think maybe I'll change my mind on that. I hear, MacDowell, also, Edward MacDowell.

And it's worth noting that Eubie Blake, who was another member of this group of musicians, always admitted his great song "Memories of You," was very much related to the MacDowell piece "To A Wild Rose." That is to say, it's not the same melody but it's the same sort of melody.

So I think that all these fellows were very much influenced by all kinds of popular music on the air in those days.

The Lion and James P. Johnson and Eubie Blake and Fats Waller all borrowed little things from each other, and not only in their ad lib playing but in their written compositions you can see some amusing little borrowing one from another. I think Willie must have, must have been influenced by Scott Joplin and that earliest generation of ragtime players. And then he went on to make his very interesting synthesis. But whenever he wanted to, he could play out and out stride piano marvelously well.

ON THE LION’S "IMAGE"
And incidently, he was very conscious of his image, Lion. He even, in an interview once described exactly the sort of bravado performers should affect when he walked into a place with a piano. He should preferably be wearing a camel's hair coat with a silk lining. Take the coat off, all this is notated, somewhere, take the coat off and fold it in such a way that the silk lining is visible to everybody and then he should sit down at the piano, carefully try it out, and make sure that he had everybody's attention.

And he also remarked that if the vibes in a place weren't proper, he would get up and walk right out. He wouldn't favor people who didn't appreciate him with any of his performances. He was a performer and he had a certain role to play which he always considered. He liked to be smoking a big cigar, wearing a derby, wearing the camel's hair coat, as I said, and generally affecting a tremendous sense of self-assertion.

But the funny thing was that underneath all this bravado, he was playing, quite often, rather delicate, pretty parlor music. That's the odd thing about the Lion.

I think Willie was a performer and I don't think he made great distinction among the different kinds of music that he played. I think he was very conscious of his audience. He wanted to please them. He wanted to please them even by playing waltzes or popular songs of the day, and maybe even croaking a vocal chorus or two. He could swing into the ragtime and the stride kind of thing and I don't think he made a clear distinction among all those, it was just the presentation of a performer supremely confident in what he was doing. I think confidence was what he was trying to express all through.

From the way he walked into a club, the way he sat down, the way he fixed the audience to make sure, with his eyes, to make sure they wouldn't be talking while he was playing. This is all an expression of self-assertion and confidence.

ON WILLIE’S JEWISH BACKGROUND
One of the curious things about Willie the Lion was his Jewish background. Apparently as a young boy he had been associated with Jewish friends, where he grew up, and he prided himself on the fact that he learned Yiddish and he claimed to be a Hebrew cantor.

I don't know if anybody ever heard him do any of the cantorial things, but this was something... He had a calling card which had his name in Hebrew and he made quite a big thing out of it. It's very odd and interesting and kind of makes him a very human character.

ANALYZING WILLIE’S TECHNIQUE
One aspect of Willie's technique was of course the fundamental stride bass which he perfected into this kind of break neck tempo. Like uh [plays left hand only] that sort of thing. Another one, he liked to do, little frilly things in the right hand [plays]. That was the other side, that was the pretty side of the music.

And he also fell into climaxes using rather more of the dynamics than some of the other pianists might have dared. [plays] That sort of a thing. [plays] Another device that he used in several of his composition was this, this sort of thing [plays] contrapuntal stuff with the left hand doing something, a third or a tenth away [plays]. And again, this is something I relate to Percy Grainger [plays]

ON THE IMPORTANCE OF THE LEFT HAND
In general his left hand was very active, very busy. He was not the sort of player who pussy footed around. The left hand was the whole orchestra.

Little way of biography. I think that's one thing I remember his telling me when I went up to see him at his apartment one time. The importance of the left hand. I think he was aware of that the tendency in those days was quite away from that. We were already into rhythm sections and swing, with bass and drum and guitar and so forth, but he believed in solo piano and the left hand doing all that.

ON WILLIE THE LION’S INTEREST IN YOUNG PIANISTS
I heard him play a few times in the late 40's at a club in Greenwich Village in New York in a club called the Pied Piper. He and James P. Johnson were both there. I think they took turns, one of them playing with a band led by Max Kaminsky, the trumpeter, and the other one playing intermission piano. And that was really, historically, that was an amazing situation. And he sort of befriended me as he did other young pianists.

Mike Lipskin, got to know him better than I did, by far. But we weren't the only ones. I think he liked to take young pianists under his wing and make sure they didn't stray into the kind of piano playing where they wouldn't develop their left hand.

[Would you consider Willie the Lion to be a transitional figure in the development of jazz piano?]
I'm not sure that Willie's role as a transitional piano is exactly the way I'd put it. But, he was one of the generation of stride people, Fats Waller, James P. Johnson, Lucky Roberts, who led eventually to what I think is the greatest manifestation of that kind of playing, Art Tatum.

I don't think that Willie's own sort of unique playing was taken up by other people, except in that, as a composer, people still might play his pieces now. In particular, Echo of Spring, is something that other pianists have learned how to play. And Ralph Sutton plays several of his things. So as a composer you would say he had a certain influence on the repertoire.

All of these, all of these people of course, laid a foundation which was well known to Thelonius, Thelonius Monk, who for all his eccentric playing was at first and maybe fundamentally, a stride player.

ON RAGTIME, STRIDE, BLUES AND BOOGIE-WOOGIE
Nowadays, many people see the relationship of ragtime and stride piano, and, in a general way consider the two things as a unit. This isn't quite the way those people [Johnson, Smith, Roberts, Blake] saw it. I'm not sure that's the way Willie the Lion saw it at all. What they did I think, was that they saw their playing as a clear evolution, something very new and more difficult, more musical, more sophisticated than ragtime and certainly than blues.

And blues and boogie woogie piano had been around at least as long as ragtime piano. It's something, a folk kind of music that started way back. These fellows did not want to be associated with that sort of thing. They were playing I think what they called, what they figured was a finer type of music. And they were right too. It was more sophisticated, more demanding, more quote modern harmonies and they had made considerable progress in their own view as to, from where the music had begun.

[Why were they so adamant about pointing out the differences?]
I think it might have been a class thing in that blues and boogie woogie piano was the way relatively unschooled kinds of players have taught themselves to play. It's wonderful music in its own way, but it is, in comparison with what the other fellows were doing, it was quite limited.

What Willie and James P. Johnson and Fats prided themselves on, I think, was their knowledge of classical music and their training, their education. They were very concerned with being accepted as well educated, sophisticated people, knowledgeable in European, as we call it now, traditions.

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THE LION AND BOOGIE-WOOGIE
I met the Lion in 1948 but I had been hearing about him for at least a decade before that and every musician I knew at that time used to bring his name up one way or another and around the time that Boogie Woogie came into vogue. […] I was working at that time on Hearst paper in Chicago writing society and as a little love present they gave me a record column. I didn't get paid extra but I could get free records. That was enough for me.

So, I thought, I should do something about this boogie woogie. I'll call my buddy Duke Ellington. So, I said what about this boogie woogie business? Well, he said: "That's nothing any janitor can play that." He said, "I like music that's more interesting and where there's skill involved." He said, "The Lion, that's my ideal."

ON HER FIRST MEETING WITH WILLIE THE LION
I came to New York, got married to Bob Bach and settled in the Village. So the Lion was appearing at a place nearby, I think it was the Pied Piper and we went to see him and I went up afterward and introduced myself and told him who our mutual friends were and he whipped out his business card which had all this Hebrew writing on it but also had his phone number.

He traveled with young would-be lions. I guess they were taking lessons from him and kind of just following him. This fellow was named Dick Levy and he was just in awe (laugh) I mean he just followed him around, kind of breathed as he breathed and everything, and the Lion sat down at the piano and we had about a dozen guests there all, hanging on his every word and he proceeded to give us a history of piano playing.

[…] And suddenly there was nobody left but Willie the Lion and Bob and I both had jobs, we had to get to work the next day, so we thought we'd help him to the door. He sank to his knees and started praying in Hebrew. I thought do you want to interrupt a fellow like this? I don't know what to do about it, but finally we got him a cab and got him off and then he would drop by from time to time with one or more of these young followers and I think that he, his influence on the them was kind of like a Svengali, cause he was so forceful and they just bought everything he said.

ON WILLIE’S DRINKING
But the few times that uh we were in his company for a whole evening, he was knocking it back and it was whiskey […] but the body stayed vigorous and powerful.

He drank throughout the various [recording] sessions that I attended and when we did rent a studio at Columbia to record in—because this first experience was in, at our little house in the village didn't go so well cause everybody was getting looped—so we said, we had gotta do this in a serious way. He's got this wonderful presentation. He'll tell us the history of jazz and it will be a wonderful recording to release. Ha ha. It never, we don't know what became of it but at any rate I think we brought liquor to the gig so we were well oiled…

ON WILLIE’S INTIMIDATING STYLE
I don't know if he was the war-hero that he claims he was and that's a story I'm not too familiar with but he acted like somebody that wasn't going to mess with him, whether they're in their battlefield or at a carving contest up in Harlem. […] And he spoke about himself in the 3rd person, ya know, "The Lion doesn't care for something," so you kind of get an idea that he's backing off and looking at the picture…

I think other musicians were amused by him and thought of him as a character and he was very old school you know, I think he wore a vest and probably a watch chain, I don't know, he was, he was a kind of a dandy from maybe the 20s maybe that was where he got his style. Whatever it was it, it really impressed Ellington.

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ON WILLIE’S EARLY INFLUENCES:
It started before Newark, when he was still in Goshen [New York]. He said he first heard blues sung by the brick layers in Haverstraw, New York in 1902 when he was 9 years of age.

He cited Victor Herbert as his first influence. I'm sure everyone was hearing Herbert at that time because Herbert was the most popular of the writers who were writing operettas.

He talked about One Legged Willie Sewell, and Walter the Shadow Gould and other pianists. You'd have to look in his book, I don't remember who they were.

He spoke about the Baptist Church and how much their music meant to him, and the call and response patterns between the reverend and the people in the congregation, in the choir.

ON THE GERMAN INFLUENCES IN RAGTIME:
He said in the Memoirs, as the opener on side one, ragtime to him meant someone who was bigoty and forward, who couldn't play the piano very well, who played in that choppy German manner. See, Robert Schuman's teacher was a German, so that number that Schuman wrote, called the "Happy Farmer" [plays and sings],

Well, that's that broken bass. But that's the bass that Joplin adopted [plays and sings Joplin], for his "Maple Leaf Rag." And Willie always played that tag. [plays] I used to wonder to myself, where did he get that? [plays] And he got that from the last measure of Maple Leaf Rag. [plays] That last measure [plays again], and a lot of people who never heard the Maple Leaf Rag heard Willie play that and they thought that was his. But he lifted that [play] from the last measure of Maple Leaf Rag. We all come from somewhere.

[Did Willie know Scott Joplin?]
He knew Joplin. He not only knew Joplin he knew his wife Lottie. And I asked Eubie Blake where did you first see Joplin, and Eubie side-stepped a direct answer. He said, first of all, I never saw him sober, he was always drunk. That was his answer. That's why he said his opera Treemonisha never got produced.

It had nothing to do with the fact that the libretto was too contrived, or appeared too contrived for the producers. It was the fact that he was drunk and he wasn't taking care of business. This is what Blake claimed. And I also asked Blake did Jelly Roll Morton wrote Tiger Rag. He said absolutely, he did. And he heard him play it hear in New York in 1911. And so did Willie.

ON HIS ACTUAL DATE OF BIRTH
He was born on November 23, 1893. This I first noticed in Hugues Panassie’s Guide to Jazz published in 1957 in English. It was published in French earlier than that. And also, I noticed it in Willie's discharge papers which he got upon his discharge from the army in 1918. We had to have those in order to bury him in the Veteran's Cemetery, when he died in April of 73.

[He was] Four years older than he said he was. His 1973 New York Times obit lists his correct date of birth. And age, that he was at the time he died. He is listed in the New York Times obit as having died at 79. Whereas, the funny thing was, the previous November 23, people were calling him all that day wishing him a happy 75th birthday, when he was actually 79. And he never corrected the people when they called him. He obviously had decided that well, if they don't know my true age, I'm not going to tell them.

[Where did his interest in classical music come from, and when?]
His feeling for the music of the European and Russian literature came from the time in which he was born. It was all over. Don't forget that Grieg was still alive, Debussy was still alive, when did he die? 1917? Padorewsky was packing Carnegie Hall…

[How and when did he learn to read music?]
That was taught to him by a man named Arthur Eckstein [sic] at a place called Parker Citerion in Newark, who said to him I'll teach you how to read if you teach me some of your ragtime licks. 1908, 1909, when he was 15 or 16.

[How would you characterize his original compositions?]
Harmonically? In terms of structure? They were like little etudes, the things he wrote like "Echo of Spring." It's Echo, by the way, he pluralized it later, but when he published, when Leeds Music Company published it in 1935, it was "Echo of Spring."

You want me to play the whole thing or just an excerpt? [plays] There, see. It sounds like what most people would call a classical piece. It doesn't sound like a stomp or a rag, or a stride piece. The bass line is not like, uh, James P. Johnson's "Carolina Shout" from 1914 [plays]. It's [plays] it's this movement here. It's relatively original.

You know one man he always spoke about and talked a little bit about in the Lipskin [RCA LP] "Memoir" was McDowall. And McDowall's an American impressionist. Even Charlie Parker quoted his tune "Wild Rose," which Eubie Blake quoted in "Memories of You." [plays] So did Hoagie Carmichael. That was salon music of the Victorian age. People, everbody had a piano in their parlor. And people played. Kids were given piano lessons.

ON STRIDE
Stride means simply this movement in the bass, from the left to the right. From the bass note or an octave to a chord as opposed to the figure that the Lion chose to include in Echo which goes like this.

That is one exception which doesn't apply to our show really. If you're doing a show on James P. Johnson, James P had a thing that he called broken bass which he says he got from Eubie Blake which is like [plays]. Like that. Which Cliff Jackson made a feature of. Cliff Jackson almost did that exclusively.

LESSONS WITH THE LION
I liked him and I went to see him first at the Central Plaza which is now the Cafe la Mama, on 4th Street. And then, I followed him around from city to city and he realized I was serious. And he and his girl, Mary Jane, always referred to me as "the boy." They never referred to me by name.

They would talk about me as if I wasn't in the room. They didn't say, he didn't say to Mary Jane, "He wants some more oysters, give him some more oysters." He'd say: "Give the boy some more oysters." Or she'd say: "You know the boy is progressing. You're teaching him well. He sounds just like you Billie."

And once when I was sitting in his parlor playing one of his numbers, I overheard them saying in their bedroom. They were an old fashioned couple, they didn't have no one bed, they had two beds like you see in the old movies. He said, after I heard her say, Billie, you know the boy sounds just like you. He said: "Jane, I'm framin up on leaving this planet, and when I do I'm framin up on leaving a carbon copy of myself and he's right in there."

Well, I had the ability to absorb his style, at least in terms of the statement of his themes note for note because they made sense to me in the same way that when Billie Strayhorn first heard Ellington in 1934, Ellington made sense to Strayhorn.

[Why don’t more pianists today play his stuff?]
Inimitable. Nobody plays like that today. I think it's too difficult for the average pianist. That's why nobody touches it. I've never heard anybody play it as well as he did. And I recorded a lot of his stuff now when he was alive, and with him and without him, in...We did four handed duets on one keyboard, we did duos on two keyboards, uh, in concert and in nightclubs. And, I even got to record some things he never got to record. […]

They were technically more difficult than a lot of the stuff that Waller wrote and most of the stuff that Johnson wrote except for Johnson's symphonic works. […] And as he [Willie] said when he was taped by Hank O'Neill of Charascura Records at Lou's Alley in the District of Columbia: "I like a challenge."

ON WILLIE THE LION’S FIRST MEETING WITH ART TATUM
…In an interview in ‘57 with Leonard Feather, [Willie said] "sometimes I would even lay for Tatum when…" and Rex Stewart the cornetist, from the District of Columbia, told me that Tatum came here from Toledo in ‘29 and James P. washed him away and Tatum came back in ‘32.

And [Don] Donaldson, Jr. told me in 1932 when Tatum came here the second time and they met at the Rhythm Club, which was located at 168 West 132nd Street which was a clearing house for musicians. You'd go there to play pool, have a drink, and relax, and let people know that you were available for a gig, or fraternize with fellow musicians.

This fellow Tatum sat down and the Lion heard him, and James P and Fats, Don Lambert, and they, as Donaldson Junior put it to me right here in this room 20 years ago, he said: "We all went in the back and had a meetin.’ We're dinosaurs. What do we do? We're extinct. How do we, how do we deal with this? What can we do? He said, Lion, you gotta go out there, you gotta go out there and cut him."

So the Lion fashioned that arrangement he did of the Chopin Etude with the stride ending that he always said he used to play when he would get into a battle of music with Tatum. And I heard the Lion play that on that piano in my mother's house in 1971. And I've heard him play it at Newport that year. I've heard him play it on record. You've heard him play it on the BBC… [anecdote never finished]

[What did Tatum think of the Lion/]
Based on any comments Tatum made to Rex Stewart who wrote for Down Beat and other people, Tatum held Lion in highest esteem and said to Rex Stewart, in fact, in a 1967 Down Beat interview, Rex recalled Tatum saying, before Tatum died in 1956, Tatum said: "You know Rex, all these piano players get to record lots and lots of LPs, where Willie just sits there in his house and smokes his cigar. What a shame. What a shame. He should be out recording more."

ON WILLIE’S MOODINESS
He would be sitting, playing something and she [his companion, Mary Jane] would say: "Hey Willie would you like another glass of brandy." And he said: "Don't disturb us while we're working!" She's say: "Alright." He was high strung. Brandy—Napoleon brandy only. The best. I saw, oh when the critics would come around, oh he would milk their, they were from downtown...he would drain their expense accounts. They told me. He'd drink all the brandy they could, they could afford.

Yes, there was one time, man, he came to my mother's house and he, and he didn't have nothing good to say about anybody. Everybody we mentioned or he thought of was substandard. It was just the mood he was in. Then the next time you speak with him he was, oh, you'd mention a relatively mediocre pianist or singer and he'd say: Oh he, if you think he sounds substandard today, you should have heard him five years ago. He was terrible. So we have to let him grow. We have to let him develop. So he was clearly moody.

ON "STRAIGHT" SINGERS
He abhorred them. He wouldn't and I know girls...He abhorred straight singers and he wouldn't want you to sing a melody as written. And, when I was going over with Jim Berkley the drummer this number by Arlen, "Get Happy," which most folks know [sings] Willie says, "No, he said try it this way [sings]. Add something. Displace the rhythm, add a syncopation, delete a note, flat a note, sharpen a note for effect. But don't just sing it as written, anybody can do that.

He said: Jazz is memorization and improvisation. He liked to sum things up succinctly. He didn't like to expound, unless it were on topics of the spirit which he loved to talk about.

ON WILLIE’S RELIGIOUS LEANINGS
He was totally immersed in the Judaic faith. And yet he loved the Baptist..... The Lion was immersed in the Judaic faith. He considered himself, he took his father's faith. Which was a Jew. His father, Frank Bertatoloff was a Jew. And I found out when I was in Israel in 1979 his father had a cousin who had been a playwright in Palestine before Palestine became Israel in 1948. And this man is highly regarded over there.

[Who would you say that the Lion mentored?]
Velvala [Yiddish nickname for Willie] was a mentor to Joe Bushkin and Artie Shaw, Mel Powell, Mike Lipskin, myself, Duke Ellington, Emory Smith—a fine pianist from Hartford, Connecticut who still works today up in Hadley, Massachusetts, Joe Knight Jr who is currently quite ill, he's got lung problems. But he taught Randy Weston. Randy Weston will tell you that Willie showed him a lot. Dwyke Mitchell of the Mitchell Ruff Duo was coached by Willie, as Willie Ruff’s book "Call to the Assembly" will attest. So Willie was quite a behind the scenes man.

‘Cause he had no kids. That was a big reason. ... Willie had no progeny so, as far as we know, so he wanted to pass on what he knew to us. Be it Ellington or myself or any of the fellows who were receptive to his stuff.

ON WILLIE’S SWEARING
Willie might have been ten ways to ten other people, maybe 100 ways, but I knew him in during the last 15 years of his life from 58-73, I only heard him utter an expletive once and he spelled it. He said: I don't give an S-H-I-T what he says. I never heard him say fuck, I never heard him say cunt, I never heard him say...but he talked about going to the whorehouses.

He talked about going to the whorehouses in Atlantic City on what they called the Line, L-I-N-E. And he talked about how they'd give you one girl a week if you worked there for free and you'd go in and she'd have a little wooden basin, like a salad bowl on the left, on a lavalier and you'd dip your dick in the bowl of hot water and if you had gleet which came out of your penis, it was like chartreuse puss, if you had that then you couldn't get no girl, no kind of way, even if you had a hundred dollars, cause that meant you had syphilis or gonorrhea or both.

He called it gleet which is, which is a medical term. I looked it up in my Lexicon. G-L, double E T. And, he talked about that, you know, very specific, but never used words that most of us use today that we learned when we were in the 4th grade, 3rd grade, whenever.

ON WILLIE’S UNPREDICTABLE NATURE, AND "TAKING MY BOSTON"
Oh in 1971, all of a sudden, he was so unpredictable. He turned to me in my mother's house and said: You may call Valvella which is Yiddish for William. And they we'd be playing a four handed duet and he'd always be usually down here below middle C, and I'd be in the treble, because he'd be, he'd be... He had a bass figure and he never named it but Emory Smith, the fellow I told you about, told me, he called this Taking My Boston.

Now I've heard other people like Mary Lou [Williams] say that when a musician was told they could take their Boston it meant that when they were playing in a jazz ensemble, you know improvising like a coronet, trombone, clarinet and saxophone, all at once, and then one guy got up to take a solo, that meant that they were going to take their Boston, their first solo accompanied by either the rhythm section or by the other horns riffing underneath him.

And Roy Eldridge used to sit and he'd say: "Man you never know what this cat is going to do." Because he'd always throw in chords that weren't, he knew his harmony and his theory backwards, so he'd always keep the harmonies alive by throwing in new and fresh substitutions.

ON POD’S AND JERRY’S
…It was owned by two fellows: Pod Hollingsworth and Jerry Preston. And it was called Pod's and Jerry's. And that's where he accompanied Billie Holiday. If you see the picture, Dianna Ross' picture, Lady Sings the Blues, he's referred to as Piano Man. And he was furious at that. He said: Why do they call me Piano Man? Why don't they call me by my name, The Lion! But, no, they didn't know or they, maybe they would have had to have paid him to use his name. I don't know. But in that picture, Dianna Ross referred to him as Piano Man. Oh was he furious at that.

ON THE TERM "RAGTIME"
Well, what I heard was that ragtime is short for ragged time. And the white folks called it ragged time because the accents are on the second and fourth beats of the measure. For example like: [plays] two, four, two, four as opposed to [plays] one, three, one, three. And when the slaves came over here and began to demonstrate their music that they brought over from Africa, via the West Indies, the whites weren't used to it. And, so the term ragged time became shortened to ragtime and Ellington once was asked by a white men to play "When The Saints Go Marching In," which was published in 1896, and done like a spiritual like this [plays]. Oh when the saints [clap], that's the pulse [clap], right? Three [clap] four [clap].

But when a white man asked Ellington to do that number, Ellington said he didn't look at him. He just shook his head and said to no one in particular but everybody in general, "No, we're not going to rag that up." Cause Ellington was a devout Christain. He wrote those three sacred concerts to prove it. And, he said, "We're not going to rag it up. We're not going to do it how everyone else does it."

ON WILLIE’S TOUGH TALK
He was, he could and might very well decapitate you verbally or even freeze on you. He used to talk a lot: Sometimes, you know when a cat bugs me I put the Jimmy Freeze on him. That's what he'd do, ...he had an accent like Groucho Marx, like a Brooklynite. He'd say er for oi and oi for er.

He'd say, yeah this turkey he came up to me once and he wanna ask me a question. He says, I got a question for you Lion. He says: When you think of the question come back and ask me. He says sometimes my boy, he never called me Brooks, he says: My boy. I have him on tape. My boy, he says, sometimes it's easier to give a turkey $10 to get rid of him than it is to endure him. [laughs] Yeah, he was a piece work.

ON WILLIE’S INFLUENCE
He stands on his own. He influenced all the people we've mentioned. Okay. Mel Powell, Jess Stacey, Art Tatum, Duke Ellington, myself. Artie Shaw wrote about him in Shaw's book, 1952 edition, The Trouble with Cinderella. And there are more. Eugene Rogers who played the piano on Coleman Hawkins "Body and Soul" record [plays]. That famous introduction. [plays] Then Coleman came in, like that [plays] Greatest selling record in jazz history. And that introduction was harmonically owed itself to Willie the Lion.

ON WILLIE’S FRIENDSHIP WITH THELONIUS MONK
Monk was living at 243 West 63rd Street in the Phipps (?) Houses next to Bubber Miley who dies in ‘32. Monk had lived there since 1921 when he moved up here with his family from Mount, North Carolina. […]

And Miley and Willie were close and Monk, initially heard James P. and hung out with James P. And James P. introduced Monk to the Lion. And uh, Monk worked a club, you can check this out, I can introduce you to the cat who led the group. He was a trumpeter named Davis, not Miles. Harvard Irving Davis. I-R-V-I-N-G. He led the band. It was at a place called The Cinderella Club at 82 West 3rd Street in Greenwich Village and Monk was the resident piano player. Irving Davis had gotten Monk when Irving was playing trumpet with Oren Hot Lips, we called him Lips Page then, trumpeter from Dallas, Texas.

And Davis stole Monk out of Page’s group and formed his own group at the Cinderella. Then the Lion used to come down and sit in and sometimes play at intermission piano and trade ideas with Monk. Now this is 1945, ‘46 and ‘47. So you can have Davis amplify on that and I'd be more than glad to give you his number. So, yeah, there were trade-offs, between the Lion and Monk, sure. The Lion loved Monk and Monk loved the Lion.