Lecture
Alyn Shipton
Wednesday 29.10.2025
Alyn Shipton
Jazz Piano, Part 1
Wednesday 29.10.2025
Summary
In the first of two talks about jazz piano, Alyn Shipton covers the early days from ragtime to the more forward looking work of Mary Lou Williams and Art Tatum. We meet the Harlem “stride” pianists including James P. Johnson and Fats Waller, and we also encounter their Chicago counterparts, the progenitors of boogie woogie, not forgetting the female pioneers Dorothy Donegan and Cleo Brown.
Alyn Shipton
Alyn Shipton has worked in music for many years as a writer, editor, and player. He was the publisher of the New Grove Dictionary series in the 1980s. His own books include numerous biographies, mainly of jazz musicians, including Fats Waller, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Ian Carr, and Cab Calloway. His other books include the award-winning life of singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson, and a study of the relationship between visual arts and jazz. His New History of Jazz (2001, revised 2007) won awards on both sides of the Atlantic and is now well established as one of the standard works on the subject. Since 1989 he has presented and produced programs on music and history for BBC Radio. As a double bassist, he has played with many leading British jazz groups, and he currently co-leads the Buck Clayton Legacy Band.