Fate Marable

A legendary name in early jazz, Destiny Marable led jazz rings on riverboats for many years. He first performed in public areas when he was nine and as soon as 1907, Marable was playing piano and calliope aboard a Mississippi steamship. He created the Kentucky Jazz Music group in 1917 and among his many sidemen through the next twenty years had been Louis Armstrong, Johnny Dodds, Baby Dodds, Pops Foster, Zutty Singleton, Henry “Crimson” Allen, Gene Sedric, Jimmy Blanton and Earl Bostic. In the 1930s, Marable occasionally co-led rings with Charlie Creath and, although located in St. Louis, he continuously recruited among the better New Orleans jazzmen for his organizations. In 1940, a terribly infected finger triggered him to retire for an extended period. Marable was energetic again from the middle-’40s, playing piano in St. Louis-area night clubs before dying from pneumonia. Regrettably, the just recordings of Marable’s music group, Frankie and Johnny and Pianoflage from 1924, are very poor musically and theoretically, therefore the power and beauty of his rings are dropped to history.