Willie Gant
American musician
Willie "The Tiger" Gant (May 10, 1899 – March 1974) was an American jazz bandleader and pianist.
History
Gant began on piano at age 12, and at 13 he began studying under James P. Johnson. He played in local New York clubs and cafes from age 17. Gant recorded some sides in the 1920s, and after the dissolution of his band the Ramblers, devoted himself almost exclusively to solo piano work. He played in New York at places such as the Hotel Fairfax and Carutti's from the 1930s into the 1960s. In 1968, Dick Wellstood identified Willie Gant as one of the regular pianists who performed at the Tom Tilghman's Hollywood Bar and Grill in Harlem, alongside Marlowe Morris, Billy Taylor, Art Tatum, and Stephen "The Beetle" Henderson.
Musical groups
Although he appears in a photograph with Lillyn Brown & Her Jazzbo Syncopators in 1921, he was not a band member and filled in for an absent piano player for the photo. He formed his own band, the Ramblers, that same year. Over the course of the next six years, Gant's band rivaled Fats Waller in popularity; it also served as early experience for many noted sideman, including Freddie Green, Ward Pinkett, Happy Caldwell, and Manzie Johnson.
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The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as american musician. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q8021519. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1899, 1974, 1968 and 1921.
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This entry incorporates text from “Willie Gant” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.