Style and Legacy
Louis Armstrong stated "Manuel and Joe King Oliver played together in the Onward Brass Band, really something to listen to when they played for parades and funerals. They had twelve musicians in their brass band. Eddie Jackson used to really swing the tuba when the band played marches. They sounded like a forty piece brass swing band." Armstrong would follow the brass band in the second line, as he listened to those early musicians whom he idolized in his youth.
In contrast to Buddy Bolden and his more improvisational free approach, Perez was a sight-reader and highly technical musician, some say he refined the play of Bolden and allowed for more of an orchestral (big band) style. Sidney Bechet comments "Manuel Perez was one. He was a musicianer; he was sincere. He stuck to his instrument." In the terminology of early 20th century New Orleans musicians, a "musicianer" was someone with good technical ability on their instrument adept at sight-reading written music.
Manuel Perez was an innovator, with a supreme sound. His legacy might be best understood, in looking at the musicians that praised him, and the styles he influenced. King Oliver went on to become the jazz impresario of Chicago. Sidney Bechet toured the world featuring some of the same sounds Perez himself had played while battling other bands on the neutral ground of Claiborne Avenue, and sitting solitary on the banks of the Mississippi River.
Read more about this topic: Manuel Perez (musician)
Famous quotes containing the words style and, style and/or legacy:
“The difference between style and taste is never easy to define, but style tends to be centered on the social, and taste upon the individual. Style then works along axes of similarity to identify group membership, to relate to the social order; taste works within style to differentiate and construct the individual. Style speaks about social factors such as class, age, and other more flexible, less definable social formations; taste talks of the individual inflection of the social.”
—John Fiske (b. 1939)
“The habit some writers indulge in of perpetual quotation is one it behoves lovers of good literature to protest against, for it is an insidious habit which in the end must cloud the stream of thought, or at least check spontaneity. If it be true that le style c’est l’homme, what is likely to happen if l’homme is for ever eking out his own personality with that of some other individual?”
—Dame Ethel Smyth (1858–1944)
“What is popularly called fame is nothing but an empty name and a legacy from paganism.”
—Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536)