Johnny Hodges

Let's get some coffee going.

got the jazz music going that's some um charlie parker it's a charlie parker jam session so you got charlie shavers benny carter johnny hodges flip phillips ben webster oscar peterson barney kessel ray brown and jc heard all right y'all um so on today's episode i'm gonna read some information about the voting We won't spend a ton of time on it, but just want to get some voting information out.

You know, we have elections coming up here.

You can start early voting tomorrow here in Wisconsin, October 20th.

have you heard

it yeah sorry i don't didn't want to cut off your thought but um that you guys summed everything up so great and i didn't really have much to add but the one thing i'm trying to do is hear little bits and pieces of recorded stuff that i had and speaking of which you know there's like these old things some of them are a date that's ostensibly led by him but it was supposed to be a johnny hodges date but there was a record contract so they changed johnny hodges name to uh

Q Porter or something like

this so it's this weird thing early thing just listening to it yesterday it's a very like tight jazz kind of rhythm section thing and I actually like got to hear him like comp and um it was kind of dry and something like that was appropriate to the to the situation and it wasn't like a lot you know there's a lot of recordings of him playing his own stuff maybe in a solo context on piano that might sound a little bit lush and not cocktail because that's a bad word but sort of more orchestral but this stuff on these weird little records and he's just comping and he sounds like a jazzer and it sounds like dry and tight and So it was cool to see like, and I'm not surprised that he fit in there too, but it was cool to see that side of him.

It's worth checking out if you read music and are interested in the nuts and bolts of what Billy Stringhorn did, especially as far as writing for larger ensembles.

And that's

interesting you mentioned those things he did with Johnny Hodges.

Apparently a lot of those things were just like thrown together for like the make of the record.

Because When you dig into it, I was trying to pick what would be the right Duke Ellington song to play.

And so many of these songs are actually written by Billy Strayhorn or Johnny Hodges or somebody else.

Talk about Duke Ellington and the way he worked as a composer with his band and his partners.

Well, this really encapsulates how different jazz was back then.

Thus, the battle over what jazz could become became a dialogue across generations rather than a single decisive verdict.

Johnny Hodges stepped onto the stage as Duke Ellington's lead alto in 1928.

And from that first note, he rewrote what an alto sax could do.

He didn't just play the written melody.

The advent of LPs in the late 1940s gave him room to stretch out, allowing those long glissandi and extended phrases that became signature.

This shift in medium changed not just how he played, but also how audiences perceived the depth of a jazz solo.

So when you think about what Johnny Hodges did for jazz, it's more than a new tone.

It's a blueprint that lets alto saxes sing like voices and dance with rhythm in ways that still inspire musicians today.

Zoot Sims, followed by Lena Horne.

Stay tuned for Buddy Greco, Johnny Hodges, Helen Carr, and, uh, many others right here on this nothing-but-swing edition of I'm Oldfashioned on Jazz.FM 91.

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Should I reveal exactly how I feel? Should I confess I love you? Should I recite beneath the pale moonlight and swear by stars above you? Could I repeat the sweetest story told? Could I entreat? Would it be too bold? Should I reveal exactly how I feel? Should I confess that I love you? [upbeat jazz music] Could I repeat the sweetest story told? Could I entreat? Would it be too bold? Should I reveal exactly how I feel? Should I confess that I love you? Should I reveal? Should I conceal? Should I confess that I love you? [upbeat jazz music]

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Well, how about some Duke Ellington and Johnny Hodges with Bend One, a little swinger you can find on their 1959 record, Side by Side.

The happiest piano player stopping by next to swing Strangers in the Night.

[jazz music] Lonnie Johnson's Harlem Footwarmers and Move Over, 1928.

Duke Ellington at the piano with Bubber Miley, Joe Nanton, Johnny Hodges, Barney Bigard, Harry Carney, essentially the Ellington Orchestra with Lonnie Johnson on guitar.

Well, by the 1920s, the border between blues musician and jazz musician could be pretty porous.

We've said this before on this program, but genres weren't so neatly fenced off then.

¦ ¦ Thank you.

All of Me was a feature for alto saxophonist Johnny Hodges during his second period with the Ellington Band.

We're not going to hear Barry Lee Hall as a soloist here, but rather as an arranger.

This is his arrangement, and what he did was took Hodges' solo and arranged it for the sax section, as was done for the solos of Charlie Parker in the group Super Saxe.