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Contents on this page were published in the October/November, 1994 edition of the Washington Free Press.
WFP, 1463 E. Republican #178, Seattle, WA -USA, 98112. -- WAfreepress@gmail.com
Copyright © 1994 WFP Collective, Inc.
REGIONAL WRITERS
IN REVIEW
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The Roots of Jazz in Seattle by Paul de Barros photographs by Eduardo Calder—n Sasquatch Books, 1993 238 pages. $22.95 |
Jackson Street After Hours began as an oral history project, and de Barros, along with a team of volunteer interviewers and transcribers, conducted over a hundred interviews. The book sparkles with first person recollections, like those of Major Pigford, a huge trombone player who played in all of Seattle's major black swing bands in the 1940s. Pigford recalls the night a drunk patron at the 102 Cherry Club asked the band to play Roy Acuff's country and western song "Wreck on the Highway." Their experimental bebop alto saxophonist Roscoe Weathers tried to talk the man into a Charlie Parker tune. But Pigford told the rest of the band, "'I know the words to one or two choruses of that thing. We can fake it.' So we faked it and this guy took this whole paper bag and threw it in the kitty. It had eighteen hundred dollars in it. So I told Roscoe, 'You wanted to play Charlie Parker. Hey, man, Roy Acuff gets you the money.'"
Soon into the six year project, however, de Barros, music critic, co-founder of Earshot Jazz and current program director for the Northwest Folklife Festival, decided that the rich memories of the musicians needed to be tied to a detailed social and musical history. De Barros has accomplished just that, producing a jazz tale that mirrors a half century of Seattle life and a history that swings. Jackson Street After Hours is a celebration of the scores of black musicians who were forgotten and have felt "robbed of their own legacy." In this book it is the white musicians who have to be identified by race.
The Jackson street gin-and-jazz scene had an uneasy but symbiotic relationship with Seattle's black middle class: "For while young black musicians may have learned to jam all night in 'hot' swing bands on Jackson Street, it was within the secure and hopeful boundaries of East Madison, with its church socials and concert band picnics, that many of them acquired the technical skills-not to say aspirations-that it took to become quality players." A great teacher of those technical skills was the saxophonist Frank Waldron who published his method book Syncopated Classic in 1924, and whose students, through the decades, included Buddy Catlett, Jabo Ward and Quincy Jones.
De Barros recounts how "at every successive stage of jazz history, most major exponents of each new style found their way to the Northwest." And for some, Seattle became a respite from touring. Stride piano player Oscar Holden came to town with Jelly Roll Morton, and stayed, becoming the "patriarch of early Seattle jazz." Saxophonist Floyd Standifer described the Seattle jazz scene as "one of the loveliest incubators you'll ever run into. Seattle always was a place to get it together, or to come off the road and reassess yourself."
Ray Charles came in 1948, seventeen years old and searching out his musical styles in clubs throughout town. He began his life-long friendship with Quincy Jones. Jones, two years younger, still attending high school and hungry to understand how to write jazz songs, remembers it as an epiphany: "So Ray hit a B-flat-seventh in root position and a C-seventh, which is a real Dizzy Gillespie kind of sound.... When I saw that, it was like that whole world just opened up. Everything from then on made sense."
In 1949 Washington state legalized hard liquor by the drink and the city of Seattle moved with the support of hotel and restaurant owners and the Teamsters to force the illegal and competitive Jackson Street "bottle clubs" out of business. "Musicians black and white began to filter together," Floyd Standifer said, "There became this great interchange. People began to spread out-and rightly so, because that other scene was built on something that was socially improper and intolerable."
Seattle jazz had lost its geographic center, an absence felt especially by black musicians whose union merged with the formerly segregated white union in 1958. But the jazz scene remained strong until the flood of rock 'n' roll nearly drowned it completely in the 1960s.
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