Midway through Billie Holiday’s plaintive 1941 recording of “Jim,” there is a short piano solo barely 25 seconds in length—not even a full 32-bar chorus—by Teddy Wilson.  “Jim” is largely forgotten today, but Wilson’s lightly swinging interpretation of the melody is typical of his elegant, rhythmic playing, exemplary for its Swing Era sensibility, and neatly brings Holiday back in to complete her rendition of this underrated but touching tune.

The single moment thought to have officially touched off the arrival of jazz’s Swing Era had occurred some six years earlier at the famous Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles on August 21,1935, a month into what had been a lackluster cross-country tour by the Benny Goodman Orchestra.  The band had been playing “stock” dance-band tunes and many in the audience at an earlier Denver engagement had even demanded refunds.  At the Palomar, Goodman and drummer Gene Krupa, disappointed in the crowd’s lukewarm response on this opening evening of a three-week booking, decided that, if failure was inevitable, they should at least play what they felt.  Two sets into the evening, they abruptly switched from the stock charts they had mistakenly thought the audience wanted to a series of uptempo arrangements of tunes like “Blue Skies,” “King Porter Stomp,” and “Sometimes I’m Happy,” which had been purchased from black bandleader Fletcher Henderson after the breakup of his group the previous winter and which the Goodman band had recorded just before the tour.  Goodman’s orchestra suddenly roared to life, the crowd surged onto the dance floor and toward the bandstand in enthusiasm, and the live radio broadcasts from the Palomar that followed reached audiences nationwide.  The Swing Era was launched.

Yet by then the stylistic essentials of what came to be known as “The Swing Era” were already in place, along with many of its standout performers.  If the Swing Era’s three acknowledged star tenor saxophone soloists were Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, and Ben Webster, and the three best alto men Benny Carter, Johnny Hodges of the Duke Ellington Orchestra, and Willie Smith of Jimmie Lunceford’s band, then the three most accomplished piano soloists of the period, aside from bandleader and showman Earl “Fatha” Hines, were thought to be Fats Waller, Art Tatum, and Teddy Wilson, whose debut in Goodman’s regular trio later in 1936 marked the first time that a black musician had been featured with a major white jazz group.  All were primarily self-taught and only Waller was known for any serious efforts at original composition, spinning off memorable tunes with ease, and his creations “Honeysuckle Rose” and “Ain’t Misbehavin’”—along with a number of others with witty lyrics supplied by Waller and his favorite working partner, Andy Razaf—have been staples of the jazz repertory for decades.  Tatum, nearly blind from early childhood and reportedly with a limitless appetite for Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer, has long been considered the most technically superb pianist in jazz history, with an unparalleled sense of time and rhythm, boundless imagination and ideas, and a gift for highly sophisticated, intricate embellishment.  Waller was a man of near-lunatic energy who wrote not only individual songs but entire revues, recorded, and toured constantly but whose overeating, heavy drinking, and all-night partying eventually killed him at age 39.  Wilson was the more conventional of the three, mellow and businesslike, with long residencies with his own groups at New York’s Café Society in the early 1940’s and interests in left-wing causes that gained him the nickname “The Marxist Mozart.”  Tatum was not known for lasting partnerships with vocalists.  Waller, although after 1922 making a few recordings with blues singers Sara Martin, Alberta Hunter, and Maude Mills, was more a flamboyant and satirical entertainer who slipped wisecracks into the middle of his own vocals.  After 1934 he fronted his own six- and seven-man groups as “Fats Waller and His Rhythm,” with boisterous sidemen like trumpeter Herman Autrey and saxophonist Gene “Honeybear” Sedric.  Wilson, though, had the ideal temperament and flexibility to serve as simpatico partner and accompanist for vocalists, and recorded with Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Lena Horne, Helen Ward, Martha Tilton, Frances Hunt, Kay Penton, Sarah Vaughan, Mildred Bailey, Ella Fitzgerald, and Nan Wynn (dubbed “the molten mama with the lava larynx”) among others.

Wilson was somewhat better-known than Holiday when they first recorded together in early July of 1935, both of them “discovered” and then promoted by producer and talent scout John Hammond, the highly knowledgeable, ubiquitous, and well-intentioned Vanderbilt heir who had first seen Wilson at a late-night jam session at Chicago’s Grand Terrace Ballroom in 1932 and then spotted Holiday at a Harlem club the following winter.  Hammond later secured a contract with Brunswick Records for Wilson to record three-minute jazz renditions of popular songs with vocals and short instrumental solos for the growing jukebox market.  He brought in Goodman, Ben Webster, and trumpeter Roy Eldridge as guest stars on this first session, which produced “Miss Brown To You,” “I Wished on the Moon,” and “What a Little Moonlight Can Do,” all tunes associated with Holiday until the end of her life.

Most of these tunes, and others that Wilson recorded with Helen Ward in 1936 and 1937 and again in 1942—“How Am I To Know,” “You’re My Favorite Memory,” and “You Came to My Rescue”—are particularly good, and with many of the others he backed were in a danceable medium tempo often defined, on the record label itself, as “Fox Trot,” and labelled “Teddy Wilson and His Orchestra.”  These were pickup record-date groups rather than his regular working band, but Wilson was always surrounded by first-rate soloists such as Johnny Hodges and trumpeter Cootie Williams of Duke Ellington’s band, trumpeters Buck Clayton and Harry James, clarinetists Benny Goodman and Buster Bailey, all playing short solos—like Wilson’s in the Billie Holiday recording of “Jim”—to fit within the three-minute structure of early jukebox era records and often incorporating the vocal into the tune in the manner of another sideman.  The Billie Holiday tracks from 1937 that featured the incomparable Lester Young—especially “He Ain’t Got Rhythm,” “Sun Showers,” and “Foolin’ Myself”—are gems.  A handful of vocals made with Ella Fitzgerald in 1936 are almost as delightful, with a more stomping quality to “My Melancholy Baby” and “All My Life.”  A V-Disc duet with Mildred Bailey of “Rockin’ Chair” (her signature tune) and “Sunday, Monday, or Always” made for the armed services in 1943—when there was no commercial recording because of an American Federation of Musicians strike against the major record companies that lasted from August of 1942 until the fall of 1944—is so well done that it’s easy to see why Bailey called Wilson her “favorite accompanist.”

In 1939 Wilson, no doubt intrigued by the popularity of big bands, organized his own, which lasted barely a year despite notable engagements at New York City’s Golden Gate Ballroom in Harlem and the Famous Door, one of the top clubs on 52nd Street, by that time ground zero of the city’s midtown jazz activity.  At the Famous Door in 1940 the band featured petite, stylish singer-actress Thelma Carpenter singing “Harlem on My Mind,” “This is the Moment,” and other features but somehow never swung hard enough to distinguish itself—bassist Al Hall complained that “everybody kept saying we sounded too white,” and some critics called the band “too polite and elegant,” perhaps reflecting Wilson’s own personality.

The smaller working group that Wilson brought into New York’s Café Society later in 1940 always featured such exceptional soloists as trumpeter Emmett Berry and trombonist Benny Morton, often with the fine bassist Johnny Williams (who stayed active until his death at 90 in 1998), and Wilson continued to work backing vocalists on the side.  The tracks made with Lena Horne in 1941, including “A Prisoner of Love” and “Out of Nowhere,” have a somewhat lighter beat and those with Sarah Vaughan in 1946, such as “September Song” and “Time After Time,” are ballads, but Wilson’s piano anchors the arrangements beautifully as always.

Much of Wilson’s work with singers can be found on a three-record collection called “Teddy & His Girls,” part of a Masters of Jazz series from the French bootleg label Média 7.  As accompanist and soloist, he was never splashy or heavy-handed but crisp and impeccable with an easy-chording left hand, light swing, and perfectly placed right-hand arpeggios that always worked.  In the 1950’s, 1960’s, and well into the 1970’s, two of the pianists most sought out by vocalists were Jimmy Rowles and Norman Simmons—in 1972, Carmen McRae called Rowles “the guy every girl singer in her right mind would like to work with”—but Wilson was at the top of every vocalist’s list in the period 1935-1950.  If critics faulted him in his later years for relying too often on his own golden oldies—“Tea For Two,” “Sweet Lorraine,” “Love For Sale”—and for recycling too much Benny Goodman-related material, and if he lacked the virtuoso pizzazz of Erroll Garner, a unique and dynamic soloist who never learned to read music, it didn’t matter.  In a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal, rock icon Keith Richards commented on his own musical illiteracy: “I can’t read a note of music.  It’s all in the ears and in the heart.  That’s all it is.”  Wilson died in 1986 at age 73, a class act with ears and heart to spare until the very end.