On the October 24, 2023 program of the radio program “Fresh Air,” Terri Gross was interviewing a young jazz performer, a woman who had won a Grammy for best new artist. Samara Joy’s album, Linger Awhile, also won a Grammy for best jazz vocal recording. While accompanying this publication’s Paula Nicewanger on October 5 on a paper delivery route, we listened to radio station WFYI and heard an interview with jazz guitarist Charlie Ballantine. And recently, I finally finished reading a book that I purchased at the Benton House Book Sale. Leonard Feather’s The Jazz Years: Earwitness To An Era has had me surfing the memories of my exposure to the music.
I grew up in the Hill District of Pittsburgh. At one time, the Hill was a jazz mecca. When I was 8 years old, my father introduced me to a man named “Dizzy;” it would be years before I learned that I had met jazz trumpeter John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie. One of my schoolmates had a brother who played the saxophone; his brother’s name was Stanley Turrentine. And everyone on the Hill was proud to say that they knew the guitarist we called “Georgie,” before he gained fame and became George Benson. One of my cousins was doing research on our family and had pictures of our uncle’s band. She also confirmed what my mother had told me: Famed jazz pianist Ahmad Jamal played in the Don Woods Band.
Leonard Feather’s journey from London to the United States was powered by his writing about a musical form that he found intriguing, but that was not readily available in England: Jazz. In addition to being a journalist, Feather was also a composer and pianist during an age when jazz was performed by all “Afro-American” groups. For a long time, there were no integrated bands, neither in Europe nor in the United States. But Feather pursued the genre and wrote about it in various publications. And many of the people that he wrote about were people who lived in the neighborhood I grew up in and played the music that informed my life. Feather noted Lena Horne, whose autograph I got in 1965 (“Me And Lena,” Weekly View, 02/08/2018,) lived for a time on the Hill, and Kenny “Klook” Clarke, a jazz drummer about whom my cousin was doing research, also lived in the neighborhood. I remember taking a friend to Gus Greenlee’s Crawford Grill and having sat at the bar in the Hurricane Lounge, watching Benson play his guitar. I have immersed myself in jazz.
My son, who played in bands both during high school and after, once told an interviewer that he had been indoctrinated in jazz by his father, a statement that made me proud. My first two grandchildren, Xavion and Imani, played trombone (Xavion) and saxophone (Imani) in high school. Imani is now playing the baritone sax in a jazz band and her mother sent me a message that she was learning to play “Sir Duke.” The song was written by Stevie Wonder to pay homage to Duke Ellington, who is mentioned often in Feather’s book. As I read the book, I reveled in his words about the jazz that had formed my music appreciation, and the musicians who lived and worked in Pittsburgh, and lived on Wylie Avenue, the street where I lived. While I composed these words, I listened to many of the 1,197 jazz compositions on my iPod. (Yes, Virginia, there is still an iPod.)
And played vinyl of Horace Silver’s “Song For My Father,” part of all that jazz.
cjon3acd@att.net