Category Archives: Advocacy

Advocacy

‘Sounds Jewish’ Symposium

Earlier today, I attended a symposium organized by the Feinstein Center for American Jewish History at Temple University, “Sounds Jewish.” The event featured an awesome array of panelists who shared their experiences and stories.

Josh Kun recounted the story of a busboy who once worked at Los Angeles’ landmark Clifton’s Cafeteria. During a break Jimmy Witherspoon’s “Ain’t Nobody’s Business” was playing on the radio. He asked the black cook who that was. The busboy decided then and there he would write music for black artists.

And he did. The busboy was Jerry Leiber. He later became one half of the legendary songwriting and producing team, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. They wrote hits for, among others, the Coasters, Drifters, Charles Brown and Big Mama Thornton.

It must have been a surreal experience for Leiber when he heard Jimmy Witherspoon’s “Real Ugly Woman” on the radio. He and Stoller wrote it.

Advocacy

Women in Jazz: Vi Redd

Elvira “Vi” Redd (born September 20, 1928) is an American jazz alto saxophone player, vocalist and educator. She has been active since the early 1950s and is known primarily for playing in the bebop, hard bop and post-bop styles. She is highly regarded as an accomplished veteran who personally knew Dizzy Gillespie and has performed with such stars as Count Basie, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Linda Hopkins and Marian McPartland.

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Advocacy

Whose Murals Get Saved?

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They say that “blues ain’t nothing but a botheration on your mind.” It’s bothersome that developers are erasing African Americans’ cultural heritage. In Philadelphia, developers routinely – and without notice – demolish or cover up murals that are paid for in part by City taxpayers.

John Coltrane Collage

Murals are part of Philadelphia’s cultural landscape. The Mural Arts Program creates murals that engage the community. They reflect a community’s history, identity, hopes and dreams.

Women of Jazz Mural

City Council members can use Councilmanic Prerogative to require that developers of publicly-subsidized projects replace murals of social or cultural significance. Who will determine which mural meets that threshold? Let’s stipulate that murals that tell stories about events or persons who are the subject of books, songs, documentaries, national holiday, or City and congressional resolutions are culturally significant.

City Council Resolution - June 2001

The how of replacement is negotiable. What is non-negotiable is that developers can erase African Americans’ cultural heritage because, to borrow a phrase from Al Gore, there is “no controlling legal authority.” A district Council member is the controlling legal authority in his or her district. He or she decides which projects go forward and which ones go nowhere. While developers view murals as disposable, district Council members must exercise their prerogative and demand that they respect that which came before.

Advocacy

Memories of Trudy Pitts and Mr. C

Jazz memories must be stored in a special place – not just your brain, but body and soul.

After being at Faye Anderson’s talk about the old locations and why she wants them given their due respect via a walking tour, I could hear – and want to move to – the wonderful sounds of Trudy Pitts & Mr. C playing the classics at Sunday jazz brunches on the river, somewhere near Spring Garden around the late 80s/early 90s. They had an occasional guest, but the highlight for me was Mr. C always ending with the Louis Armstrong classic, “What a Wonderful World.”

Anyone have more detailed memories?

Dr. Janice Presser, CEO of The Gabriel Institute, is a behavioral scientist and the architect of Teamability® – a completely new technology that measures how people will perform in teams.

ED. Note: Trudy Pitts and Mr. C held forth at Meiji-en on the Waterfront.

Advocacy, Cultural Heritage Preservation, Jazz Landmarks

Philadelphia Pyramid Club

Founded in 1937 and formally opened three years later, the Philadelphia Pyramid Club was a small, exclusive club for black professionals. Its mission was to foster the “cultural, civic, and social advancement of Negroes in Philadelphia.” The membership fee was $120, and monthly dues were $2.40.

pyramid-club

The club hosted a wide range of social and cultural activities, including performances by Marian Anderson and Duke Ellington and, after 1941, annual art exhibitions for African American artists. It also hosted events with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb. During the Pyramid Club’s heyday, its membership rolls were a Who’s Who of black Philadelphia.

The club was dissolved in 1963.

Pyramid Club Historical Marker

Advocacy, Jazz Landmarks

Philadelphia Jazz History Mosaic

NetworkArts was invited by The Free Library of Philadelphia to create after school arts programming in ten North Philadelphia library branches over a two-year period. Partnering with the Philadelphia Clef Club, NetworkArts offered programs in jazz history, lectures, demonstrations and poetry.

The collages of Romare Bearden were studied, and students created sculptures and plaques commemorating 75 important jazz artists who worked, lived, or were born in Philadelphia. During installation, Project HOME and over 200 neighborhood residents participated. The Philadelphia Clef Club Junior Ensemble performed during the community installation day.

Advocacy, Cultural Heritage Preservation, Green Book, Jazz Venues

Ridge Cotton Club

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Opened in the 1930s and listed in the The Negro Motorist Green Book, the Ridge Cotton Club shows the influence of Harlem and the Cotton Club. And like the legendary Harlem nightspot, it was probably controlled by the mob.

Two of the original owners, Morris Brodsky and Harry Hirsch, died within days of each other in January 1949 following “injuries inflicted by an assailant.”

The Elmer Snowden Trio played here in April 1946.

Advocacy

From Bebop to Hip-hop

Hip-hop artists are influenced by that which came before. Like beboppers, they have created their own language and culture. Beboppers improvised. Hip-hop artists freestyle.

In an interview with West Philadelphia Music, a project of the University of Pennsylvania School of Arts and Science, jazz drummer Lucky Thompson said:

Uhh, yeah! Yeah, because it’s all improvisation. Like what they do, they call a rap, a rap is nothing new. Rappers, well, they was doing that back in the forties. That’s not, you know, that’s not new, that’s not new. That used to be a hip talk back then. You know, skeealeebop skeetaleebop babop la-deh-da, you know, that’s old. That’s not—that’s new to them, you know, but it’s not nothing new. It’s been out—it’s been here for a while, and they just called it scatting or talking jive—they would call it talking jive. So that’s, you know, and then cuz like, you can use it—they like now, you see, they using a lot of—they go to Europe, they take a lot of the traditional jazz music and put hip hop beats and everything right over the top of it. And they dance to it, you know, I was really—I was really shocked when I heard it when I went to Europe I was like, “Wow, they playing [Col]trane?” And they got them dancing you know, but it had like a hip hop—a hip hop beat, you know. But it was deep, it was deep, I swear it was deep.

Still, for some jazz purists, the only thing bebop and hip-hop have in common is “they rhyme.” While their heads are stuck in rarified air, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson dropped some knowledge in the liner notes for “Droppin’ Science: Greatest Samples From The Blue Note Lab”:

The one that makes me the proudest, of course, is my hometown champ (and the greatest, funkiest, and most precise DJ ever!), DJ Jazzy Jeff, who lived up to his name in 1986 with a ditty called “A Touch of Jazz,” a compiled cram session of ’70s funk/jazz trivia looped and scratched to perfection. It was the “DJ cut” — remember those? — on his debut album, Rock the House (along with an MC I haven’t heard from in eons? Any locale for a Will Smith? Anyone? . . . lol).

[…]

Enter Idris Muhammad, a crucial general in the Blue Note army that was key to crossing the prestigious jazz label over to the soul side of thangs. That was how I got sucked into Bluebreaks. Same jazz outlook, just a lil’ funkier, to reach the corners of the ghetto that an otherwise (still worthy) Jackie McLean or a Horace Silver couldn’t penetrate. Idris’s drums had equal influence on me just as strong as if he were playing the role of John “Jabo” Starks or Clyde Stubblefield in the James Brown band.

In an interview with the Smithsonian Jazz Oral History project, NEA Jazz Master and Philly native Percy Heath said:

Anyhow, they [hip-hop artists] take little pieces of some things that were written in the bebop era, post-bebop era, and they make little licks out of it and they use it. That’s good that some people, they listen to hip-hop. So, hip-hop is like bebop was back then, revolutionary movement. This business of rapping, I used to do that in the schoolyard when I was twelve years old.

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