Ifabiszletter 93024--O24-O January 1992 Vol
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
P.O. Box 240 Ojai, Calif. ifabiszletter 93024--O24-O January 1992 Vol. 11 No. 1 changed and segregation has ostensibly ended, the vestiges of Mail Bag a segregated society still exist there, and even in Cincinnati, where I now live. In The Prez of Louisville, I was captured in nostalgia and When I was going to place a black sales representative in tenderness with your treatment of your feelings about early southern Kentucky, the owner of a large wholesale grocery experiences with blacks. I too "never understood those who warehouse told me that other companies had tried it and pull back from difference, or more, hate it." failed. Most of the people had crosses burned in their front I was born in the early years of the development of jazz, yards, or received other unpleasant warnings. There are a few 1926. As I grew up, it took a certain amount of daring for me black sales representatives in Louisville today, but very few. to visit the black ghettos of Long Beach, California, and Los Cincinnati has improved greatly, and black representatives are Angeles. Blacks did not go into white restaurants or night- not uncommon today. ‘ubs, they did not appear in public on the same bandstand or Yet it is rare even today to go into a black neighborhood even baseball diamond. Blacks rarely went mto the stores bar and see a white man, except in clubs featuring jazz. So, where whites shopped in the 1930s and later, and whites rarely while we have progressed some in the past 30 or 40 years, it visited black neighborhoods, churches, clubs, or restaurants. is painfully slow and the dark and sad reality is that prejudice Blacks were not even allowed to play on our high school lives and even thrives in the hearts and souls of too many basketball, football, or baseball teams, though many I knew people in the "land of the free." were superior in skill to most of our team members. I recall Gordon H. Sandberg, Cincinnati, Ohio asking Charlie Church, our basketball coach, why. His only answer was "the Septem will not permit it yet." Ella By Starlight _ One year after we had won the CIF championship and were quite cocky, Charlie Church set up a game with a Los Angeles high school team, all black. They beat us badly, in every A little girl stood transfixed, eyes wide, in a California phase of the game. Charlie Church _made his point: we supermarket, listening as a woman wearing thick glasses leaned weren’t as good as we thought. Of course, we never had to toward her and sang in a voice of incomparable sweetness, "Do play black schools in championship games; they weren’t you know the Muffm Man?" allowed. We went on to capture second place in CIF that year Whether the girl’s mother recognized the singer is impossible (1944). I often wondered whether we could have finished in to say, the child certainly didn’t. The girl was listening to the the top five teams if the black schools had been allowed to voice of Ella Fitzgerald, famous around the world. I remem- compete. Later, in college, some schools began to integrate, ber getting off an airplane in the small Chilean coastal town thank God. of Arica in 1962 and hearing that voice coming from a sound It was after World War II, when I returned to Los Angeles, system somewhere. .iat I first saw white and black musicians playing the same Ella Fitzgerald recalled: "The little girl’s mother said, ‘Please E/nightclubs -- those called sepia clubs, where whites and blacks don’t stop. Just keep on.’ And then there was a little boy could mingle and listen to great music together. I first met who followed me all around in a store, when I sang to him. Jimmy Witherspoon in the Melody Club in Los Angeles. Also And that knocks me out. I just love children, and I hate to playing the club in those years were Oscar Moore, the Trenier see anybody do anything to hurt them. The store where I go, Twins, Nat Cole, Sammy Davis Jr., and many more. the kids like me to sing. They wait for me to do a song in Just prior to being discharged from service in 1946, I spent Spanish. more than a month on liberty in the Big Apple, virtually all of "I am a sucker for children. I’ll stop on the street and sing my time on 52nd Street, listening to jazz sixteen hours a day for them." or more. I met Billie Holiday, the greatest singer ever, for From the stage of the Apollo theater in 1934 to the present, me. Art Tatum, my idol, befriended me and began taking me recording a title track for a Japanese movie or simply perform- to a spot in Harlem called Minton’s. There he introduced me ing for her own delight to children, Ella Fitzgerald has been to all the greats who showed up to jam after hours: Max singing in public for 58 years. Hers is doubtless the longest Roach, Curley Russell, Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, Al Haig, singing career in American music, popular, jazz, concert, or and many more. I was in paradise. Billie. Holiday called me any other kind of music, and it certainly is one of the most "my cute little sailor boy." illustrious. More than a few critics have referred to her work In the early 1950s, I was a regular with my wife at Howard as genius. ' Rumsey’s Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach. There were hun- Occasionally through the years there has been debate over dreds of greats we heard play and met briefly. Many were ex- whether Ella Fitzgerald truly is a "jazz singer." The term is a Kenton band members. There was a continuous joy of hearing dubious one, and a number of singers so described -- including top musicians. And there were many other clubs where we the late Sarah Vaughan -- have objected to it as limiting. enjoyed jazz. Sarah used to assert that she was not a blues singer, and if a From 1963 to 1969, my work as a sales manager took me flair for the blues is part of the definition of "jazz singer," then into the charming city of Louisville. Though the laws have it didn’t fit her. *¥" J_ Nor does it fit Ella Fitzgerald, whose career has been United States was embodied in the Statue of Liberty, the devoted almost entirely to the great American songwriters. In Empire State Building, the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. 1955, her manager and record producer, Norman Granz, began And the voice of Ella Fitzgerald. recording with her a series of two-LP "songbook" albums on That exquisite sound would come sailing across the border the work of these composers and lyricists. During the next 12 from radio stations in Buffalo and Rochester and Detroit, years, she made so many of these albums that today she isn’t swinging and sensitive and young and absolutely pure, although sure how many there were -- albums devoted to Duke El- she was played plenty on Canadian radio too. lington, Harold Arlen, Rodgers and Hart, Cole Porter, Jerome It is hard to remember, in this age of talk radio, rock radio, Kern, Johnny Mercer, George and Ira Gershwin, and more. and country-and-western radio, that what Fitzgerald did was All were successful, and some of them made the hit charts. not seen in those days as the high art it actually was. It was If, however, an ability to improvise vocally is part of the considered popular music, and some of her songs were very definition of a "jazz singer," then it assuredly fits Ella Fitzger- big hits. ald, whose ability to scat sing with impeccable rhythmic, As the years went by, her singing became more seasoned imagination and accurate intonation at high speed is incom- and brilliantly skilled, passing beyond anything anyone else parable. Yet in the songbook albums, she sang the songs very could do. Certain of her performances linger in memory (and, straight, with minimal embellishment. fortunately, on records) as bright as jewels on velvet. But“Q Ira Gershwin told writer George T. Simon, "I never knew strange thing is that the voice itself remained eternally yo . how good our songs were until I heard Ella Fitzgerald sing In her soimd, she seemed like what she was when she had her them." first hit: a teen-ager. And the combination, the sweet naivete Musicologist and historian Henry Pleasants, in his book 77ze of that sound coupled with the sophisticated and secure Great American Popular Singers (Simon and Schuster, New command of her art, was startling, and inimitable. To be sure, York, 1974), observes: a lot of excellent singers have been influenced by her, but she "She commands . an extraordinary range of two octaves remains unique, beyond imitation. An American monument. and a sixth, from the low D or D-flat to the high B-flat and Her long and distinguished career has made Ella a wealthy possibly higher. This is a greater range, especially at the woman, and she lives in a big, comfortable home in Beverly bottom, than is required or expected of most opera singers." Hills. It is dramatic, striking, a two-story structure in Mexican Pleasants recalls Gerald Moore, the English pianist knovm for hacienda style built in a U-shape around a large inner garden his distinguished work as accompanist, telling a story about rich in exotic tropical and subtropical flora, receding to a Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.