4_WashHist_Spr2014_Brower-2.pdf
Bill Brower
Notes from a keen observer and scene maker
INTERVIEW BY WILLARD JENKINS
For the past forty-plus years jazz historian Bill Brower, a native of Toledo, Ohio, has been a true D.C. jazz community renaissance man. He has been a jazz journalist-critic, occasional broadcaster, an event technical producer, and a concert, festivals, and jazz event producer. We interviewed
Bill one afternoon in his Northeast D.C. kitchen, a few short steps from a room packed with records, CDs, and books on jazz and various sundry subjects.
When did you arrive in D.C. and what brought you here?
Bill Brower: I came here in the summer of 1971 after a series of coincidences that involved Tom Porter, then Dean of the Antioch Putney Graduate School of Education based in D.C. I graduated from Antioch [College] in the spring of 1971. A friend of mine from the Antioch days, Archie Hunter, came through that spring and said, “Why don’t we go to Brooklyn and hang out at the African festival?” I was on my way to Brooklyn, Archie’s car broke down, and I decided to go to D.C. and hang out with Tom; I’d known him since I was a sophomore at Antioch.
Tom quipped, “You’re in Dayton, the New York Times comes a day late, and there’s no music. You need to bring your butt to D.C.” Long story short, when my then-wife came back from California I said, “Hey, we’re moving to D.C.”
What was your experience on the jazz scene in D.C. in your earliest days here?
My first real D.C. job was as a community orga- nizer and that actually led to one of my earliest jazz experiences. I was working for the Washing- ton Urban League coordinating a group called Government Employees United Against Racial Discrimination that . . . had various anti-discrimi- nation task forces within federal agencies. One of them was the Black Deputy U.S. Marshal’s organi- zation, and Wallace Roney, Sr. was their represen- tative. We’d have these weekly meetings to discuss basic strategies and mutual interests—some were legalistic, some were direct action.
Wallace took me home one evening and, when he came up to my apartment, saw my living room full of records. He said, “I’ve got a son who’s involved in jazz.” That’s when [trumpeter] Wallace Roney, Jr. was at Duke Ellington School for the
Arts. And because Senior traveled a lot, he needed someone to work with Wallace Jr. Wallace’s early band had Clarence Seay on bass, Marshall Keys on sax, Geri Allen on piano, and Eric Allen was playing drums….Some of them were in col- lege. . . . Chuck Royal (trombone) and Kevin Berthaud (guitar) were in that band. [Wallace] had a lot of young, really good players. That’s why [Wallace Sr.] needed me, because Wallace Jr. was at Duke Ellington; Marshall is a little bit older, he might have been in college. It was some high schoolers and some college-aged folks. They were playing [places] like the Pigfoot, Harold’s Rogue and Jar, GW’s student pub, venues that sold alco- hol—that’s where Wallace was getting gigs. So my job was to be the adult, to collect the money, watch the band. Kind of chaperone-manager.
What was the scene here like overall when you first got to D.C.?
I started collecting records when I was in junior high school and continued in college. When I got to D.C. I actually stayed with Tom Porter and he intro- duced me to a bunch of other collectors like Bob Daughtry, and there was a legendary cat named Thomas Paul, who worked for what became Ols- son’s Books & Records. The first place I remember was a record store up Connecticut Avenue south of the Washington Hilton Hotel and there were two partners, Bob Bialick and John Olsson.
At one point Olsson split off. Thomas Paul was like the jazz guy at Olsson’s. I fell into a group of cats that collected records, like Art Cromwell. Thomas Paul was our connection, we were like record junkies, if I can draw that analogy and not seem too pejorative. This was when Olsson’s was across from what is now a Sun Trust Bank at Dupont Circle, in the Dupont Circle building. Later on it became Olsson’s Books & Records. Richard Goines was also a jazz buyer for Olsson’s. Eventu- ally I went to work for Olsson’s in 1982, at Nine- teenth and L, and I had a helluva jazz section. I was the jazz buyer there and Richard was the jazz buyer at the Georgetown store. I did that maybe three or so years, until just after the first Capital City Jazz Festival in 1985.
Did that record store work open doors for you in the D.C. jazz community?
Before I started working in retail I was already writing [about jazz]. I started writing around 1974, with the Washington Post as a stringer. That didn’t last long so I had to decide whether I was still going
Bill Brower has been active in the local jazz scene since the 1970s and, among other activities, has been involved as writer or producer of many jazz concerts, shows, and festivals. In 2008 he worked with Dr. Billy Taylor to develop a series of programs based on Washington jazz history for the Kennedy Center’s Jazz in D.C., and he has worked with Congressman John Conyers, Jr. since 1985 to produce the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation Annual Legislative Conference
Jazz Issue Forum and Concert. Courtesy, Bill Brower.
to write or not. I had a jazz column for the Afro American that went on for years. I started a column for the Journal newspapers, all jazz-oriented. Then I had a jazz column for the Washington Informer, one of the two African American newspapers in the city at the time. I was also the Washington cor- respondent for Down Beat.
What aspect of jazz were you writing about for these local publications?
It was a combination of things—who’s coming to town, almost like jazz notes. I might write a fea- ture on somebody, it might be record-oriented, I might do a bunch of short record reviews; it was a variety of things, whatever I wanted to do.
Where was the jazz being performed in D.C. at that time?
You had some venues on Rhode Island Avenue, like Mr. Why’s, Moore’s Love and Peace, the Pig- foot, Blues Alley in Georgetown, The Etcetera Club on M Street, the One Step Down, the Top of
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Blues Alley is packed for a performance by saxophonist Byron Morris and Unity in November 2000. The popular club in Georgetown has been showcasing local and national acts since 1965. Photo © Michael Wilderman/jazzvisionsphotos.com.
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the Foolery, Harold’s Rogue and Jar on N Street south of Dupont Circle.
Were these clubs that would feature mainly D.C.-resident musicians?
On the Rhode Island Avenue side, in Northeast where most of the black clubs were, it was local musicians. Wallace played there. Davey Yarbor- ough, tenor saxophonist, now the head of the jazz program at Ellington, and his wife, the singer Esther Williams, were at Moore’s Love and Peace a lot—a lot of local cats played those places. Bill Har- ris’s place, the Pigfoot, would occasionally have a national talent like Betty Carter or someone from his years in the music that he had a relationship with, but also a lot of the local cats. I remember a wonderful afternoon with the great poet Sterling Brown accompanied by blues pianist Sunnyland Slim at the Pigfoot. I think it was a fundraiser for WPFW. Top of the Foolery played mostly resident musicians; Marshall Hawkins and Bernard Sweet- ney played a lot, for example. One time Andrew White, the saxophonist and John Coltrane anthol- ogist, played 6 p.m. to 6 a.m., and Steve Novosel played his bass the whole time. Later Andrew released every note that was played, twelve albums’ worth on his label, Andrew’s Music. The Top of the Foolery was near George Washington
University, on Twenty-third Street on the north side of Pennsylvania Avenue.
What was the occasion for Andrew to play that marathon?
Because that was an Andrew White production [laughs]: “I’m gonna play twelve hours.” That was the gig. He produced all of that, you know like his book [Everybody Loves the Sugar—The Book, White’s 794-page autobiography] is this big [holds hands wide apart].
The Etcetera was on M Street between Con- necticut and Nineteenth Street. They were a short- lived club—maybe a couple of years—they were trying to compete with Blues Alley. I remember Sun Ra playing there. And they would also do gigs at lunchtime. They weren’t focusing on Washing- ton artists; they were bringing national or interna- tional artists.
When I first got here Blues Alley’s orientation was traditional jazz. By the time I started to write, at least by the middle to late seventies, Blues Alley was a six-night-a-week national club, which would be like Dizzy Gillespie, Ramsey Lewis, the Heath Brothers, McCoy Tyner. . . .
The One Step Down was famous for their juke- box, and on Friday and Saturday evenings they would bring in a Barry Harris or sometimes a
As part of a fundraiser for radio station WPWF, Sterling Brown reads poetry at the Pigfoot, Bill Harris’s jazz club just off Rhode Island Avenue, NE. A Washingtonian, Dunbar High School graduate, and Howard University professor for forty years, Brown influenced many “jazz poets,” including Amiri Baraka. Photo © W.A. Brower
working trio or working quartet, but often times they were bringing in soloists to work with local rhythm sections. One Step Down and Blues Alley were ongoing; I don’t remember a time until One Step Down closed when those clubs weren’t active. The Top of the Foolery was active as long as I could remember, then at some point it became a parking lot on Pennsylvania Avenue over by George Washington University, around Twen- ty-third Street.
When you arrived in D.C., who were some of the more important and impactful musicians around town?
Andrew White, Buck Hill, Ruben Brown, the pia- nist, Marshall Hawkins—those guys, those circles. Of course Charlie Byrd was still around and his club, which was on K Street, was just south of Blues Alley. Can’t forget Shirley Horn. Harold Kaufman, a psychiatrist and amateur piano player, owned Harold’s Rogue and Jar. Wallace worked there and I also remember David Murray playing there with Bobo Shaw, just after David married Ntozake Shange. I have tapes from that gig.
Betty Carter does a sound check for a performance at the Fort Dupont Summer Theatre. In the 1970s and 1980s the U.S. Park Service presented the summer-long free concerts, which featured such national and international artists as Dizzy Gillespie, Art Blakey and The Jazz Messengers, Rashaan Roland Kirk, Dexter Gordon, and Roy Ayers. Photo © W.A. Brower
Would you characterize D.C. at that time as having an active jazz scene?
Oh yeah, definitely for the size of D.C. There was jazz a lot of other places; there was an Ed Mur- phy’s Supper Club over there by the Howard Uni- versity Hospital who developed a hotel and he had a club that I remember Sun Ra playing. Then later you had Woodies Hilltop Lounge almost across from Howard University on Georgia Avenue and Euclid Street. He would bring in singles like [Phil- adelphia saxophonist] Bootsie Barnes, different soloists who would pick up a rhythm section here. The great drummer Philly Joe Jones would sit in at Woody’s, after hours, after he made a gig at, say,
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the One Step, playing drums and piano. There are a bunch of places that popped up, but the real con- stant has been Blues Alley. As long as the greats of the bebop and hard bop generations of musicians were still touring—like Max Roach, Diz, Sarah Vaughan, the Heaths and Nancy Wilson—that echelon of artists played Blues Alley. A peg below that in terms of commercial viability would be One Step Down. Then occasionally Harold Kaufman might get in the game, then Etcetera was trying to be Blues Alley, but it didn’t last.
What was it about the D.C. jazz scene that has made documenting its history compelling for you?
I began to feel that over the years Washington’s role in the development of jazz was not sufficiently acknowledged. John Malachi, the wonderful pia- nist, was teaching at Howard University; he wrote “Opus X,” and was the piano player with Billy Eckstine, who as a youth moved to D.C. from Pittsburgh and attended Armstrong High School.
John Malachi appears at an informal program at Wolf Trap in 1981. In his youth Malachi was a pianist with the legendary Billy Eckstine Big Band and later a professor in Howard University’s Jazz Studies Program. Photo © Michael Wilderman/jazzvisionsphotos.com.
Then I understood that [Charlie Parker’s bassist] Tommy Potter was in D.C., Eckstine was here, too. If you looked at the Earl Hines band, then you looked at the Eckstine band, you’d see this D.C. element in those bands. Those cats didn’t just pop out of the air, what was going on here?
As I began to find out more about people who were taken for granted, then I started to connect more dots. And then when I started to do more things with Dr. Billy Taylor, it sharpened my knowledge and interest. Dr. Taylor had great sto- ries about D.C., like checking out Jelly Roll Mor- ton at the Jungle Inn (above where Ben’s Next is), when Malachi was the intermission pianist for Morton. Bringing attention to Washington jazz history was an important part of Dr. Taylor’s mis- sion, particularly as he could see the end of his life. Taylor was a graduate of Dunbar High School. It’s very clear to me that the program that he put together at the Kennedy Center and hired me for—Jazz in D.C.—he wanted to find ways to get people to look at Washington as an important cen- ter for jazz development.
How did your relationship with Dr. Taylor develop?
I first met him because I had an assignment from DownBeat to write about Jazz Alive [the NPR series Dr. Taylor hosted] and through that I met [series producer] Tim Owens, Wiley Rollins, and Dr. Taylor. To do that article I had to research his career and all the things he was involved with. Through the years, as I evolved more from being a journalist into concert production, I would encounter [Billy] at festivals and different projects I’d be working on.
What was the nature of this Jazz in D.C. production?
I curated eight concerts, November 21–29, 2008, for the Millennium Stage that were all them- ed. . . . Some years earlier, 651, an arts-presenting organization based in Brooklyn, New York, orga- nized a project called Lost Jazz Shrines, in which presenters in different cities around the country were to do programs about historic jazz venues. Nathea Lee, then director of the U Street Theatre Foundation, hired me to write the essay for the Lost Jazz Shrines booklet about Washington ven- ues. In the process I also developed a menu of ideas for public programs related to D.C. “jazz shrines.” Initially, the only program that came of that was a concert of Ellington’s sacred music at
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Dr. Billy Taylor interviews trumpeter Terence Blanchard for his radio show, Jazz at the Kennedy Center, one of many educational initiatives by Taylor while he was Artistic Director of Jazz at the Kennedy Center. Brower worked with Taylor on a series of programs for Jazz in D.C. Photo by Jeffrey Kliman, courtesy, Kennedy Center.
the National Cathedral on Ellington’s one hun- dredth birthday. I went back to that menu for ideas when curating Jazz in D.C.
What were the eight concerts you produced for Jazz in D.C.?
They were themed around venues. I did one around the Howard Theatre, one on Abarts and the Hollywood, Bohemian Caverns, stuff around Seventh Street—Little Harlem and the Off- beat. . . . I’d give a brief talk about the venue and show some images that I’d collected and then there would be a performance. We did one devoted to Dr. Taylor’s big band music, the only one that wasn’t themed around a venue. We put together a band led by Charlie Young, the saxophonist and conductor, who pulled a bunch of music charts at the Library of Congress. Charlie went through it and was able to reconstruct charts; we also got Afro Blue involved. That was quite a concert! Bobby Felder (trombonist, arranger, composer and educator) helped me a lot with that series. We did one featuring the music Charlie Byrd did at the Showboat Lounge.
Billy did a big concert around James Reese Europe. There might have been a couple of con- certs at the Eisenhower Theater that were part of it, but we did these eight nights on the Kennedy Cen- ter’s Millenium Stage during Thanksgiving week. That was a real opportunity to get paid to dig into [D.C. jazz history] and do some research and come up with the concepts for those concerts.
Since your earliest days observing the jazz scene here, what are some of the elements you’ve witnessed that have negatively impacted jazz in D.C.?
That’s just business cycles more than anything. I always make a distinction between the culture and the business. Businesses go up and down for a variety of reasons and that’s not in and of itself a way to judge whether jazz is dead or alive. I think the reason that One Step Down came to an end was because the [owner, Joe Cohen, and manager, Ann Mabuchi] got old. They were hav- ing health issues and there were development options coming in there, so people make [busi- ness] decisions.
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So it’s your sense that those kinds of things run in cycles as opposed to that old “jazz is dead” canard?
I get sick of that discussion; I think it’s shortsighted. Dig a little deeper, think a little bit deeper about what may be happening. It might be because a club is in an area that’s going through a change and the club can’t survive that change. I think it has more to do with urban development or rede- velopment than it does “is jazz up or down.” You could be a good businessperson or a bad business- person; you could be getting old or it could be a demographic change or some other kind of change that would cause that business to run a cropper.
Conversely, what have been some of the more positive developments on the D.C. jazz scene that you’ve observed?
The fact that the music has moved to other plat- forms than clubs. I’d say that right now, for a com- munity like ours, we have an embarrassment of riches. We have the Friday night jazz scene at Westminster Church, but you also had the Smith- sonian Natural History with a Friday night jazz scene kind of in the same time period, and other churches trying to replicate that. Just the fact that jazz is not limited to the club platform has been a real important development.
Obviously WPFW is very important. The loss of WDCU had nothing to do with the music, it had to do with the state [the University of the District of Columbia] was in. I think at the point where we had two radio stations providing on-air jazz pro- gramming was really important. I can think of a whole set of individuals who were very knowl- edgeable—lay scholars if you will—aficionados who used radio as a platform to share their knowl- edge, their collections with the community, that was very important.
What the Kennedy Center has done for jazz, what Strathmore has done to a lesser degree, Cla- rice Smith Center at the University of Maryland, George Mason University—all that is relatively new stuff. Library of Congress, Smithsonian—the institutional engagement is providing more plat- forms for the music.
You’re not one who reacts negatively to the whole notion of jazz in the institutions and the evolution of jazz to the concert stage?
Not at all; I think jazz is a big house and it’s import- ant that there is something happening in every
room, so to speak. I would hate for musicians to feel dependent or feel like they have to be funded to do what they do. I think it is a dynamic culture, basically a vernacular culture that has moved into more academic realms. I think that’s why jazz is healthy, vibrant, and dynamic; that’s what I love about it. I like joints and I like concerts and I think they all have a place, they all fit and that’s what’s good about the situation now. I wish that the musicians at the club level could be compensated better, but then that sort of self-selects. Cats will play the clubs for their own agendas until they say, “I can’t do that anymore.”
Talk about your work on the Capital City Jazz Festival.
The seeds of that lie with A. B. and Karen Spell- man, as well as with WPFW. The center of [Capital City Jazz Festival] was Karen Spellman. I had known Karen through SNCC [Student Non- violent Coordinating Committee] connections. I got to know A. B. Spellman through [poet] Gaston Neal. She did a concert as a fundraiser for WPFW. And how I got involved was, the Roneys [Wallace Jr. and saxman Antoine] were on the concert. It was the McLeans—Jackie and Rene—the Marsalis brothers, and the Roneys.
I did my first Antioch College co-op here in 1966. Through coincidence I got off the bus one day on Fourteenth Street and I saw this guy in a storefront fixing it up, so I went in there, and it was Gaston Neal and that’s how I met him. He was getting ready to open up the New School for Afro- American Thought. He was part of the black poetry movement with Larry Neal, Marvin X, Amiri Baraka. . . . At that point what Baraka was to New- ark, Gaston was to D.C. Gaston got sidetracked because of some personal things and never got his work out there in publication . . . but at that time he was definitely a cultural visionary and a lot of music was coming through that New School for Afro-American Thought. And that first weekend when it opened, A. B. Spellman was a part of it and that’s how I came to know him. Gaston was later a founder of the Listening Group, an organi- zation of black men who started to gather in the early 1980s to meet, eat, and discuss jazz once a month. It still exists.
Then later A. B. and Karen were in Atlanta and they got married and he came to Washington with the NEA. A. B. had attended Howard with Baraka and had authored the now-classic Four Lives in the Bebop Business. A. B. used to shop at
Bill Brower, Karen Spellman, Forrest Whitaker, and Congressman John Conyers, Jr. attend the Washington premier of Bird during the 1988 Capital City Jazz Festival. Whitaker portrayed saxophonist Charlie Parker in Clint Eastwood’s biographical movie about the great modern jazz innovator. Photo © Michael Wilderman/jazzvisionsphotos.com.
Olsson’s. He would come in once a month and say, “Bill, what should I buy?” One time he came in and said, “We’re thinking about doing a festi- val, we believe that it’s important that Washing- ton have a festival.”
The Kool Jazz Festival had come to the Ken- nedy Center in ’77 or ’78, and they actually used the whole Kennedy Center. I was like an intern, it wasn’t a paid position, and I worked on that. Part of what A. B. was referring to was “this city is still ripe for a festival, there’s a new Washington Con- vention Center with a subway stop right there, I can’t do it I’m at the NEA, Karen is going to take the lead, and I want you to get with her to do this festival.” Because of the relationship Karen had with WPFW around that concert she produced for them as a fundraiser, they were in the mix, so Bob Tyner, who was then the program director, was involved. Jeff Anthony was at the NEA working in the Music Program specifically around jazz but he resigned at some point after we’d done [Capital City Jazz Festival] a couple of years and he became an important part of that.
The Cap City team, led by Karen, later went on from the Capital City Jazz Festival to do a lot of things in D.C. That same core of people did the
Black Family Reunion, organized by the National Council of Negro Women led by Dorothy Height, and also started the Adams Morgan Day Festival, on the production side. One of the board members of the Capital City Jazz Festival was Ralph Rinzler, who was like an external affairs guy for the Smith- sonian. Ralph was a mandolin player and the orig- inator of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. That’s how we wound up doing events at the Smithso- nian as part of the Capital City Jazz Festival. Those events were inspired by House Concurrent Reso- lution 57. The first festival we did, we honored Bill Harris, Roy Haynes, and Benny Carter, and we presented Marlon Jordan and the American Jazz Orchestra under Loren Schoenberg’s direction and they played a work of Benny’s in the National Museum of American Music Great Hall.
The first two Cap City Jazz Festivals were at the old D.C. Convention Center. We actually did a full festival three years—two at the Convention Center, with a sidecar at Duke Ellington High School the second year. And then the third year, 1988, we did a weekend at Howard University, and we did a week of stuff at the Old Post Office Pavilion—that was lunchtime stuff—and then the next weekend we did at George Washington
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Max Roach and M’Boom take the stage during the first Capital City Jazz Festival in 1985. M’Boom was an all-percussion ensemble in which all members could play any of the tempered and untempered instruments featured in concerts. Photo © Michael Wilderman/jazzvisionsphotos.com.
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University. That was a festival where we basically got in so much debt that we never mounted another full festival of that type. But we did do another event at the Smithsonian in 1989. That was the only thing that we did in ’89. Roger Ken- nedy made that second Smithsonian event hap- pen. We honored Ella Fitzgerald and Milt Hinton. Keter Betts, also a Cap City board member, was most important in that because he was the con- nection to Ella and The Judge (Milt Hinton).
The first festival (1985) that we did we opened up with Miles Davis and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band at the Convention Center. It was around Miles’s birthday and we gave him a big cake; he played so long that people got tired. We wheeled out the cake and Miles cut it and gave it out to the audience. We did a lot of great shows. We did M’Boom and the World Saxophone Quartet, Little Jimmy Scott with Milt Jackson, Betty Carter, Tito Puente and Paquito D’Rivera and we had a Latin jam session with local Latin cats. . . . We had Abdullah Ibrahim and Hugh Masekela. We had Miles’s paintings, we did a Chuck Stewart photog- raphy exhibit, we had panel discussions. . . . Par- ticularly when we first started we didn’t have a lot for artist fees, so I added a lot of stuff like the jazz marketplace, panel discussions, films.
In 1988, we did “Love Supreme,” a tribute to John Coltrane with Gary Thomas, Joe Ford, Hamiet Bluiett, Andrew White, Dave Liebman, a slew of saxophone players. . . . We did “Homecookin’ Revisited,” with the Kenny Burrell Jazz Guitar Band and the Hank Crawford/Jimmy McGriff Quartet. For “Homecookin’,” we passed out copies of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” to the audience but nobody sang it; McGriff always ended his concerts with that song. I was giving away copies of “Lift Every Voice” for years after that. During the week we did D.C. resident artists at lunchtime at the Old Post Office Pavilion. The last weekend of the festi- val we did “The Composer’s Art: Contemporary Voices” with Geri Allen, Henry Threadgill, and Henry Butler. . . . The crazy thing is that before we even did the first Friday night concert at Crampton Auditorium, we were at the bank getting a loan to be able to pay the musicians.
That Sunday we all met at Karen’s house because we knew we had to re-fashion the festival in order for it to get done. That was probably one of the most emotional times I’ve had because that year, 1988, Karen was working on the Democratic National Convention and I was really running everything. I did production, a lot of the program- ming, publicity stuff, but Karen was the interface
with the money and she was better able to negoti- ate a lot of things.
Keter Betts, the great bassist who had moved to D.C., really helped us the year we honored Ella Fitzgerald and Milt Hinton. He had played with her for many years. We had to make a lot of diffi- cult choices. . . . Given the amount of resources that we had, what we were trying to do was prob- ably too ambitious and probably should have been more conservative in our programming. I don’t regret one moment, though.
We did three full festivals and another year we only did the Smithsonian piece; I think that was the year we did the piece with Milt Hinton and Ella. Because we had debt that we had to pay off we would do sessions like Monday nights at Takoma Station and Trumpets for a while. And we did concerts at people’s houses; if they had a grand piano we’d say, “OK, we’ll get Henry Butler.” We’d have him come and play and we’d charge $75 per person, with champagne and cake for an intimate evening.
As a legal entity we went on for a few years after we stopped putting on big things, mostly as a way to try to pay down the debt. People had put up their properties to secure the bank loan. There are people, including me, that were emotionally crushed by the fact that what we were unable to pay for what we proposed to put on the stage. But there were people who said, “We’ll support you.” Reflecting on that still makes me cry.
How did that festival work evolve into your concert and festivals production work?
I started working as a stagehand well before this. I used to write for the Unicorn Times late seventies to early eighties, which was like the City Paper except it came out once a month. Richard Harrington, later the Washington Post “pop” music maven, was the editor. He called me one day and said, “I want you to go down to the corner of Seventh and E; there are two guys there who are doing some interesting stuff.” I was writing mostly about the avant-garde for the Unicorn Times. When I was writing for the Journal or the Afro American, I wrote more about mainstream and more about local activities and record reviews. I got access to any club I wanted and I was inundated with music. I wrote for JazzTimes, I wrote for Musician, a bunch of different publications.
Anyway, he sent me down to this place, which had been like a lunchtime spot. There were two
people there, Bill Warrell, who would later estab- lish the arts-presenting non-profit District Curators, and a guy named Earl Bateman. Bill Warrell wanted to start a loft, which was what D.C. Space essen- tially was. Bateman wanted to do a festival in ’78.
Bateman wanted to do two nights of “avant garde” music, both “classical” and jazz: Cecil Tay- lor, Anthony Braxton, World Saxophone Quartet, Sam Rivers, Marion Brown, John Cage, Phillip Glass, Steve Reich—kind of like a mix-and-match thing. I never wrote the article for the Unicorn Times because Bateman hired me to be the publi- cist for these two nights of music. He said he’d pay me $ 1,000 and 10 percent of all the recording and video taping that would result. So I signed on for that. I got one check for $100, which bounced. The concert was at Constitution Hall and collapsed the first night.
Marion Brown opened, after which Bateman came out and said, “We have technical difficul- ties.” The technical difficulty was there wasn’t enough money in the box office to pay the next artist, so that delay went on for forty-five minutes or so. Then Bateman came out and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, the concert is over.” And it was a cold, icy rainy night, a chill-to-the-bone night. They put everybody out of Constitution Hall.
D.C. Space wasn’t quite ready as a performance space, but that night Bill opened it anyway. Out of that came his relationship with Julius Hemphill, Oliver Lake, and David Murray. They said, “We’re in D.C., we might as well play somewhere,” so that night is actually when D.C. Space opened. But I never made it over there.
There was a club nearby where I could catch a bus to get home, so I stopped in there to drown my sorrows. I’m sitting there and next to me is the stagehands’ union shop steward of Constitution Hall, a guy named Jerry King. First he recognized me as one of the people who did that concert the stagehands weren’t going to get paid for. I thought I was going to get $1,000 at the end of the concert and I’m sitting there trying to add this all up. We ended up spending that evening there.
Some time later a guy in my apartment build- ing, who was a stagehand at the Warner Theater, asked me if I wanted to make some money. He said come down to the Warner Theater at 10:00, they needed some extra guys for the load out. At the end of the night I got paid in cash! When the guy paid me, he looked at me and said, “Don’t I know you?” It was the same guy Jerry from that night at the Kung Fu Lounge! He said, “You wanna
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Muhal Richard Abrams familiarizes himself with the piano at D.C. Space in preparation for a solo performance. The alternative venue’s second-floor performance space was the size of a living room and modest, but well suited for its frequent solo concerts. Abrams is an NEA Jazz Master and recipient of the prestigious “genius grant” from
the MacArthur Foundation. Photo © W.A. Brower
work tomorrow? Be here at 8:00 a.m. and bring a crescent wrench.” I had always been around the- ater, but never as a stagehand. I was still writing and the two fit together great. At one point I was working at Olsson’s twenty hours a week, working as a stagehand, and freelance writing.
When I got to the Capital City Jazz Festival I already had production chops. We had been doing circuses, ballets, plays. . . . Bill Washington’s DimensionsUnlimitedandCellarDoorProduc- tions were presenting all of the major concerts in the area. Dimensions Unlimited produced all the black shows. So that’s what we did at Constitution Hall: the Whispers, Gladys Knight & the Pips, whomever. . . . Sometimes two shows a night.
Later, during the Cap City Jazz days, Quint Davis and Tom Dent, from the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and Foundation respec- tively, came to D.C. to do a workshop for people
who wanted to produce festivals. Karen Spellman wanted to get involved with them as a way to better understand the festival we had. I also approached them about working at JazzFest and nothing was available. A year later I heard from John Washington, [a friend of a friend who] was on the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Founda- tion board. He knew I wanted to work at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and that’s how I got to New Orleans. That led to twenty-three years. I learned a lot about production and New Orleans culture.
Throughout all this work in D.C. on jazz, how has the D.C. jazz audience evolved through the ensuing years?
I think the audience I first knew got older and a new one developed. Obviously a big boon has been the re-development of U Street, which went down with the King riots. It didn’t really come back until the subway was finished. When that happened a whole new U Street nightlife devel- oped and with that nightlife came a whole new generation. The resurgence of U Street meant a new audience, a young audience. There was an audience that was a part of what Blues Alley was about and Harold’s Rogue and Jar, Top of the Foolery. . . . That audience I encountered at those places was probably a little bit older than me. Now it’s forty-some years later and most people in their eighties aren’t going out to clubs; you might see them at Westminster, but they’re not going out to clubs. So with the revival of U Street as a nightlife venue, not only did the Bohemian Caverns come back, you had Twins Jazz there, but also you had other places that feature some type of jazz at some point or another, that’s when I saw a new audience.
The continuity that was broken up was the result of all of these socio-economic things that have happened, and then with the demographic infusion—the city has changed. One of the reasons I was so excited to come to D.C. was because I was fromToledo,wenttoWesternReserveAcademyin Hudson, Ohio, then went to college in Yellow Springs, Ohio, then I came to D.C., and I was lov- ing all the black culture. But then Chocolate City has changed. After the [post-MLK assassination] riots a lot of people left D.C. because they could leave and a lot of people stayed because they couldn’t leave, and a lot of areas that were central to the black community at that time were on the decline: H Street, U Street, and everything related
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to that; so those areas came back with this whole gentrification process and with that has come new audiences.
One such development in recent years has been a kind of do-it-yourself attitude as far as presenting jazz, as exemplified by Capital Bop and what writer Gio Russonello and musician Luke Stewart are doing, something of a loft scene.
The new loft scene.
Do you see any correlation between what Bill Warrell did with D.C. Space and what’s happening now with this new loft scene?
There were some other places also; there was another kind of jazz scene, almost like a Black Nationalist scene. Jimmy Gray—aka Black Fire— another important figure people overlook or for- get about, was one of those programmers who came on WPFW. Another was Eric Garrison. They were scholars in their own right, they really knew the music. Jimmy Gray had been in the record dis- tribution business, and got out to start his own label. . . . There were some other kind of loft sce- narios that featured musicians that Jimmy was working with, not so much the well-known New York cats D.C. Space presented, but musicians who were trying to and could play in that way.
I haven’t patronized Capital Bop’s events, but my attitude is, this new loft development is in a way repeating the past—cats playing for small money in environments that are less than what I think the music deserves, and I feel sort of like “been there, done that.” But it is a new generation doing their thing. More power to them.
The one thing I think continues that District Curator tradition more directly is what Transpar- ent Productions does. I think that [Transparent producer] Bobby Hill was kind of a part of what we were doing, “back in the day.” God bless Bobby Hill and his team.
One of the things I did when we had Capital City Jazz Festival, I invited Tom Porter, Bobby Hill, and a bunch of other people to do a sort of pro- gramming focus group. Once we started Cap City Jazz everybody felt like “I could do that,” because everybody has ideas about programming. And that’s when I realized that, yeah, I had great ideas about programming but what you really needed was a business sense, which I didn’t have. We made choices out of what our vision was, not how
to stabilize and grow a festival. By the time I went to work in New Orleans on the festival, that’s when I realized what I needed to learn.
I would say that Transparent Productions rep- resents more of a continuum with what District Curators was about. District Curators evolved out of D.C. Space. Bill Warrell produced a series at the Corcoran. He presented Cecil Taylor, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and Julius Hemphill’s Ralph Ellison’s Long Tongue—three nights at the Corcoran. That was the genesis of District Curators. The Corcoran series led to what we did with “Long Tongues.” Warrell went on to produce all kinds of music via District Curators.
Transparent Productions, because of the indi- vidual people involved—Bobby Hill, Thomas Stan- ley, Larry Appelbaum—all those individuals had the experience of D.C. Space, felt the void when it went off the scene, and created a vehicle to con- tinue in that spirit. What Luke and Gio are doing I don’t think has anything to do with D.C. Space. They’re a new young generation creating their own space; they may reverse engineer and look back and see themselves as inheriting some kind of a mantle, but to me Transparent Productions is what D.C. Space spawned, there’s a more direct relationship between what they’re doing and what D.C. Space was. I’m not going to say what Gio and Luke are doing is not important. It is important. They’re creating another beachhead, creating opportunities for people to play. . . . I think their [Capital Bop] website is amazing—what they’ve put together and how they relate that to what they do. I think their initiative is great.
How do you see these developments, like Transparent Productions, what Capital Bop is doing, impacting D.C.’s cultural scene in general?
The beat goes on, I’m just glad they’re doing it. The fact that oncoming cats are doing what they’re doing, you have to have faith in that.
How does your work on the annual Congressional Black Caucus Foundation jazz day impact the D.C. jazz community?
It’s become an event that people like to go to, peo- ple that don’t otherwise necessarily attend the CBCF Annual Legislative Conference come to that event. When that started it was just a panel discus- sion and a reception.
Detroit, Michigan’s Congressman John Con- yers, Dean of the Congressional Black Caucus and Congressman John Conyers, Jr., left, honorary host of the CBCF Annual Legislative Conference Jazz Issue Forum and Concert, and Cedric Hendricks, executive producer, share a moment during the 2013 concert. Both men have been vital to continued legisla- tive support of jazz as a “national treasure.” Photo © Imagine Photography, courtesy, Congressional Black Conference.
known as the “Jazz Congressman,” sent out a let- ter [saying] that he wanted to do some jazz stuff, and Cedric Hendricks was on his staff. And because I could write, I could program and I could organize production, I became a very useful piece of that puzzle. I started out working with that event as a volunteer in 1985 [and in 1992 became a producer of the conference.] . . . That’s not a gig I was look- ing for, but I owe that opportunity to John Conyers.
After ’92, because I was one of the producers I was able to push the jazz piece even further. By this time I’d been working in New Orleans, at Jazz at Lincoln Center . . . my range of contacts had grown exponentially. I had much more expe- rience in terms of production, and not just pro- duction nuts and bolts, but I had that concept of what it is to be a producer. So I was able to push it to another level.
When we first started doing the jazz event the record companies would underwrite the perfor- mance if we picked up the travel. Once the record industry died it became a different game in terms of sponsorship and how to keep that afloat. For the Foundation it’s all about every event earning more in sponsorship than it costs because the ALC
is a fundraiser for the overall work of the CBCF throughout the year.
It is very important that the Foundation has remained committed to the Jazz Issue Forum and Concert despite the changes in the sponsorship sit- uation. So it’s a free event during the ALC that has a high level of talent that the community can par- ticipate in. As the years have gone on just about the only high profile thing left for the community to be involved in with no charge is the jazz event. . . . Now it’s an asset to the whole CBCF enterprise.
House Concurrent Resolution 57, declaring jazz “an American national treasure,” resulted from the first CBCF jazz evening panel discussion in 1985. At the end of that session Jimmy Owens challenged Conyers to do something legislatively for jazz. He took on the challenge. While we were working on the resolution, I was still working as a stagehand. I was on the show call at the Kennedy Center for a Kabuki Theater run, and a Japanese stagehand pointed to an artist and said, “You see that guy there? In Japan, he’s a living national treasure.” Bingo, that’s where that language came from! That next day I took what that guy said to me and finished drafting H.Con.Res. 57.
What’s your overall goal for the CBCF jazz day?
Just that it’s important that an organization of that significance in the national African American community and the nation at large has seen fit to put a showcase around the music. It doesn’t hap- pen with the Urban League, it doesn’t happen with the NAACP, nor with the black fraternities and sororities—it does happen at the Congressio- nal Black Caucus Foundation Annual Legislative Conference. And the reason it happens is because John Conyers had that vision to add that piece as an issue discussion and it has evolved. Because of his stature he was able to create that space.
If there’s a study or something done in the jazz community, I’ve tried to have a presentation about it to open up the issue forum, because I know that much of that information is not broadly dissemi- nated, even within those circles in the black com- munity that claim they’re interested in the music. So we say, “Let’s do it there, let’s bring together a panel of experts, let’s elevate a discussion.” It became more of a day; we went from an issue forum coupled with a concert to a two-hour block of prime time for the issue forum that is something of a town hall meeting on jazz. In the evening we have the concert and keep a humanities element in it by having a meet-the-artist discussion so that people who don’t get into the issues forum still get to have some introduction to what people think about this music. We also present the CBCF Jazz Legacy Awards. This year we honored Dr. Larry Ridley and Bobby Watson. I’m all about preserving our stake, the African American stake, in this music. That’s my agenda. This music came out of our experience, in our community, in the Ameri- can context. Cedric and I are all about using that platform to keep that alive, that’s what WE can do.
I’m disappointed that JazzTimes, DownBeat, and the rest of them don’t pay any attention to this event, but I think they’re gonna pay attention around HR2823 [Conyer’s new jazz support legis- lation]. The reason this bill was drafted is because John Hasse, curator of American music at National Museum of American History, met with Conyers to discuss the state of the Smithsonian’s jazz efforts. Cedric called me with the idea that maybe it was time for some new legislation. I said if we’re going
to do a new bill it can’t just be about getting the Smithsonian more money.
Conyers is planning to introduce this new jazz legislation just prior to Jazz Appreciation Month (April), in conjunction with an event that the Smithsonian is organizing called Two Johns, hon- oring Congressman Conyers and John Coltrane, Conyers’s favorite musician next to Charlie Parker, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of Coltrane’s “ A Love Supreme.” That will give us a piece of legis- lation with some teeth; it will direct agencies of government to spend money for preservation, edu- cation and the promulgation of jazz.
Willard Jenkins is a journalist, broadcaster, concerts and festivals producer, and jazz programmer at WPFW and co-author of African Rhythms, the autobiography of NEA Jazz Master Randy Weston.
