boogie-woogie piano

An African American piano style originating in the 1920s characterised by a driving, repetitive bass pattern in the left hand (typically broken octaves or a rolling eighth-note figure) over which the right hand plays blues-inflected melodies and syncopated riffs. Adams explicitly cites boogie-woogie as an influence on American Berserk, which he describes as recalling 'the fractured boogie-woogie style of Conlon Nancarrow' — a composer famous for player-piano studies of superhuman speed and complexity that push boogie-woogie to its mechanistic extreme.

In American Berserk, the boogie-woogie bass is not a relaxed groove — it is manic and relentless. The left hand drives the piece; the right hand reacts. The energy level should feel unsustainable — which is exactly the composer's intention ('short, manic, bipolar scherzo').