Discovering brooklyn New Yorks Jazz History part 1

More and more of the clubs that use to define Brooklyn, New York from the swing era till the 1960's are slowly becoming empty vacant buildings whispering a whine to tell their past. Well, always willing to oblige the obsolete ghosts of yesterdays for the next few weeks we will explore a number of closed bars here in Brooklyn, NY and hopefully uncover their contribution to jazz history...here is a interesing article from the American Music review to get us started:


American Music Review

Formerly the Institute for Studies in American Music Newsletter

H. Wiley Hitchcock for Studies in American Music
Conservatory of Music, Brooklyn College of the City University of New York


Volume XXXVI I I



No. 2 Spring 2009




Charles Ives and His Tunes, review by Tom C. Owens
Across the East River: Searching for Brooklyn’s Jazz History

by

Jeffrey Taylor










The Night of the Cookers (Blue Note Records, 1965)







On 9 and 10 April 1965, a series of musical performances took place at Brooklyn’s Club La Marchal, located at Nostrand Avenue and President Street. The event was sponsored by “Jest Us,” an enterprising group of women who happened to be the wives of trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, pianists and composers Cedar Walton, Bobby Timmons, and several other of the era’s best-know jazz performers. Hubbard, who had replaced Lee Morgan in Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers three years earlier, was the headliner (his name is highlighted on the original album cover) but he is joined by a unique gathering of jazz individuals, most from his own band at the time: reed and wind player James Spaulding, pianist Harold Mabern, bass player Larry Ridley, Pete La Roca on drums, Big Black (Daniel Ray) on congas, and, perhaps most importantly, Morgan himself. The performances were recorded by Blue Note and issued as The Night of the Cookers.


The Night of the Cookers is a remarkable aural document. Each tune lasts twenty minutes or more, which forced Blue Note to issue the recording in two volumes (it is now available on a 2-CD reissue, Blue Note/EMI 7243 5 94323 2 8), and it shows, better than most live recordings, the potent relationship between audience and performer. As the original liner notes by Alfred Davis observes: “Throughout this album you will become more and more aware of the total freedom, almost to the point where the artists and audience become one in their appreciation of each other.” But most jazz fans relish the two cuts that feature both Morgan and Hubbard in cordial exchanges. In the opening track, Clare Fischer’s Latin-tinged “Pensativa,” (an Art Blakey standard) a muted solo by Morgan gives way to an open-horn improvisation by Hubbard; after a solo by Mabern, Morgan removes his mute and engages in a lengthy conversation with Hubbard, the two throwing ideas back and forth (“Camptown Races” makes several appearances, for some reason). The performance gives listeners a rare opportunity to hear these two great artists, born the same year, play side by side, with Hubbard’s famous warm tone making a perfect foil for Morgan’s slightly edgy, bluesier sound. Though the tune builds in intensity until brought to a close by James Spaulding’s return on flute, there is less a sense of competition here than of friendly exchange and the occasional humorous tweak. And throughout the audience is a partner in the proceedings, yelling out encouragement and laughing at the witty jibes.

Night of the Cookers is undoubtedly the most famous jazz album recorded in Brooklyn, but few know about the musical setting in which the events of that evening took place. Hubbard, whom we sadly lost last December, had immortalized that scene—especially in the mostly African-American neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant—three years earlier with “Nostrand and Fulton,” a catchy tune deftly combining hard bop motives and a lilting waltz. The trumpeter, who lived in the borough during the 1960s, was only one of dozens of jazz artists who were fixtures in Brooklyn jazz during what some call the “glory days” of jazz in the borough, from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s. But scan the “Nightclubs and Other Venues” section of The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, and one finds only three references to Brooklyn among the dozens of Manhattan clubs listed (and all three are out of business). There is not even an entry for the Blue Coronet, a long-running club on Fulton Street that hosted John Coltrane in the 1950s while he was playing at Manhattan’s Five Spot with Thelonious Monk, and Miles Davis in the late 1960s just as he was embarking on his controversial “Bitches Brew” period (a bootleg recording of the latter’s performance there has circulated for years). Nor is there mention of Putnam Central, a men’s social club that featured Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, J.J. Johnson, and many others. Then again, much of what made Brooklyn’s jazz community special were not the performance venues, but the musicians’ homes, where innumerable jam sessions took place, or the long-gone Bickford’s Coffee Shop, where players would meet after gigs to socialize and discuss music.

It is hardly surprising that Manhattan’s jazz history has overshadowed that of Brooklyn, for the latter borough had nothing like the organized entertainment industry that took root on Broadway or 52nd Street. But just ask those who lived in Brooklyn during those glory days—most notably pianist, composer and bandleader Randy Weston—and you will get an earful: not just about the clubs, though there were many, but about community, about a social network that existed among jazz musicians of which most historians are completely unaware. Weston is a walking dictionary of Brooklyn jazz history, and his autobiography, due out next year, will no doubt begin to give the borough a privileged place in the story of this music. Yet, a conversation with this famous Brooklyn son, still inexhaustibly robust at 83, only confirms that there is much more to be discovered about Brooklyn’s role in jazz’s development.

In our Spring 2004 issue,1 Robin D. G. Kelley discussed Brooklyn’s recent “jazz renaissance,” focusing primarily on organizations such as the Central Brooklyn Jazz Consortium as he framed the revitalization of the scene as largely a local community project. And just this spring, during our Brooklyn jazz symposium, (see p. 2), Kelley showed how Thelonious Monk was influenced by the time he spent immersed in Brooklyn’s jazz community, though he lived in Manhattan. Weston, in turn, was of course influenced by Monk’s idiosyncratic approach to the piano. Yet though the lively community remembered by Monk and Weston is only beginning to be fully appreciated, the history of jazz in Brooklyn goes back much further, to the early years of the twentieth century.

One might begin before jazz even arrives, with the work of ragtime pianists and composers who made Brooklyn their home. Of particular importance is Joseph F. Lamb who, along with Scott Joplin and James Scott, is considered one of the greatest composers of advanced “classical” ragtime. Though Lamb was born in New Jersey, he moved to Brooklyn after his marriage in 1911, and remained there until his death in 1960. I often walk by his modest house in Sheepshead Bay, built when much of Brooklyn was still farmland, and the local elementary school has been renamed in his honor.


Another ragtime and popular song composer with ties to Brooklyn is James Hubert “Eubie” Blake (1887-1983). Blake was born in Baltimore and spent much of his career in Manhattan, where he had an immense impact on the New York entertainment scene, particularly with his all-black show “Shuffle Along” of 1921, co-written with his partner Noble Sissle. Blake moved to Brooklyn around 1940 after his wife Avis died, and the borough can lay claim to many of his later works, including “Rhapsody in Ragtime” and the hauntingly beautiful “Eubie’s Classical Rag.” He boasts a plaque on the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s “Walk of Fame,” alongside the likes of Aaron Copland, Barbra Streisand, and George Gershwin.

The story of jazz in Brooklyn seems to begin in earnest at Coney Island, a thriving amusement park and beach getaway in the 1910s and 20s. The area boasted a vigorous nightlife, much of it built up by Frankie Yale, an infamous Brooklyn underworld figure and associate of Al Capone. The best-known of Yale’s clubs was the College Inn (not to be confused with the famous Chicago club of the same name), where the Original Dixieland Jazz Band played after their famous gig at Reisenweber’s in 1917. Throughout the late 1910s and 1920s, a variety of performers that often featured jazz held forth at Coney Island, including Eddie Cantor and Jimmy Durante. Further research will be needed to learn more about this club scene, though we do know that not all the performers were white: we have learned from Lawrence Gushee’s research that the Creole Band played at Coney Island in 1915.2 One can’t help wondering, too, if any of the famous early jazz musicians who were active in Manhattan in the 1920s made it down to this popular playground on a hot summer day. Did Louis Armstrong take the train out there in 1924, perhaps, with his cornet tucked under his arm?


During the swing-crazed 1930s and 40s, the greatest big bands of the day worked at the Brooklyn Paramount (called that to distinguish it from the Paramount in Manhattan). Built in 1928, the Paramount was located in downtown Brooklyn, at the current site of Long Island University at DeKalb and Flatbush Avenues (part of the ballroom—and the organ—still exist, though most of the building was absorbed by LIU’s gymnasium). Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway were among the stars who brought their orchestras into this imposing structure in the 1930s, and later Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald, and Miles Davis appeared there as well. In the 1950s, the Paramount became famous for Alan Freed’s broadcast live rock ‘n roll shows, which featured Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, and others—making it something of an epicenter for the development of modern popular music. But during the Swing Era, one can’t help wonder if the publicity given the Brooklyn Paramount obscured other Brooklyn venues that might have provided music and dancing space to Depression-weary audiences. It’s not difficult to imagine that other perhaps less prestigious venues offered music for dancers and listeners, perhaps performed by local musicians.


Which brings us to the previously-mentioned glory days of the late 1940s through the 1960s discussed by Robin Kelley, the world experienced by Weston, Monk, Hubbard, Max Roach, and others. This musical scene is, of course, still vividly remembered by many, though their numbers are quickly disappearing. Interviews with musicians, club owners, and audiences, as well as examination of advertisements and reviews await the ambitious researcher. But time is pressing; in the next decade most of the first-hand accounts of this time will no longer be available to us. Luckily, the Brooklyn Historical Society, as well as some other institutions, are working to preserve the living legacy of Brooklyn’s jazz history. We hope these efforts, combined with a careful look at how jazz arose and flourished in this borough, will help us better understand a story that has long been overlooked to the detriment of jazz scholarship everywhere.

As this project, now obviously in its early stages, moves forward, I invite readers who may be able to shed light on Brooklyn’s jazz scene to contact us. For too long it has been assumed that Manhattan remained the only borough worth investigating by jazz historians. But it is now clear that just across the river there is a vital part of the music’s story waiting to be discovered.

—Jeffrey Taylor

Notes

1 Robin D. G. Kelly, “Brooklyn’s Jazz Renaissance,” I.S.A.M. Newsletter 23, no. 2 (Spring 2004): 4-5; 14.

2 Lawrence Gushee, Pioneers of Jazz: the Story of The Creole Band (Oxford University Press, 2005), 180-181.