Henry Crowder | |
---|---|
Born | 1890 Gainesville, Georgia |
Died | 1955 |
Occupation | Jazz musician |
Henry Crowder (1890–1955) was an American jazz musician. He was an important figure in the European jazz culture of his time. [1]
Crowder was born in Gainesville, Georgia, to a poor family and was largely a self-taught musician. Crowder began his career playing piano in the brothels of Washington, D.C., and rose to become an important bandleader here before leaving for Europe in 1928 [2] with Eddie South's Alabamians. [3]
He was best known for his romantic and professional involvement with avant-garde poet, muse, and shipping heiress Nancy Cunard. They met in 1928 in Venice, where the Alabamians had an extended engagement to play, a residency at the Hotel Luna. [3] Cunard’s 1934 anthology Negro is inspired by and dedicated to Crowder. [4] [5] Crowder also assisted Cunard in creating her Hours Press publishing house, which published Richard Aldington, Ezra Pound, and Samuel Beckett among others. Crowder’s influence on Cunard was profound. She claimed in one letter that: “Henry made me”. [6] Cunard and Crowder collaborated on a book of music and poetry with contributions from Samuel Beckett, Richard Aldington, and pictures by Man Ray. [7]
By Crowder’s own account, musician Sidney Bechet was deported from France after an argument with a member of Crowder’s group turned violent and several bystanders were shot. [8]
Crowder died in Washington, District of Columbia, having largely given up performing and recording jazz on his return from Europe in the 1940s.
Henry Crowder was married to May Frances "Frankie" Turner, Eleanor Roosevelt's seamstress at the White House, with whom he had one son, Henry Jr. [9]
Henry Crowder lived for almost 12 years in Paris and Brussels. During his stay there, the Nazis invaded France. He was interned for 22 and a half months in POW camps, first in Belgium then in Germany. [9]
Richard Aldington was an English writer and poet. He was an early associate of the Imagist movement. He was married to the poet Hilda Doolittle from 1911 to 1938. His 50-year writing career covered poetry, novels, criticism and biography. He edited The Egoist, a literary journal, and wrote for The Times Literary Supplement, Vogue, The Criterion and Poetry. His biography of Wellington (1946) won him the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. His contacts included writers T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, Lawrence Durrell, C. P. Snow, and others. He championed Hilda Doolittle as the major poetic voice of the Imagist movement and helped her work gain international notice.
Earl Rudolph "Bud" Powell was an American jazz pianist and composer. Along with Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Kenny Clarke and Dizzy Gillespie, Powell was a leading figure in the development of modern jazz. His virtuosity led many to call him the Charlie Parker of the piano. Powell was also a composer, and many jazz critics credit his works and his playing as having "greatly extended the range of jazz harmony".
Bennett Lester Carter was an American jazz saxophonist, clarinetist, trumpeter, composer, arranger, and bandleader. With Johnny Hodges, he was a pioneer on the alto saxophone. From the beginning of his career in the 1920s, he worked as an arranger including written charts for Fletcher Henderson's big band that shaped the swing style. He had an unusually long career that lasted into the 1990s. During the 1980s and 1990s, he was nominated for eight Grammy Awards, which included receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award.
Kenneth Clarke Spearman, nicknamed Klook, was an American jazz drummer and bandleader. A major innovator of the bebop style of drumming, he pioneered the use of the ride cymbal to keep time rather than the hi-hat, along with the use of the bass drum for irregular accents.
Woody Herman Shaw Jr. was an American jazz trumpeter, flugelhornist, cornetist, composer, arranger, band leader, and educator. Shaw is widely known as one of the most important and influential jazz trumpeters and composers of the twentieth century. He is often credited with revolutionizing the technical and harmonic language of modern jazz trumpet playing, and to this day is regarded by many as one of the major innovators of the instrument. He was an acclaimed virtuoso, mentor, and spokesperson for jazz and worked and recorded alongside many of the leading musicians of his time.
Nancy Clara Cunard was a British writer, heiress and political activist. She was born into the British upper class, and devoted much of her life to fighting racism and fascism. She became a muse to some of the 20th century's most distinguished writers and artists, including Wyndham Lewis, Aldous Huxley, Tristan Tzara, Ezra Pound and Louis Aragon—who were among her lovers—as well as Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Constantin Brâncuși, Langston Hughes, Man Ray and William Carlos Williams. MI5 documents reveal that she was involved with Indian socialist leader V. K. Krishna Menon.
Howard McGhee was one of the first American bebop jazz trumpeters, with Dizzy Gillespie, Fats Navarro and Idrees Sulieman. He was known for his fast fingering and high notes. He had an influence on younger bebop trumpeters such as Fats Navarro.
James Mundell Lowe was an American jazz guitarist who worked often in radio, television, and film, and as a session musician.
The Klezmorim, founded in Berkeley, California, in 1975, was the world's first klezmer revival band, widely credited with spearheading the global renaissance of klezmer in the 1970s and 1980s. Initially featuring flute and strings—notably the exotic fiddling of co-founder David Skuse—the ensemble reorganized into a "loose, roaring, funky" brass/reed/percussion band fronted by co-founder Lev Liberman's saxophones and founding member David Julian Gray's clarinets. As a professional performing and recording ensemble focused on recreating the lost sounds of early 20th century klezmer bands, The Klezmorim achieved crossover success, garnering a Grammy nomination in 1982 for their album Metropolis and selling out major concert venues across North America and Europe, including Carnegie Hall and L'Olympia in Paris. The band performed steadily until 1993, regrouping in 2004 for a European tour.
Michael Mantler is an Austrian avant-garde jazz trumpeter and composer of contemporary music.
Edward Otha South was an American jazz violinist.
The Harlem Renaissance was an intellectual and cultural revival of African-American music, dance, art, fashion, literature, theater, politics and scholarship centered in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City, spanning the 1920s and 1930s. At the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement", named after The New Negro, a 1925 anthology edited by Alain Locke. The movement also included the new African-American cultural expressions across the urban areas in the Northeast and Midwest United States affected by a renewed militancy in the general struggle for civil rights, combined with the Great Migration of African-American workers fleeing the racist conditions of the Jim Crow Deep South, as Harlem was the final destination of the largest number of those who migrated north.
David Meltzer was an American poet and musician of the Beat Generation and San Francisco Renaissance. Lawrence Ferlinghetti described him as "one of the greats of post-World-War-Two San Francisco poets and musicians". Meltzer came to prominence with inclusion of his work in the anthology, The New American Poetry 1945–1960.
Robert Goffin was a Belgian lawyer, author, and poet, credited with writing the first "serious" book on jazz, Aux Frontières du Jazz in 1932.
La Chapelle-Réanville is a former commune in the Eure department in northern France. On 1 January 2017, it was merged into the new commune La Chapelle-Longueville.
Anthony Barnett is an English poet, essayist and music historian.
The word negrophilia is derived from the French négrophilie that means love of the negro. It was a term that avant-garde artists used amongst themselves to describe their fetishization of Black culture. Its origins were concurrent with art movements such as surrealism and Dadaism in the late nineteenth century. Sources of inspiration were inanimate African art objects such as masks and wooden carvings that found their way into Paris's flea markets and galleries alike, which inspired artworks such as Picasso's Les Demoiselles d' Avignon that found their way into Paris as a result of colonial looting of Africa as well as live performances by Black people, many of whom were ex-soldiers remaining in European cities after World War I, who had no choice but to entertain as a source of income. Equally of interest to avant-garde creators were live arts such as dance, music and theatrical performances by Black artists, as evidenced by the popularity of comic artist Chocolat and the musical review Les Heureux Nègres (1902).
Ruth Weiss, better known by the lowercase name ruth weiss, was a poet, performer, playwright and artist. Born in Germany, but of Austrian citizenship, weiss made her home and career in the United States. She was considered to be a member of the Beat Generation, a label she, in later years, embraced.
Eugene McCownor MacCown was an American pianist, painter of the Ecole de Paris and writer, also remembered for being part of the chic bohemian set of Paris in the roaring twenties.
Billy Arnold led an early jazz band in first London and then Paris in the 1920. He was one of the first people to bring American jazz style to Europe. His band had a strong impact on classical composer Darius Milhaud and initially on Django Reinhardt.