They called the early jazz pianists "ticklers," and William Henry Joseph Bonaparte Bertholoff Smith—a.k.a. “the Lion”—was a tickler’s tickler. He was also a composer of over one hundred songs, a captivating showman (“a keyboard gladiator,” according to Duke Ellington), a decorated war hero, and a cantor in a Harlem synagogue. With his trademark derby, a smoldering cigar and an icy stare, he had a knack for flustering rival pianists, but he was also a beloved mentor to three generations of jazz musicians. Raised in turn-of-the-century Newark and shaped by its diverse ethnic and cultural influences, he went on to become a legendary figure in Harlem in the1920s and ‘30s, where he created a new jazz idiom—stride.

Narrated by actor Joe Morton, Willie the Lion uses rare performance clips and stills, reminiscences by Duke Ellington and James P. Johnson, and on-camera interviews with Artie Shaw, Dr. Billy Taylor, Amiri Baraka, and pianists Dick Hyman and Mike Lipskin, who demonstrate the essential elements of Smith’s distinctive style.
Smith grew up on the mean streets of Newark’s red-light district, the Coast, one of the major black entertainment centers in the early 1900s. It was the heyday of ragtime, but his church-going mother tried to steer her son to holy music. “I used to hear my mother play a hymn,” recalls Smith, “and I used to take it and play it in ragtime. I used to go to a saloon, dance, sing and play, then pass my hat around.” He was equally drawn to the musical traditions of his roguish father, who was Jewish. Young Smith learned Hebrew from a Newark rabbi for whom his mother did laundry. (In the 1930s, Artie Shaw noticed that Smith’s business card had Hebrew characters identifying him as a cantor, and in a 1970 appearance on the David Frost Show, he baffles his host by speaking in Yiddish). Young Smith also absorbed Newark’s other musical influences—Victor Herbert was an early favorite, along with German classical and vaudeville tunes.

Willie the Lion follows the ups and downs of his long career: the segregated clubs of Atlantic City in 1915, the influence of James Reese Europe, the battlefields of France in WW I (where he earned his nickname), and the Harlem clubs and rent parties where Smith and his pals James P. Johnson and Fats Waller developed a new, more sophisticated piano style later called “stride.” We hear about the cutting contests, (including the Lion’s account of his famous showdown with Jelly Roll Morton), and how he befriended and mentored the young Duke Ellington and Artie Shaw.

Unwilling to “dumb down” his compositions for Tin Pan Alley, he struggled to get his songs published, and then found himself labeled an old-timer when be-bop came in. Throughout, Dick Hyman and Dr. Billy Taylor explain what made the Lion’s music so innovative, and we see and hear the Lion perform his own compositions and jazz classics such as “St. Louis Blues,” “Carolina Shout,” and “Maple Leaf Rag."”

Willie the Lion breaks new ground in its depiction of the Northeast as a crucible of early jazz rivaling New Orleans and Chicago. Overturning stereotypes about early jazz men as self-taught “primitives” rooted solely in the blues, Willie the Lion presents a musical pioneer whose best compositions rank with those of Gershwin and Ellington in the jazz piano repertoire.

In the words of his protégé Duke Ellington, "The Lion was a myth actually that you saw come alive." In Willie the Lion, the man and his music live on.

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