1. Albert Clifton Ammons was an American pianist and player of boogie-woogie, a blues style popular from the late 1930s to the mid-1940s.
12 Facts About Albert Ammons
1. 2.
Albert Ammons's parents were pianists, and he had learned to play by the age of ten.
3.
Albert Ammons played percussion in a drum and bugle corps as a teenager and was performing with bands in clubs in Chicago.
4.
Albert Ammons started his own band at the Club DeLisa in 1934 and remained at the club for the next two years.
5.
Albert Ammons moved from Chicago to New York City, where he teamed up with another pianist, Pete Johnson.
6.
On December 23,1938, Ammons appeared at Carnegie Hall with Johnson and Lewis in From Spirituals to Swing, a concert produced by John H Hammond, which helped launch the boogie-woogie craze.
7.
Two weeks later, the record producer Alfred Lion, who had attended the concert, started Blue Note Records, recording nine Albert Ammons solos, including "The Blues" and "Boogie Woogie Stomp", eight by Lewis and two duets in a one-day session in a rented recording studio.
8.
Albert Ammons played himself in the movie Boogie-Woogie Dream, with Lena Horne and Johnson.
9.
Albert Ammons continued to tour as a solo artist, and between 1946 and 1949 recorded his last sides, for Mercury Records, with the bassist Israel Crosby, and took on the position of staff pianist with the Lionel Hampton Orchestra.
10.
Albert Ammons died of natural causes on December 2,1949, in Chicago, at age 42.
11.
Albert Ammons was interred at the Lincoln Cemetery, at Kedzie Avenue in Blue Island, Illinois.
12.
Albert Ammons has had a wide influence on countless pianists, such as Jerry Lee Lewis, Dave Alexander, Dr John, Hadda Brooks, Johnnie Johnson, Ray Bryant, Erroll Garner, Katie Webster and Axel Zwingenberger.