George Lewis (clarinetist)
| George Lewis | |
|---|---|
Photograph by Stanley Kubrick, published in "Look" magazine, June 6, 1950
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| Background information | |
| Birth name | Joseph Louis Francois Zenon |
| Born |
July 13, 1900 New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S. |
| Died | December 31, 1968 (aged 68) |
| Genres | Traditional jazz |
| Occupation(s) | Musician |
| Instruments | Clarinet |
| Years active | 1917–68 |
| Labels | American Music, Decca, Victor, GHB |
George Lewis (born Joseph Louis Francois Zenon, July 13, 1900 – December 31, 1968) was an American jazz clarinetist who achieved his greatest fame and influence in the later decades of his life.
Lewis was born in the French Quarter of New Orleans, Louisiana. Through his mother, Alice Zeno, his maternal great-great-grandmother was a Senegalese slave who was brought to Louisiana around 1803. Zeno's family retained some knowledge of Senegalese language and customs until Alice's generation.
Lewis was playing clarinet professionally by 1917, at the age of 17, working with Buddy Petit and Chris Kelly regularly as well as with the trombonist Kid Ory and other leaders. At this time, he seldom traveled far from the greater New Orleans area. During the Great Depression he took a job as a stevedore, continuing to take as many music jobs after hours as he could find, a schedule that often meant he got very little sleep.
In 1942, when a group of New Orleans jazz enthusiasts, including jazz historian Bill Russell, went to New Orleans to record the older trumpeter Bunk Johnson, Johnson chose Lewis as his clarinetist. Previously almost unknown outside of New Orleans, Lewis soon was asked to make his first recordings as a leader on American Music Records, a label created by Russell to document the music of older New Orleans jazz musicians and bands.
Although purists such as folklorist and musicologist Alan Lomax and others, touted Lewis as an exemplar of what jazz had been before it became overly commercialized by the popular swing bands of the late 1930s and early 1940s; in the words of Gary Giddins—Lewis was no "dinosaur". When Lomax brought Lewis on a Rudi Blesh radio show in 1942, he played the solo from clarinetist Woody Herman's then-recent hit, "Woodchopper's Ball", but his hosts had no idea that Lewis was applying his distinctive style to one of the latest hot tunes.
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