Septet Frans Elsen NORWAY featuring Piet Noordijk - Netherlands Jazz Archives

 © Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

I suppose in some ways it was inevitable that the Jazz-Rock Fusion movement that began in earnest on the United States Jazz scene in the later 1960s and early 1970s would reach The Netherlands and be emulated there.

Every other stylistic development in Jazz in America reached Holland and was replicated so why not the melding of Jazz with Rock with its groove or in-the-pocket beats with a full-fledged percussionist adding effects, electric instruments including the Fender Rhodes piano, a steely sounding guitar hooked up to a wah wah pedal and other modulating devices and the electric bass guitar replacing the upright acoustic string bass, simplified and persistently repeated melodies, and  oscillating harmonies with a dash of Free Jazz dissonance thrown in for contrast.

Why not go with the times?

Of course, in the right hands, compositionally and with a stellar soloist or two and a discriminating rhythm section, there are distinct musical possibilities to be achieved such as those accomplished by Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters, Chick Corea’s Return to Forever, Wayne Shorter and Joe Zawinul's Weather Report and of course the many Jazz-Rock groups led by Miles Davis later in his career.

Enter Dutch composer and keyboardist Frans Elsen and soloist extraordinaire Piet Noordijk and the music on Norway [NJA 2101] recently released as part of the Treasures of Dutch Jazz series by the Nederland Jazz Archief.

Go here for more information on the Netherlands Jazz Archief [the site translates into English and click on “Store” for specific order information on 

Frans Elsen/Piet Noordijk and the music on Norway [NJA 2101].

You can also send queries to info@jazzarchief.nl.

Thanks to a gift from Frank Jochemsen who co-produced the Norway [NJA 2101] along with iconic Dutch drummer Eric Ineke, I was able to explore the music on the CD as well as read the back stories about how the recording came about because of the English translations of the insert notes as written by Rob Koster and Eric [as translated by Martin Cleaver].

In keeping with its primary mission, the NJA has issued CD’s by American Jazz greats who performed and recorded in Holland at the peak of their careers including Chet Baker, Don Byas, Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald, Dexter Gordon and Sonny Rollins  and many historically important albums by first-rate Jazz artists including Ruud Bos, Rob Pronk, and Herman Schoonderwalt, among many others. Obviously the Elsen/Noordijk falls into this latter category.

“The collection of the Dutch Jazz Archive is located in the book depot of Allard Pierson – The Collections of the University of Amsterdam and includes materials from more than a hundred years of Dutch Jazz history. From 78 rpm records and tapes to digital music files, from negatives to posters and from handwritten scores to special objects.”

As can be discerned from the above statement, the NJA has an actual physical location in Amsterdam, but it can also be researched online as is explained via the following link.

If the format for Norway [NJA 2101] is any indication, each CD comes with audio restoration of the original masters, a host of photographs taken at the recording date and a comprehensive insert booklet filled with information about the music and the musicians who performed it.

Although musicians going off to wood shed or woodshedding is a common allusion in Jazz circles, remarkably, much of the music on Norway was inspired and some of it was actually composed in a log cabin!

Rob Koester describes how this came about in the following:

Frans Elsen in Norway

“In July 1970, Frans Elsen travelled to Norway for about two and a half weeks with my family. This was related to his first marriage, which was not going well at the time. I was ten years old when we undertook this exciting journey in a Fiat 124. My parents Piet and Riet Koster had rented a log cabin called Nyster in the Gudbrandsdal Valley somewhere between Hamar and Lillehammer. I know that Frans Elsen wrote several pieces afterwards named after small towns and rivers in the expansive countryside of Norway.

It was so tranquil; you could fetch milk in a jug from the farmer on the next hill. In July, the days were long and we made day trips through an area that seemed so desolate. My father and Frans shared a fascination with the Second World War. When we set off for the umpteenth drive around the area where we were staying, Frans spontaneously exclaimed: 'Look Piet, what a beautiful plain for a tank battle.'

They consumed a lot of alcohol, which was quite normal in those days. At one point, we had to go to Liliehammer because the duty-free alcohol bought on the boat had run out. In those days you could buy liquor in special shops in the larger towns in Norway, and Frans and my father made it clear with their hands and feet that they wanted aquavit.

There was electricity in the cabin but no radio. Fortunately, Frans had one of the first Philips cassette recorders with him with a stack of cassettes and so there was music anyway.

I am sure that my father and Frans Elsen spent their evenings talking about music, for they were both musical omnivores. Frans was a musician who loved “live” music and my father collected the same music.

There was no piano in the log cabin, so I suspect that Frans made notes of the impressions he gained and later translated these into the pieces he wrote. I vaguely remember a radio broadcast being made with some of those pieces and we were able to gloat because we knew what the titles referred to.

I managed to find twelve black and white photos from this holiday, but unfortunately, there are no people on them. I do have a picture of the log cabin, as evidence of the place where the concept of Frans Elsen's Norwegian Cycle originated.”

As to the actual tunes that make up the “Noorse Cyclus,” there are four - Harpefoss, Ringebu, Skåbu and Otta [all small towns in Norway visited by Frans with the Koster family in 1970] and these are combined with eight other tracks to make up Norway including lengthy, live performances of Skåbu and Otta which close the CD.

What stands out throughout these performances are the thought and skill that Elsen put into these compositions and the consistently excellent soloing of Noordijk who, at times, reminds me of a Dutch Paquito D’Rivera with his lighting fast ability to get around the alto sax and his use of the upper register of the horn.

Unlike much of what later passed for Jazz Rock Fusion in the U.S. in the 1970s and 1980s, the music on Norway is not a mindless procession of limpid solos played over two oscillating chords with the endless drone of uninspired electric bass riffs and drum backbeats constituting the background.

Each composition is well-constructed and arranged to include unison horn riffs, vamps and interludes that add a degree of complexity and intrigue to the music.

Funky boogaloo beats and strong grooves laid down by Eric on drums that are complemented and enhanced by percussionist Wim van der Beek provide a rock solid foundation for all the compositions. 

In additions to Frans Elsen on keyboards, Piet Noordijk on alto sax, and Eddie Engels on trumpet [also a fine soloist], the “electronic atmosphere” is provided by Wim Overgaauw on guitar and either Rob Langereis or Victor Kaihatu on bass guitar. To top it all off, Ferdinand Povel, the fine tenor saxophonist and flutist plays on five of the tracks.

The funky grooves associated with Jazz Rock Fusion are best illustrated by the Frans Elsen septet on the four tunes that make up the Norway Cycle and this is mainly because they are played with such great taste and definition by drummer Eric Ineke who, ironically, is best known as an iconic bebop drummer in Dutch Jazz circles.

While they do not exactly “swing” in a metronomic sense, they are composed in such a way by Elsen so as to allow them to be driven forward by Eric and percussionist Wim van der Beck which serves to create momentum and excitement in the music.

All of the solos are first-rate with none of the musicians losing control and playing mindlessly nonsense just for effect. While the Dutch effort is imitative of the Jazz Rock Fusion in the U.S. in the 1970s, in many ways, this approach by Frans Elsen’s Septet is more fundamentally sound, both melodically and rhythmically as it does away with the excesses that sometimes detracted from the American model.

Interestingly, the innovative and progressive sounds and concepts on Norway never came out in a full album at the time.

“More than fifty years later, two brilliant studio sessions were found, recorded for the European Broadcasting Union and Radio Nederland Wereldomroep. The septet can also be heard live on this album during the International Jazz Festival Loosdrecht (1972) and in the original line-up as a sextet in the PePijn theater in The Hague.”

Norway [NJA 2101] as part of the Treasures of Dutch Jazz series by the Nederland Jazz Archief is archival Jazz at its best and I think you’ll find it a real treat as its music as vital today as it was when it was first conceived, played and recorded over a half century ago.

Part 8 - Herb Snitzer's Glorious Days and Nights - A Jazz Memoir

 © Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“This book includes Snitzer's very best jazz photographs. He reveals the essences of the artists, their struggles, joys, and pains. A number of Snitzer's jazz images have become iconic, including Louis Armstrong with the Star of David, Lester Young at the Five Spot Cafe in New York City, John Coltrane reflected in a mirror,Thelonious Monk with piano keys reflected in his sunglasses, and Miles Davis at Newport. With eighty-five black-and-white images of jazz giants, Glorious Days and Nights provides a long-awaited testimony to the friendships and artistry that Snitzer developed over his remarkable career.”

To order the book directly from the University of Mississippi Press please use this link.

8    Switzerland

“Through the efforts of drummer Oliver Jackson, for three straight years I was invited to attend and photograph the Bern International Jazz Festival. The concerts were produced by Hans Zurbrugg, an amateur trumpet player (and banker) who told me he would invite Dizzy Gillespie back to Switzerland any chance he could get given how very special Dizzy was as a player and human being. The public persona — always happy-go-lucky, smiling, joking — is sometimes different from the private side and John Birks (Dizzy) is a good example of this. For all his funny antics, Dizzy was a very serious fellow, committed to his music and his religion (he was a Bahai) and to bringing great music before his adoring public.

Dizzy was the closest of friends to Charlie Parker, the mercurial alto-saxophonist of the forties and fifties who died at the age of thirty-five, yet looked as if he were sixty. Dizzy, who never engaged in drugs, tried his best to get Parker off drugs — to no avail.

I'm jumping ahead of myself here. 

As I explained earlier, Oliver Jackson was someone I knew back in the late fifties, early sixties as a wonderful drummer and human being. We hung out together then. It took twenty-five years for us to catch up to each other, which we did when I went to Switzerland with Nina Simone. Oliver convinced Hans Zurbrugg that I was the best jazz photographer in America (not true) and that I should document his festival in 1987. I was hired to cover the 1987 jazz festival and returned the next two years as well.

The festival takes place every spring, the weather warming, the grass turning green with the faraway mountains still covered with snow. The Swiss had an honest, no-nonsense attitude, cleanliness, punctuality, and a total absence of humor. A Swiss comic would be a contradiction in terms, but they sure love their bebop and blues, as the festival is sold out for five straight evening concerts that last well past midnight. It was more or less a "straight ahead" festival, with many of the performers the very backbone of the jazz world. There were others whom I did not know but they soon became some of my favorites. Being there in Bern also brought me into contact with many men and women whom I knew from the old Metronome days: blues singer Joe Williams, trombonist Slide Hampton, Newport Jazz Festival producer George Wein, Sarah Vaughan, trumpeter Clark Terry, pianist Horace Silver.

One early evening before the concert, I went out for a spaghetti dinner with Joe Williams and a number of other folks, and we had a wonderful time. Joe was holding court, putting people on, the usual jazz dinner, with everyone relaxed and in good spirits.

I had briefly met Joe Williams when I was working for Metronome. He had replaced Jimmy Rushing as the singer in the Count Basie Orchestra in the mid-fifties. He then left Basie and formed his own trio. Joe sang the blues like no one else. I have to admit he was my favorite male jazz singer.

That night in Bern, Joe was on a bill with another great singer, Carmen McRae. Always independent, Carmen had also come on the scene in the fifties. I made photographs of her in Switzerland and later at the Newport Jazz Festival. She told me one of my photos was the best she ever saw of herself.

At the end of that evening's concert, Joe and Carmen were walking down a long hall backstage, ready to split for their respective hotels. Carmen I had known from afar, and Joe was someone closer, and when they were together Joe greeted me as a friend, and I was able to make use of his ease and openness. The photo I made of the two of them was memorable.

Later I would see Joe at festivals, where we would chat, talking about life and loves, and we'd move on. For a jazz musician the road is their home most of the time. It's like what trumpeter Ted Curson said about one of his tours: "Man, you play the gig, get on the bus, move to the next town, wake up with a different ceiling in your face, wash, eat, dress, play the gig, and move on again. After six weeks of this, you get a little tired." A little tired? I'd be exhausted after two days. For a jazz musician, stamina was almost as important as talent.

One characteristic of jazz performers is their physical durability. The music can become very quick, the notes rolling off the tongues, and it takes a certain level of endurance to not only play but to stay in tune. To see this happen with young musicians is expected; to see it happen with middle age and older musicians is truly remarkable. So many of the men and women I met while covering the Bern Jazz Festival are still out there, still making music: singer Dee Dee Bridgewater, trumpeter Jon Faddis, bluesman Buddy Guy (a story in its own right). 

Upon my return to America in 1989, I put together a wonderful exhibition that opened at the Verve Gallery in Los Angeles in 1990. Buddy's image was in the show, and by chance one of the producers of "Damn Right I Got The Blues," the new Buddy Guy record, worked it out with the gallery owner, Bill Goldberg, for me to fly to Chicago and make the image that eventually appeared on the record cover. Never was I so cold in my entire life, going to Chicago in December 1990.  I spent a weekend at Buddy's blues club listening to wonderful music.

I was set to leave Chicago the next day but I also wanted to see the Picasso sculpture in front of the stock exchange, so I left the hotel early and began to walk to where the sculpture was located. It turned out to be a terrible mistake as I had no hat and my jacket wasn't that warm and the weather was nasty. Halfway to the Picasso piece I turned around and hurried back to the hotel as quickly as I could, getting colder and colder by the minute. Not one to ever take a drink in the middle of a morning, I hurried to the bar. Thankfully, it was actually open, ready for business. I asked for something that would warm me up as quickly as possible. Mission accomplished, I then headed out to the airport, never so glad to leave Chicago. Sadly, I have never returned to Chicago, but, from the many friends who not only vacationed there but also lived there, I know that Chicago is a "happenin' town." Someday.

Anyway, returning to the Bern Jazz Festival of 1987, it was a who's who of great talent and funny stories: The Blind Boys of Alabama, saxophonist Al Cohn (a real gentleman and one of the funniest persons I have ever known), saxophonist Scott Hamilton, and trumpeter Nat Adderley, the younger brother of Cannonball Adderley. Nat and I eventually became "neighbors" when I moved to Florida in 1992, as he lived in Lakeland, Florida, not far from my home in St. Petersburg.

The star of the 1987 Bern Jazz Festival was Sarah Vaughan. Knowing she was to be there, I brought along a small print of a photograph I made many years before of a young Sarah Vaughan singing with O. C. Smith of the Count Basie Band, an image I made at the old Birdland. Sarah did not recognize O. C. when she saw the photograph, and I was not about to tell her the story of how she "killed" O. C. in thirty-two bars, a story I have told elsewhere.

Being in Switzerland for the second time was a trip all by itself. The Swiss are certainly fastidious, neat, clean, punctual, and extremely honest. I thought I could leave my camera bag next to a lamppost, walk around the block, and return to find rny bag still there. I recall an incident in New York City when in fact I did leave my suitcase, by accident, next to a lamppost and, discovering the absence, immediately returned to the corner, to find my suitcase gone — all within the space of no more than two minutes.

The Swiss people that I met - all involved with the jazz world — were open, engaging, and very knowledgeable and they treated me with great respect as an artist. I had very few occasions in New York where I was treated as an artist because of what I did for a living. I felt very special.

Also, being in Switzerland enabled me to reconnect with Allan Porter, the former editor of the magazine Camera, a well-respected magazine publishing some of the world's finest photographers. Allan and I went to the same

Philadelphia high school and art college. He spent a few years in New York and had been for the past forty years a resident of Switzerland. It was a wonderful meeting and I continued to see him when I returned to Bern in 1988 and 1989. We have remained in contact through emails and telephone conversations. He continues to photograph and write about photography.

I returned home after a week's worth of great music, anticipating my returning in 1988, wondering which musical artists Hans would seek out for 1988.

I did return in 1988 (and 1989) and I brought along a tape recorder, enabling me to record some of the music played by the Count Basie Band under the direction of Frank Foster, a great tenor saxophonist, heading the band since Basie’s death. Clark Terry introduced me to B. B. King, with these words, "Herb, you will never meet a man who is more of a gentleman than B. B." He was so right. What a generous and thoughtful man he is, still out there, still making audiences cheer. He is so very special to the blues and jazz communities. And of course his performance was "totally out of sight." He brought the stoic Swiss to their collective feet, continuing to cheer until he appeared on stage to take another bow.

One of the other wonderful occasions was meeting and photographing the renowned stage and film actor Burgess Meredith, a jazz fan who stayed the entire week digging the music and socializing with musicians every night, backstage. He was so unassuming and allowed me to make a few images along the way. One of the performers, totally without fanfare, also brought the house down: Maxine Weldon's time on stage was exciting to watch. She was just terrific. Maxine was an unknown (to me) singer

from Los Angeles who continued to reinforce my feelings that there are so many talented people in this world who go through life making music, making art, who simply never receive the attention they deserve. Maxine is one of them. I loved speaking with her; she was not only a quality person but also a really talented singer.

I have always wondered what happened to her over all these years, twenty-one years to be exact. The 1988 Bern Jazz Festival ended with performances by Lionel Hampton, Joe Williams/Carmen McRae, and the great pianist Oscar Peterson. Once again I returned home with a bundle of money, some valuable tapes, and a desire to sleep for a week to make up for the too many nights of parties. Jazz musicians certainly know how to have fun!

Before leaving for home Hans and I had a conversation about my having an exhibition of work made at the 1987 and 1988 festivals; a one-person show situated at two venues, one of them being located at the upscale hotel at which the more well known musicians were staying. The other was at the performing arts center; both exhibits got high visibility out of which came a number of sales — very gratifying to say the least!

But 1989 was the last year I was able to return to Switzerland as the festival's main underwriter (a Swiss bank) pulled out and there went my opportunity to be part of any more Bern Jazz Festivals. It was a grand three-year ride, 1989 was the best of the three years, filled with great music from pianists Michel Camillo and Hank Jones; the great drummer Art Blakey and his Jazz Messengers; the steady jazz bassist Milt Hinton (a wonderful photographer, too); bluesman Albert King; trumpet players Freddie Hubbard and Tom Harrell; the always energetic singer Dee Dee Bridgewater; clarinetist Buddy DeFranco (still alive and cookin'); the composer and saxophonist Benny Golson. Freddie and Benny years ago were part of the early sixties band of Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers — so the festival was a small sort of reunion for them both.

Freddie is no longer alive, while Benny is still blowing, still composing, for which we can all be thankful. The Detroit-based Moss Family Singers brought the festival to a close, and with it rny time in Switzerland. But thousands of negatives and prints are within my archives and many of the images will last long into the future, testifying to a time of great music, three weeks in three years, among creative people wishing to do no harm but rather to bring into the world all that is positive and life affirming. I was proud to be a part of those times.

After the last concert of the 1989 festival, trumpeter Clark Terry and I were sitting backstage. We were tired, drained from a week's worth of concerts, long hours, hard work, and too many parties. Clark looked at me, and I said, "Hey, Clark, what's up?"

He said, "You know, Herb, I've been thinking, you've been at this as long as we have." I thought, Oh no, Clark. You're much older than I am.

I was touched. His music and my images relate to a particular time and place, where blacks and whites — finally —  came together, however haltingly.

The next morning many of the musicians and I took a bus to the Zurich airport. They were off to other places, other gigs, festivals, or small clubs throughout Europe. The ride was filled with laughter, warmth, comradeship, good vibes. Albert King and his band were aboard, as were Milt and Mona Hinton, Dave Berger and his wife, Holly Maxson. Ruby Braff, the great grumpy cornet player, was also on board, as were the Moss Family Singers.

The sun was warm, and it wasn't long before most of the musicians were sound asleep. I always admired how musicians can fall asleep wherever they are, sitting or leaning.

We arrived at the airport, hugged, said good-bye, and since I was the only one flying to Boston, I found myself alone, thinking about my life, my friends, and the wonderful music I had just heard — a nice way to make a living.”

To order the book directly from the University of Mississippi Press please use this link.

Part 7 - Herb Snitzer's Glorious Days and Nights - A Jazz Memoir

 © Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

Glorious Days and Nights is a personal account of the fifty-year career of jazz photographer Herb Snitzer, with a special focus on his years in New York City from 1957 to 1964. A photojournalist for Life, Look, and Fortune, Snitzer was the photo editor and later associate editor of the influential jazz magazine Metronome. During the 1960s, politics, race, and social strife swirled in Snitzer's life as a working artist. But throughout the bus boycotts, demonstrations, and civil and racial unrest, what remained constant for him was jazz.

Snitzer recalls what it was like to go on the road with these musicians. His reflections run the gamut from serious meditations on his development as a young photographer working with musicians already of great stature to more conversational recollections of casual moments spent having fun with the jazz artists, many of whom became close friends.

7    Conversations

“Living in Cambridge gave me the opportunity to meet some of the younger jazz players for the first time. For instance, in June 1991, I arranged to interview trombonist Clifton Anderson, who was part of Sonny Rollins's band. We met in New York City in the courtyard of Lincoln Center. Looming behind us was a massive Henry Moore sculpture. By 1991 jazz had become so marginalized that CD sales of jazz records made up only 1 percent of all music sales. This was the milieu in which jazz musicians had to survive, and it wasn't easy. I began by asking Clifton Anderson why he became a jazz performer.

"I guess you know I'm Sonny Rollins's nephew. He gave me my first trombone when I was seven years old. It was after I went to see the movie The Musk Man with Dick Van Dyke. There was a scene in the movie where seventy-six trombones led the big parade, and I fell in love with the trombone, so my mother told Sonny, and Sonny bought me a trombone. It wasn't until junior high school that I began to take the trombone seriously. I didn't recognize what a giant Sonny is until I went to music and art school, and that's when I started playing jazz.

"When I was fourteen I went backstage at one of Sonny's concerts, and I was able to see how enamored people were of Sonny, and I could see the glitzy lifestyle, and it was then I decided this was something I wanted for myself. I also saw how the music made people feel. I recognized that everyone was so happy around Sonny.

"I was personally moved by the civil rights movement — touched, moved, influenced by that period — and I know that is a part of me and the experience is all a part of my music. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King and many other black leaders are a part of what influences me when I think about my music and the emotions or feelings I have about society in a greater spiritual sense.

"Some people think the vitality of jazz is going to be lost, but that is a misconception. Jazz is, for the most part, chamber music. You can enjoy it at a concert level. All great music has a connection to one's spirituality. Music is universal; jazz is accepted all over the world, less so in the United States, so maybe there is another factor blocking that acceptance and recognition and support of the arts that doesn't exist in other countries. I think jazz and lots of other things suffer because most people don't see it as classical American music. They see it as something black Americans play.

"I think a lot of us have suffered from a lack of self-esteem. And so when we perform, we do so because we love what we are doing but at the same time we don't project ourselves, we don't see the actual level of respect that we should be given and should be appreciated for what we do.

"The jazz scene is a lot harder for musicians today than it was for artists like Sonny and Monk and Bud Powell and J. J. Johnson. Back then you had much more access to jam sessions. A young musician has to go to a club to hear someone play, possibly paying up to twenty-five dollars to get into the club. There are no jam sessions or the degree of open playing there once was even when I was coming up, and I came up at the tail end of the time jam sessions were going on. Right now I think there is so much commercialism involved in record companies accepting you. I know great, great artists who make records on obscure European record labels, and many people don't know these records have even been released. And if you sign with the larger record companies, they have stipulations on who they want you to use, the kind of music they want you to play, and when you may perform. I don't want to go to a record company and be restricted to what they want me to perform. I'm the artist. So a lot of the great music is being performed on small labels, and the general public doesn't get to hear this, and a lot of the artists are almost unknown. [YouTube, The Internet, and Google have changed all this.]

"Right now the accessibility of the music and the artists to the public is very poor, particularly in the United States. You have to really go looking for it, and unless you have an idea of what you're looking for, you can get caught up in the misleading approach to jazz marketing. I think one of the best ways to be introduced to this music is to see and hear a master like Sonny. I've heard people come backstage after one of our performances and say ‘I've never been to a jazz concert before, and I never thought I'd like it, but now I'm hooked.' So I think the music is more powerful than any set of obstacles. Jazz will have its day. I'm convinced of it."

That same year I met with jazz singer Sheila Jordan while she was appearing at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, Massachusetts. Poor as dirt, Sheila discovered that being poor and white wasn't much different from being poor and black. As a young girl Sheila moved from the desolation of coal country in western Pennsylvania to Detroit, where she found a home in the black community. But because she was white, white police officers constantly harassed her for engaging with blacks. To get away from the hassle, she moved to New York City, where she married the great bebop pianist Duke Jordan and became a staple of that city's jazz scene.

"Coming out of the poverty-stricken background I came from, I wasn't content to sing 'country,'" said Jordan. "I just said, This isn't the music I want to sing. I was really looking for a special kind of music, to take from it spiritually so I could find what I felt. I came out of an area near Johnstown, Pennsylvania, coal-mining country. I was raised by my grandmother. We were so poor we didn't have electricity, so we didn't have lights, didn't have record players. I lived a mile from Charles Bronson. His family were miners too. I find that in any race of people, when you are poor, really impoverished, music heals, whether you are black or white. At least it did for me.

"I knew I was a singer. I found my music in Detroit when I went to visit my mother. When I was a teenager, I finally moved to Detroit to be with my mother, and that was where I heard Charlie Parker for the first time. Music was the most important thing to me because it kept me alive.

"As a little kid I was really a mess. There were times when I said, God, if you have to live like this for the rest of your life, who wants to live? I knew I wanted to sing, but I didn't know how I wanted to sing until I heard Bird. I felt the freedom and the creativity, and I knew I wanted to feel those things myself. Here was the freedom to take a song and do whatever I wanted with it because I felt it. When I heard jazz, that made me realize I had something to live for. It all tied in. After I moved to Detroit, I started hanging out with black kids. I identified with black kids; maybe it was because of the poverty and feeling rejected. I came from a very alcoholic family, but that's another story. But I really felt close to black kids. And I wanted to be black.

"I felt comfortable with black people, comfortable with the music. I got a lot of warmth and love and understanding from black people. And the people I grew up with are the great players of today: Tommy Flanagan, Barry Harris, Kenny Burrell. Top guys. I remember being called down to the office of my principal, and she said to me, 'You are such a nice gal. Why do you hang around with colored girls?' I lied. I said, 'I'm part colored.' I told this to all the white people who gave me a hard time.

"So I found my family among the black community of Detroit. I just totally identified with black people. There is still a part of me that is very sorry I wasn't black. But that is also why I never tried to copy any of the great black singers, like Billie or Sarah or Ella. As a white singer I didn't want to steal anything from a black singer because I felt they were robbed enough.

"As a young girl I wanted to go where the music was happening in Detroit. There wasn't a big white jazz following in Detroit. Most of the people were black. I tried getting into a jazz club called the Club Sudan. Of course I wanted to sing, but I was scared to death. The cops were constantly stopping me because I was young and white and I had black friends. I took a lot of chances. I tried everything to get in, including putting on dark pancake makeup to look older and black. It was so bizarre. I never drank in the clubs, so I never got busted. But it was a constant battle, degrading, sometimes being taken down to the police station and searched. We were told, 'You don't hang out with them, understand?' It was then I knew I had to get out of Detroit and move to New York. I wanted to be near Charlie Parker's music.

"I went to New York to study under [pianist] Lenny Tristano. A lot of musicians would come to his loft. This was the mid-fifties. Even in New York if I went out with a black woman, we would get the stares and the hard looks from people. It was a drag, almost all the time, except within the jazz world.

"But feeling the pain and the rejection of the black people by the whites made me more honest. Hell, I didn't want to sing white music. If anything I was going to be more dedicated to jazz because of the race thing. I'm never uneasy about singing this music because I've got my own sound. One of the joys I really get is from a black musician or black singer who really digs what I do. It's like being adopted. Somebody adopts you, and maybe they aren't your real parents, but they love you, dearly, and that's how I feel. I've been adopted into this music, and I've earned my place in it. I try very hard not to let comments about it not being my culture, or I have no right to do it, bother me."

Abbey Lincoln was another jazz singer I was crazy about. An introspective artist; a chanteuse who seems to sing with a tinge of sadness, she had been married to legendary drummer Max Roach, and she had sung on his recording of the Freedom Now Suite. Now in her eighties, she continues to make records.

I had met Abbey at the ping-pong tournament Metronome held for jazz musicians in 1960, and after I moved to Cambridge, I saw she was playing in a little nightclub there, and I looked her up. We then met at her home in Sugar Hill in Harlem. Duke Ellington had lived across the street, and Coleman Hawkins lived a block away. Abbey turned out to be a spiritual, almost a mystical, person.

She said, "I wrote a song that goes,' I live in a world that never was my own. A world of haunted memories of other worlds unknown. I'll tell them of my trouble here when they call me home. And I think everyone feels what I feel. You look up in the sky and wonder, 'Where did I come from? I wonder why I'm going through this. 'We all live in a world of scattered thought and illogical thought with stories that are not based on anything real, that have nothing to do with the world we experience. It is difficult for people to find happiness here because we are told so many lies as children — fairy tales, stories. It creates adulterated grown-ups. In that way we all suffer the same fate: none of us gets away. It's a common life.

"I am evolving and becoming more conscious of myself, of my being. It is a development that comes from the work. Practicing the arts helps develop the senses, the abilities to comprehend. I find life to be a scientific adventure. Nothing is made through happenstance except confusion. There is a real, sincere, excellent mind-boggling planet of existence.

"It's like when I was a little girl in school. I discovered I could get to the second grade by learning everything I was supposed to in the first grade. I think life is like that. We learn what it is to live on this planet. Most times we become disillusioned, unhappy or bitter, and old and tired and feeble and weak, and die with almost nothing we were given. Everything is gone before we leave.

"I am disillusioned and better, not bitter. I'm glad that all they told me was a lie and not the truth.

"I sing. I write. I act out things sometimes. I practice the arts, and I'd be doing this whether anyone is watching or not. The arts come first, and the industry comes second in the real world. I know the strength of my position. I make what I want to make. If the people say you are great, you are. So it is the best work I know, and I am thankful I was introduced to it and had the chance to be involved in it.

"I've lived a number of years, and I don't feel all at sea. I sing about the life I know. A great lyric poet and songwriter by the name of Bob Russell taught me when I was young how to judge a song for its merit. He wrote a lot of great songs, including 'Crazy He Calls Me' and 'Don't Get Around Much Anymore.' He told me a great song has originality of thought and has to be succinctly said. I look for these kinds of songs that say what I want to say. All songs have a philosophy. I've never heard a song in my life that didn't have a message.

"My culture has a lot to do with the songs I sing and how I sing them. The African culture produced brilliant artists, singers, dancers, musicians, and storytellers. The holdovers of this lifestyle are the abilities African Americans express and are privileged to possess, even now. It is as natural as the texture of our hair. It is in the genes. It is a result of experiencing life in America. It is a spirit, an approach to life. It is a residual of that time when we were very young and instructed and brilliant, and it is still with us. Everybody in the world admires it. It should make us rich and self-sustaining, but it doesn't.

"We live in a different world now. The arts have been industrialized. They have lost their therapeutic value, and theater is now practiced for the sake of capital. There is also a deficit side to the artist personality. It is, for the most part, a one track mind.

"Still, we have a chance to enhance the world in which we live. The African people have a lot to be thankful [for], for our ancestors left a legacy, something all of us can do: express ourselves. It is not something for only a few chosen people. We can all do it, if we want to do it.

"If you have a gift, it is up to you to hold it, embrace it, caress it, protect it, and pump it up. It's not someone else's responsibility. It is something you must do for yourself. But you know, there is so much animosity and anger and hatred that came from the practice of slavery and we're still caught up in it. There are some of us who blame all the tragedy in our lives on other people — always other people — while they themselves are never responsible for anything wrong. Maybe one day we will learn as a people to wear the black hat as well as the white hat.

"For the most part, my career as a singer is forwarded by Jews, Japanese, and European peoples. I appreciate the attention and investment that has come my way from managers and producers who are part of the entertainment industry. I'm thankful for an industry that affords me a way to live and support myself in a world that is for the most part unsupportive of the artist. There is nothing greater to be, if one is black and a female, than a singer. Everywhere in the world we are invited and embraced and expected to be really good. The people keep me alive.

They come to listen and encourage me to be myself and they bring money and give it to the producers who give some of it to me to support myself and live in style and buy spiffy things when I feel like it.

"I like people who come to see me who know me, who've heard about me. I'm not anxious for a wider audience. It's a lot more work, and a lot more involved. I like a select audience. That's the way my music is. Jazz is not meant for the masses. It's for the discerning, those who have taste and can understand this approach to music. That's all I want. I don't want a spectacle. Serious music brings a serious crowd, and that's what I want.

"So many jazz folks died young. The lifestyle of the music is dangerous for the musicians and singers because the performers do not embrace the life of a monk or the minister but instead embrace the life of street people, the pimps and whores who have no skills. They find the lifestyle attractive, and it is dangerous, and they overindulge and use things they shouldn't, and they should be brighter than they are.

"People say that's a result of being born black, but that's a lie. Being born black gives you an advantage. There is no deficit in being born black, having African parentage and heritage, because you inherit all these wonderful attributes that is our culture. Some people learn to be jealous and feel that other people have a better life than they have, but I know better than that. This is a common life we all live. We are living on the planet earth and we all know the same things.

"We all have our needs and wishes, and there are very few people who have the inner strength not to fall: to succumb to money, fame, power."

"If you are a victim, you have to look to yourself because people who are victims all the time need to look inside to try and find out why they are this way most of the time. I was brought up with Bible stories, and that has saved me from a lot of grief by adhering to these kinds of thoughts. We were given instruction and examples to live by and told not to do things, and one of the things we're taught to do is not covet our neighbor. And we are supposed to be kind and not abusive. If there is a God, then I am one who reflects it, like everyone else."

While I was visiting my daughter in Berkeley, California in 1991,I went to see the great jazz bass player Milt Hinton at Kimball's East in nearby Emeryville. I had first met Milt while I was working at Metronome, and we had become friends. For eighteen years Milt was the bass player in Cab Calloway's band. After that he was a studio musician in high demand, playing on perhaps five hundred albums by dozens of performers. Jackie Gleason, who made a series of very successful albums, was the first to hire him.

Hinton refused to say that racism brought the jazz age to an end, but he was very concerned that too many of the next generation of black youth were frittering away their opportunities. Milt, who passed away in 2000, was as always charming, attentive, and gracious.

"My grandmother, who raised me, was born a slave in Vicksburg, Mississippi. She was a slave of Joe Davis, Jefferson Davis's father. This lady was a lover of peace, and she had nothing. I never had a pair of skates or a bicycle, but there was always love and concern, and I never missed a meal. As times got better, we moved from Mississippi to Chicago. I remember all those wonderful times. It was just beautiful. All life is beautiful.

"I started taking violin lessons when I was thirteen. I found out that music was the one thing no one except the man upstairs could take from me. No matter how bad things were, I always had music.

"The love and concern which was so important to my life we've now lost. I've seen so much that we've lost our concerns for each other. When I was a kid and anyone in my neighborhood got sick, my grandmother would tell me to take a bowl of soup over there. We seem to have forgotten how this sustains us.

"Cab Calloway was my musical father — not that he is that much older than me, but he stood for so many things. I am proud to have been around him. He stood for decency, respect, and discipline. He carried himself that way, and he insisted that anyone around him be like that.

"We lived in a world of music, and music is an auditory art. We lived by sound, and I don't care where you're from or who your daddy was, we only cared how you sounded. Even in the South in the days of segregation, people came to hear us because we sounded good. The rules of the country said we couldn't sit together, but they could listen together, so that's what we did.

"We played the Cotton Club every night, and we had Dizzy Gillespie, Chu Berry, Doc Cheatham, everybody, and we were heard on the radio, and we were in great demand, even in the South, except that we had to obey the rules wherever we went, and that's what we did.

"I obeyed the rules. I didn't enjoy them, but they came to hear us, and we played for them. We came from New York to the South, and we had these pretty girls in the show with us. Cab was sharp in his zoot suit, and we had these copper colored gals, and it was just beautiful. We came down with this wonderful show giving these people a model to say, 'Hey, this is where we want to be.' We got a lot of flack for that in those days. The powers that be wanted us to play blues and ragtime that said, “‘’m going to cut your throat if you drink my wine,' but we refused to do that. I can't tell you how close we came to being lynched sometimes. Really close, because the people never saw a show like ours.

"But the powers that be kept us out of a lot of places, and that was one of the reasons Cab's band finally had to break up.

"We weren't angry at the way we were treated as much as disappointed. I don't know any other country but this one. I was born here, so I felt badly I wasn't treated the way everyone else was treated. You know, you can't play music angry. We used to laugh at people asking us to do certain things. I would take pictures of my wife, Doc Cheatham and other guys in front of a hotel sign that said, 'For Colored Only.' We had come from New York where things were great for us, and we came down South and everything was just silly. I was taking these pictures of the silliness, hoping in later years the young people would see what a stupid thing it was, and that's what happened. I'm glad I took them, and I'm glad young people have a chance to see them. To show the dues we had to pay in order to play our music.

"When the big bands broke up, there was no more big-band work, but I got lucky. Thanks to Jackie Gleason, I got into recordings and I began to make good money. Jeff [Hilton Jefferson] was working down in Wall Street. Cozy Cole was trying to form a little band. We would meet every Monday at Beefsteak Charlie's at five when Jeff got off. Quincy Jones, Oscar Pettiford, Jeff, and all of us would be standing at that bar. We would put our change up on the bar. We'd just drink and laugh and talk until it was time to go home. I wanted to take Jeff and Cozy down to Mexico for a week's vacation, because I had the money, but they had too much dignity, and we never did it. It is one of the greatest regrets of my life that we never made that trip.

"Jazz is not embraced by the general population because it's ours. We have a tendency to lose respect for what is ours. Why do we buy so many Japanese cars? Man, my house is loaded with everything made in Japan. Very few things are made in America anymore. It's sad. The young jazz musicians today make more money abroad than they do at home.

"You can't make everything into a race thing. We have become complacent about being efficient. We could make better cars.

"My mother had a short fuse. You know, you either do it, or forget it. Man, I never had a pair of skates or a bicycle, but you can't miss what you never had. But you want your children to have what you never had. But you must learn to earn. It's a difficult thing for young people today to realize this. They think everything is easy. There is no question that Japanese things are better than our things.

"I teach at Baruch College. It's a business school with a small music department. The school is seventy-five percent oriental. Where are all the American kids in business? And that music class I have is a small class: eighty-five percent Asian. I find it very difficult to entice some of the black students to make some progress, because they don't see where they are going in the future. They don't have any role models.

"I play to white audiences all the time. Black kids don't come to see me. They don't know whether I'm successful or not. When Cab Calloway was around, they could see it. When Duke Ellington was around, they could see it. They could say, 'Hey, I want to be like that.' We play these places where the price of admission is high, and they don't come to see us.

"The young black kids are into rap, saying things we don't want to hear. I won't condemn them for saying it. That's poetry, man, and it's great. They're saying it the way they see it in a language they know.

"These black kids don't have the bread to come to a place like Kimball's East. More whites can afford tickets. That's the real reason the audience is mostly white."”

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