Keyboard player and arranger Tiny Parham (February 25, 1900 – April 4, 1943) was born in Canada, but grew up in Kansas City. He got his start in vaudeville and moved to Chicago in 1925. In Chicago he led several small bands, worked as an arranger and talent scout at Paramount Records, and played organ and piano in theatres.He cut 38 sides for Victor between 1928 to 1930 under the name of Tiny Parham and his Musicians. The sound of these records is somehow reminiscent of Duke Ellington’s records from the same time period. (Listen to the song “Jungle Crawl” and see if you don’t think so yourself). Throughout the 1930s he continued to lead and tour with his own bands and played organ in a Chicago roller-skating rink in 1939 and 1940. He died in a dressing room in Milwaukee during a show in 1943.
| Tiny Parham and his Musicians | Dodds And Parham |
| Tiny Parham and his “Forty” Five | Parham’s Black Patti Band |
| Parham – Pickett Apollo Syncoators | Tiny Parham’s Four Aces |
Redhotjazz.com was a pioneering website during the "Information wants to be Free" era of the 1990s. In that spirit we are recovering the lost data from the now defunct site and sharing it with you.
Most of the music in the archive is in the form of MP3s hosted on Archive.org or the French servers of Jazz-on-line.com where this music is all in the public domain.
Files unavailable from those sources we host ourselves. They were made from original 78 RPM records in the hands of private collectors in the 1990s who contributed to the original redhotjazz.com. They were hosted as .ra files originally and we have converted them into the more modern MP3 format. They are of inferior quality to what is available commercially and are intended for reference purposes only. In some cases a Real Audio (.ra) file from Archive.org will download. Don't be scared! Those files will play in many music programs, but not Windows Media Player.
