Invisible Man
The pianist James P. Johnson was born in 1894. He played his first gig when he was 8 years old at a bordello in his Jersey City neighborhood. The patroness sat him down at the keyboard and told him to keep his eyes to himself. She paid him 25 cents.
So begins the tale the jazz faithful tell about the birth of jazz piano playing: That it began with Johnson’s reinterpretation of the rollicking two-handed style of his elders, which became known as Harlem stride, the earliest form of jazz piano.
You don’t hear Johnson’s music much anymore, but there is a group of stride pianists in New York who gather regularly to play in the style of that era. One of them is Spike Wilner, who is also one of the owners of Small’s, the basement jazz club on West 10th Street in Greenwich Village. He is an intense guy with dark curly hair who traces his ancestry back to a prominent 19th-century European rabbinical dynasty.