The Lion was a myth actually that you saw come alive. And the Lion was one of the greatest influences on the piano players of the era. Even James P. was influenced by him. And many years later, even the great Art Tatum, who was definitely the greatest…

Between 1920 and 1940, few pianists achieved the mythological status of Willie the Lion Smith. Harlem was the Lion’s den, and there he lay in wait for other pianists trying to make a name for themselves. Duke Ellington said that any cat who came in thinking he was something special had to prove it right then and there, and he usually came out lacerated by the Lion…

So I start to play and I'm walking tenths and I'm doing what I thought was pretty hip for a young piano player, and uh I was about 16 bars into the tune when this elderly gentleman with a cigar and a derby came over and said, let me try a little of that son. I looked up, I said, yeah, sure.

So I got up and this guy sat down. I had never in my life heard a left hand like this. And he was awesome. The left hand it was playing octaves and, and a chord. Then he'd play a tenth then a chord. I said "Wow." You know. My mouth fell open. It was Willie Lion Smith.

They called the early jazz pianists "ticklers," and Willie the Lion Smith was a tickler’s tickler. He was also a showman, a composer of over a hundred songs, a war hero, a cantor in a Harlem synagogue, and a raconteur. He helped to create the piano style known as stride, but in the words of Duke Ellington, he was "beyond category…"

He—like I—hated categories. And he was a musician. A musician plays music, other people name it. He was unique. There was nobody else like him. I know that Willie did things that no one had done before…

I was walking along Harlem one night as a kid, about 19, I just got to New York uh waiting for a local 802 card.

…So I 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 tiny little club. And I heard this piano coming out and it was quite different from anything I ever heard. And I started listening, fascinated.

Whoever was playing that piano in there, the son of a bitch had to be a kind of a real wild man. So, I stood there and waited. And after a while the guy came out.

I said, uh who's that piano player, he's a bitch. So, the guy said you're looking at him. 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. 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.

…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 being a protege…

For some young jazz musicians—like Artie Shaw, Duke Ellington, Thelonius Monk and Billy Taylor—the Lion was a beloved teacher. But he could be tough on pretenders. With his trademark derby, a smoldering cigar and an icy stare, he had a knack for flustering rivals. Duke Ellington called the Lion "a gladiator at heart…"

I had a habit like a fighter has, it’s called psychology. When a guy’s playing his heart out, I walk up to him and say, get away from that piano, man. And say it like you mean it. Grab his arms and say, get away from there…

And the Lion was such a harsh teacher, I mean, he’d walk up to people while they were playing and say, "is there something wrong with your hand, there, your left hand? What are you, crippled?" [laughs]

He could and might very well decapitate you verbally or even freeze on you. 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. Yeah, he was a piece of work…

I was born in a little place called Goshen, New York, // 1897, the 25th day of November. Name: William Henry Joseph Bonaparte Bertholoff Smith. Quite a name. Takes in French and Jewish. My mother played the organ and my grandmother played the organ and guitar. That’s where I take the music from. And I heard it first as a little boy in Newark, New Jersey…

By the Lion’s own account, musical sounds were like a magnet that was constantly pulling him toward the source. And in turn of the century Newark, there were many sources… ragtime and church hymns, marching bands, Tin Pan Alley hits, Yiddish songs, Victorian parlor melodies and European operettas. The hybrid sounds of Newark—Willie absorbed them all.

…Newark in those early years of the 20th century, right into the Thirties, was known as a very important place for jazz piano players, stride piano players, boogie woogie piano players, blues piano players, to develop…

Newark was known as a tickler’s town, tickler being the word for piano player.

The city was predominantly German, with a patchwork of ethnic neighborhoods—German, Irish, Jewish, Greek, Chinese, and a small but rapidly growing black population, mostly in the old Third Ward, on the fringes of the red-light district.

Young Willie, whose actual birth date was 1894, was about seven years old when he arrived in Newark. He described his early years in his memoir, Music on My Mind:

"We lived on the edge of the tenderloin district known around the world as the Coast. My stepfather put us into a four room house with an attic at 76 Academy Street, where the rent was only 12 dollars a month…"

His mother was a devout Baptist who played the organ in church. She tried to steer her son to sacred music…

…I used to hear my mother play a hymn… and I used to take it and play it in ragtime, we called it then. Some folks called it "gut bucket." Some folks called it "in the alley," some folks called it "lowdown," as you feel it… I used to go to a saloon, dance, sing and play, then pass my hat around. Then I’d come home and bring the money. So then my mother said okay, if that’s what you want to do, then I’m with you.

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

…And I was always kind of thrilled by the way the Baptists sang because they seemed to give vent to their feelings. Two things that attracted me from my early boyhood and still does, between the Baptist colored people and the Jewish people…

The Lion was immersed in the Judaic faith. He considered himself, he took his father's faith. His father, Frank Bertholoff, was a Jew.

The only ones who knew how to cook up pig’s feet, then pickle ‘em up real good were the Jewish people. We’d go around later in the evening and say, "Noch a Bissel, noch, noch. Ve shtayt? [laughs]

He did speak a little Yiddish. And I asked him how that came about 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 card was in Yiddish characters.

Willie not only celebrated his bar mitzvah at age thirteen, but in later years he became the cantor of a synagogue in Harlem.

Newark’s tenderloin was known as the Coast, the only part of town where a young black entertainer could get a start. That’s where Willie learned the ragtime favorites—in the saloons, the buffet flats and brothels…

This is one I remember from when I was 10 years old. The name was: "Doncha Hit That Lady Dressed in Green." [MUSIC UP FULL] This is how they used to play it, and this is the type of music they played at the time. They called it ragtime…

The main point about ragtime was that it was syncopated. It was usually a steady 2-4 rhythm in the left hand and all sorts of fooling around in the right hand, against the beat. And that's a pretty fair definition of syncopation. Ragtime was based on that…

Willie got his first steady gig playing piano at Bill Buss’s saloon, for a dollar a day and tips, then moved up to Randolph’s, a dance hall and rathskellar. The cakewalk had inspired new dance crazes—the two-step, the turkey trot, and the grizzly bear—and the ticklers had to provide the musical accompaniment.

Willie Smith now had several rivals to watch out for, as well as those who dropped in from out of town.

In 1913, a short but powerfully built pool shark by the name of Charles Luckeyeth Roberts showed up at Randolph’s on the Coast. Luckey Roberts had been an acrobat and child actor in traveling productions of "Uncle Tom’s Cabin..."

His massive hands could stretch a fourteenth on the keyboard. Willie admired his style. Roberts’ signature piece, "Pork and Beans," became one of the tests for serious pianists.

In the fall of 1914 Willie met James Price Johnson, from New Brunswick, New Jersey, who became his closest friend. Willie wrote about James P. with obvious affection: "He was born under the mixed-up sign of Aquarius. He was always a sincere guy, easily hurt, kind of naïve and easy going… I used to sort of watch after him.… so naturally, I nicknamed him The Brute."

Willie and James P. were soon exchanging ideas and tricks of the trade. Willie adopted one of his pal’s display pieces, "Carolina Shout," and continued to perform it for the rest of his life…

Jimmy was a guy, very timid but a great artist. He liked the alleys, he was a real alley cat… I got his philosophy. He always kind of liked to go where the guys weren’t doing so well. What we call now the ghettoes…

James P. felt the same admiration for Willie…

Willie Smith was one of the sharpest ticklers I ever met—and I met most of them. He was a fine dresser, very careful about the cut of his clothes and a fine dancer, too, in addition to his great playing. When Willie Smith walked into a place, his every move was a picture…

He was always a fighter; and he fought a lot of my battles over the years. I remember the first thing he ever said to me when I met him and played after him on The Coast over in Newark. He said: Well, you may be able to play better than I can, but I’ll bet I can beat you fightin’.

In those times, when you were a personality there, you could always tell one because he wore a diamond stickpin. It wasn’t make believe, it was a diamond stickpin, let’s say 500 dollars. And a diamond in the tooth. And that’s what Jelly Roll had when I first saw him…

Willie and his pals were intoxicated with the glamorous life style of the ticklers—sporting men with lots of girl friends, musical gladiators whose sharp playing and sharp clothes were weapons for cutting up the competition…

He came out of a tradition in which pianists were entertainers, and in which they played by themselves. Possibly they might be accompanying singers, but they were unencumbered by rhythm sections or bands. They were the featured act.// And they were the reason people showed up for many of those clubs…

…Well, Art, this reminds me of what we used to call in Harlem "in the alley." Everything’s copacetic. I got my 20 dollar gold piece on… There are a lot of 20 year men here. Every time I look at you it makes me think…

When Willy sat down at the piano he was really going to show you how it should be done. And um I remember him going, "BONG," like that (laugh) that would be the tonic note...

…He'd hit it very hard and then he'd go into some beautiful, original harmonic thing.

In those days, every pianist had his own signature chord or signature piece or signature riff. He wouldn’t play it immediately. He’d start off softly and play maybe a ballad of the day and then without warning he’d break into a fast stride thing to show everybody how great he was…

It was entertaining… Not only the music but it was his persona that was such a grabber.

According to Willie, all the good pianists were ladies’ men. "The women," he wrote, "always wondered if the piano man was as good in bed as he was at the keyboard.

During the summers before World War One, serious piano players from all over the East converged on Atlantic City. While the white folks frolicked along the Boardwalk, the blacks who lived and worked in town found their amusement twenty blocks west, in a neighborhood known as "the Line." In places like the Boathouse, the Bucket of Blood, and Kelly’s, competition at the keyboard was fierce.

…There was a guy called Kitchen Tom, in Atlantic City, was a Creole. Jelly Roll, he was a Creole, and myself, we were about three of the guys who played in sportin’ houses on The Line. You got to be a sharpie—you see and don’t see. If they used to like you they’d allow a guy one girl a week if you picked out one…

They wouldn’t allow too many fellows to set in, but when a guy was going to take your job if you don’t know it real good, he would be watching you.

At Kelly’s, Willie was watching an older guy from Baltimore named Eubie Blake, who had to defend his chair from the likes of Willie, James P. Johnson, and Luckey Roberts. In 1915, when Eubie Blake moved on to New York, Willie took his place.

He said to me very often it was uh better to not go to the bathroom and relieve yourself on the piano stool than get up and risk having someone else come in and uh bump you. If you had competitors, and in those days, everybody did… He talked about him as if, like Macy’s vs.Gimbels. It was a real battle. That’s what they liked…

Ragtime means a guy that don’t know the keyboard. He just rags off a few riffles that come to him. Now the difference between a ragtime pianist and a pianist is that a pianist is supposed to know all the progressions, how to move around in both hands…

As pianists like Willie Smith, James P. Johnson, and Eubie Blake transformed ragtime into a new musical style, they grew to resent the assumption that all black players were ragtimers.

Many people see the relationship between ragtime and stride piano and in a general way consider the two things as a unit. I’m not sure that’s the way Willie the Lion saw it at all.

Now, uh most of those pianists, uh in the stride period, learned to play in every key. They learned to play whatever they could do in any tempo. So they mastered the instrument… The piano in their hands was an orchestra. You heard everything you needed to hear.

This is the style of piano they played when they didn’t have good left hands [plays]… Now that’s what they call the corn. Some people think that’s piano but that’s pure corn. It means, I don’t know how to play…

Well in ragtime, there was always this steady left hand rhythm and Scott Joplin would do [plays Maple Leaf Rag]

The stride pianists like Willie the Lion or James P. Johnson extended the bass. They had a lot more going on. They would play, for example the same piece… [plays]

The left hand [demonstrates left hand only] which is probably the origin of the term striding. It moves, it strides really from up [demonstrates with left hand only]. In that kind of fashion.

Ragtime was a pure written form similar to Satie and early Mozart sonatas, not improvisational. Stride is a jazz piano style that has a very different beat, has a much more varied left hand. There are many different forms of what are called tension and release in stride and there aren't that many in ragtime.

Now that’s what we call stride. It means both hands moving…

They saw their playing as a clear evolution, something very new and more difficult, more musical, more sophisticated than ragtime and certainly than blues. They were playing I think what they figured was a finer type of music…

…Cuz if I were going to put that same strain in, I’d stride it… [plays] Stride means "real good."

We had a club here in New York called the famous Clef Club where all the guys were thorough musicians. In order to join it, your discipline had to be 100 percent, your character 100 percent, because we played for all the rich people, the classy people.

In 1910, a Broadway orchestra director named James Reese Europe formed the Clef Club, a booking agency and union for black musicians. From the cabarets to the concert halls, Europe’s orchestras dominated the New York music scene and won new levels of respect and popularity for black musicians.

Well, you have to recognize that the musicians that uh were in that group all came under the influence of James Reese Europe.

This was all a part of what Willie the Lion heard. And he could see around him 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.

Willie called it "beautification"—the merging of light classical melodic and harmonic strains with the rhythmic pulse of stride. In this early sound film, Clef Club member Eubie Blake beautified a familiar tune…

When Willie was showing me music or when he was playing he mainly talked about how you should beautify a piece, how you should make it refined and how you should not bang on the piano and how you should use dynamics.

The classical influence dispels the myth that these people were semi-literate or illiterate bums working in bars and that they didn't have any understanding of music outside uh purely instinctive means of performance. These people were sophisticated and were aware of harmony uh and counterpoint, musical structure…

Eubie told me that the fellows in Jim Europe’s band could read the spots on a snake’s ass, they were so good at sight reading…

Blake also remembered that in the Clef Club orchestras, they sometimes had to hide the music to avoid disappointing white audiences who thought the black musicians played by ear and couldn’t read music.

In September, 1916, Jim Europe enlisted in the US Army Infantry and was ordered to organize a regimental band. On the battlefields of France, the15th Regiment earned the nickname "the Hellfighters," and Jim Europe became the first black combat officer in World War One…

Two months after Europe enlisted, Willie Smith traded his English suits for Army drab. He had recently left his wife, a white vaudeville performer who he never divorced. Willie ended up in a new segregated regiment for field artillery—the Black Devils—and helped form their own regimental band. But their musical talents did not exempt them from battle duty, as Willie recalled:

"When they asked for volunteers to fire the French 75s, I stepped forward. The French captain in charge told us, ‘Well, I think it will take you a month to learn the mechanisms and then we’ll shoot you up to the front.’

I learned that mechanism in 6 hours. They tabbed me as an A-1 gunner right off the bat. I shot those 75s at the Fritzies for forty nine days straight without a break or any relief. Word got back and a colonel came up and said, ‘Smith, you’re a Lion with that gun.’ That name stuck with me ever since."

Lieut. Jim Europe’s band took France by storm , turning the new sounds of jazz into an international phenomenon. Returning stateside, the Hellfighters marched up Fifth Avenue to Harlem, where they received a hero’s welcome.

Sergeant Willie the Lion Smith was not sent home until a year after the armistice, but he entertained French audiences wherever he found a piano. On his discharge papers, they wrote: "Sgt. Smith went through the war with the 92nd Division and his conduct was excellent in battle showing nerve, faith, and intuition."

The Lion took his nerve and faith where his intuition told him to and immediately went back to the saloon wars in Harlem, pounding the piano.

According to the Lion, Leroy Wilkins’ club at 135th and 5th was the oldest cabaret in Harlem, the place where all the dictys from the Negro show world, the prize fighters, and the sports people stopped in. Wilkins put the Lion in charge, which meant performing seven nights a week from nine-thirty until the morning.

For white audiences, two events sparked the vogue for Harlem—Prohibition and the first successful all-black Broadway show in over a decade. In 1921, Shuffle Along became the surprise hit of the season. The score was by Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle, and the production featured some of the hottest dancing white theater-goers had ever seen. It started a vogue for black shows that lasted throughout the decade.

Prohibition brought the white bootleggers and gangsters uptown. The Cotton Club and Connie’s Inn instituted a "whites only" policy for the clientele. Small’s Paradise had a big floor show and advertised itself as the place "where the races mix and the high hats mingle with the native stepper."

The Lion played the clubs that catered to black clients, like Leroy’s, the Nest, and Pod’s & Jerry’s, and the after-hours joints where the serious musicians put each other to the test and the younger players came to learn the new sounds of jazz.

Fats was a big ol’ good natured boy born under the sign Gemini. When I worked in Leroy’s, James P. brought him down one Sunday afternoon and we were all dressed in full dress suits and tuxedos. And in comes this guy with a greasy suit on, walks right down to the bandstand and says, "hello there, Lion, what d’ya say?" He made me furious and I said to Jimmy, "Sit that guy down cuz he looks filthy." From that day on I named him Filthy…

So he sat down until I got finished, and then he was very insistent, very persistent. He insisted that he wanted to play Jimmy Johnson’s Carolina Shout. When I got through, he sat down and played it and made Jimmy like it and made me like it. From then on it was Thomas Fats Waller.

Well most every um pianist who came along who thought he was playing like Fats Waller in many cases picked up things from Fats that Fats picked up from Willie the Lion Smith. With the octaves in the bass, and doing a certain kind of tenth with a fifth in it, and there are just little things that made me think, Willie the Lion…

When he heard Fats play, the Lion said to James P, "Watch out, Jimmy, he’s got it!". They were the three musketeers of Harlem stride—the Lion, James P. and Fats—the Big Three.

When Duke Ellington came to smoke me off the 1st time, I had a band at the Capitol Palace, 139th and Lenox Ave. So I sat him down to play the piano at the Capitol. But I took one look at this guy and I said there’s a guy who’d make a good bandleader—he’s sharp and he has a nice disposition and he’s the type of guy that wins you over when you first see him.

The Lion was a myth actually that you saw come alive. The Lion was one of the greatest influences on the piano players of that era. And when you get to NY and you meet the Lion, and the Lion is working in a place called the Capitol Palace. And the great thing that impressed me was that the minute you walk in the door, everything is in tempo with the Lion. Everything…

As Duke related the whole place was in step with the Lion and the way he was playing. [PLAYS EXAMPLE OF WILLIE’S BEAT]

According to Ellington, "the walls and furniture seemed to lean understandingly. The waiters served in that tempo; everybody who had to walk in, out, or around the place walked with a beat…"

"Willie the Lion was the foundation… To spend an evening with the Lion was really something of an experience. If you troubled to hang around a while and listen to all that was said and played, […] you’d learn something."

They called them Chittlin Struts, Gumbo Suppers, and Fish Fries. Duke Ellington called them Parlor Socials...

So they’d run these affairs and they’d get a pianist to play. And the fee was $10 and all you can eat. And if you had a couple buddies you wanted to bring along to play, they would split up the ten. They would play so the next session would be mine, the next one could be Jimmy’s and the next could be Fats.

Besides the home cookin’ and bootleg liquor, the Harlem rent party was also a musical battleground, the site of the legendary cutting or carving contests involving the Big Three and their colleagues.

Willie and James P. had kind of a routine where James P. would deliberately play a wrong note, and Willie walk out from the other room to the parlor and tap Jimmy on the left shoulder and say, "What's the matter? ‘You a cripple? Let me show you how it goes." Blub, blub, blub..... And make like he was stealing the show.

Finger Buster was a kind of challenge piece that those fellows used to defeat the competition. There was another one with a very similar title called The Finger Breaker that Jelly Roll Morton used, but this one is clearly throwing down the gauntlet, so that uh, no amateurs would dare to compete with the mighty Lion as he strode into a place.

Sometimes the cutting contests would occur at rent parties. Other times the cutting contests would occur when some new musician came to town. Cutting meant being able to play longer and more varied and with more technical dexterity and in many keys. Also with inventiveness…

Jelly Roll Morton came in the late twenties from Chicago I think. He was famous already because he had done these wonderful Jelly Roll Morton and his Red Hot Pepper recordings for Victor…

Well I knew Jelly Roll well. I think I was one of the few who did know him… // He was a character. Quite a talker, he had a habit of tearing people apart…

Well Jelly Roll Morton had his own novelty piece called "Finger Breaker" where he would try to outdo the other pianist. And in New Orleans and Chicago it was generally known that he could // cut people. But when he came to New York, the New York pianists really intimidated him, and Willie did...

I challenged him in the Hoofer’s Club, in the Rhythm Club. I got him before nearly 300 musicians and I said, you call the terms and I’ll call them on the piano, and I’m gonna make you remember piano as long as you live, and I could…

After that, whenever anybody referred to Jelly Roll Morton, the Lion would say, "Oh, you mean ‘Mr. One-hand’…"

Harlem was a great place back then. I was up there every night, almost…

We'd go from the Savoy, to Cotton Club to Connie's, to Smalls, to the Paradise all these joint and all these little places, all right in a little cluster. All around Pod’s and Jerry's. It was a world, a little world of its own. It was the only place to go to play the kind of music you cared about.

A 1930 guide to dining in New York described an evening at a basement club in Harlem called the Categonia Club, known to regulars as Pod’s & Jerry’s. At Pod’s & Jerry’s: "the waffles and bacon are grand… the clientele [is] colorful… there was also a grand piano soloist… one Bill Smith, Harlem’s only genuine colored Jew, who cheerfully speaks a fluent Yiddish on no provocation whatever."

Anybody worth a dime used to come uptown to 131st Street. Pod’s & Jerry’s was where I had six singing waiters. They used to take a tray full of drinks/ in this hand and dance down the floor… If I felt good I’d go in at eleven and stay till nine in the morning… Had special guests come in after the shows closed downtown // ofays…

At Pod’s and Jerry’s, white musicians and songwriters dropped in after hours to hear the Lion holding forth at the ivories—Bix Beiderbecke, the Dorsey Brothers, Hoagy Carmichael, and an unemployed 19 year old named Artie Shaw…

He was a very interesting guy to play with. I'd never seen anything like it. Never heard anything like it. First time I heard him play it really threw me. But I got with it pretty soon. I found it was very exhilarating, very, very exciting.

Don't forget he 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 until 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?

He was the first guy that paid me any attention and then later when he'd say Artie, my boy, my boy… I didn't know I was his boy. I was playing. He was playing.

He wasn’t arrogant at all. 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. That's part of what they called his arrogance. It wasn't arrogance, it was a funny forthrightness…

This is not egotism, but if you can’t sell yourself, you don’t have faith in yourself, then nobody in that audience is gonna have faith in you. You got to walk out and command the thing.

He wasn’t above telling you, "I’m the best guy around. I mean I can do things other people can’t do. And he was right. But people just didn’t want people to do that you know [laughs]…

And behind even his most outrageous claims to virtuosity, there was usually a more significant point about the difference between those who sit at the keyboard simply to play, and those who invent…

This is how I re-wrote "The Polonaise" by Chopin… [plays]

[reciting] We have obligations plus complications

That haunt us all the day through,

You know man I can’t concentrate half the time.

Why? Because I’ve got music on my mind…

I don’t know how he got published. I used to tell him. There were things he'd play like that Echo of Spring 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 white people wanted to hear "When Francis Dances the Hully Gee"—that's what they wanted to hear. They were terrible tunes but that's what you had.

According to the Lion, the only ones who’d publish colored composers’ work were WC Handy and Clarence Williams, who dominated the blues and race record industry in the 1920s.

Williams published a folio of compositions by James P and the Lion, but their music was too hard for the average player and didn’t sell. In the 1930s, when pop tunes played by big bands ruled the airwaves, Willie the Lion composed his greatest music.

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.

Bix Beiderbecke wrote a thing called "In a Mist." I had the same dream, I wrote one called "Morning Air" while my Jane was sitting in the park, this is the idea I got. Different phrases, different types. [begins playing]

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 sort of tied the music together in a way that was very personal…

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. In Ellington’s work you hear this time and time again.

He loved Ravel and Debussy and he combined these classical influences into his own compositions of stride. And it was sort of made out of whole cloth and so in a sense created a new style that was different from the other pianists who used classical music.

His music was like his playing, it was either superduper stride, double tempo, faster than Bud Powell, faster than Charlie Parker, 800 miles an hour, or these beautiful little etude like numbers, like Concentratin’…

In one particular piece called Concentratin' he starts off with a real salon sort of, pretty phrase like [plays].

But the next thing he comes up with is out and out stride. And that goes, [plays].

But he returns to [plays] And it seems to me that it's these two elements in his musical personality that give much of his character.

My mother said he was schizoid. I don’t know. I’m no doctor.

Willie the Lion thought of himself as a composer who played the piano. And he was very disappointed I'm sure in not getting uh wider circulation of his compositions.

If you look in the various cultures around the world and you observe how music is taught, more often than not it's taught mentor to pupil. In Brazil if I were a kid growing up in Brazil I would not be allowed to touch the drums until I learned to sing those rhythms to the satisfaction of whoever my mentor was. That same kind of mentor-pupil relationship happened in jazz in the early days.

Billy Taylor was a teenager taken with the swing piano style of Teddy Wilson when he first came to New York City. He immediately headed uptown to a bar managed by a friend of his father’s, and got invited to a brownstone around the corner to show off his stuff…

So I start to play and I'm walking tenths and I'm doing what I thought was pretty hip for a young piano player, and uh I was about 16 bars into the tune when this elderly gentleman with a cigar and a derby came over and said, let me try a little of that son. I looked up, I said, yeah, sure.

I got up and this guy sat down. I had never in my life heard a left hand like this. And he was awesome. The left hand it was playing octaves and, and a chord. Then he'd play a tenth then a chord. I said "Wow." You know. My mouth fell open. It was Willie Lion Smith.

Now the people in the room uh were the house belonged to James P. Johnson. Willie the Lion Smith was there, they were very good friends.

At any rate, there was one young guy 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." This was my introduction to Willie The Lion Smith. First as a formidable pianist and second as a mentor.

With the repeal of Prohibition and the deepening of the Great Depression, many of the Harlem nightspots closed. The jazz action moved downtown to 52nd Street.

In 1930, the Lion began working a 52nd Street joint called Helbock’s, which soon moved across the street and re-opened as the Onyx Club.

The block, 52nd Street between 5th and 6th Avenue was uh, there were 10 clubs on either side of the street all of the styles that were his, historically relevant were represented there. So if you started at 6th Avenue and went backwards, you were going back historically.

Down at the far end, closer to 5th Avenue, you had a club uh where most of the people who played in Willie's style played..

But what exactly was Willie’s style?

On 52nd Street, jazz bands dish out for hep cats the genuine tailgatin’ gut bucket…

The Lion had been typecast as an old-timer playing mainstream or "hot" jazz. The new generation played it "cool." When the first bebop bands started ruffling the fur coats on 52nd Street, there was a sudden revival of interest in traditional New Orleans jazz. The Lion’s age and colorful personality seemed to fit the nostalgic stereotypes, but his originality as a composer and performer made him impossible to label.

Willie, because he didn't have many hit songs, and was sort of ignored when bop came along, didn't have many gigs. But he was very proud. You wouldn't know that sometimes he was broke and he wouldn't eat for a day or two. So the first time I met him he asked me to, I said "What can I bring you?" He said "Bring me some ravioli." So I brought him a can of ravioli and uh, he immediately heated it up, ate it and when he was finished, he gave me this very sheepish look like a kid would have if he put his hand in a cookie jar, and he took the can of ravioli in the paper bag and heaved it with one hand out the uh, out the window to the air shaft.

…On a wild spree with Fats and Jimmy and different fellows like Jack Teagarden and George Wettling, Jack Teagarden and James P., one morning I came home around nine-thirty and I’d been having a good time and I was groggy. I was fooling around at the piano and I got a weird strain in the bass like a drum going half a tone down, half a tone up, and I kept hearing it, and then got another strain. Being half high, I called it "Zig Zag"…

I think one reason why his recollection of dates aren't consistent is because of the liquor.

NARRATOR (V.O.)

By the 1940s, the long nights and drinking sprees were taking their toll. Fats Waller died of pneumonia on a transcontinental train. In 1951, James P. Johnson had a massive stroke from which he never fully recovered. At his bedside, the Lion played "Carolina Shout," and Johnson wrote out a message: "They were too good to the piano players with all that free booze. It catches up with you."

The Lion’s legs started giving out and he was diagnosed with high blood pressure.

And he had these shoes that he loved that he bought from Thom McCann and he fell asleep on the train cause he was a little juiced and some cat stole these shoes. And he was mortified. And he, uh, was holding his eyeglasses, you know, the, the, earpiece with one hand, saying, "I'm high, baby, I'm high. You know what? I gotta cool it. I gotta cool it." And he did.

He was able to cool it with the help of Mary Jane Williams, whom he met in 1949. The Lion had finally found his lioness, and she became his lifelong companion.

…None other than Willie the Lion Smith. Willie!

During the Forties and Fifties, Smith recorded only occassionally, but he basked in the glow of nightclub work. The fierce keyboard gladiator became a jazz patriarch, a mentor to dozens of young players…

When it was clear that I was going to become his pupil, he said to my mother he put his arm around me, he said: Edith, I want you to know I’m going to take your boy in hand and I’m going to be strict but affectionate with him.

Willie had no progeny so, as far as we know, so he wanted to pass on and impart what he knew to us.

When I was thirteen I saw in the New Yorker magazine that they mentioned Willie the Lion Smith, one of the remaining stride pianists, playing at a place called the Central Plaza…

Willie the Lion was a regular at the week-end jamfests, along with his drinking buddies Peewee Russell, George Wettling, and Jimmy McPartland. There was dancing of all kinds and the liquor was cheap.

Anyway so my father took me there. And of course I’m anticipating what this is going to be like. It’s like a whole new world opening up. And there was this lousy piano on a stand and there were these great musicians standing there playing and I just walked up and I asked Willie, I said, "My name is Mike Lipskin and I want to hear you. Do you mind if I stand close to the piano?" "No problem."

As the Lion recalled it, the Central Plaza jams gradually evolved into a Dixieland drinking party for young white squares who cared little for real jazz.

"The musicians who worked the Plaza called themselves the Foreign Legion. "When the Saints Go Marching In" was their marching song. From the opening note at 9 PM the audience would start hollerin’, ‘When are we gonna hear the Saints?’ By midnight the tension was really built up… At about the fifth chorus the horn men would start leading the parade off the stand and around the hall…

"Everybody was screaming, wriggling, and throwing glasses… The Lion was usually frustrated. The only time you could hear the piano was early in the evening before the ruckus got under way… You had to fight your way in and way out…"

Sometimes Willie could be very angry and he could be angry for several hours. He, in certain regard he didn't receive the respect that he though he was due, because bop was taking over and many people would ask him to play compositions or songs that he considered to be "Uncle Tom" or beneath him. "My Old Kentucky Home," "man we don't do that stuff around here, that stuff is corny, and that's offensive."

And also he wasn't that successful. He was broke. And when you're broke and you're passed by as an artist and you think you're really talented many artists become angry. It's a substitute for depression.

The Lion was one of the lucky ones to get called to be in this historic photo that um (tilt down) ran in Esquire in January of 1959. It is since become known as the greatest jazz photo, or certainly is the greatest collection of jazz people ever photographed.

And among the stars was Willie Smith, which was very important because this picture as it turns out represents many layers of jazz ,of early jazz, New Orleans right up to uh Sonny Rollins and uh Dizzy and Thelonius Monk. So, it was a nice bouquet of people. And they all got along wonderfully. And of course, the Lion, who was always so stately and proud that everybody was deferring to him. And he chose to stand next to his buddy, Lucky Roberts.

They looked like Mutt and Jeff because Luckey was a little short guy and the Lion stood tall and proud.

It was a hot August morning, and the photo took so long to set up that Willie, who suffered in the heat, left Luckey Roberts and sat down on a nearby stoop.

And um, meanwhile Art Kane kept clicking his picture. And the one they chose to put in the magazine is the one where he's missing. So now Willie the Lion missed out on the most important jazz photo that there ever was and heaven knows he was an important figure and should have been in it. But the Lion of course is so self-important he had to walk out and get his throne over there, I think it was a couple steps up…

As long as they can wheel me up to the piano, with the help of the good Lord, I’ll play…

During the late 1960s, when various kinds of pre-bop jazz were once again popular, Willie the Lion Smith became a frequent guest on television and at jazz festivals around the world.

In 1969, the White House hosted Duke Ellington’s 70th birthday party, and Ellington invited his old mentor.

They remained close for their entire life. And whenever Duke was in town and had time he was always sure that Willie was included in all his parties and events…

For Ellington, the high point of the evening was seeing the Lion at the concert grand with his derby on, playing behind the President…

Willie the Lion Smith kept right on performing and teaching until his death from cancer in April 1973.

While the works of his peers James P. Johnson, Fats Waller, Jelly Roll Morton and Eubie Blake have enjoyed frequent recordings and re-interpretations, Willie the Lion’s music has been curiously overlooked. Two of his students suggest some reasons why…

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.

Willie was an artist. He was always trying 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? They are freaky. They are different.

I'd be in his apartment and he'd say, out of nothing, uh he'd say, "You know why water disappears from a vase?" I'd say "Why?" And he would say "Because the angels come and drink it." And I'd say "Don't you mean evaporation?" And he'd say "Yeah, that's it." [laughing]