Professor Jaki Byard’s Pre-Postmodern Piano
By Kevin Whitehead, eMusic Contributor
When Jaki Byard was with Charles Mingus in the 1960s, audiences would laugh when, mid-solo, Byard would burst into 1920s-style stride piano — the revved-up ragtime offshoot where the left hand bounds back and forth over the lower half of the keyboard. Its archaic quality struck listeners as comic — in that avant-garde age, stride was for antiquarians. Nowadays every hip outside or inside pianist will drop a little stride science once in awhile — like… more »