Of the four genres represented on this site, stride piano (also called Harlem stride piano) is my favorite.

The term stride comes from the action of the left hand, which supplies a constant beat against a melodious right hand. The left hand jumps from strong upbeats (either single-note, octaves or tenths) to chordal downbeats (usually triads or tetrads, but sometimes single notes). Variety is given to the left-hand accompaniment through a walking-bass pattern, melodic episodes, arpeggiation and other techniques).

Although people associate stride music with tour-de-force presentation, stride can also be played slowly and introspectively (listen to "Blueberry Rhyme," for example). However, the music is, in fact, generally played at a fast pace.

Like ragtime, there are three giants of stride piano: James P[rice] Johnson, Thomas Wright "Fats" Waller and Willie "The Lion" Smith. Samples of their work are included in this site. Of this trio, Johnson (1891 - 1955) is recognized as the seminal influence; some students of the subject credit him with creating stride piano (originally called "shout" piano). He was Fats Waller's mentor. Fats (1904 - 1943), of course, went on to compose dozens of tunes, many of which have become standards. However, he never lost his enthusiasm for stride. He was also the most "commercial" of the Big Three. William Henry Joseph Bonaparte Berthloff (Willie "The Lion") Smith (1897 - 1973) was a classically-trained musician who claimed to have developed his left hand by playing Bach.

All three pianists (as well as many other stride artists) would play at "rent parties," that is, parties given for the sake of raising money to pay the monthly due to the landlord. Very often, contests were held among the pianists to see which of them could "cut" the others by playing the most difficult passages or by playing the most involved "tricks." I am not aware of any recordings of such cutting contests, but they must have been something to hear.

A note from Dick Hyman in Riccardo Scivales' folio of Dick Wellstood transcriptions, Hyman quotes from Wellstood's liner notes for an LP collection of Donald Lambert performances. It is the best and most succinct description of stride piano that I have yet found.

"I would say, first, that I don't like the term 'Stride' any more than I like the term 'Jazz.' When I was a kid, the old-timers used to call stride piano 'shout piano,' an agreeably expressive description, and when once I mentioned stride to Eubie Blake, he replied, 'My God, what won't they call ragtime next?'

". . . May I say that stride is indeed a sort of ragtime, looser than Joplin's 'classic rag,' but sharing with it the march-like structures and oom-pah bass. Conventional wisdom has it that striding is largely a matter of playing a heavy oom-pah in the left hand, but conventional wisdom is mistaken, as usual. Franz Liszt, Scott Joplin, Jelly Roll Morton, Earl ['Fatha'] Hines, Teddy Wilson, Erroll Garner, and Pauline Alpert all monger a good many oom-pahs, and whatever their other many virtues, none of them play[s] stride.

"To begin with, stride playing requires a certain characteristic rhythmic articulation, for the nature of which I can only refer you to recordings by such as Eubie Blake, Luckey Roberts, James P. Johnson, Fats Waller, Willie 'The Lion' Smith and Donald Lambert. The feel of stride is a kind of soft-shoe 12/8 rather than the 8/8 of ragtime, and, although the left hand often plays oom-pahs, the total feeling is frequently an accented four-beat rather than the two-beat you might expect. . . . By pulling and tugging at the (steady) rhythms of the left hand, the right hand provides the swing.

". . . In a world full of pianists who can rattle off fast oom-pahs or Chick Corea solo transcriptions or the Elliot Carter Sonata, there are perhaps only a dozen who can play stride convincingly at any length and with the proper energy."

Today, stride piano is in the capable hands of such people as Dick Hyman, Judy Carmichael, Mike Lipskin, Jay McShann, Ralph Sutton and John Gill. See John Roache's Page for more information about and some real-time performances by Gill, who is an Australian pianist often appearing at ragtime festivals throughout the United States.

For those of you who may be interested in stride piano CDs, here's a short list of what is available: