Anthony Parenti (8-6-1900 to 4-17-72) was born into a musical family and learned as a youngster to play various reed instruments. By the time he was a young man he had secured a job with Johnny De Droit’s Jazz Orchestra, which was the first to play Jazz as we know it for the elite of New Orleans social functions. In 1924 he was leading his own band at La Vida, a restaurant in his native city, and with this unit he made his first records. He recorded sporadically, at least up to the Depression of the early thirties, which found him in New York as one of Irving Mills’ cornermen, sitting in on recording dates with The Dorsey Brothers Orchestra and their associates.
During the early forties he worked with Ted Lewis alongside Muggsy Spanier, and with Preacher Rollo and his Five Saints on M.G.M. Tony Parenti was possessed of a fluent clarinet tone that is more close to legitimate than that of many of his colleagues. In his early records, the delicate lines were often lost in the indifferent recording of the ensemble, but later in his career he can be heard as a brilliant, tasteful soloist whose work is reminiscent of the Creole clarinettists Barney Bigard, Omer Simeon and Albert Nicholas.
Taken from the book Recorded Jazz: A Critical Guide by Rex Harris and Brian Rust.
| Anthony Parenti’s Famous Melody Boys | Tony Parenti’s New Orleanians |
| Parenti’s Liberty Syncopators |
Title | Recording Date | Recording Location | Label |
| Old Man Rhythm (Anthony Parenti) | 6-28-1929 | New York, New York | Columbia |
| Artist | Instrument |
| Vic Briedis | Piano |
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.
