Someone with whom I was having a conversation said that they did not know that Pittsburgh had such a foundation in music, especially, jazz. I mentioned that jazz-guitar player George Benson was from Pittsburgh, and that my uncle Donald had a jazz band, with a piano player named “Fritz” Jones. (We know “Fritz” as Ahmad Jamal, now.) I’m not sure if I told the person the story of my father introducing his 8-year-old son (me) to a grown man named “Dizzy.” I thought at the time that it was a strange name for an adult man; it would be years before I realized that I had met jazz trumpeter John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie. An episode of the TV show “Watson” opens with a graphic saying “Lower Hill,” and a woman playing saxophone in a jazz club. Watson is played by Morris Chestnut; Watson’s father has a jazz club in Pittsburgh. The “Lower Hill” is where I used to watch “Georgie” play guitar.
Recent unfortunate circumstances took me back to the city of my birth. My two nieces picked me up at the bus station and took me to their home in Beechview, outside of the Pittsburgh city limits. As we wended our way along highway 376, I asked one of them which river we were driving beside. The natives fumbled for a moment before they remembered the Monongahela, one of the two rivers at whose confluence the mighty Ohio is formed. We climbed hills and turned onto other hills until we reached Beechview, and the hill on which they live. I imagined that I could hear Bill Henderson singing “The Folks Who Live On The Hill.” And oh, those hills.
In the town of Beechview there is a commemorative sign at the foot of Canton Street that boasts that it is the “steepest … in the Continental United States,” and proclaims that the street has “an ankle-straining 37% grade.” Looking up that grade is an imposing view, almost straight into the sky. My first bride taught me to drive on hills such as this, and I had to learn to hold my 4-speed manual VW on a hill without using the handbrake: clutch and gas, only. (Try that, you speed-minions of May.) Right next to the “ankle-straining” street, there is another sign: “Graymore Ave.” To those unfamiliar with the Pittsburgh area’s history, this sign would appear to point toward a series of steps. But as author Bob Regan pointed out in his book, “The Steps of Pittsburgh: Portrait of a City,” this may be one of the “712 sets of steps, 44,645 treads, 24,208 vertical feet” that are legal streets. I travelled those steps long before I ever drove on a paved (and cobbled) city street.
That is something about Pittsburgh. Hills and rivers and steps and music, music that includes jazz guitarist George Benson, jazz pianist Ahmad Jamal, and singer and actress Phyllis Hyman, whom I met when she lived in St. Clair Village, in the South Hills section of Pittsburgh. Phyllis and I danced together, eye to eye: She was 6 feet tall. We also sang together, long before she performed in the musical revue “Sophisticated Ladies” on Broadway, where she earned a Theater World Award and a Tony Award nomination.
Oh: And football. I remember when my friend Steve Nicewanger was excited to hear that my old classmate, Francis Peay, was going to be an assistant coach with the Indianapolis Colts. I wrote of my “Fear Of Franny” (The Weekly View May 2009; reprinted Sept. 9th, 2021,) but was glad to see the ‘Burgh represented in Indy.
cjon3acd@att.net