Booker deserves to be as acclaimed and widely known as Beethoven. The fact that he isn’t may have something to do with the fact that Booker did not play in the royal courts of Vienna. He was a gay, Black heroin addict who played New Orleans dive bars, and never had a hit record (though he played on the hits of others, including Ringo Starr, the Doobie Brothers, and Fats Domino). (...)
Booker had a tough life. When he was 9 years old, he was hit by an ambulance traveling 70 miles an hour. Given morphine to deal with the pain of his injuries, he became an addict, and he was repeatedly busted on drug charges, even serving a stint in Louisiana’s infamous Angola prison. Later in his life, Booker was appreciated in Europe, and some of the best recordings of his work are from live performances at jazz events in Switzerland and Germany. But he spent most of his career drifting around New Orleans, playing its various pianos.
One of those pianos was at the district attorney’s house. The DA was an amateur singer, and allegedly offered an arrangement whereby Booker would avoid prison time for drug charges if he would give piano lessons to the prosecutor’s son. The DA, Harry Connick Sr., would become infamous for putting innocent people behind bars, and one of his wrongful convictions led to a major Supreme Court case, Connick v. Thompson.
The son of that infamous DA, the one who received Booker’s piano coaching, was Harry Connick Jr.. He would go on to become one of the leading jazz pianists in the world, selling 30 million records and winning three Grammy Awards. (...)
I am not a music writer, so it is beyond my capacity to evocatively describe his sound. All I can say is it’s some of the best piano playing I’ve ever heard, and I think James Booker deserves to be considered the finest piano player of the 20th century.
I think other piano players like Toussaint and Dr. John would agree with that. Connick Jr. himself has said that “There’s nobody that could even remotely come close to his playing ability…I’ve played Chopin Etudes, I’ve done the whole thing, but there is nothing harder than James,” and “he did innumerable things that would be considered revolutionary.”
by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. See also: The Ed Sheeran Copyright Lawsuit Exposes The Absurdity of Music Ownership (CA) - especially now that AI is involved (see below).]
[ed. See also: The Ed Sheeran Copyright Lawsuit Exposes The Absurdity of Music Ownership (CA) - especially now that AI is involved (see below).]