ONLINE EVENT - Tom Roberts & the Hot Club of Pittsburgh: Boogie-woogie Blues! Monroeville Public Library. ONLINE Zoom event

Tom Roberts & the Hot Club of Pittsburgh present the funkiest sounds ever captured in shellac! Tom Roberts will be discussing and playing boogie-woogie with the rarest-of-rare pristine shellac-based 78 rpm records from his collection. Originating with African-American communities in the 1870s, and rising to incredible levels of popularity in the 1920s, boogie-woogie has had a vast influence on both R&B and rock and roll.

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Highlights we will hear include Cripple Clarence Lofton, Kimmy Yancey, Sugar Underwood, Blind Leroy Garnett, Speckled Red (Rufus Perryman), Pigmeat Terry, Bat the Hummingbird, Romeo Nelson, Little Brother Montgomery, Pinetop Smith, Cow Cow Davenport, and the 1936 Decca recording session held in Angola Penitentiary of Jesse James, who had been incarcerated since 1900. In these recordings we hear the prototype of blues piano – sounds that predate anything we’ve heard before.

Tom Roberts has been acclaimed as one of the world’s foremost practitioners of the art of Harlem Stride Piano. He has been featured at Jazz in July at the 92nd St Y, the Professor Longhair Society’s Piano Night at Tipitina’s New Orleans, Carnegie Hall with the New York Pops Orchestra, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, and the International Stride Piano Summit in Zurich, Switzerland.