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:
“A man is free to go up as high as he can reach up to; but I, with all my style and pep, can’t get a man my equal because a girl is always judged by her mother.”
—Anzia Yezierska (c. 1881–1970)
“The authoritarian child-rearing style so often found in working-class families stems in part from the fact that parents see around them so many young people whose lives are touched by the pain and delinquency that so often accompanies a life of poverty. Therefore, these parents live in fear for their children’s future—fear that they’ll lose control, that the children will wind up on the streets or, worse yet, in jail.”
—Lillian Breslow Rubin (20th century)
“What is popularly called fame is nothing but an empty name and a legacy from paganism.”
—Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536)