Who Remembers Jimmy Durante

Who remembers Jimmy Durante? Well I sure do! I remember my parents enjoyed watching his humor on tv. I thought he was funny myself but what I remember most is how well he could play the piano. The ragtime music was so fun and that's what he loved to do. Well today marks the date of his death. January 29, 1980~

James Francis Durante (February 10, 1893 – January 29, 1980) was an American singer, pianist, comedian, and actor. His distinctive clipped gravelly speech, New York accent, comic language-butchery, jazz-influenced songs, and prominent nose helped make him one of America's most familiar and popular personalities of the 1920s through the 1970s. He often referred to his nose as the Schnozzola(from the German Schnauze [nose]), and the word became his nickname.

Early career

Durante dropped out of school in seventh grade to become a full-time ragtime pianist. He first played with his cousin, whose name was also Jimmy Durante. It was a family act, but he was too professional for his cousin. He continued working the city's piano bar circuit and earned the nickname "Ragtime Jimmy", before he joined one of the first recognizable jazz bands in New York, the Original New Orleans Jazz Band. Durante was the only member not from New Orleans. His routine of breaking into a song to deliver a joke, with band or orchestra chord punctuation after each line, became a Durante trademark. In 1920 the group was renamed Jimmy Durante's Jazz Band.

Jimmy Durante was the first white bandleader to feature black musicians in his live band, such as Achille Baquet, who played and recorded in Durante's Original New Orleans Jazz Band (1918–1920).

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