From Jazz.com:
Ray Bryant and [Benny] Golson played regularly in late 1946 with bassist Gordon “Bass” Ashford. They performed one night a week at Joe Pitt’s Musical Bar, and weekends at the Caravan Republican Club, for as long as six months at a stretch.
The Red Rooster Cafe opened circa 1952. The West Philly jazz club had a seating capacity of 350. Drummer Coatesville Harris led the house band. Coatesville’s 1953 recording, “Strange Things All The Rage,” features an uncredited solo by John Coltrane.
According to the radio documentary “Tell Me How Long Trane’s Been Gone,” in 1957 Coltrane kicked his heroin habit cold turkey by day and played at the Red Rooster at night.
McCoy Tyner met Coltrane at the Red Rooster when he was working a gig with the Cal Massey Band. It was here that Tyner played with Trane for the first time. From a 1997 news article:
It was at the Red Rooster, a now defunct jazz club on 52nd and Market streets in West Philadelphia, where Massey, a long-time Coltrane friend, introduced Tyner to the saxophonist. Later that afternoon, the club owner asked Coltrane if he would play the next week at the club. Coltrane didn’t have a rhythm section — in fact, he didn’t have a working band — so, with Massey’s blessing, he borrowed Massey’s band, which included Tyner and Garrison.
In an essay in “Lost Shrines of Jazz,” noted author and scholar James G. Spady wrote:
Saxophonist and Coltrane collaborator Archie Shepp, hailed in the ‘60s as one of the jazz purveyors of the so-called “new thing,” reflected on Philly’s importance to him:
I don’t want to leave out Clarence “C” Sharp, who was a tremendous influence and has helped me off and on. He was one of the main teachers in the Philadelphia school. . . . The first time I heard Trane, I was with Reggie Workman. We went to hear Coltrane at the Red Rooster out in West Philly. McCoy Tyner was playing with Trane that night. He [Coltrane] had a lot of problems with his teeth. (I didn’t know this until much later.) He didn’t play much. But what he played was so unusual. I was a bit frustrated by that. I had no idea at that time just how enormous this man’s capabilities were. One of my friends said, “That’s Philly Joe, the cat that went on to play with Miles.” He played drums that night.
The Red Rooster has long since closed its doors. The building is still there. It’s the last stop on the walking tour, 52nd Street Stroll.
Watts’ Zanzibar was located on the “Golden Strip.” In the 1940s, the house band was led by tenor saxophonist Jimmy Oliver who later played with Bootsie Barnes, the Heath Brothers and John Coltrane, and recorded with Dizzy Gillespie.
In an essay in “Lost Shrines of Jazz,” noted author and scholar James G. Spady wrote:
Perhaps no institution in the city was more responsible for Philly’s bop revolution than a North Philly club named Watts’ Zanzibar, located at 1833 W. Columbia Avenue (now named Cecil B. Moore Avenue, in honor of a black attorney and 1960s Civil Rights leader in Philadelphia). It was recognized as the bop spot, the home of modern African American culture. Sonically and sartorially hip, it both nurtured and reflected bop ethics and aesthetics. The very name reflected the old and the new: Africa and America, Watts’ Zanzibar. The proprietors were brothers Richard and Robert Watts.
Located in West Philly on “the Strip,” Philly Groove Records was owned by Stan “The Man” Watson.
The record company put out discs by First Choice, the Delfonics and other lesser-known local acts. Thom Bell, who produced some of the Delfonics’ biggest hits at Sigma Sound Studios, met singer-songwriter Linda Creed while with Philly Groove. The Bell-Creed alliance hit it big in the ’70s with a string of hits they wrote and produced for the Spinners.
According to author Sean Patrick Griffin, the record company had ties to the fearsome Black Mafia:
John Stanley “Stan the Man” Watson owned Philly Groove Records, and employed the Black Mafia’s Bo Baynes from January 1968 until June 1971. Baynes’ stated position at Philly Groove was “road manager or promoter” and a PPD OCU [Philadelphia Police Department Organized Crime Unit] report states, “Reliable sources claim that Baynes did work for Watson. However, his position with Watson was that of an enforcer. Baynes’ primary mission was to intimidate disc jockeys to push certain records.
Black Brothers, Inc.: The Violent Rise and Fall of Philadelphia’s Black Mafia
The former location of Philly Groove Records is a stop on the 52nd Street Stroll walking tour.
In 1964, Dizzy Gillespie threw his beret into the ring and ran for President of the United States.
In a piece for Al Jazeera America, Tom Maxwell wrote:
It started as a joke, as so many serious things do. His booking agency had some “Dizzy Gillespie for president” buttons made around 1960, because, you see, it’s funny. Somebody even asked Gillespie why a black jazzman — a permanent member of the underclass if there ever was one — would even think of trying for the job. “Because we need one,” he said.
“Anybody coulda made a better President than the ones we had in those times, dillydallying about protecting blacks in the exercise of their civil and human rights and carrying on secret wars against people around the world,” Gillespie wrote in his autobiography “To Be, or Not … to Bop.” “I was the only choice for a thinking man.”
Vote Dizzy!
From 1979 to 1989, Jewel Mann-Lassiter operated her eponymous jazz club, Jewel’s, on Broad Street in North Philly. Both local and national artists played here, including Trudy Pitts and Mr. C, Kevin Eubanks, Jimmy Scott, Bootsie Barnes, Evelyn Simms, Joey DeFrancesco and Pieces of a Dream.
In 1986, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported:
She brought in past and current greats Betty Carter, Gloria Lynne, Jimmy McGriff, Arthur Prysock, Dakota Staton, Herbie Mann. She tried out newcomers Nancy Kelly, Janice McClain. And the customers came, with Jewel’s attracting the city’s black movers and shakers as well as professional people, students from nearby Temple University and others seeking good music and good times.
Herbie Mann played there, tenor sax player Al Cohn and organist Jack McDuff. The “new Cotton Club,” Jewel likes to call her place.
Ortlieb’s Jazzhaus was opened in September 1987 by jazz musician Pete Souders, who ran it until 2007. Under the new owner, they’re still holding their Tuesday night jam session
In a post for Hidden City Philadelphia, Bart Everts wrote:
The bar became a mainstay of the Philadelphia jazz scene, with musicians such as Bootsie Barns, Shirley Scott, Duane Eubanks, Farrid Barron, Cecil Payne and other notables taking residency. Tuesday nights featured an open jam where lesser known musicians might get to play with a legend. Throughout the 1990s, Ortlieb’s thrived as one of the few venues in the region offering jazz seven nights a week, a distinction that continued through the next decade.
Back in the day, musicians used to “walk the bar.” Philly native Lee Morgan was among those “honking and stepping.”
In an interview with the Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Project, NEA Jazz Master and Philly native Benny Golson said: “I caught my boy John Coltrane on the bar.” In a 2009 piece, jazz critic Marc Myers also shared the story:
In 1954, Coltrane’s expanding heroin and alcohol addiction cost him playing jobs, most notably a significant one with alto saxophonist Johnny Hodges. After moving back to Philadelphia, Coltrane was forced to play with local R&B bands to make ends meet. In some of these bands, he had to honk away on the tenor while walking along the bar. One night, he saw childhood friend and tenor saxophonist Benny Golson enter the club. Mortified, Coltrane climbed off the bar and walked out for good.
The Smithsonian interviewer asked Golson where the tradition was started:
I don’t know where it started. It didn’t start with the jazz artists, per se. It started with one of the entertainers. An entertainer’s plot is to do or to second-guess what the audience wants to hear. Yeah, I got involved in that. I did some crazy stuff when I was doing all that stuff. You do what you think is going to entertain them. It’s going to bring acclaim to what you’re doing. Yeah, what’s more ridiculous than getting up on the bar where the drinks are and start playing your low B-flats no matter what key you’re in, just honking. We call that honking and stepping. They’re applauding. Ain’t nothing happening. Stepping over those drinks.
Jazz landmarks are broadly defined. Philadelphia’s jazz scene did not exist in a vacuum. The golden age of jazz predates the Civil Rights Movement.
African Americans were not allowed to stay in downtown hotels. Instead, they stayed at places like the Douglass Hotel in South Philly, the Hotel Chesterfield and Hotel LaSalle in North Philly, and the Blue Moon Hotel and Swim Club in West Philly. The Ebony Lounge was located in the lower level of the Hotel Chesterfield. The Douglass Hotel was home to the Rendezvous Club (1950s), Showboat (1960s), and Bijou Café (1970s).
Jazz was heard in Elks’ lodges, musicians’ homes, Union Local 274 (the Black musicians union), ballrooms, private clubs, and historic venues such as the Academy of Music, Pyramid Club, Blue Horizon, and the Wharton Center Settlement House. Musicians held jam sessions in restaurants, private homes and community centers.
Tenor saxophonist Bootsie Barnes grew up in North Philly’s Richard Allen Homes whose jam sessions in the community center were the inspiration for “Boppin’ Round the Center.”
A restaurant and music venue, Time has jazz nearly every night in the 60-seat dining room. There’s a jam session on Sundays, 8pm to midnight.
For more info. visit. www.timerestaurant.net.
