[Hazel Scott was a piano prodigy who wowed the worlds of music,
TV, and film. But when she stood up for her rights, the establishment
took her down.]
[[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

SHE WAS ONCE THE BIGGEST STAR IN JAZZ. HERE’S WHY YOU’VE NEVER
HEARD OF HER  
[[link removed]]


 

Lorissa Rinehart
August 1, 2018
Narratively
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Hazel Scott was a piano prodigy who wowed the worlds of music, TV,
and film. But when she stood up for her rights, the establishment took
her down. _

,

 

_Hazel Scott
The Pioneering Journey of a Jazz Pianist, from Café Society to
Hollywood to HUAC_
Karen Chilton
University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 978-0-472-12283-7

_Cafe Society
The wrong place for the Right people_
Author: Barney Josephson with Terry Trilling-Josephson
University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 978-0-252-08181-1

On a rainy September morning in 1950, jazz pianist Hazel Scott stood
in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee hoping to clear
her name.

The publication “Red Channels” had accused Scott — along with
150 other cultural figures — of communist sympathies. Failure to
respond would be seen as an admission of guilt. But her appearance at
HUAC had a greater purpose than personal exoneration. She believed she
had a responsibility to stem the tide of paranoia that gained momentum
by the day.

She told the committee’s members, “Mudslinging and unverified
charges are just the wrong ways to handle this problem.” With the
same poise she brought to the stage as a musician, she testified that
“what happens to me happens to others and it is part of a pattern
which could spread and really damage our national morale and
security.”

Chin up, shoulders back, she warned against “profiteers in
patriotism who seek easy money and notoriety at the expense of the
nation’s security and peace of mind,” and that continuing down
this road would transform America’s artists from a “loyal troupe
of patriotic, energetic citizens ready to give their all for
America” into a “wronged group whose creative value has been
destroyed.”

Speaking with a voice that simultaneously conveyed clarity and nuance,
strength and warmth, she knew what she was doing. She had been
rehearsing for this moment her entire life.

Born in Trinidad, Scott was raised on music. As Karen Chilton recounts
in her biography, _Hazel Scott: The Pioneering Journey of a Jazz
Pianist, from Cafe Society to Hollywood to HUAC_
[[link removed]], Scott’s whole
family played and her mother, Alma, an aspiring concert pianist,
taught music to help make ends meet. Unbeknownst to her family, Hazel
Scott absorbed everything she heard until one day she woke her
grandmother from a nap by playing a familiar hymn on the piano,
two-handed and with perfect pitch. Her grandmother woke thinking, not
wrongly, that she was witnessing a miracle.

Scott’s arc was fixed in the stars from that moment on. At three
years old, Chilton writes, Scott played parties, churches, and
gatherings. But economic opportunity was hard to come by, and when her
parents’ marriage fell apart in 1923, her mother decided she and
Scott would emigrate to New York City.

Scott grocery shopped, prepared meals, and handled the household’s
money. When word got around that, in her house, a child paid the
bills, a gang of white teenagers broke in and demanded money. Scott
refused to give them any. They beat her black and blue, and Scott
still refused to turn over the cash. Finally, as police sirens grew
nearer, the boys ran off with her blood on their hands.

Another time, Scott was playing near the trench being dug for the
subway line that would become the A train. A white girl from the
neighborhood who she had been playing with told her to “Turn around
so that I can brush you off and send you to school,” as Scott
recounted in her journal, which is featured in Chilton’s book. When
she did, the girl pushed her into the trench.

The workmen who rescued Scott had the unmistakable look of “fear and
guilt” in their eyes. “They, too, were white,” Scott wrote in
her journal “They had witnessed the horrible act. They were involved
and they resented it and me.”

Scott resolved never to be so naïve again — nor did she allow the
incident to dictate her life.

She kept playing piano, kept stunning audiences, and impressed one
person in particular. The story sounds more like legend than fact, but
several sources, including Scott’s journal and the accounts of the
parties involved, confirm it.

German-born, wearing a meticulous goatee and a pocket watch, and
steeped in the traditions of European classical music, Juilliard
founder Frank Damrosch was the very model of high culture in New York
City. As such, his blood began to boil when he heard someone in the
audition room improvising over Rachmaninoff’s “Prelude in C Sharp
Major.” Marching down the hall to confront the blasphemer brash
enough to attempt such a thing, he heard the ninths being substituted
with the sixths. It was sacrilege, he thought, until he saw who was
playing.

Since eight-year-old Scott’s hands couldn’t reach the piece’s
intervals, she played the sixths to make it sound the way she
intuitively knew it should. No one taught her how to do this. In the
journal that Chilton quotes, Scott wrote: “I was only reaching for
the closest thing that sounded like it, not even knowing what a sixth
was at that age.”

When she finished, the auditions director whispered, “I am in the
presence of a genius.” Damrosch agreed and Scott was admitted to
Juilliard. But her real education wasn’t in the classroom. It was in
her living room.

In New York, as Chilton writes, Alma quickly became a successful jazz
musician and befriended some of the Harlem Renaissance’s brightest
stars in the process. In turn, they shone on young Hazel. She sat
beside ragtime legend Fats Waller — whom she called “Uncle” —
at the piano, while his hands strode syncopated rhythms across the
keys. Piano legend Art Tatum became a close family friend and mentor
to Hazel, advising her to dive deep into the blues.

Meanwhile Hazel’s mother, Alma, bought a brownstone on West 118th
Street, opened a Chinese restaurant on the ground floor, and taught
herself to play tenor sax. Her circle widened. Lester Young and Billie
Holiday came over after hours. Young and Alma traded turns playing sax
in the living room when she and Holiday weren’t gossiping in the
kitchen. Holiday became like a big sister to Hazel, taking her under
her wing as Hazel ventured out into the life of a working musician. In
an article she wrote for _Ebony_, Hazel Scott recalled how, once, when
“wondering where I was going and what I was doing, I began to
cry.” Holiday then “stopped, gripped my arm and dragged me to a
back room.” She told Scott, “Never let them see you cry” — a
piece of advice Scott followed forever.

While still a child, Hazel Scott played piano for dance classes and
churches. At 13 she joined her mother’s jazz band, Alma Long
Scott’s American Creolians. When she outgrew the gig, her mother
secured her a spot playing piano after the Count Basie Orchestra at
the posh Roseland Ballroom. Scott recounted in her journal that while
watching Basie bring the house down, she turned to Alma and said,
“You expect me to follow this?” Stage fright or no, she played
what would become her signature boogie-woogie style. The crowd adored
her. From there, she took flight.

At the time, the majority of jazz clubs were segregated. Even the
famed Cotton Club in Harlem, where Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway
headlined, had a “colored” section. Blacks and whites almost never
shared the stage. But in 1938, a shoe clerk from Trenton, New Jersey,
opened a different kind of club.

Cafe Society was “the wrong place for the Right people” according
to founder Barney Josephson. As Josephson recounted in his
autobiography, _Café Society: The Right Place for The Wrong
People,_ “I wanted a club where blacks and whites worked together
behind the footlights and sat together out front.” It was there that
Holiday performed “Strange Fruit” for the first time and became a
legend, and it was there that Holiday got Scott her first steady
engagement.

When Holiday canceled a standing engagement three weeks early, she
insisted Scott take her place. By the end of the run, Scott was Cafe
Society’s new headliner. Only 19 years old, she inherited the bench
previously occupied by piano greats like Meade Lux Lewis, Albert
Ammons, and Pete Johnson. But as _The New York Amsterdam News
_reported_, _“Hazel more than holds her own, and demonstrates a
style all her own.”

As it turned out, not only was Scott a brilliant pianist, she also had
a hell of a voice: deep and sonorous, comforting yet provocative —
the sort of singing style that makes you want to embrace the sublime
melancholy that is love and life and whiskey on a midwinter’s night.
And, she was beautiful. She wore floor-length ball gowns on stage and
gazed out into the audience with almond-shaped eyes that seemed to
communicate a deep knowledge of everyone they fixed upon. Like
watching a painter paint or a sculptor sculpt, when Scott sang, you
saw the song traveling through her, taking shape before emerging from
her lips. And when she played her boogie-woogie, she grinned ear to
ear, looking like self-possessed joy manifested. She was, in a word,
irresistible.

Audiences flocked to see her. Fan mail flooded in. As the _Chicago
Defender_ reported, Josephson decided to open a second Cafe Society
location, uptown for a swankier audience, with Scott as the marquee
performer. New York’s finest showed up in droves, including First
Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who dropped in one evening for “some
entertainment and relaxation,” as one reporter wrote in the
_Pittsburgh Courier_. After the show, Mrs. Roosevelt asked Scott to
join her for a late supper. Because she had already changed from her
evening wear to streetwear, Scott begged off the invitation.

“I’m inviting you,” said Mrs. Roosevelt, “not your clothes.”

How could Scott refuse?

She was the reigning queen of jazz, a friend to some of the most
famous names in the country, and all at just 22 years old.

Hazel Scott had conquered New York. Hollywood was next. But in a
motion picture industry where people of color were usually restricted
to playing maids, cannibals, or buffoons, was there room for Hazel
Scott?

Nine black soldiers march down a hill to the sound of piano and drum.
They are upright, dignified, ready to fight and die. Their sweethearts
line the road, waving handkerchiefs and bidding their fellows goodbye.
It’s 1943, and the question on the backlot is, “What should these
women wear?”

The scene is from “The Heat’s On,” a patriotic 1943 musical.
Scott is performing a rah-rah number called “The Caissons Go Rolling
Along.” In conceptualizing the scene, the director intended to dress
the women in what Hollywood assumed all black women would wear: dirty
aprons.

Scott wasn’t having it, as she recounted in her journal. Her
contract always included final script and wardrobe approval, ensuring
she’d never play or look the fool. She told the choreographer she
wanted that protection extended to the extras who shared her stage.

“What do you care?” said the choreographer. “You’re
beautifully dressed.”

“The next thing I knew,” wrote Scott in her journal, “we were
screaming at each other and all work had stopped. … I insisted that
no scene in which I was involved would display Black women wearing
dirty aprons to send their men to die for their country.”

Neither side relented, so Scott went on strike. For three days, the
studio begged and pleaded for her to return to set. But Scott would
not be moved. The more the clock ticked, the more money it cost, a
fact of which Scott was well aware. Finally, the studio caved to
Scott’s demands, and the women appear in the film wearing
particularly fetching floral dresses.

Though she won the battle, Columbia Pictures was far from conceding
the war. In the minds of producers who were used to dictating to
African-Americans — particularly to African-American women —
Scott’s public victory was more than they could stand. In the next
two years, she was given small parts in two more second-rate movies.
After that, she was finished with motion pictures.
“I had antagonized the head of Columbia Pictures,” wrote Scott in
her journal. “In short, committed suicide!”

She packed her bags and headed back east — where love was about to
sweep her off her feet.

Scott was once again wowing crowds at Cafe Society, when she caught
the eye of a young politician.  Josephson wrote in his autobiography
that Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., soon to become New York’s first
African-American congressman, pulled Josephson aside, and asked for an
introduction.

“Are you really interested in Hazel,” said Josephson, who
considered Scott a daughter, “or are you just screwing around?”

Powell assured him of his sincerity, Josephson made the introduction,
and their romance caught fire — despite the fact that Powell had
been married to nightclub singer Isabel Washington since 1933. For the
next year, Scott and Powell pursued their love with reckless abandon,
damned be the consequences. In 1945, he married Scott 11 short days
after his divorce was finalized.

Her career in Hollywood dead, Scott started touring, winning rave
reviews at concerts across the country and fighting discrimination
throughout. In November 1948, the _Washington Post_ reported that she
refused to play a sold-out show at the University of Texas because the
audience was segregated, despite the anti-Jim Crow clause in her
contract, which allowed her to cancel the booking without forfeiting
her pay. And in February 1949, she sued a restaurant in the tiny town
of Pasco, Washington, after she and a companion were refused service
because, as the proprietor put it, “We don’t serve coloreds.”
Scott won $250 in the suit, and donated the proceeds to the NAACP.

Scott was making around $75,000 a year during this time, according to
_Life_ magazine — making her one of the most successful musicians in
the country, black or white. After five years’ continued success,
Hollywood could ignore her no longer. In 1950, she came to break the
color barrier on the small screen.

Scott sits at the keys of a grand piano in an elegant white gown. With
a backdrop of Manhattan behind her, she looks like the urban empress
she had become.

“Hello,” she coos, “I’m Hazel Scott.”

Broadcast on the DuMont Network, _The Hazel Scott Show _was the first
television program to have an African-American woman as its solo host.
Three nights a week, Scott played her signature mix of boogie-woogie,
classics, and jazz standards in living rooms across America. It was a
landmark moment. As a passionate civil and women’s rights activist,
the show symbolized a triumphant accomplishment. As a career musician,
her program took her to professional heights known by few, assuring
her place in the pantheon of America’s greatest performers. To be
sure, Scott had arrived at the success she had sought since playing
that first simple tune in Trinidad as a three-year-old.

And then, just like that, it all came tumbling down. “Red
Channels.” HUAC. Another star tainted by a whiff of Communism.

When she stood in front of HUAC, it only made sense to speak truth to
power, to stand up for what she believed in. She believed herself the
embodiment of the American dream, and she spoke in its defense. In an
unwavering voice she told the committee, “the entertainment
profession has done its part for America, in war and peace, and it
must not be dragged through the mud of hysterical name-calling at a
moment when we need to enrich and project the American way of life to
the world. There is no better, more effective, more easily understood
medium for telling and selling the American way of life than our
entertainers, creative artists, and performers, for they are the real
voice of America.”

But they did not hear her, did not believe her. And she in turn
underestimated the power of fear, never having bent to it herself.

One week after her testimony, DuMont canceled _The Hazel Scott Show_.
Concert appearances became few and far between. Even nightclub gigs
were hard to come by.

Exhausted and unraveled, Scott went to Paris on what was to be a
three-week vacation. Her sojourn extended to three years. To her,
Paris became “the magic of looking up the Champs-Élysées from the
Place de la Concorde and being warmed by the merry madness of the
lights,” she wrote in _Ebony_. It was also “a much needed rest,
not from work, but from racial tension.”

She played across Europe and in North Africa and the Middle East.
Crowds still loved her, still swooned over her swinging classics. But
it was not the same. Her spotlight had dimmed, and would never again
shine on her the way it had in her halcyon days.

Eventually, Scott returned to America and slipped further into
obscurity. In 1981 she passed away at 61 from cancer. Her albums are
hard to come by now and her name never appears where it should, beside
Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, and others who we
think of when we think of jazz. But for a while, she led them all,
until a country twisted by fear pushed her past the point from which
even she, the force of nature that she was, could return.

* 1940s
[[link removed]]
* Jazz
[[link removed]]
* Popular Front
[[link removed]]
* Harlem
[[link removed]]
* HUAC
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit portside.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 



########################################################################

[link removed]

To unsubscribe from the xxxxxx list, click the following link:
[link removed]