QUEENS CHRONICLE, Thursday, June 23, 2022 Page 4
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Queens Jazz Trail: walk back in time From Armstrong to Williams, Queens really did have all that jazz by Michael Gannon Senior News Editor Ragtime composer Scott Joplin died penniless in 1917 and was buried in an unmarked grave at St. Michael’s Cemetery; it would not be until the movie “The Sting” came out in 1973 that he achieved acclaim. Contrast him with Jimmy Heath, the saxophonist and National Endowment of the Arts Jazz Master who played with all the greats from the 1940s until his death in 2020 — the city named a street corner in Corona in his honor back in May, continuing an unbroken connection between the borough and the first truly American music genre. For several years, Flushing Town Hall conducted guided tours of the historic neighborhoods, homes and concert venues, complete with a colorful map created in 1998. Clyde Bullard, a bass player who has performed in more than 50 countries and venues that include the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, and the Luciano Pavarotti concert in Central Park, led the tours. He also is producer in residence at Flushing Town Hall, and co-founded the Queens Jazz Orchestra, which Heath conducted, in 2008. Bullard said the century-old link was no accident, starting in 1920 with Clarence Williams, a pianist and producer who like many jazz artists, made his name in New Orleans. “I think Queens has always been a diverse borough,” Bullard said in an interview last week. “[Williams] is the one I would say is really credited with starting the exodus of musicians coming up here.” It all started, he said, with a section of The Big Easy once known as Storyville. “Storyville was a red-light district in New Orleans, a 16-, 17-square block area with a lot of brothels, and a lot of great jazz musicians played in Storyville. Storyville was closed in 1917. It was shut down. And so people who were conditioned to working all the time had to find work. Many of them went to Chicago. Some came to New York. And those brought the influx of musicians east where we are now. “That’s why we have the Louis Armstrongs. Many say Louis Armstrong came here because he had known Clarence Williams. Clarence Williams told him what a hip place it was. Also, it gave a musician a feeling of still being in a rural place, and in Addisleigh Park in St. Albans, it’s still kind of rural. And yet, being in Queens, you could still go across the Triborough Bridge and you could be in Manhattan where the jazz scene was burgeoning very quickly. And so the Borough of Queens is then the place that has more jazz icons living here than anyone else in the entire world.” A look at the map is impressive, with illustrations of the great musicians, singers, band leaders and other contributors; renderings of their homes, many looking the same today as they did then, are depicted with
Fans of jazz used to be able to spend an entire day if they wanted to visit the homes and hear FILE IMAGE the stories of the legends of jazz who once made Queens their home. their addresses. Bullard can run off the names with equal amounts of speed and reverence: Count Basie; Heath and his neighbor Clark Terry; Milt Hinton; Charlie Mingus; Fats Waller; Mercer Ellington; Lena Horne; Billie Holliday; brothers and neighbors Illinois and Russell Jacquet; John Coltrane; Percy Heath; Roy Eldrigde; James P. Johnson — “He created the Charleston,” Bullard said — Louis Armstrong; Dizzy Gillespie; Ben Webster, Jimmy Rushing. “Tony Bennett was born in Flushing,” Bullard said, in 1926. “Bix Beiderbecke died in Sunnyside.” Beiderbecke, a coronet player and pianist, died at age 28 in 1931. Alcoholism is the stated cause, but Bullard believes that may have come from underlying pressures that had their roots back in places like Storyville. “He was always frustrated because his parents, especially his father, wanted him to do something more respectable than being a jazz musician,” Bullard said. “Because of what happened in Storyville, for one reason.” Jazz had been associated with brothels, prostitution and drinking. “The so-called morally bad things,” he said. “That’s why a lot of jazz musicians, if you notice, when they performed they would wear suits and ties, jacket and tie. They wanted to bring respectability to the music.” A glance at the Flushing Town Hall map shows Waller in a coat, tie and bowler hat. Basie and Armstrong are depicted in tuxedos. Benny Goodman has removed the jacket from his three-piece suit. “There was a time in America when if you
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Jazz History
went to Juilliard or other colleges to study classical music and got caught practicing jazz in one of the practice rooms you would be reprimanded and told, ‘Listen, this is a legitimate school with legitimate music.’” Further offenses could get one expelled. “That was the way it was at one time,” he said. “And now look at how it has transmogrified. So many institutions across America now feature accredited jazz courses in things like composition and improvisation. It took people like Clark Terry, like Jimmy Heath, Barry Harris, Armstrong. These are the people who championed the music, who based their lives upon it. These are the people who eventually made the world see that jazz is legitimate music.” Then came the British invasion. “They made America know about its musical heritage that was being overlooked. One of the Beatles’ earliest hits, ‘Roll Over Beethoven’? A Chuck Berry tune. ‘Twist and Shout?’ The Isley Brothers. The Rolling Stones named their band after a Muddy Waters song. People asked them, ‘Where do you get this great music?’ ‘From your Negro musicians in the South.’” Bullard said House Resolution 57 in December 1987, introduced by the late U.S. Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich), acknowledged jazz as America’s indigenous music, and that it should be honored and preserved. Bullard pointed out that many lauded jazz artists are steeped in classical training. “Wynton Marsalis has Grammys on trumpet for classical music as well as jazz,” he said. Then there is Ron Carter, a bassist and cellist who started out 60 years ago pursuing a career with an orchestra. “But back then, with Jim Crow, they
weren’t hiring a lot of people of color,” Bullard said. “People told him, ‘While you wait, you’ve got a lot of chops. Why don’t you play jazz and make some money? If you get an offer, you can transition.’ Ron Carter is now one of the most recorded artists in history.” Bullard presided over The Queens Jazz Trail tour for about seven years until it ended more than a decade ago. “In that time, we were given Best Jazz Tour in New York City by the Village Voice,” he said. “We also won the Silver Otter, which came out of Europe.” For a while they had partnership with NYC & Co., which works in fields such as tourism, marketing and promotion. “People would be on vacation from London or Germany or Spain,” Bullard said. “They would be asked if they knew about the Queens Jazz Tour.” It was a combination of a bus ride and a walking tour. “They would drive by the home of Fats Waller — there’s a plaque in front showing it to be a landmark. In Addisleigh Park they’d drive past the homes of Mercer Ellington, Count Basie. The old home of Lena Horne.” A DVD accompanied the bus ride portion of the trip. Most of the homes were owned by others at that point, so there was no visiting. Except for one. “The one person who would let us in was [bassist] Milt Hinton. They called him ‘The Judge.’” Hinton and his wife, Mona, welcomed visitors with The Judge regaling audiences with his stories, and usually giving each visitor a pin or some other trinket that he had collected over decades in the business. While the tour ended about 13 years ago by Bullard’s estimate, Queens’ ties to jazz have not. On June 17, Flushing Town hall hosted a tribute to Phil Schaap, a Grammy-winning broadcaster, record producer and jazz historian from Hollis who hosted a longtime radio show dedicated to Charlie “Bird” Parker. “He had an encyclopedic knowledge of jazz,” Bullard said. And the ties to Joplin, Beiderbecke and Clarence Williams remain unbroken.
If Louis Armstrong was Queens’ only legacy from jazz music, it would have been enough. But Satchmo was merely one of scores of artists who called the borough home. PHOTO BY JACK BRADLEY / FILE
