Who was the first Jewish jazz star?
Al Jolson? No, the closest the singer got to swinging was starring in 1927’s groundbreaking talkie, “The Jazz Singer.”
Benny Goodman? You could make a strong case for the clarinetist and bandleader.
The most intriguing candidate may be Harlem stride pianist Willie Smith, who was born 130 years ago tomorrow.
With his bowler hat, horn-rimmed spectacles and trademark cigar clenched between his teeth, “The Lion,” as he was known, was an iconic American figure for half a century. The brilliant and innovative musician’s career encompassed ragtime and vaudeville, the rise of Broadway and Tin Pan Alley and the emergence of jazz as America’s popular music. He also embodied the deep cultural currents and affinities coursing between New York’s Black and Jewish communities.
And, however murky the details may be, he was the first jazz master who claimed a Jewish identity.
As he wrote in his consistently engaging 1964 autobiography “Music On My Mind,” “You could say I am Jewish partly by origin and partly by association. As it turned out I favored the Jewish religion all my life and at one time served as a Hebrew cantor in a Harlem congregation.”
The Lion came into the world Nov. 23, 1893 in Goshen, New York, as William Henry Joseph Bonaparte Bertholf, acquiring the Smith around the age of 3 when his mother remarried. He discovered later in life that his father had Jewish heritage, which deepened the connections he felt for the Jewish people and faith established during his childhood.
His mother took in washing, and on Saturdays he regularly delivered freshly laundered bundles of clothes to a prosperous Jewish family in Newark, the Rothschilds. Enamored by the chanting he heard during their children’s Hebrew lessons, he was invited to join, which led, he said, to him becoming a bar mitzvah at 13.
“It didn’t take much time before I began to learn the meanings of the Hebraic words,” he wrote. “When the rabbi saw how well I was doing, he took special pains to teach me, and it wasn’t long before I was talking Hebrew as well as the Rothschild kids.”
If the Lion had a knack for languages, he had a far more profound gift for music. He was playing professionally around Newark as a teen, while making regular forays into New York City to observe and learn from older pianists. Jazz was still coalescing in the first decade of the 20th century as ragtime and various African-American dance idioms from the South merged with music from the Black church and the bravura piano tradition of late European Romanticism.
The Lion devoured it all.
He acquired his feline nickname due to his prowess as an artillery gunner in France during World War I. After the war, he returned to New York to help usher in the Harlem Renaissance.
Along with his stride piano compatriots Luckey Roberts (1887-1968), James P. Johnson (1894-1955) and their protégé Fats Waller (1904-1943), the Lion kept Harlem jumping throughout the 1920s, playing at rent parties (where hosts charged admission to their homes to help pay their rent), dance halls and speakeasies. While the demanding, two-handed stride style they personified reached its apotheosis with the foursome, its influence reverberated for decades in the hands of pianists as disparate as Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Thelonious Monk.
Mike Lipskin, a San Francisco pianist and protégé of the Lion who has championed stride for decades, described the style this way: “The left hand in stride gives the piano its own full rhythm section, often a necessity before jazz bass proliferated. It is inaptly so called as the left hand tends to ‘stride’ or alternate between the low section of the piano and chords around the middle of the keyboard.”
The Lion played an essential role in the idiom’s evolution and was an early source of awe and inspiration for Ellington, who described encountering the pianist in his element at the Capital Palace. He made an impression before Ellington even caught sight of him, delivering a bounce so compelling that everything, animate and inanimate, “seemed to be doing whatever they were doing in the tempo the Lion’s group was laying down,” Ellington wrote in his autobiography “Music Is My Mistress.” “The walls and the furniture seemed to lean understandingly — one of the strangest and greatest sensations I ever had. The waiters served in that tempo; everybody who had to walk in, out, or around that place walked with a beat.”
He and Ellington became lifelong friends, and the Lion took delight in describing in “Music On My Mind” how he corrected the Yiddish pronunciation of an Ellington vocalist singing “Eli, Eli,” Jacob Koppel Sandle’s setting for Psalm 22. Initially popularized in the early 1920s by Ukrainian-born Cantor Josef Rosenblatt, the song turned into something of a jazz standard when the Lion recorded it later in the decade.
The question of the Lion’s Yiddish fluency remains cloudy, however, as does his employment history as a hazzan. (He wouldn’t have been an anomaly, as African-American vocalist Thomas LaRue performed and recorded in the 1920s as “Der Shvartze Khazn,” or the Black Cantor.)
Dan Morgenstern, a revered jazz historian, wrote in an email to Henry Sapoznik, a historian of Yiddish and American popular culture: “While I got to know Willie quite well he was evasive about the extent of his cantorial activities. And I never heard him sing anything approaching it or say or sing anything in Hebrew. His Yiddish, however, was fluent and he set witty lyrics to ‘I’ve Found a New Baby’ that I wish he had recorded. His sing-songy vocalizing had a definite Jewish tinge.”
In a recent phone interview, Lipskin, 78, reported differently about the Lion’s Yiddish fluency. Lipskin had become enamored with stride piano as a child, and in 1958 attended an all-star jazz concert produced by Jack Crystal, comedic actor Billy Crystal’s father, that included the Lion. The 13-year-old Lipskin not only got to meet his hero. By the end of the evening, he ended up arranging to study with him.
“We immediately bonded, and he let me stand right next to the piano,” said Lipskin, who served as music director for and performed in eight “Stride Summit” concerts at Davies Symphony Hall and Masonic Auditorium from 1988 through 2004. (Still active at the keys, he plays Bix in North Beach intermittently Dec. 1-17.)
Recalling their unlikely friendship, Lipskin described the Lion as “a very deep-soul person and we had a powerful connection. He said I had been sent to him by God, and for many years we talked almost every day.”
While Lipskin didn’t speak Yiddish, his father Lawrence was fluent (he translated “The American Jewish Folklore Book” into English), and Lipskin the elder said that the Lion didn’t really speak the language. Rather he “had picked up on Yiddish words and used them in a comical way,” Lipskin recalled his father remarking. For example, the Lion wrote a song called “Nacha Bissell” that strings together Yiddish phrases in a series of non sequiturs. “He was never a cantor, as far as I know,” Lipskin continued. “I don’t think he was bar mitzvahed. He just felt a real affinity for Jewish people. He told me, ‘Whenever anything good happens, there’s always a Jew involved.’”
What’s beyond doubt is that the Lion thrived in Jewish creative contexts. Just about every “Music On My Mind” chapter includes an anecdote about the Lion mixing it up with Jewish artists, like the time he took over the piano from George Gershwin at a swanky 1924 affair celebrating the triumphant premiere of “Rhapsody In Blue.” He’s on Broadway in 1927 playing the role of a pianist in George Abbott’s and Dana Burnet’s “Four Walls,” a production starring Paul Muni and Lee Strasberg. And he has several experiences playing communist retreats where it would have been easy to form a minyan but that leave him leery of fellow-traveling gigs.
The Lion died in 1973 at the age of 79. His Jewish identity might be unorthodox (pun definitely intended), but as musicians like to say, it’s close enough for jazz.