The biggest jazz star you've never heard of

Authored by theweek.com and submitted by howmuchbanana

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

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

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

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

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

Hazel Scott at the age of 3 or 4. | (Courtesy Narratively)

Born in Trinidad, Scott was raised on music. Her whole family played and her mother, Alma, an aspiring concert pianist, taught music to help make ends meet. Unbeknownst to her family, Hazel Scott absorbed everything she heard until one day she woke her grandmother from a nap by playing a familiar hymn on the piano, two-handed and with perfect pitch. Her grandmother woke thinking, not wrongly, that she was witnessing a miracle.

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

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

Another time, Scott was playing near the trench being dug for the subway line that would become the A train when, according to Scott, a white girl from the neighborhood who she had been playing with told her to "Turn around so that I can brush you off and send you to school." When she did, the girl pushed her into the trench.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the rest of this story at Narratively.

Narratively is a digital publication and creative studio focused on ordinary people with extraordinary stories.

frugalerthingsinlife on March 3rd, 2021 at 00:33 UTC »

Her hands were too small.

is a bit of an understatement. Rachmaninoff was 6'6" and had a 12-inch hand span. That's above average for NBA players.

He wrote music for himself to play which is why there are so few on the planet that can play his music well.

notagoodboye on March 2nd, 2021 at 21:44 UTC »

Rachmaninoff was 6'6, and had a 12-inch finger span.

That is a monster reach, and the reason his piano concertos are considered so hard to play is not just because they're incredibly hard to play, but also because some of the chords he hit can't be hit by people with human-sized hands.

howmuchbanana on March 2nd, 2021 at 21:02 UTC »

The stories of Hazel Scott could fit a dozen TILs:

Born in Trinidad and raised in Harlem, she never had a single piano lesson, and learned everything by watching her grandmother play. By age 5 or so, her musical talent made so much money that she was the main breadwinner for the family. A group of white teenagers learned this, and beat her "black & blue" for some money, which she refused to give up. You already know the Juilliard story. But it's worth noting: her improvisations (on Rach's "Prelude in C Sharp Major") were proper substitutions: she played the sixths instead of the ninths. No one taught her to do this, it was just intuitive for her. Her mom formed "Alma Long Scott's All-Girl Jazz Band", in which a teenage Hazel played trumpet & piano. She became embedded in the Harlem Renaissance, befriending and playing with other jazz greats like Count Basie, Billie Holiday, Lena Horne, Duke Ellington, etc. She was a mainstay at Café Society, where she invented "swinging the classics" — playing piano solos from Mozart, Bach, etc, but with jazzy improvisations all over them. This made her an international star by age 25. Here's her swinging Liszt for WWII soldiers. She was an avid advocate for civil rights, and refused to play before segregated audiences (which even started some fights from angry White crowds) She got into Hollywood but had many anti-stereotyping stipulations in her contracts: she would never play a maid or a slave, she got to pick her own costumes, and sometimes she even had "final cut" of the film. She married Adam Clayton Powell, the first Black congressperson from NY, who became a leader in civil rights. At age 30, she became the first Black person to host their own TV show (yes, that's Charles Mingus on her show). She would even play two pianos at once! The show received outstanding ratings, but was canceled because... McCarthyism ended her career. She was accused of communist sympathies (which many think was in response to her civil rights advocacy), and she even spoke before HUAC to decry their witch hunt. She warned against "profiteers in patriotism who seek easy money and notoriety at the expense of the nation’s security and peace of mind" She was blacklisted, suffered a mental breakdown, and moved to Paris for decades. There, she befriended James Baldwin, and they came back to the US to support MLK's March on Washington She stayed in the US and continued to record & perform music, until ... She died in 1981. She's buried in New York near other jazz greats like Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, and Johnny Hodges.