Play a Day: Bars and Measures

Idris Goodwin

For Sunday I read Bars and Measures by Idris Goodwin, and available for download from New Play Exchange.

Goodwin's play touches on the cultural divide of our age, from the vantage point of two brothers, one a convert to Islam, both talented, professional musicians. The plot (did-he-or-didn't-he) is very compelling. But I particularly was drawn to the older/younger sibling dynamics.

My wife doesn't believe in it, but I do. The insecurities of the younger sibling is real. I have also watched this play out with our own two children, the older driven, determined, and potentially judgmental. Like the younger brother in Bars, a talented classical musician in his own right, he is sensitive with the suggestion that his recent interest in jazz, which is his elder brother's purview.

The larger story addresses the misunderstandings which have and will continue to plague our nation, and our world. Americans define themselves by their enemies. When I was young, it was the Communists. the Soviet Union wasn't dead for a year before the initiation of the Persian Gulf War (1990-1991) and our pivot towards the Islamic world.

Interesting, yesterday I read a complete farce about terrorism, today something much more grounded and real. I love theater.

If there is one point of view present in this work with which I am certain I agree, it is that terrorists are made, and not born.

Miles Davis

Sam Firsten opened Cleveland's own Cotton Club in June, 1954 at the corner of East 4th Street and Huron, featuring local son Jimmy Scott as emcee. The joint was established to showcase local jazz ensembles, though within a year Firsten was also booking national acts.

In November 1955 Firsten brought in the Modern Jazz Quartet, featuring Miles Davis and Teddy Wilson, not only to play night gigs but also Sunday matinees for teenagers - soda pop only, thank you. At this stage in his career, Miles Dewey Davis III (May 26, 1926 – September 28, 1991) had only recently kicked heroin, a plague which was currently affecting peers such as Sonny Rollins, Dexter Gordon and Art Blakey.

It has been suggested that touring the Midwest made it easier to stay away from drugs and from the hustling he had been engaged in during the early 50s to pay for his habit. The soda pop did not hurt.

Sources:
Jazzed in Cleveland (Joe Mosbrook)
Wikipedia

Dave Brubeck

"Dave Brubeck's the swingingest."
- Jack Kerouac
David Warren "Dave" Brubeck (born December 6, 1920) is the swingingest. He was almost kicked out of conservatory because he couldn't read music, but his talent was so great they let him graduate with the understanding that he would never teach.

Serving in World War II he was allowed to create an ensemble (one of the first integrated musical combos in the Army) and met saxophonist Paul Desmond, with whom he would create his most legendary work.

He and Desmond formed the Dave Brubeck Quartet in 1951, and they were an huge hit on college campuses -- see not only Jazz at Oberlin (1953) but also Jazz at College of the Pacific (1953) and Jazz Goes to College (1954).

"This is incredible music, jazz or whatever, and you should buy it."
— Down Beat review of Jazz at Oberlin
Brubeck once cancelled a television appearance when he discovered they intended to keep his African-American bassist, "The Senator" Eugene Wright, off-camera.

It is true, there were those serious jazz fans during the 1950s who called Brubeck's work "Europeanised and overly formal." Without soul. You know what I'm saying.

But I wish to announce the opening of new sessions, and new fields, Daddy-o! Hello, Dave!




Source:
Wikipedia
Oberlin.edu
Guardian.co.uk
Poetry For the Beat Generation (Jack Kerouac & Steve Allen)

Gleason's

William "Jap" Gleason (Cleveland's most successful impresario! The man that finds and makes the stars!) opened his jazz joint at 5219 Woodland near East 52nd St. in 1942. Blues were also a heavy favorite of the owner's, and attracted artists like Bo Diddley and B.B. King. Legend has it a young James Brown, in addition to singing, would sweep up to make a few extra bucks.

By the early 50s it was the home of interracial mixing to enjoy rhythm and blues. By 1952 WJW disc jockey Alan Freed was calling the stuff "rock and roll" and he and his entourage could regularly be found at Gleason's having late night supper and listening to the likes of Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Muddy Waters and Big Maybelle Smith.

The advertisement above features The Metronomes, an r&b group (made up of several John Adams High graduates) that won Gleason's Fame And Fortune Contest on March 4, 1954. Their prize was a week-long engagement.

My father told me that when he was in high school he would frequent jazz clubs where the segregation apparent virtually everywhere else in the city was ignored. I need to ask if Gleason's was one of them. One local jazz trumpeter named Earl Douthitt described Gleason's as "a jamming joint, a good spot with no problems, an orderly crowd that came to listen to the music."

Sources:
Encyclopedia of Cleveland History
Jazzed In Cleveland (Joe Mosbrook)
Marv Golderg's R&B Notebooks

Jimmy Scott

James Victor Scott (July 17, 1925 - June 12, 2014) has a preternaturally high contralto voice, a result of Kallman's Syndrome. He first drew attention as a jazz vocalist in 1950 as a member of the Lionel Hampton Band, under the name Little Jimmy Scott. At that time, he was 4-feet-eleven.

Café Tia Juana

One of Scott's bandmates in the Hampton band was Quincy Jones, who once remarked, "Jimmy would tear my heart out every night with his sole-penetrating style.”

Born in Cleveland, one of Scott's first singing gigs was in elementary school, where he sang the lead in a musical version of Ferdinand the Bull. Scott was classmates with Louis Stokes at Central High School. Scott began singing professionally in nightclubs long before he was of legal age.

In 1954, Sam Firsten opened a nightclub in the Central Market area, at the corner of Huron and East 4th Street (now about fifty paces from The Q) named with no lack of imagination, The Cotton Club. Firsten hired Jimmy Scott to emcee and the produce the evening's programs, which included dancers, comedians and jazz. Within a year, the acts being booked included non-Black performers. The place was jumping seven nights a week -- with matinees on Sunday!

Jimmy himself would take in the work of Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Dinah Washington when they would come into town to play the Café Tia Juana, at the corner of 105th and Massie Avenue.

Café Tia Juana is now a fenced-in church parking lot.

Original Café Tia Juana sign
Cuyahoga Community College, Metro Campus
Sighted 11/17/2018

My own introduction to the work of Jimmy Scott was in 1992 with the song Sycamore Trees from the movie Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.

This post was updated on 6/14/2014 with the date of Jimmy Scott's death.

Sources:
Smithsonian Museum of National History
Funding for the Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program NEA Jazz Master interview was provided by the National Endowment for the Arts
Jimmy Scott Official Website
Joe Mosbrook's Jazzed in Cleveland
Wikipedia

Jazz at Oberlin

"Jazz at Oberlin" was an extremely popular record for Brubeck’s quartet and a smashing success in the Oberlin community. The concert and album presented an audience largely uneducated in jazz with some of the genres finest players, all performing at the top of their game. And while a successful jazz concert at Oberlin these days is a regular occurrence, such was not the case in 1953, when the concert halls at Oberlin were filled with Bach, Beethoven, Brahms — and occasionally Bartök — but not with Basie or Baker.

- Oberlin Online

On March 2, 1953 The Dave Brubeck Quartet played Oberlin. And my father was there. The quartet was Dave (never David) Brubeck on piano, Paul Desmond on alto saxophone, Ron Crotty on the bass and Lloyd Davis on drums.

The concert had all the ingredients of a major disaster. Aside from Oberlin’s indifference toward jazz, Brubeck and his outstanding saxophonist, Paul Desmond, had just had an argument, bass player Ron Crotty had just been given his notice, and drummer Lloyd Davis was ill with the flu and had a 103-degree fever.

- Joe Mosbrook, Jazzed in Cleveland

My father was seventeen, in his senior year at Lakewood High School. The night in question was a Monday night, otherwise he is sure he could have gotten someone to go with him. But as it was a school night he could not, so he drove to the Oberlin Conservatory of Music on his own, and experienced was he still calls “one of the greatest musical experiences I ever had.”

Brubeck also later called that night's gig, "the best thing we’ve ever done."

Tracks included on the original LP include These Foolish Things (Reminds Me Of You), Perdido, Stardust, The Way You Look Tonight and How High The Moon.

Back in 1953 any form of on-location recording was by no means a commonplace event. So much of the technology that is taken for granted today had not even been imagined: to record during ‘live’ performance meant setting up a portable machine for one-track (monaural) taping, using relatively insensitive microphones and no monitoring systems, with little or no physical or acoustic control over the surroundings.

- Orrin Keepnews in the liner notes for a 1986 CD release

My father was turned onto jazz by a guy whose name he cannot remember who worked at Lamp’s Melody Lane on Detroit, just around the corner from his home on Mars. This fellow (in his 20s? 30s? Dad’s not sure) “inculcated” my father with jazz -- and lots of other music, too. In fact, when I was speaking with him about it tonight, he was remembering how the piece he heard the Cleveland Orchestra play this weekend, Bartök’s Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, was first played for him by this guy at Melody Lane.

When my father went to college he found the opportunity to go with friends to other jazz clubs, though most were pretty strict about not letting people under 21 in. He found most of them to be integrated -- mostly black clientele -- but from his perspective no one really cared.

My senior year in high school I saw Maynard Ferguson at Rocky River High School. Not the same thing.

Noble Sissle

Noble Sissle (July 10, 1889 – December 17, 1975) was born in Indianapolis, and moved with his family to Cleveland in 1906 when his father became minister of Cory Methodist Church at E. 35th & Scovill. At the age of seventeen he attended Central High where he played baseball and football, and sang with the glee club.

During World War I, Sissle entered the Army and became the drum major of an Army band that caused a sensation in France by playing a form of ragtime music. The 369th Infantry Band, led by Lt. James Reese Europe, began calling itself a "jazz band." Reese’s Army band not only helped popularize the new music among U.S. soldiers, but it was the first exportation of jazz, America’s new art form. Sissle said at the time, "The jazz germ hit France and it spread everywhere" they went. 

- Joe Mosbrook, Jazzed in History

Mosbrook also credits Sissle with discovering Sidney Bechet, and being part of a vaudeville act with Eubie Blake. Sissle composed the classic tune I'm Just Wild About Harry, and three years before The Jazz Singer created a short film with Blake called A Phonofilm that was first shown at the Palace Theatre in December, 1923. He had a history of breaking racial barriers, working clubs that had previously hired only all-white ensembles.

In 1935 Sissle hired a young chorus girl from the Cotton Club to sing with his Franco-Harlem Revue, and she was singing for them when they played in Cleveland for a week in October, 1936. Her name was Lena Horne.