BRUCE JOHNSON
This folder is dedicated to the writings of Professor A J B (Bruce) Johnson, perhaps best-known as the author of the Oxford Companion to Australian jazz (1987). A prolific writer on Australian jazz, his articles on this website already appear in many folders, and in the fulness of time they will hopefully be uploaded to this folder. Click on the INDEX button for a list of articles in this folder.
Red Rodney
ON RED RODNEY
by Bruce Johnson
Jazz Magazine, November/December, 1982
It is unlikely that the jazz world noticed a young boy named Robert Chudnick playing piston bugle in a Jewish War Veterans' band in the late thirties. But when he reappeared in the early forties as Red Rodney, still in his mid-teens, playing with Jerry Wald and Jimmy Dorsey, he began to gain attention as a young prodigy in the style of Harry James. Then he heard the Bird. He was so struck that in 1945 he accepted a chair in Gene Krupa's band for a brief season at the Hollywood Palladium simply because it enabled him to hear Parker every night at Billy Berg's club. He evolved quickly into a bopper of such conviction that his idol invited the 24-year-old trumpeter to join his quintet in 1949. Rodney still regards the three years he spent with Parker as the most important period of his career. Unquestionably it was a profound imprinting process: more than 30 years later, Rodney remains the bop trumpet player par excellence…