Stride Piano

Stride piano took ragtime’s left-hand pattern — alternating bass notes and chords — and made it faster, harder, more physically demanding, and more harmonically sophisticated. The result was a style built around virtuosic pianists competing at Harlem “cutting contests” and rent parties: events where the landlord would charge admission to a house party, using the piano music as entertainment to raise rent money.

James P. Johnson was the form’s inventor and theorist: his “Carolina Shout” (1921) was the test piece every aspiring stride pianist learned. Willie “The Lion” Smith added a cigar-chewing theatricality and a certain French Impressionist harmonic sophistication. Fats Waller — Johnson’s protégé — was the most commercially successful, combining technical brilliance with comic performing style on songs like “Ain’t Misbehavin’” and “Honeysuckle Rose.”

Stride’s influence on subsequent jazz piano is total: every major jazz pianist of the swing era — Teddy Wilson, Art Tatum, Earl Hines — came through it. Art Tatum extended the stride tradition into something beyond category: his speed, harmonic reharmonizations and technical range exceeded anything the form’s founders had imagined possible. Thelonious Monk learned stride from James P. Johnson and Fats Waller in Harlem, and his deliberate wrong-note style is most fully understood as a commentary on the stride tradition he had mastered before abandoning it.