Willard Jenkins: What was your next step after high school? Rusty Hassan: After high school, I got accepted to Georgetown University in Washington, DC. I came down to Washington in the Fall of 1963, took my albums with me. At first, I didn't even have a record player in the room. Gradually, I started checking out the jazz scene in Washington. I didn't go there at first, but I saw an ad for an unusually sounding name for a group, the JFK Quintet at the Bohemian Caverns. Ultimately, I would discover that club. In 1965, I went with my roommate from ... Actually, my sophomore year at Georgetown, I was living with some students from George Washington University in Virginia, and my roommate Toby Mason and I, went to go see Ramsey Lewis at the Bohemian Caverns. There was a big truck outside. We went in and they were recording, and Ramsey did this R&B tune called "The In Crowd". That got released that following summer ... Willard Jenkins: So you were there for that. Rusty Hassan: I'm clapping on a record on The In-Crowd. Rusty Hassan: But what really, really sticks with me from the Bohemian Caverns, when I went by myself to see John Coltrane and it was a quartet with McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin Jones. Willard Jenkins: What year are we talking? Rusty Hassan: '65. Willard Jenkins: Okay. Rusty Hassan: The performance was so intense, I was really just gosh ... And when Coltrane finished, he was walking by and he had that expression that's like on the cover of a Love Supreme ... Willard Jenkins: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Rusty Hassan: ... and I kept, well I can't say that, that sounds like bullshit. I don't wanna say that. I let him walk by me. I couldn't say anything, I was tongue-tied. Later on, as I got to know McCoy Tyner and I told him that story, he laughed. He said, "John was really friendly. He would have talked to you all night just about music. Don't talk about sports." Willard Jenkins: So the year you got to DC was '65? Rusty Hassan: '63. Willard Jenkins: '63. Rusty Hassan: I was here, and gradually ... My freshman year I didn't get out to hear too much music. My sophomore year, I did. [crosstalk 00:02:58] Caverns. Willard Jenkins: When you got there, how would you describe the jazz scene in DC when you arrived to attend GU? Rusty Hassan: George Washington, Georgetown. Willard Jenkins: Georgetown, yeah GU. Rusty Hassan: GU. Yeah. Rusty Hassan: It was exciting in many ways. Go to the Caverns and see John Coltrane. There was actually a bar that I went to. It was 18 drinking age for beer at that time in DC, and there was a bar that had a jazz jukebox. It had Coltrane on the jukebox, it had Modern Jazz Quartet, it had the Crusaders. It had a crusty bartender who owned the bar, named Joe Cohen. That was sort of the hang out for ... Willard Jenkins: What the name of that place? Rusty Hassan: It was called the One Step Down. Willard Jenkins: And where was it located? Rusty Hassan: It was on Pennsylvania Avenue, 2000 Block 20 something ... Pennsylvania Avenue. Willard Jenkins: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Rusty Hassan: It was only later in the '70s when they started presenting live music, and I'm trying to remember. I think maybe it was Lawrence Wheatley who persuaded him to allow him to do some jazz workshops there, and they started dealing with some local artists. Somehow, this woman came down from New York, and I don't know how she weedled her way into it, but she came in with Joe. Her name was Ann Mabuchi. He said, "We should start bringing down people from New York." Rusty Hassan: So in the '70s, she would be booking Lee Konitz. Geeze, who else? Any major act that wasn't playing at Blues Alley, would be playing at The One Step Down. Willard Jenkins: So, now One Step Down at that point ... Rusty Hassan: This is a decade later. This is like in the '70s now. Willard Jenkins: When you first started going there [crosstalk 00:05:08] Rusty Hassan: When I first started going there, was because of the music on the jukebox. Willard Jenkins: Did it have the same configuration as the place that eventually presented live music? Rusty Hassan: Absolutely. All it did was move some tables around. It was not even a stage that they had. It was space next to the bar. Willard Jenkins: What else was happening on the DC jazz scene at that time? Rusty Hassan: On the DC jazz scene, you had the Cellar Door, you had Blues Alley opened up I think in '65. You had a place called Shadows on M Street. The Modern Jazz Quartet played there, and you could hear them there. You know, you had all these clubs playing jazz. Rusty Hassan: Interestingly enough, Blues Alley when it started, had a separate room for the bar. So it was an even smaller club, and they had a house rhythm section accompanying the artist coming through there. Bass player by the name of Billy Taylor who was the son of the bass player named Billy Taylor, played with Duke Ellington, was a bassist there. They would have acts like Marian McPartland would play there. In fact, I did an interview with her when she was playing at Blues Alley. Rusty Hassan: Then in the late '70s, John Dimitriou came in, who owns Jazz Alley in Seattle. He came as a manager for a guy named John Munyon who bought the club. They opened up the bar area, pushed the bar back up against the area, and made it a whole wider space. Started booking hard bop, Art Blakey, the Heath Brothers, and stuff like that. Willard Jenkins: This is Blues Alley we're talking about? Rusty Hassan: This is Blues Alley, yeah. Rusty Hassan: This is around the same time in the '70s that Ann Mabuchi's bringing people down from New York, or booking national acts there at the One Step Down. In the '70s, when I moved into this neighborhood, there was a guy who lived over on Hamlin Street, named Bill Harris, guitarist, who did a solo jazz guitar album, who started off playing rhythm and blues earlier on. He would have a party every Labor Day, and bring in guitarists like Kenny Burrell, play in his backyard. His dream was to have a club, so he found a spot at 18th and Rhode Island Avenue NE, and he opened it up and called it Pig Foot. The irony of Pig Foot, it's named after the Bessie Smith song "Give Me a Pig Foot and a Bottle of Beer". By that point, Bill Harris who had been an alcoholic, had stopped drinking and was a vegetarian, so he didn't eat the food that he served in the club. Rusty Hassan: Further down the street were two other clubs that were black owned. Mr. Wise and Moore's Love and Peace. Willard Jenkins: Were these places in competition with each other, did you think? Rusty Hassan: Yeah, of course, but it was a friendly competition. It was like you go from one spot to the other [inaudible 00:08:31] see artists. Rusty Hassan: I wanna backtrack a little bit to get the chronology back to the '60s, when I'm ... Willard Jenkins: Just getting there. Rusty Hassan: ... just getting to DC, and discovering these places, like the Bohemian Caverns in the '60s. Going to the One Step Down for the jukebox. Then hanging out with Carolyn to go to the Howard Theater to hear the R&B acts and soul acts, and Motown acts. I was looking at the music as a connection. Rusty Hassan: I'm into jazz, and at Georgetown right off campus, there were two restaurant bars. One was the very toney 1789. The 1789 had the downstairs beer garden called the Tombs, and the upstairs restaurant was very classy. Right next to it was a lunch counter bar type place called T Hands. It was owned by Lebanese immigrants. Affordable food and beer. One day, I'm drinking some beer and hanging out with some friends, we're talking and having a grand old time. A guy walks in and he's ordering something from the counter, and he's holding albums. You know how we jazz fans are, in the hip and the now, what do you got? Rusty Hassan: I asked about the albums, we were talking and he had some pretty good stuff under his arms and stuff. We started talking some more. He said, "Well, I just play these on my jazz show on the campus station, but I gotta give up the show to take a class. Why don't you do it? You know enough about this stuff." I said, "Well, I never did radio." He said, "Well yeah, come by next week. I'll show you what to do." It was very serendipitous. That's how I started doing jazz radio as a student at Georgetown on the FM station that the University had at that time. Willard Jenkins: At the time, were you acquainted at all with many DC jazz musicians? Rusty Hassan: I was starting to meet them, but not quite yet. But then when I got the radio show going ... Willard Jenkins: Well, let's backtrack a second.