Here’s a compilation edition of our bi-weekly jazz trivia show Jazzology, all episodes available on www.savagecontent.com:

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Bill Brower

Notes from a keen observer and scene maker

INTERVIEW BY WILLARD JENKINS

For the past forty-plus years jazz historian Bill Brower, a native of Toledo, Ohio, has been a true D.C. jazz community renaissance man. He has been a jazz journalist-critic, occasional broadcaster, an event technical producer, and a concert, festivals, and jazz event producer. We interviewed
Bill one afternoon in his Northeast D.C. kitchen, a few short steps from a room packed with records, CDs, and books on jazz and various sundry subjects.

When did you arrive in D.C. and what brought you here?

Bill Brower: I came here in the summer of 1971 after a series of coincidences that involved Tom Porter, then Dean of the Antioch Putney Graduate School of Education based in D.C. I graduated from Antioch [College] in the spring of 1971. A friend of mine from the Antioch days, Archie Hunter, came through that spring and said, “Why don’t we go to Brooklyn and hang out at the African festival?” I was on my way to Brooklyn, Archie’s car broke down, and I decided to go to D.C. and hang out with Tom; I’d known him since I was a sophomore at Antioch.

Tom quipped, “You’re in Dayton, the New York Times comes a day late, and there’s no music. You need to bring your butt to D.C.” Long story short, when my then-wife came back from California I said, “Hey, we’re moving to D.C.”

What was your experience on the jazz scene in D.C. in your earliest days here?

My first real D.C. job was as a community orga- nizer and that actually led to one of my earliest jazz experiences. I was working for the Washing- ton Urban League coordinating a group called Government Employees United Against Racial Discrimination that . . . had various anti-discrimi- nation task forces within federal agencies. One of them was the Black Deputy U.S. Marshal’s organi- zation, and Wallace Roney, Sr. was their represen- tative. We’d have these weekly meetings to discuss basic strategies and mutual interests—some were legalistic, some were direct action.

Wallace took me home one evening and, when he came up to my apartment, saw my living room full of records. He said, “I’ve got a son who’s involved in jazz.” That’s when [trumpeter] Wallace Roney, Jr. was at Duke Ellington School for the

Arts. And because Senior traveled a lot, he needed someone to work with Wallace Jr. Wallace’s early band had Clarence Seay on bass, Marshall Keys on sax, Geri Allen on piano, and Eric Allen was playing drums….Some of them were in col- lege. . . . Chuck Royal (trombone) and Kevin Berthaud (guitar) were in that band. [Wallace] had a lot of young, really good players. That’s why [Wallace Sr.] needed me, because Wallace Jr. was at Duke Ellington; Marshall is a little bit older, he might have been in college. It was some high schoolers and some college-aged folks. They were playing [places] like the Pigfoot, Harold’s Rogue and Jar, GW’s student pub, venues that sold alco- hol—that’s where Wallace was getting gigs. So my job was to be the adult, to collect the money, watch the band. Kind of chaperone-manager.

What was the scene here like overall when you first got to D.C.?

I started collecting records when I was in junior high school and continued in college. When I got to D.C. I actually stayed with Tom Porter and he intro- duced me to a bunch of other collectors like Bob Daughtry, and there was a legendary cat named Thomas Paul, who worked for what became Ols- son’s Books & Records. The first place I remember was a record store up Connecticut Avenue south of the Washington Hilton Hotel and there were two partners, Bob Bialick and John Olsson.

At one point Olsson split off. Thomas Paul was like the jazz guy at Olsson’s. I fell into a group of cats that collected records, like Art Cromwell. Thomas Paul was our connection, we were like record junkies, if I can draw that analogy and not seem too pejorative. This was when Olsson’s was across from what is now a Sun Trust Bank at Dupont Circle, in the Dupont Circle building. Later on it became Olsson’s Books & Records. Richard Goines was also a jazz buyer for Olsson’s. Eventu- ally I went to work for Olsson’s in 1982, at Nine- teenth and L, and I had a helluva jazz section. I was the jazz buyer there and Richard was the jazz buyer at the Georgetown store. I did that maybe three or so years, until just after the first Capital City Jazz Festival in 1985.

Did that record store work open doors for you in the D.C. jazz community?

Before I started working in retail I was already writing [about jazz]. I started writing around 1974, with the Washington Post as a stringer. That didn’t last long so I had to decide whether I was still going

Bill Brower has been active in the local jazz scene since the 1970s and, among other activities, has been involved as writer or producer of many jazz concerts, shows, and festivals. In 2008 he worked with Dr. Billy Taylor to develop a series of programs based on Washington jazz history for the Kennedy Center’s Jazz in D.C., and he has worked with Congressman John Conyers, Jr. since 1985 to produce the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation Annual Legislative Conference
Jazz Issue Forum and Concert. Courtesy, Bill Brower.

to write or not. I had a jazz column for the Afro American that went on for years. I started a column for the Journal newspapers, all jazz-oriented. Then I had a jazz column for the Washington Informer, one of the two African American newspapers in the city at the time. I was also the Washington cor- respondent for Down Beat.

What aspect of jazz were you writing about for these local publications?

It was a combination of things—who’s coming to town, almost like jazz notes. I might write a fea- ture on somebody, it might be record-oriented, I might do a bunch of short record reviews; it was a variety of things, whatever I wanted to do.

Where was the jazz being performed in D.C. at that time?

You had some venues on Rhode Island Avenue, like Mr. Why’s, Moore’s Love and Peace, the Pig- foot, Blues Alley in Georgetown, The Etcetera Club on M Street, the One Step Down, the Top of

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Blues Alley is packed for a performance by saxophonist Byron Morris and Unity in November 2000. The popular club in Georgetown has been showcasing local and national acts since 1965. Photo © Michael Wilderman/jazzvisionsphotos.com.

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the Foolery, Harold’s Rogue and Jar on N Street south of Dupont Circle.

Were these clubs that would feature mainly D.C.-resident musicians?

On the Rhode Island Avenue side, in Northeast where most of the black clubs were, it was local musicians. Wallace played there. Davey Yarbor- ough, tenor saxophonist, now the head of the jazz program at Ellington, and his wife, the singer Esther Williams, were at Moore’s Love and Peace a lot—a lot of local cats played those places. Bill Har- ris’s place, the Pigfoot, would occasionally have a national talent like Betty Carter or someone from his years in the music that he had a relationship with, but also a lot of the local cats. I remember a wonderful afternoon with the great poet Sterling Brown accompanied by blues pianist Sunnyland Slim at the Pigfoot. I think it was a fundraiser for WPFW. Top of the Foolery played mostly resident musicians; Marshall Hawkins and Bernard Sweet- ney played a lot, for example. One time Andrew White, the saxophonist and John Coltrane anthol- ogist, played 6 p.m. to 6 a.m., and Steve Novosel played his bass the whole time. Later Andrew released every note that was played, twelve albums’ worth on his label, Andrew’s Music. The Top of the Foolery was near George Washington

University, on Twenty-third Street on the north side of Pennsylvania Avenue.

What was the occasion for Andrew to play that marathon?

Because that was an Andrew White production [laughs]: “I’m gonna play twelve hours.” That was the gig. He produced all of that, you know like his book [Everybody Loves the Sugar—The Book, White’s 794-page autobiography] is this big [holds hands wide apart].

The Etcetera was on M Street between Con- necticut and Nineteenth Street. They were a short- lived club—maybe a couple of years—they were trying to compete with Blues Alley. I remember Sun Ra playing there. And they would also do gigs at lunchtime. They weren’t focusing on Washing- ton artists; they were bringing national or interna- tional artists.

When I first got here Blues Alley’s orientation was traditional jazz. By the time I started to write, at least by the middle to late seventies, Blues Alley was a six-night-a-week national club, which would be like Dizzy Gillespie, Ramsey Lewis, the Heath Brothers, McCoy Tyner. . . .

The One Step Down was famous for their juke- box, and on Friday and Saturday evenings they would bring in a Barry Harris or sometimes a

As part of a fundraiser for radio station WPWF, Sterling Brown reads poetry at the Pigfoot, Bill Harris’s jazz club just off Rhode Island Avenue, NE. A Washingtonian, Dunbar High School graduate, and Howard University professor for forty years, Brown influenced many “jazz poets,” including Amiri Baraka. Photo © W.A. Brower

working trio or working quartet, but often times they were bringing in soloists to work with local rhythm sections. One Step Down and Blues Alley were ongoing; I don’t remember a time until One Step Down closed when those clubs weren’t active. The Top of the Foolery was active as long as I could remember, then at some point it became a parking lot on Pennsylvania Avenue over by George Washington University, around Twen- ty-third Street.

When you arrived in D.C., who were some of the more important and impactful musicians around town?

Andrew White, Buck Hill, Ruben Brown, the pia- nist, Marshall Hawkins—those guys, those circles. Of course Charlie Byrd was still around and his club, which was on K Street, was just south of Blues Alley. Can’t forget Shirley Horn. Harold Kaufman, a psychiatrist and amateur piano player, owned Harold’s Rogue and Jar. Wallace worked there and I also remember David Murray playing there with Bobo Shaw, just after David married Ntozake Shange. I have tapes from that gig.

Betty Carter does a sound check for a performance at the Fort Dupont Summer Theatre. In the 1970s and 1980s the U.S. Park Service presented the summer-long free concerts, which featured such national and international artists as Dizzy Gillespie, Art Blakey and The Jazz Messengers, Rashaan Roland Kirk, Dexter Gordon, and Roy Ayers. Photo © W.A. Brower

Would you characterize D.C. at that time as having an active jazz scene?

Oh yeah, definitely for the size of D.C. There was jazz a lot of other places; there was an Ed Mur- phy’s Supper Club over there by the Howard Uni- versity Hospital who developed a hotel and he had a club that I remember Sun Ra playing. Then later you had Woodies Hilltop Lounge almost across from Howard University on Georgia Avenue and Euclid Street. He would bring in singles like [Phil- adelphia saxophonist] Bootsie Barnes, different soloists who would pick up a rhythm section here. The great drummer Philly Joe Jones would sit in at Woody’s, after hours, after he made a gig at, say,

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the One Step, playing drums and piano. There are a bunch of places that popped up, but the real con- stant has been Blues Alley. As long as the greats of the bebop and hard bop generations of musicians were still touring—like Max Roach, Diz, Sarah Vaughan, the Heaths and Nancy Wilson—that echelon of artists played Blues Alley. A peg below that in terms of commercial viability would be One Step Down. Then occasionally Harold Kaufman might get in the game, then Etcetera was trying to be Blues Alley, but it didn’t last.

What was it about the D.C. jazz scene that has made documenting its history compelling for you?

I began to feel that over the years Washington’s role in the development of jazz was not sufficiently acknowledged. John Malachi, the wonderful pia- nist, was teaching at Howard University; he wrote “Opus X,” and was the piano player with Billy Eckstine, who as a youth moved to D.C. from Pittsburgh and attended Armstrong High School.

John Malachi appears at an informal program at Wolf Trap in 1981. In his youth Malachi was a pianist with the legendary Billy Eckstine Big Band and later a professor in Howard University’s Jazz Studies Program. Photo © Michael Wilderman/jazzvisionsphotos.com.

Then I understood that [Charlie Parker’s bassist] Tommy Potter was in D.C., Eckstine was here, too. If you looked at the Earl Hines band, then you looked at the Eckstine band, you’d see this D.C. element in those bands. Those cats didn’t just pop out of the air, what was going on here?

As I began to find out more about people who were taken for granted, then I started to connect more dots. And then when I started to do more things with Dr. Billy Taylor, it sharpened my knowledge and interest. Dr. Taylor had great sto- ries about D.C., like checking out Jelly Roll Mor- ton at the Jungle Inn (above where Ben’s Next is), when Malachi was the intermission pianist for Morton. Bringing attention to Washington jazz history was an important part of Dr. Taylor’s mis- sion, particularly as he could see the end of his life. Taylor was a graduate of Dunbar High School. It’s very clear to me that the program that he put together at the Kennedy Center and hired me for—Jazz in D.C.—he wanted to find ways to get people to look at Washington as an important cen- ter for jazz development.

How did your relationship with Dr. Taylor develop?

I first met him because I had an assignment from DownBeat to write about Jazz Alive [the NPR series Dr. Taylor hosted] and through that I met [series producer] Tim Owens, Wiley Rollins, and Dr. Taylor. To do that article I had to research his career and all the things he was involved with. Through the years, as I evolved more from being a journalist into concert production, I would encounter [Billy] at festivals and different projects I’d be working on.

What was the nature of this Jazz in D.C. production?

I curated eight concerts, November 21–29, 2008, for the Millennium Stage that were all them- ed. . . . Some years earlier, 651, an arts-presenting organization based in Brooklyn, New York, orga- nized a project called Lost Jazz Shrines, in which presenters in different cities around the country were to do programs about historic jazz venues. Nathea Lee, then director of the U Street Theatre Foundation, hired me to write the essay for the Lost Jazz Shrines booklet about Washington ven- ues. In the process I also developed a menu of ideas for public programs related to D.C. “jazz shrines.” Initially, the only program that came of that was a concert of Ellington’s sacred music at

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Dr. Billy Taylor interviews trumpeter Terence Blanchard for his radio show, Jazz at the Kennedy Center, one of many educational initiatives by Taylor while he was Artistic Director of Jazz at the Kennedy Center. Brower worked with Taylor on a series of programs for Jazz in D.C. Photo by Jeffrey Kliman, courtesy, Kennedy Center.

the National Cathedral on Ellington’s one hun- dredth birthday. I went back to that menu for ideas when curating Jazz in D.C.

What were the eight concerts you produced for Jazz in D.C.?

They were themed around venues. I did one around the Howard Theatre, one on Abarts and the Hollywood, Bohemian Caverns, stuff around Seventh Street—Little Harlem and the Off- beat. . . . I’d give a brief talk about the venue and show some images that I’d collected and then there would be a performance. We did one devoted to Dr. Taylor’s big band music, the only one that wasn’t themed around a venue. We put together a band led by Charlie Young, the saxophonist and conductor, who pulled a bunch of music charts at the Library of Congress. Charlie went through it and was able to reconstruct charts; we also got Afro Blue involved. That was quite a concert! Bobby Felder (trombonist, arranger, composer and educator) helped me a lot with that series. We did one featuring the music Charlie Byrd did at the Showboat Lounge.

Billy did a big concert around James Reese Europe. There might have been a couple of con- certs at the Eisenhower Theater that were part of it, but we did these eight nights on the Kennedy Cen- ter’s Millenium Stage during Thanksgiving week. That was a real opportunity to get paid to dig into [D.C. jazz history] and do some research and come up with the concepts for those concerts.

Since your earliest days observing the jazz scene here, what are some of the elements you’ve witnessed that have negatively impacted jazz in D.C.?

That’s just business cycles more than anything. I always make a distinction between the culture and the business. Businesses go up and down for a variety of reasons and that’s not in and of itself a way to judge whether jazz is dead or alive. I think the reason that One Step Down came to an end was because the [owner, Joe Cohen, and manager, Ann Mabuchi] got old. They were hav- ing health issues and there were development options coming in there, so people make [busi- ness] decisions.

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So it’s your sense that those kinds of things run in cycles as opposed to that old “jazz is dead” canard?

I get sick of that discussion; I think it’s shortsighted. Dig a little deeper, think a little bit deeper about what may be happening. It might be because a club is in an area that’s going through a change and the club can’t survive that change. I think it has more to do with urban development or rede- velopment than it does “is jazz up or down.” You could be a good businessperson or a bad business- person; you could be getting old or it could be a demographic change or some other kind of change that would cause that business to run a cropper.

Conversely, what have been some of the more positive developments on the D.C. jazz scene that you’ve observed?

The fact that the music has moved to other plat- forms than clubs. I’d say that right now, for a com- munity like ours, we have an embarrassment of riches. We have the Friday night jazz scene at Westminster Church, but you also had the Smith- sonian Natural History with a Friday night jazz scene kind of in the same time period, and other churches trying to replicate that. Just the fact that jazz is not limited to the club platform has been a real important development.

Obviously WPFW is very important. The loss of WDCU had nothing to do with the music, it had to do with the state [the University of the District of Columbia] was in. I think at the point where we had two radio stations providing on-air jazz pro- gramming was really important. I can think of a whole set of individuals who were very knowl- edgeable—lay scholars if you will—aficionados who used radio as a platform to share their knowl- edge, their collections with the community, that was very important.

What the Kennedy Center has done for jazz, what Strathmore has done to a lesser degree, Cla- rice Smith Center at the University of Maryland, George Mason University—all that is relatively new stuff. Library of Congress, Smithsonian—the institutional engagement is providing more plat- forms for the music.

You’re not one who reacts negatively to the whole notion of jazz in the institutions and the evolution of jazz to the concert stage?

Not at all; I think jazz is a big house and it’s import- ant that there is something happening in every

room, so to speak. I would hate for musicians to feel dependent or feel like they have to be funded to do what they do. I think it is a dynamic culture, basically a vernacular culture that has moved into more academic realms. I think that’s why jazz is healthy, vibrant, and dynamic; that’s what I love about it. I like joints and I like concerts and I think they all have a place, they all fit and that’s what’s good about the situation now. I wish that the musicians at the club level could be compensated better, but then that sort of self-selects. Cats will play the clubs for their own agendas until they say, “I can’t do that anymore.”

Talk about your work on the Capital City Jazz Festival.

The seeds of that lie with A. B. and Karen Spell- man, as well as with WPFW. The center of [Capital City Jazz Festival] was Karen Spellman. I had known Karen through SNCC [Student Non- violent Coordinating Committee] connections. I got to know A. B. Spellman through [poet] Gaston Neal. She did a concert as a fundraiser for WPFW. And how I got involved was, the Roneys [Wallace Jr. and saxman Antoine] were on the concert. It was the McLeans—Jackie and Rene—the Marsalis brothers, and the Roneys.

I did my first Antioch College co-op here in 1966. Through coincidence I got off the bus one day on Fourteenth Street and I saw this guy in a storefront fixing it up, so I went in there, and it was Gaston Neal and that’s how I met him. He was getting ready to open up the New School for Afro- American Thought. He was part of the black poetry movement with Larry Neal, Marvin X, Amiri Baraka. . . . At that point what Baraka was to New- ark, Gaston was to D.C. Gaston got sidetracked because of some personal things and never got his work out there in publication . . . but at that time he was definitely a cultural visionary and a lot of music was coming through that New School for Afro-American Thought. And that first weekend when it opened, A. B. Spellman was a part of it and that’s how I came to know him. Gaston was later a founder of the Listening Group, an organi- zation of black men who started to gather in the early 1980s to meet, eat, and discuss jazz once a month. It still exists.

Then later A. B. and Karen were in Atlanta and they got married and he came to Washington with the NEA. A. B. had attended Howard with Baraka and had authored the now-classic Four Lives in the Bebop Business. A. B. used to shop at

Bill Brower, Karen Spellman, Forrest Whitaker, and Congressman John Conyers, Jr. attend the Washington premier of Bird during the 1988 Capital City Jazz Festival. Whitaker portrayed saxophonist Charlie Parker in Clint Eastwood’s biographical movie about the great modern jazz innovator. Photo © Michael Wilderman/jazzvisionsphotos.com.

Olsson’s. He would come in once a month and say, “Bill, what should I buy?” One time he came in and said, “We’re thinking about doing a festi- val, we believe that it’s important that Washing- ton have a festival.”

The Kool Jazz Festival had come to the Ken- nedy Center in ’77 or ’78, and they actually used the whole Kennedy Center. I was like an intern, it wasn’t a paid position, and I worked on that. Part of what A. B. was referring to was “this city is still ripe for a festival, there’s a new Washington Con- vention Center with a subway stop right there, I can’t do it I’m at the NEA, Karen is going to take the lead, and I want you to get with her to do this festival.” Because of the relationship Karen had with WPFW around that concert she produced for them as a fundraiser, they were in the mix, so Bob Tyner, who was then the program director, was involved. Jeff Anthony was at the NEA working in the Music Program specifically around jazz but he resigned at some point after we’d done [Capital City Jazz Festival] a couple of years and he became an important part of that.

The Cap City team, led by Karen, later went on from the Capital City Jazz Festival to do a lot of things in D.C. That same core of people did the

Black Family Reunion, organized by the National Council of Negro Women led by Dorothy Height, and also started the Adams Morgan Day Festival, on the production side. One of the board members of the Capital City Jazz Festival was Ralph Rinzler, who was like an external affairs guy for the Smith- sonian. Ralph was a mandolin player and the orig- inator of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. That’s how we wound up doing events at the Smithso- nian as part of the Capital City Jazz Festival. Those events were inspired by House Concurrent Reso- lution 57. The first festival we did, we honored Bill Harris, Roy Haynes, and Benny Carter, and we presented Marlon Jordan and the American Jazz Orchestra under Loren Schoenberg’s direction and they played a work of Benny’s in the National Museum of American Music Great Hall.

The first two Cap City Jazz Festivals were at the old D.C. Convention Center. We actually did a full festival three years—two at the Convention Center, with a sidecar at Duke Ellington High School the second year. And then the third year, 1988, we did a weekend at Howard University, and we did a week of stuff at the Old Post Office Pavilion—that was lunchtime stuff—and then the next weekend we did at George Washington

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Max Roach and M’Boom take the stage during the first Capital City Jazz Festival in 1985. M’Boom was an all-percussion ensemble in which all members could play any of the tempered and untempered instruments featured in concerts. Photo © Michael Wilderman/jazzvisionsphotos.com.

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University. That was a festival where we basically got in so much debt that we never mounted another full festival of that type. But we did do another event at the Smithsonian in 1989. That was the only thing that we did in ’89. Roger Ken- nedy made that second Smithsonian event hap- pen. We honored Ella Fitzgerald and Milt Hinton. Keter Betts, also a Cap City board member, was most important in that because he was the con- nection to Ella and The Judge (Milt Hinton).

The first festival (1985) that we did we opened up with Miles Davis and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band at the Convention Center. It was around Miles’s birthday and we gave him a big cake; he played so long that people got tired. We wheeled out the cake and Miles cut it and gave it out to the audience. We did a lot of great shows. We did M’Boom and the World Saxophone Quartet, Little Jimmy Scott with Milt Jackson, Betty Carter, Tito Puente and Paquito D’Rivera and we had a Latin jam session with local Latin cats. . . . We had Abdullah Ibrahim and Hugh Masekela. We had Miles’s paintings, we did a Chuck Stewart photog- raphy exhibit, we had panel discussions. . . . Par- ticularly when we first started we didn’t have a lot for artist fees, so I added a lot of stuff like the jazz marketplace, panel discussions, films.

In 1988, we did “Love Supreme,” a tribute to John Coltrane with Gary Thomas, Joe Ford, Hamiet Bluiett, Andrew White, Dave Liebman, a slew of saxophone players. . . . We did “Homecookin’ Revisited,” with the Kenny Burrell Jazz Guitar Band and the Hank Crawford/Jimmy McGriff Quartet. For “Homecookin’,” we passed out copies of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” to the audience but nobody sang it; McGriff always ended his concerts with that song. I was giving away copies of “Lift Every Voice” for years after that. During the week we did D.C. resident artists at lunchtime at the Old Post Office Pavilion. The last weekend of the festi- val we did “The Composer’s Art: Contemporary Voices” with Geri Allen, Henry Threadgill, and Henry Butler. . . . The crazy thing is that before we even did the first Friday night concert at Crampton Auditorium, we were at the bank getting a loan to be able to pay the musicians.

That Sunday we all met at Karen’s house because we knew we had to re-fashion the festival in order for it to get done. That was probably one of the most emotional times I’ve had because that year, 1988, Karen was working on the Democratic National Convention and I was really running everything. I did production, a lot of the program- ming, publicity stuff, but Karen was the interface

with the money and she was better able to negoti- ate a lot of things.

Keter Betts, the great bassist who had moved to D.C., really helped us the year we honored Ella Fitzgerald and Milt Hinton. He had played with her for many years. We had to make a lot of diffi- cult choices. . . . Given the amount of resources that we had, what we were trying to do was prob- ably too ambitious and probably should have been more conservative in our programming. I don’t regret one moment, though.

We did three full festivals and another year we only did the Smithsonian piece; I think that was the year we did the piece with Milt Hinton and Ella. Because we had debt that we had to pay off we would do sessions like Monday nights at Takoma Station and Trumpets for a while. And we did concerts at people’s houses; if they had a grand piano we’d say, “OK, we’ll get Henry Butler.” We’d have him come and play and we’d charge $75 per person, with champagne and cake for an intimate evening.

As a legal entity we went on for a few years after we stopped putting on big things, mostly as a way to try to pay down the debt. People had put up their properties to secure the bank loan. There are people, including me, that were emotionally crushed by the fact that what we were unable to pay for what we proposed to put on the stage. But there were people who said, “We’ll support you.” Reflecting on that still makes me cry.

How did that festival work evolve into your concert and festivals production work?

I started working as a stagehand well before this. I used to write for the Unicorn Times late seventies to early eighties, which was like the City Paper except it came out once a month. Richard Harrington, later the Washington Post “pop” music maven, was the editor. He called me one day and said, “I want you to go down to the corner of Seventh and E; there are two guys there who are doing some interesting stuff.” I was writing mostly about the avant-garde for the Unicorn Times. When I was writing for the Journal or the Afro American, I wrote more about mainstream and more about local activities and record reviews. I got access to any club I wanted and I was inundated with music. I wrote for JazzTimes, I wrote for Musician, a bunch of different publications.

Anyway, he sent me down to this place, which had been like a lunchtime spot. There were two

people there, Bill Warrell, who would later estab- lish the arts-presenting non-profit District Curators, and a guy named Earl Bateman. Bill Warrell wanted to start a loft, which was what D.C. Space essen- tially was. Bateman wanted to do a festival in ’78.

Bateman wanted to do two nights of “avant garde” music, both “classical” and jazz: Cecil Tay- lor, Anthony Braxton, World Saxophone Quartet, Sam Rivers, Marion Brown, John Cage, Phillip Glass, Steve Reich—kind of like a mix-and-match thing. I never wrote the article for the Unicorn Times because Bateman hired me to be the publi- cist for these two nights of music. He said he’d pay me $ 1,000 and 10 percent of all the recording and video taping that would result. So I signed on for that. I got one check for $100, which bounced. The concert was at Constitution Hall and collapsed the first night.

Marion Brown opened, after which Bateman came out and said, “We have technical difficul- ties.” The technical difficulty was there wasn’t enough money in the box office to pay the next artist, so that delay went on for forty-five minutes or so. Then Bateman came out and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, the concert is over.” And it was a cold, icy rainy night, a chill-to-the-bone night. They put everybody out of Constitution Hall.

D.C. Space wasn’t quite ready as a performance space, but that night Bill opened it anyway. Out of that came his relationship with Julius Hemphill, Oliver Lake, and David Murray. They said, “We’re in D.C., we might as well play somewhere,” so that night is actually when D.C. Space opened. But I never made it over there.

There was a club nearby where I could catch a bus to get home, so I stopped in there to drown my sorrows. I’m sitting there and next to me is the stagehands’ union shop steward of Constitution Hall, a guy named Jerry King. First he recognized me as one of the people who did that concert the stagehands weren’t going to get paid for. I thought I was going to get $1,000 at the end of the concert and I’m sitting there trying to add this all up. We ended up spending that evening there.

Some time later a guy in my apartment build- ing, who was a stagehand at the Warner Theater, asked me if I wanted to make some money. He said come down to the Warner Theater at 10:00, they needed some extra guys for the load out. At the end of the night I got paid in cash! When the guy paid me, he looked at me and said, “Don’t I know you?” It was the same guy Jerry from that night at the Kung Fu Lounge! He said, “You wanna

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Muhal Richard Abrams familiarizes himself with the piano at D.C. Space in preparation for a solo performance. The alternative venue’s second-floor performance space was the size of a living room and modest, but well suited for its frequent solo concerts. Abrams is an NEA Jazz Master and recipient of the prestigious “genius grant” from

the MacArthur Foundation. Photo © W.A. Brower

work tomorrow? Be here at 8:00 a.m. and bring a crescent wrench.” I had always been around the- ater, but never as a stagehand. I was still writing and the two fit together great. At one point I was working at Olsson’s twenty hours a week, working as a stagehand, and freelance writing.

When I got to the Capital City Jazz Festival I already had production chops. We had been doing circuses, ballets, plays. . . . Bill Washington’s DimensionsUnlimitedandCellarDoorProduc- tions were presenting all of the major concerts in the area. Dimensions Unlimited produced all the black shows. So that’s what we did at Constitution Hall: the Whispers, Gladys Knight & the Pips, whomever. . . . Sometimes two shows a night.

Later, during the Cap City Jazz days, Quint Davis and Tom Dent, from the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and Foundation respec- tively, came to D.C. to do a workshop for people

who wanted to produce festivals. Karen Spellman wanted to get involved with them as a way to better understand the festival we had. I also approached them about working at JazzFest and nothing was available. A year later I heard from John Washington, [a friend of a friend who] was on the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Founda- tion board. He knew I wanted to work at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and that’s how I got to New Orleans. That led to twenty-three years. I learned a lot about production and New Orleans culture.

Throughout all this work in D.C. on jazz, how has the D.C. jazz audience evolved through the ensuing years?

I think the audience I first knew got older and a new one developed. Obviously a big boon has been the re-development of U Street, which went down with the King riots. It didn’t really come back until the subway was finished. When that happened a whole new U Street nightlife devel- oped and with that nightlife came a whole new generation. The resurgence of U Street meant a new audience, a young audience. There was an audience that was a part of what Blues Alley was about and Harold’s Rogue and Jar, Top of the Foolery. . . . That audience I encountered at those places was probably a little bit older than me. Now it’s forty-some years later and most people in their eighties aren’t going out to clubs; you might see them at Westminster, but they’re not going out to clubs. So with the revival of U Street as a nightlife venue, not only did the Bohemian Caverns come back, you had Twins Jazz there, but also you had other places that feature some type of jazz at some point or another, that’s when I saw a new audience.

The continuity that was broken up was the result of all of these socio-economic things that have happened, and then with the demographic infusion—the city has changed. One of the reasons I was so excited to come to D.C. was because I was fromToledo,wenttoWesternReserveAcademyin Hudson, Ohio, then went to college in Yellow Springs, Ohio, then I came to D.C., and I was lov- ing all the black culture. But then Chocolate City has changed. After the [post-MLK assassination] riots a lot of people left D.C. because they could leave and a lot of people stayed because they couldn’t leave, and a lot of areas that were central to the black community at that time were on the decline: H Street, U Street, and everything related

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to that; so those areas came back with this whole gentrification process and with that has come new audiences.

One such development in recent years has been a kind of do-it-yourself attitude as far as presenting jazz, as exemplified by Capital Bop and what writer Gio Russonello and musician Luke Stewart are doing, something of a loft scene.

The new loft scene.

Do you see any correlation between what Bill Warrell did with D.C. Space and what’s happening now with this new loft scene?

There were some other places also; there was another kind of jazz scene, almost like a Black Nationalist scene. Jimmy Gray—aka Black Fire— another important figure people overlook or for- get about, was one of those programmers who came on WPFW. Another was Eric Garrison. They were scholars in their own right, they really knew the music. Jimmy Gray had been in the record dis- tribution business, and got out to start his own label. . . . There were some other kind of loft sce- narios that featured musicians that Jimmy was working with, not so much the well-known New York cats D.C. Space presented, but musicians who were trying to and could play in that way.

I haven’t patronized Capital Bop’s events, but my attitude is, this new loft development is in a way repeating the past—cats playing for small money in environments that are less than what I think the music deserves, and I feel sort of like “been there, done that.” But it is a new generation doing their thing. More power to them.

The one thing I think continues that District Curator tradition more directly is what Transpar- ent Productions does. I think that [Transparent producer] Bobby Hill was kind of a part of what we were doing, “back in the day.” God bless Bobby Hill and his team.

One of the things I did when we had Capital City Jazz Festival, I invited Tom Porter, Bobby Hill, and a bunch of other people to do a sort of pro- gramming focus group. Once we started Cap City Jazz everybody felt like “I could do that,” because everybody has ideas about programming. And that’s when I realized that, yeah, I had great ideas about programming but what you really needed was a business sense, which I didn’t have. We made choices out of what our vision was, not how

to stabilize and grow a festival. By the time I went to work in New Orleans on the festival, that’s when I realized what I needed to learn.

I would say that Transparent Productions rep- resents more of a continuum with what District Curators was about. District Curators evolved out of D.C. Space. Bill Warrell produced a series at the Corcoran. He presented Cecil Taylor, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and Julius Hemphill’s Ralph Ellison’s Long Tongue—three nights at the Corcoran. That was the genesis of District Curators. The Corcoran series led to what we did with “Long Tongues.” Warrell went on to produce all kinds of music via District Curators.

Transparent Productions, because of the indi- vidual people involved—Bobby Hill, Thomas Stan- ley, Larry Appelbaum—all those individuals had the experience of D.C. Space, felt the void when it went off the scene, and created a vehicle to con- tinue in that spirit. What Luke and Gio are doing I don’t think has anything to do with D.C. Space. They’re a new young generation creating their own space; they may reverse engineer and look back and see themselves as inheriting some kind of a mantle, but to me Transparent Productions is what D.C. Space spawned, there’s a more direct relationship between what they’re doing and what D.C. Space was. I’m not going to say what Gio and Luke are doing is not important. It is important. They’re creating another beachhead, creating opportunities for people to play. . . . I think their [Capital Bop] website is amazing—what they’ve put together and how they relate that to what they do. I think their initiative is great.

How do you see these developments, like Transparent Productions, what Capital Bop is doing, impacting D.C.’s cultural scene in general?

The beat goes on, I’m just glad they’re doing it. The fact that oncoming cats are doing what they’re doing, you have to have faith in that.

How does your work on the annual Congressional Black Caucus Foundation jazz day impact the D.C. jazz community?

It’s become an event that people like to go to, peo- ple that don’t otherwise necessarily attend the CBCF Annual Legislative Conference come to that event. When that started it was just a panel discus- sion and a reception.

Detroit, Michigan’s Congressman John Con- yers, Dean of the Congressional Black Caucus and Congressman John Conyers, Jr., left, honorary host of the CBCF Annual Legislative Conference Jazz Issue Forum and Concert, and Cedric Hendricks, executive producer, share a moment during the 2013 concert. Both men have been vital to continued legisla- tive support of jazz as a “national treasure.” Photo © Imagine Photography, courtesy, Congressional Black Conference.

known as the “Jazz Congressman,” sent out a let- ter [saying] that he wanted to do some jazz stuff, and Cedric Hendricks was on his staff. And because I could write, I could program and I could organize production, I became a very useful piece of that puzzle. I started out working with that event as a volunteer in 1985 [and in 1992 became a producer of the conference.] . . . That’s not a gig I was look- ing for, but I owe that opportunity to John Conyers.

After ’92, because I was one of the producers I was able to push the jazz piece even further. By this time I’d been working in New Orleans, at Jazz at Lincoln Center . . . my range of contacts had grown exponentially. I had much more expe- rience in terms of production, and not just pro- duction nuts and bolts, but I had that concept of what it is to be a producer. So I was able to push it to another level.

When we first started doing the jazz event the record companies would underwrite the perfor- mance if we picked up the travel. Once the record industry died it became a different game in terms of sponsorship and how to keep that afloat. For the Foundation it’s all about every event earning more in sponsorship than it costs because the ALC

is a fundraiser for the overall work of the CBCF throughout the year.

It is very important that the Foundation has remained committed to the Jazz Issue Forum and Concert despite the changes in the sponsorship sit- uation. So it’s a free event during the ALC that has a high level of talent that the community can par- ticipate in. As the years have gone on just about the only high profile thing left for the community to be involved in with no charge is the jazz event. . . . Now it’s an asset to the whole CBCF enterprise.

House Concurrent Resolution 57, declaring jazz “an American national treasure,” resulted from the first CBCF jazz evening panel discussion in 1985. At the end of that session Jimmy Owens challenged Conyers to do something legislatively for jazz. He took on the challenge. While we were working on the resolution, I was still working as a stagehand. I was on the show call at the Kennedy Center for a Kabuki Theater run, and a Japanese stagehand pointed to an artist and said, “You see that guy there? In Japan, he’s a living national treasure.” Bingo, that’s where that language came from! That next day I took what that guy said to me and finished drafting H.Con.Res. 57.

What’s your overall goal for the CBCF jazz day?

Just that it’s important that an organization of that significance in the national African American community and the nation at large has seen fit to put a showcase around the music. It doesn’t hap- pen with the Urban League, it doesn’t happen with the NAACP, nor with the black fraternities and sororities—it does happen at the Congressio- nal Black Caucus Foundation Annual Legislative Conference. And the reason it happens is because John Conyers had that vision to add that piece as an issue discussion and it has evolved. Because of his stature he was able to create that space.

If there’s a study or something done in the jazz community, I’ve tried to have a presentation about it to open up the issue forum, because I know that much of that information is not broadly dissemi- nated, even within those circles in the black com- munity that claim they’re interested in the music. So we say, “Let’s do it there, let’s bring together a panel of experts, let’s elevate a discussion.” It became more of a day; we went from an issue forum coupled with a concert to a two-hour block of prime time for the issue forum that is something of a town hall meeting on jazz. In the evening we have the concert and keep a humanities element in it by having a meet-the-artist discussion so that people who don’t get into the issues forum still get to have some introduction to what people think about this music. We also present the CBCF Jazz Legacy Awards. This year we honored Dr. Larry Ridley and Bobby Watson. I’m all about preserving our stake, the African American stake, in this music. That’s my agenda. This music came out of our experience, in our community, in the Ameri- can context. Cedric and I are all about using that platform to keep that alive, that’s what WE can do.

I’m disappointed that JazzTimes, DownBeat, and the rest of them don’t pay any attention to this event, but I think they’re gonna pay attention around HR2823 [Conyer’s new jazz support legis- lation]. The reason this bill was drafted is because John Hasse, curator of American music at National Museum of American History, met with Conyers to discuss the state of the Smithsonian’s jazz efforts. Cedric called me with the idea that maybe it was time for some new legislation. I said if we’re going

to do a new bill it can’t just be about getting the Smithsonian more money.

Conyers is planning to introduce this new jazz legislation just prior to Jazz Appreciation Month (April), in conjunction with an event that the Smithsonian is organizing called Two Johns, hon- oring Congressman Conyers and John Coltrane, Conyers’s favorite musician next to Charlie Parker, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of Coltrane’s “ A Love Supreme.” That will give us a piece of legis- lation with some teeth; it will direct agencies of government to spend money for preservation, edu- cation and the promulgation of jazz.

Willard Jenkins is a journalist, broadcaster, concerts and festivals producer, and jazz programmer at WPFW and co-author of African Rhythms, the autobiography of NEA Jazz Master Randy Weston.

At least up until the weather gods intruded upon the National Weather Service with lightening advisories, one of the more eagerly-anticipated sets on our schedule for DC JazzFest 2024 was our slated Saturday evening closing set with NEA Jazz Master bassist Stanley Clarke N4Ever. Unfortunately our outdoor venue at The Wharf on the banks of the mighty Potomac River couldn’t stand up to those dire weather advisories and we had no choice but to shut down both our District Pier and Transit Pier stages.

Luckily that weather shutdown did compel significant numbers of DCJF patrons to flock over to our indoor festival venue at Arena Stage to experience a deeply thrilling set by Carmen Lundy. Fortunately, earlier that Saturday I had an opportunity to sit down with Stanley Clarke for one of the festival’s Meet The Artist programs. Our conversation started with a query on exactly what compelled Stanley to play the bass as a young man coming up in Philadelphia.

Stanley Clarke: The bass is a misunderstood instrument still. But where it came from when I started in the late 60s, and the guys that came before me, [the bass] has come a long way – a whole paradigm shift. When I came up there were maybe 3 bass players that had records [as leaders]. Now there’s thousands of bass players that have records. I can’t say they’re all good, but there are a lot of bass players…

For me it was a goal of mine in life not to necessarily liberate the bass, but to sort of break the idea that you have to be attached to an instrument. Like if you sit at a piano and wear some glasses, someone says … ‘you’re the smartest guy…’ It’s not true! You can [be playing] a rubber band and be a genius. If you go to Senegal right on the continent you see people playing anything… geniuses playing serious rhythms, serious phraseology… It’s not the instrument, it’s what comes from here, here and up here [taps his gut, heart, and head] that comes out. These instruments are just physical objects.

Originally this Meet The Artist session was slated to be a live DownBeat Magazine Blindfold Test, but it seems Stanley Clarke was fated to encounter a raft of impediments on this particular day as audio technical difficulties intruded on the BFT segment of our interview session. One particular selection that we were able to experience during the interview was a piece from DC Jazz Festival 2024/2025 artist-in-residence, DC native – and Duke Ellington School for the Arts graduate among his other achievements – bassist-bandleader Corcoran Holt. We played the piece “Raven’s Wing” from Corcoran’s most recent release as a leader, The Mecca (CD Baby).

Stanley Clarke: I like that record. The first thing I noticed was the bass… nice stuff, very creative! He’s playing up in the upper register. It would have been nice if he or she would have played a solo first. I liked that one; loved the riff he’s playing on the bass… and the sound was good, really good actually! It was fresh, it sounded new… That’s important too. I think musicians sometimes when they’re young, they feel like they have to copy something, and you really don’t have to… you have to study!

Miles Davis said sometimes it takes a long time to find yourself. It doesn’t have to take that long if someone acknowledges you and tells you it’s OK to be yourself, you don’t have to sound like Stanley Clarke, Ron Carter, Jaco Pastorius, or whoever – you can be yourself, and this guy [Corcoran Holt] is nice!

Another selection we played for Stanley came from the legendary Cuban bass master Cachao.

Stanley Clarke: I actually met Cachao, that was a highlight of my life! Cachao pretty much invented Latin bass lines. He’s a real big influence on me. There’s an actor named Andy Garcia who had a party for Cachao on his 80-something birthday and I went to the party to see him. I had no idea Cachao even knw anything about me. I was very humble when I went up to him. I said ‘hey man, how ‘ya doin’?’ He looked up at me and he goes… ‘ah, loco… [crazy]!’ So we hung out, he was great, amazing player.

I’ve tried a lot to get him in bass player magazines, to do an article on him because he’s just as important as Charlie Mingus or any of the guys. I saw [Cachao] play with a full orchestra, with a singer, dancers and everything. What I liked about him is he plays the acoustic bass, he didn’t have a baby bass.

He started out with a bow and he started playing, building it up… Then he hit a riff and the orchestra came in and everybody came on the dance floor. That’s the other thing I liked, it was a real communal thing. Everybody came out and danced and it was incredible, he was killin’! Cachao… yeah, that was a good one!

How much are you influenced by changes n our musical tastes? How much does that influence your playing?

SC: I’d say the older I get… my influences come from other places now. My influences come from my family and friends, and things that I see… I spent a long time writing music for films. I’ve written music for about 85 films, and what happens when you’re a film composer and say you’re writing an orchestral score… I’ll give you an example: one of the scores I did was for the Tina Turner movie, What’s Love Got to Do With It and they wanted an orchestral score. I watched the movie footage, and I knew Tina, but it’s funny, all the years I knew her I never knew all the pain she went through! I just knew there was Tina Turner!

I had a couple of friends in that film – Larry Fishburne, and Angela Bassett who I worked with on Boyz ‘n The Hood. I was talking with them on the set [of the Tina Turner film]. Tina didn’t want to come to the set, and I understood because I didn’t know the back story. The score was written about the pain, the sorrow, the joy… all that kind of stuff. But I can’t say that I was influenced [by those elements of life]. For me, influence is something you see or take from somebody. Because I’m a composer and I write from how I feel and how I see things, then that’s an influence. But sometimes I’ll take things and they come through me and it’s brief.

When you’re a film composer you cannot get hung up on anything. I did [What’s Love Got to Do With It] and I think shortly after that I [scored] a two-hour television special with Angela Lansbury for Murder She Wrote – a completely different thing. And so that came out and what was interesting about that was it was a show that required Celtic music!

The producers liked me, [Angela Lansbury] liked me… It was all Celtic music and I didn’t know anything about that. She said the best thing to me, she said “you’re a composer, right?” I said “…yeah”… and she said “…there’s a library…” [laughs]. And I went there and listened to all the Celtic music and in a real serendipitous way there was a woman who lived in this city I lived in, which is out in Topanga, a mountain town right off of Malibu, and she was one of the foremost Celtic singers. She came by the house, we recorded it and it was a great experience!

So yeah, I got influenced by that for a moment, but I haven’t made a Celtic record. That would be deep [audience and Stanley laugh]! But I do like some of that stuff. Music and art is very interesting. You can have influences, things that come to you and then go right away. But I think that a little piece of it stays with you and sometimes some artist will say ‘I feel very rich in what I do.’

In my 73 years I’ve experienced a lot of music, I’ve played with a lot of musicians… Just my time with Chick Corea… This guy was one of the most prolific composers of our time – a Great American composer, and all that music is in me. I have memories of it, and so yeah influence is an interesting word! For me, it’s having all these fine jewels and gold…

For his Stanley Clarke N4Ever band Clarke is decidedly at the helm of a young crew of next gen musicians.

SC: They’re all under 30! I have a great memory of when I was 18 years old I played with Horace Silver, then I went to play with Dexter Gordon, Stan Getz, and all those guys. They didn’t have to be nice to me! It’s kind of like I came on the scene, I play bass, guys pay me… I wasn’t expecting much more than that.

For me, I wanted to learn from those guys, but they were all… Art Blakey was another one… but they were all very, very nice to me. And what I learned from them – the good ones and the bad ones – and I bring that with me [as a bandleader].

I remember one time I was playing with Dizzy Gillespie at the Hollywood Bowl and one of the things he said to me was that you can’t count on the radio or press or people to move our music forward – you have to pass it down, and so it goes to the youth. So I make a point of doing that because nothing will change that because I know that the guys I mentor are going to take those lessons – good and bad – forward. And that’s how our music travels. So I have no worries about – you wanna call it jazz or whatever – improvised music. The term jazz, as we move through life on this planet, has become more and more of an undefined term. Like some people say ‘this is jazz, that’s jazz’… The common denominator that goes through all these different musics is improvisation and the spirit of play.

We have people – a guy playing with a drummer and he’s looking, and they’re jammin’… you don’t get that in pop music or hip hop music… and there’s nothing wrong with what they’re doing. But this music… it has [improvisation] and it goes through to the youth, and that’s all I do now; it’s great and I love it!

I come from a family of artists. My mother paints, my daughter is a painter… I really understand how when you have hard times, and maybe there’s a song that gets you through it… You know what’s beautiful about art… What I’ve found out in my short life, is that art is the only… whether its music, literature, painting or even the newer forms of art that come through the digital platform… the beautiful thing is that when it’s really art, it’s good art and it’s positive, it reminds all of us who we really are, and that has nothing o do with your title – whether you’re president of this or whatever… you’re this famous guy or… you’re homeless, or whatever. Music, art, literature, the good stuff is like a laser beam and it cuts through all of the stuff to you… you always stay young that way. Trust me, just keep listening.

[An audience member asks Stanley about his bass guitar, and reminds Stanley about a mutual friend of theirs who is a bass maker.]

I’ll tell you a story about that bass. I’m in this club – me and Chick and Lenny White… just at the beginning of the second Return to Forever, right before Al DiMeola, when we went electric. So I’m in this club and I’m playing a Gibson, one of those kind of fat body basses. So this little guy comes in, he says “you sound nice, but your sound is like shit [audience laughs]. So I’m looking at this guy, Lenny White is looking at this guy… So he has this bass with him. He says “…you should try this bass.” And it was really like the first bass where you could play this FM technology, where you could play the top of the bass, you could play chords on the bass. A lot of my tunes, like “School Days,” would have chords, but you could never do that on other basses. So I played this bass and people in the audience literally came backstage and said ‘What the hell was that?”

This bass was a real piece of art – the woodwork was beautiful, it was really natural… So Lenny and Chick said ‘we can’t let this guy go with that bass!’ He said, ‘man this is one of our prototypes, this cost me $1600.’ Back in those days $1600 was like $5,000 today! Do you know we had a collection… we got $1600, handed it to this guy Rick and shoved him out the door… True story!

When drummer-composer-bandleader-educator-activist NEA Jazz Master Terri Lyne Carrington set out to right a historic wrong – i.e. the sad and ongoing lack of recognition for women’s compositions as vehicles of jazz expressions, she craftily went about assembling a vehicle for the broader dissemination jazz compositions by women. And in so doing she offers a document that will hopefully dispel any lingering myths about the compositional prowess of women operating in the jazz composing realm. In part New Standards serves as a touchstone volume for her groundbreaking Jazz & Gender Justice program and curriculum at Berklee College of Music. But more than anything her New Standards book is a marvelous illustration of the many important gifts to jazz contributed by women in the composers.

Not only has Ms. Carrington built a remarkable pedagogical standard at one of the planet’s leading music conservatories, she has also crafted an impressive platform for recognition and performance of a body of compositions that previously were only available somewhat anecdotally. Players know some of these compositions, but the anthology aspect represented by this New Standards volume is precedent-setting in bringing these compositional resources together, and will hopefully spur increased visibility for the extraordinary coterie of women composers, and vehicles for performance New Standards represents.

In addition to New Standards, Terri Lyne also curated a unique companion, a traveling visual arts exhibition that further illustrates the indelible role of women musicians in the development of jazz music – representing a range from Mary Lou Williams, Melba Liston and Geri Allen, to Carmen Lundy, Esperanza Spalding, and Kris Davis. Incorporating sculpture (including the memorable artistry of Ms. Lundy), a Geri Allen/Mary Lou Williams conversation, representations of many contemporary jazz women such as trumpeter-educator Ingrid Jensen (including a wonderfully illustrative photo of trumpeter Jensen practicing while holding her young child in her lap; a humane family/artistry juggling act many jazz women through the ages have encountered), bassist Linda May Han Oh, saxophonist-vocalist Camille Thurman, guitar explorer Mary Halvorson, and the emerging flutist-vocalist Elena Pinderhughes among them, and a Carrie Mae Weems film on Ms. Carrington that celebrates her amazing odyssey from 10-year old drumming prodigy (seeing the assured confidence of her posture at the kit at that young age is truly remarkable), to NEA Jazz Master and one of the essential contributors to jazz in the 21st century.

Clearly some questions were in order for Ms. Carrington and her Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice colleague Aja Burrell Wood weighed in with some wisdom as well.

While the New Standards book is so necessary and such a great companion piece to your overall mission at the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice, please detail how you determined to develop this volume.

TLC: The first event we held to announce the institute was in summer of 2018. I asked students to play some songs written by women at the event and when they pulled out the Real Book, they could not find any, other than “Willow Weep for Me” – by Ann Ronell. I knew then that this would be our first initiative. It took a few years to really get going with it. But when we met with Berklee Press (whose books are distributed by Hal Leonard), they told me 100 songs was a lot and they would still do the book if it were only 20 songs. And then asked if there are enough [women] composers to fill my ambitious request. It is actually 101 [compositions by women] because of an overlap or miscalculation when accounting for who said yes! 

Once you developed your publication plan, how did you go about soliciting such a broad range of compositions by women across generations?

I started with people I knew – songs I had played before and songs I liked. It was fairly easy to do half the book that way. But in general I asked composers to send me a few songs to choose from – or I would tell them which song of theirs I wanted to include. Or a few people I would take anything they sent. With the deceased composers it was trickier because I had to deal with their estates and with some [composers] we could not really locate the people that controlled the songs – so we did not include a few that I wanted to. But it was always my desire to have it span over many years from Lil Hardin [who became Lil Hardin Armstrong] to top recent Berklee grads. And also to be diverse stylistically within jazz.

What was the response from the field when you began soliciting these compositions?

Everyone was happy to be included. I only got 2 rejections. 

Was the goal to publish exactly “101 Lead Sheets by Women Composers” or is that simply the number you wound up attracting?

The goal was 100 – but it ended up at 101. 

How do you see this book proliferating in the field, and particularly among musicians?

I see it as an addition to the jazz canon of songs that we all play all the time – that rarely includes women composers. So New Standards is saying, “If you want to be more diverse with the composers you play, here are some other options.” Many musicians mainly play their own music, but while they are developing their craft and their writing skills – in school – they play other composers, and the way it has been, male composers are the ones who are informing our budding composers and performers, which reinforces the male jazz narrative. But now there is something that can be used to counter that narrative, if an educator (or performer) wants to do so – neatly, packaged in a collection, which means there is no excuse if you want to diversify the material being taught, because a lot of people say that they could not easily find music written by women. Not so anymore. 

The New Standards traveling exhibition premiered at The Carr Center in Detroit, where Ms. Carrington is a curator, and subsequently touched down at the home of the DC Jazz Festival at Arena Stage in DC’s southwest waterfront corridor (home also to DCJF festival stages at The Wharf and Arena Stage) during DCJF 2024.

Talk about how you arrived at the exhibit as such a vivid and illustrative companion piece to the New Standards book and what do you foresee as the future of the exhibit?

I have always been attracted to multi-disciplinary expression. If you are a creative person, chances are you are creative in more than one area. It could be said that men have had it easier with their creativity being both accepted and expected – no matter the form it is being expressed in. They have been supported – often by women – to go be a “creative genius.” but women have had more barriers and burdens pursuing their creative endeavors and for sure more glass ceilings. The exhibit is a [vehicle] to center multi- dimensional, multi-disciplinary artists in, a space dedicated to the varying contributions women have made and continue to make in the art form, from different parts of the jazz ecosystem.

Bringing ideas of freedom and jazz without patriarchy into a space with sound (pressure waves), 2D (film) and 3D (paintings, sculptures) art. And the exhibit’s purpose was also to overwhelm you with the theme/topic. It was my hope that after visiting the exhibit, the viewer would be transformed, inspired and educated in some ways as well. And at the very least, not able to say that they did not know there were so many great jazz women performers and composers. The hope is for them to leave looking at jazz differently, acknowledging that jazz has a gender problem, realizing their own part – knowingly or not – in supporting the inequities, and resolved to pay better attention to how and what they support in reg

ard to the art form. A resolve to being part of a solution and change  – not part of keeping jazz from reaching its greatest potential, which can only happen when there is diversity among the people that create it. Jazz is not men’s music – and that is what the exhibit is saying loudly. 

Aja Burrell:

Terri covered it all. I would add to your question about proliferation… since New Standards has become available, I believe it continues to have the potential to add to and reframe what we consider the “standard” in jazz on and off the stage, and in classrooms near and far.

An immediate impact I have already witnessed (and heard) has been the way the tunes in [New Standards] have been incorporated in curriculum, in jazz education spaces, and live performances. And in such a short time! On Berklee’s campus alone, I can’t count how many times I’ve heard Geri Allen’s “Unconditional Love” coming out of practice rooms at times simply because the students love to play it. Let alone, the enthusiastic response from both students and educators I encounter from other institutions, who are now incorporating New Standards tunes in their sets and beyond the classroom.

The response to New Standards has been tremendous and the proof has been in the music. I look forward to seeing its continued impact over time.

By now you’ve likely seen the clip of Vice President and presidential nominee Kamala Harris exiting a DC record store with an armful of Lp purchases, notably including several jazz releases, among them Charles Mingus and Roy Ayers. The story behind that particular record store – and its place among what some consider ‘a dying breed’ of retail outlets is quite interesting; Ms. Harris decidedly wasn’t crate digging at some hole-in-the-wall or some retail outlet with side orders of Lps and CDs (as if those still existed!).

The store in question is HR Records, located in the heart of DC’s northwest quadrant at 702 Kennedy Street NW. Given that momentous Kamala Harris visit and the seeming rarity of retail record stores these days, some background on this particular store was in order, so we sought out HR Records proprietor Charvis Campbell with some questions.

What are the origins of HR Records, and it’s Kennedy Street location?

HR Records was founded by myself and Michael Bernstein, my partner, in March 2018. We have a video on our Instagram page that shows the early days of the shop when the walls were naked. But you knew something special was going to happen in the place. We’re just so blessed and grateful to be here for five years.

The majority of the early collection for the store came from Baltimore. I essentially acquired an entire record shop, and we brought that from Baltimore to DC. The shop was called East-West Records, located kind of on the edge of Baltimore on Liberty Road near I-695, located in a small strip mall. I remember that I had to go down some stairs and that there was a church in the basement, an African hair braiding spot, a barber shop, a religious bookstore, and then Bill’s record shop. I would suggest to Bill let’s bring these records to DC and we’ll make some money. Bill being the wise old man that he was said ‘you do a pop-up and yard sales but don’t do a brick & mortar because it’s tough.’ He was right.

But I clearly didn’t listen to him, and he didn’t listen to himself because he called me one day and he said ‘hey, you know that record collection you wanted to buy, you can have it and on top of that I have another large collection from a friend who passed away so you could have that as well.’ It turned out to be hundreds of boxes of records, books, record bins, posters, etc.

I met Michael when he actually came to my house to buy some records. I was getting married and I vividly remember that I put an ad on craigslist to sell some of my records because my wonderful wife, my beautiful smart wife said… ‘you know that I love you but you can’t bring all those records into our house.’ So I knew I had to sell off some of the collection, so I put an ad in craigslist and sure enough some of the folks who came were record shop owners… and Michael Bernstein. That’s when I realized there was some value to records. Before, I was very content just buying let’s say 100 records, with the intention of keeping five and selling the remaining 95 to break even and get my money back. It wasn’t until I was getting married and the record shop guys came to my house that I knew there was some value in these records.

Michael and I hit it off. I’m from New York and so is he. I have a love of jazz and so does Michael. We both have families – his kids are a little bit older than mine, but we both appreciate and love kids. We spent a few months looking for a spot. We looked in Georgetown and we looked in different neighborhoods around the city. But when we saw our spot on Kennedy Street we just fell in love. We just knew right away it was our home. We walked in and it was like one of those aha moments where you could just feel the energy and the vibe. You knew it was going to be something special and we’re just grateful that we’ve been here for five plus years, and we’re strong.

What would you say is the primary feature of HR Records?

We specialize in rare jazz and soul, African and reggae records. That’s what we love, that’s what we know, and that’s what walks in the door. We’re one of the only record shops that’s kind of in the community – we’re on Kennedy Street in Brightwood [702 Kennedy St. NW]. We’re not on U Street, we’re not on 14th Street, and we’re not in Georgetown. We’re a destination – you have to come and find us. Which I think is an important aspect of who we are – we’re community-focused.

One of the most interesting things about owning a record store is that I feel that we’re a community space. We have people who come in the shop who believe it or not don’t have a record player but buy records! We have folks who come in who go digging the crates and who are looking for beats. I have people who are being exposed to jazz music for the first time. It’s a wide-range of people who come in our door. I feel like I have a duty to be that space where people can come in and talk and exchange ideas about music and culture. Historically record shops, like barber shops and beauty salons, have been that place in the Black community where you can go and talk about music, film, and culture. In many ways we are that space.

How do you stock HR Records and keep your selection fresh?

Records walk through the door. Almost every day someone comes in with some records to sell from large to small collections. They call sometimes to set appointments but what I’m really enjoying is making house visits. I learn more about people spending a few hours going through records, talking about music, family, and DC culture. For me it’s really about relationships and developing relationships. I’m excited to hear stories about DC music and culture, stories about how people acquired their music. I think you really get to know somebody when you spend a couple hours in someone’s house going through their record collection.

Moreover there’s some collections that have taken me years to acquire. Some people treat some of their records like they treat their kids – sometimes better! So it’s about music, and relationships, but it’s also about learning that there’s a deeper story to be told. For example, we had acquired an amazing collection of records from a man named Georges Collient. George is one of the founders of Afro-pop and was one of the first African music journalist/hosts on Voice of America.

I found George to be a great man with a love of life – he laughs, knows music, and he’s just one of those people who as soon as you meet him you know he’s special. When I first met Georges I was attracted to his records – he had thousands of African and jazz records. But the other aspect was really just my love of wanting to learn more about Georges the man and wanting to learn more about his life, then realizing that Georges is special and that other people need to hear his story.

So I believe that I have a duty to help tell the stories of DC music and culture. I have a responsibility to help tell Georges’ story to other people – not to necessarily make a movie but to document and help preserve this history. I believe in oral histories, and we were fortunate through our non-profit to get a grant a few years ago to do oral history interviews on some of DC’s jazz musicians who performed at Westminster Church. [Editor’s note: Westminster Presbyterian Church in SW DC, under the leadership of Rev. Brian Hamilton and tireless jazz supporter and weekly host Dick Smith has for decades presented Jazz Night in DC every Friday evenng, featuring many of the DMV’s finest musicians and selling dinners in its lower level.] So when I acquire records and when I visit people’s homes, I think in terms of how do I make sure to tell this story and keep the legacy and culture alive.

In this day of vastly diminished record store resources, what does HR Records offer that folks simply cannot find online?

We offer the best in rare jazz and soul. We also offer what other record stores don’t. In any business, I think it comes down to the people. I know that our staff is the best in town. We just love music. We love and know jazz music. We love and know soul music. We love what we play and we know what we play. I think we have a love of jazz, soul, reggae and African records that is about understanding our history and culture.

How do you suppose Kamala Harris found out about HR Records, and tell us about the day she stopped by and was famously interviewed with her purchases that day? What was she specifically looking for at HR Records?

I would like to thank Madam Vice President for visiting HR Records! I’m not really sure how she heard about HR Records. I would like to think that Kamala Harris is a record shop junkie was like ‘I must go to HR Records!’ Maybe she heard about HR Records because we both went to Howard University. Or maybe it’s because I’m in Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity and she’s in Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority. Frankly it’s very possible that it was her advance team or someone on our staff who alerted her to the shop. Bottom line, the VP made a visit and it’s a wonderful story that I’m blessed to share.

I received the first call I think like around 9-10am. I think it was first from the Small Business Administration. They asked if I was the owner of the shop, and if I would be around throughout the day. They asked some background questions and it felt almost like an interview. When I hung up the phone I didn’t think anything until a few minutes later when I got the next call from the Vice President’s office. They said something like someone senior on the VP’s staff may make a visit. But they never stated directly who would be visiting. They also said that the Secret Service will first visit the store. I remember hanging up and calling my wife saying that I think the Vice President is coming but I wasn’t sure. I didn’t know what to expect. I thought that if they’re sending Secret Service to checkout the store then maybe the Vice President’s coming but I wasn’t quite sure, but you still don’t know. I didn’t know what to expect. I would have thought that they would do a visit a day or weeks in advance. But then the Secret Service team arrived in the shop, and they’re spending hours i n the shop. But they again don’t say that the Vice President is coming!

When Madame Vice President came in the shop she was sincere and down to earth. She was engaging. She spoke with my staff and customers. She made me feel special – like I’m the main reason why she’s here. Perhaps that’s why she’s a politician and hopefully about to be the next POTUS.

It’s funny now, I tried to throw her some softballs and say ‘hey, you want to checkout Coltrane‘ but she was like ‘no, where’s the Mingus.’

When the Vice President goes anywhere a team of press corps travels with her. It’s a lot of people: it’s Secret Service, it’s an advance team, it’s the press corps, it’s the local police and fire department… It’s huge and it’s overwhelming! I can see why in some instances the President doesn’t want to hit the local restaurant or shop because they have to close things down. They had to shut down the entire neighborhood for blocks during her visit. I didn’t realize it because I was inside the shop, but I heard from various people that the neighborhood was frozen and that they couldn’t move anywhere for about an hour because the Vice President was in the shop. It was an amazing experience – the VP was sincere, down to earth, and I think really cared about the experience.

Talk about how HR Records became central to the efforts of the Home Rule Music Festival and how that event became a reality.

The Home Rule Music Festival is a program of the Home Rule Music and Film Preservation Foundation. It’s a long title but it clearly says what we do and what we love – music and film.

I believe that when you combine the mediums of film and music there’s nothing like it – from an educational perspective, from a historical perspective, from a cultural perspective – or a let’s just enjoy life perspective.

During the Covid pandemic, we started Home Rule Music and Film. Before Covid we were doing a lot of events on Kennedy Street and in the community, with music performances and events with the kids. We knew it would be helpful to establish a non-profit to have other folks support us with those efforts. One of our first projects was the documentary on Black Fire Records that’s currently available for viewing on PBS.com.

It was right before Covid that we held an event in the shop with (saxophonist) Plunky (Branch) from Oneness of JuJu. It was for record store day and I think we termed it Black Fire Records Day. Plunky spoke and performed and we filmed it. I stood behind the camera and watched through the lens as Plunky told his story. I was really impressed with Plunky’s love of life. He’s full of energy and he knows his jazz. He’s smart and articulate and just one of these men that you know is special and you want to be around. I knew then that I wanted to help tell his story and the Black Fire Records story.

So on his way out that day I told Plunky and his team that I want to do a documentary on him. Plunky’s a nice guy so he was like ‘sure’. I’m not sure if he knew what he was getting himself into when he said sure. About a week or two later, I heard about this community grant through Humanities DC. The deadline was in a week. So I contacted Plunky and I pitched him. We quickly started working on the grant document. We submitted the paperwork and didn’t think anything about it. A couple of months later, I received an email saying that we got the grant.

The reality is you can’t make a movie with a $10,000 grant, so we raised about another $20-25K from other sources, including Plunky, family, friends, and through a crowdsourcing campaign. We interviewed 19 people over several days, and we shot quality interviews with the understanding that we wanted to do something with the final product. So we had this wonderful film but near the end of Covid people were still hesitant to come inside in large crowds, so we rightly concluded that the best way to show off the film was to have a full-day of live performances of the music associated with the film, followed by a screening of the film at night. So the Home Rule Music Festival was really born out of our desire to support our documentary on Black Fire Records and to have the community better understand and appreciate DC’s music history and culture.

The festival morphed into a day of music, with vendors, food, and community organizations. The festival grew beyond our wildest expectations and dreams. We were over-achievers and in year one I think we had about 2500-3000 people show up. In year 2 we had closer to 4000 and in year three we programmed an even bigger festival.

The festival has grown into a year-long program that now takes a team with months of planning, effort, time and fundraising. This past year our budget was nearly $200K.

How do you see HR Records and the Home Rule Music Festival working hand-in-glove?

HR Records is our for-profit business, Home Rule Music and Film is our non-profit organization, and then the festival is a program that supports our strategic mission and vision. We have been thoughtful to separate our community engagement work, which is done through our non-profit, from our for-profit business.

Where do you see the Home Rule Music Festival advancing?

The Home Rule Music Festival wants to be the preeminent festival celebrating DC’s rich musical heritage and culture. With that being said, my grandmother once told me to be careful what I ask for because you may just get it. We clearly over-achieved starting with the first year of the festival growing in attendance, and with the number of vendors and sponsors participating. Producing an event of that size and caliber requires a team and months, if not a year of planning, and so the festival is kind of turning into a year-round program which is wonderful but obviously comes with challenges as well.

We’re currently working on developing an education program tentatively called The Uptown Arts Project that’s connected to the festival. The Uptown Arts Project focuses on teaching skills and providing experiential opportunities for youth in events production, filmmaking, music production, video editing, sound and lighting, and stage management. Our plan is to provide classes and structured activities that aim to increase the capacity of youth in DC to be productive and employed members of the arts community. A goal is to help youth develop media arts competencies and literacies to effectively participate in the modern digitally centered environment, and to achieve sell-sufficiency and economic enhancement.

Talk about your WPFW radio show and how that dovetails with your activities on behalf of jazz & arts.

I wish I was more thoughtful and intentional with my work with HR Records, Home Rule Music and Film, and with my personal work with WPFW as an on-air programmer. But frankly my work with WPFW is really just me having fun, and sharing my love of music with a hopefully interested and excited audience. I play what I know and love – jazz and soul music with a spiritual sound. Moreover, I feel I have a duty to not only preserve the stories of jazz history and culture in Washington, DC, but a right to show and tell everyone about it. At WPFW, I go on the air after the great Rusty Hassan. Sitting in the WPFW control room listening to stories from Rusty Hassan about jazz legends is worth the price of admission and the weekly overnight loss of sleep.

What can we look for from the Home Rule Music Festival in it’s 2025 incarnation?

We are still plowing through the 2024 Home Rule Music Festival. Due to the extreme heatwave this past summer, we re-scheduled part 2 of our festival and our celebration of go-go music to Saturday, October 26th. The date is quickly approaching so that’s our immediate focus. But obviously we’re already thinking about and planning for 2025. We’re going to be strategic with our growth, and we’re going to spread the Home Rule Music Festival to other areas of DC.

We’re going to build on what we do well and I think that’s the creation of a wonderful community of artists, supporters, vendors, sponsors and community organizations who are all there in the community to celebrate DC’s rich musical history and culture. So that’s what we’re about and that’s what we’re going to continue to do.