Jazz
Keyboard eccentric
Martin Gayford
The first time I saw the late Dick Well- stood, he appeared to have fallen asleep behind the piano. At any rate, he was rest- ing there, beneath a double-bass cover, awaiting the arrival of the rest of the band. When they turned up he emerged, a mas- sive, tousled, bespectacled figure, and played — as always — with magnificent verve and impish imagination. Among his offerings on that occasion was a virtuoso extravaganza on the theme 'Jingle Bells' in his personal variant of the New York key- board style of the Twenties which is known as stride piano.
Wellstood (pronounced Wellstead) died suddenly ten years ago last week, leaving a large and unfillable hole in the landscape of keyboard jazz. He was — not exclusively, but notably — an exponent of stride, a fiendishly complex idiom which scarcely anyone can play with the proper spirit these days. It was the glory and pride of performers of yesteryear such as Willie the Lion Smith, James P. Johnson, and Thomas Waller, known as Fats to the pub- lic, and Filthy to his friends.
But Dick Wellstood was far from being merely an imitator of these men. In fact, even in his choice of models he was highly individual. As a 17-year-old, he used to pass out printed cards reading, 'Will some- one please introduce me to Joe Sullivan?' This was doubly eccentric. First, because in those days, the early Forties, the minds of most aspirant young jazz musicians in the New York area were probably turning to more progressive things (bebop was just emerging). Second, because even youthful traditionalists would tend to take as idols more stellar figures than Sullivan, a splen- did piano player, but not a star, even in jazz terms.
But Wellstood loved the byways of recent musical history. He revered James P. Johnson as the greatest of stride players — he wasn't so keen on Waller — but his performances were peppered with the music of obscure, indeed virtually forgot- ten, composers. Long before they became an international cult, Wellstood was play- ing the rags of Scott Joplin, and playing them with the correct zest and energy, missing from the lethargic, classically tinged versions that swept the world in the Seventies. He delighted in such oddities as Russian Rag a ragtime adaptation of Rach- maninov's Prelude in C Sharp Minor by a Bostonian named George L. Cobb.
Nor did he restrict himself to the musical era that ended with the Wall Street crash. In a Wellstood recital Waller, Joplin and George L. Cobb would rub shoulders with Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Michel Legrand, 'an old rag written by John Coltrane many years ago', anything that took his fancy. The music and atmosphere — anarchic, uproarious, erudite by turns of an evening with Wellstood at the piano is marvellously captured on Live At The Sticky Wicket (Arbors ARCD 19188, a double CD, which should be available from specialists such as Ray's Jazz Shop, and Mole Jazz in London, Garon in Cambridge).
This recording, made before what sounds like a small but enthusiastic audience in Hopkinton, Mass., in 1986, vividly recalls similar occasions I attended around that time. It is, indeed, the next best thing to actually being there, with not only an entire evening of music, including most of Well- stood's party pieces — Russian Rag among them — but also all the badinage.
Wellstood was in the habit, for example, of soliciting requests from the audience, which he would then, as like as not, reject with disdain CI hate that song'). He was also fond of delivering cod-scholarly lec- turettes on the music to come — 'This next one is by Edgar Sampson who, as you will recall, played violin in the Charlie Johnson band in 1927 and is famous as the compos- er of Stomping at the Savoy. This one I am going to play is not so well-known, and not as good.' All of this was delivered in an emphatic Bronx accent, about which his friends often wondered since Wellstood hailed in reality from smart Greenwich, Connecticut.
He was a complex and very witty man. His bands, on the odd occasions when he led them, had wonderful names. A piano- soprano saxophone duet from 1973, for instance, came out as Dick Wellstood and His All-Star Orchestra featuring Kenny Davem (the determined might find a copy of the reissue on Chiaroscuro CR [D] 129). The air of erudition, however, wasn't assumed. Wellstood was erudite. He read Latin for pleasure, and put himself through law school in the Fifties, while continuing to play with musicians such as Roy Eldridge and Coleman Hawkins by night.
On the only occasion he transformed himself into Richard M. Wellstood, attor- ney at law, however, he found the legal life lacking in fun and went back to playing piano. His stock explanation for being a jazz musician was that it was 'easier than working'. Actually, of course, there isn't anything remotely easy about playing piano the way he did. Dick Wellstood was not merely a reviver of historical styles, but, like all major jazz musicians, a unique and irre- placeable individualist. He is much missed.
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