Marian McPartland, who gave the world an intimate, insider’s perspective on one of the most elusive topics in music — jazz improvisation — died of natural causes Tuesday night at her home in Long Island, N.Y. She was 95.

For more than 40 years, she hosted Marian McPartland’s Piano Jazz, an NPR program pairing conversation and duet performances that reached an audience of millions, connecting with jazz fans and the curious alike. She interviewed practically every major jazz musician of the post-WWII era.

McPartland’s soft English accent wasn’t the only thing that made her a good radio personality. She was an accomplished jazz pianist herself, which was readily evident on her program.

McPartland The Pianist

Marian McPartland, radio host, was at one time Margaret Marian Turner, piano student. She told NPR in 2005 that her interest in music started when she was a young girl, after she heard her mother play piano.

“From that moment on, I don’t remember ever not playing piano, day and night, wherever I was,” she said. “At my aunt’s house, at kindergarten — wherever they had a piano, I played it. Of course, on the BBC they played all the hits from over here [in the U.S.]. They played them, I heard them and I learned them.”

Young Marian Turner studied classical music, then went on to perform in vaudeville theaters across England. During WWII, she entertained troops, often jamming with American soldiers.

She married one of them: cornetist Jimmy McPartland. After the war, the couple made their way to the U.S. — first to Chicago, then to New York.

There, she tracked down one of her early idols, one of the few women in the bebop revolution, pianist Mary Lou Williams.

“A man might come into New York in 1951 and be kind of gunning for his competition,” says Paul de Barros, McPartland’s biographer. “Marian McPartland came to New York City and befriended Mary Lou Williams. She immediately tried to establish a kind of camaraderie with her, a kind of female strategy of ‘we’re in this together.’ ”

That “we’re in this together” attitude was central to the success of her radio program and her career — not that she had an easy time of it at first. As McPartland struggled to make a name for herself in New York, one critic caustically suggested that she had three things going against her: She was British, she was white and she was a woman.

“I guess it wasn’t that usual to see a woman musician playing in a group, although there were many, actually,” McPartland told NPR. “But everybody seemed to think that this was pretty strange, maybe because I was British also. And someone would say, ‘Oh, you play good for a girl,’ or ‘You sound just like a man.’ At the time, I just took all those things as encouragement.”

McPartland landed a gig in 1952 at The Hickory House, a noisy steakhouse on 52nd Street, the center of the city’s jazz scene.

“Everybody came by,” de Barros says. “I mean, she had the opportunity to meet everyone from Duke Ellington to Pee Wee Russell to Thelonious Monk. Jazz was really an underground community, and everybody hung out.”

Conversations Like Jazz

McPartland continued to record and perform throughout the 1950s and into the ’60s, but as rock ‘n’ roll took over, she began to lecture on college campuses. In the late ’60s, she started spinning jazz records on a New York radio station where other pianists would drop by the studio unannounced, just to chat.

A casual hello became a regular program in April 1979, when McPartland and South Carolina ETV Radio launched Piano Jazz. Her first on-air guest was the late Billy Taylor, also a pianist and NPR jazz host.

“It seemed as if every opportunity that came her way in the past prepared her for being a radio host,” de Barros says. “She had researched other people’s styles, so she had questions that she wanted to ask. All of those skills were in place, and she was ready for the opportunity that came to her.”

McPartland said the conversations themselves were very much like jazz, spontaneous and free-flowing.

“It’s so easy to make it a conversation, and you don’t know where it’s going to lead,” McPartland said. “The whole thing is so improvised, you really don’t know where it’s going to go.”

Along the way, McPartland also became a mentor to many young pianists. Geri Allen, one of those pianists, says she hears something familiar to musicians when she listens to Piano Jazz.

“It’s a very personal exchange that only happens to musicians on the bandstand,” Allen says. “But to have it opened up to the fans, I think it helps to create even more of an understanding [of] what that whole experience of improvising is about.”

McPartland was once asked how she did this. Her answer was simple: “You have to love what you do,” she said.

That was perhaps Marian McPartland’s greatest talent: She made Piano Jazz not about her, but about the musicians, the fans and our collective exploration of jazz. For more than 40 years, she reminded listeners every week that we’re all in it together.

Originally published at NPR.org

NEA Jazz Master Cedar Walton passed away this morning.

He had early associations in the 50’s with Coltrane and Bird , but he first came to international prominence as the piano player and arranger for Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers in the early 60’s. After the Messengers, Walton was house pianist for Prestige Records and is the sideman on many hard bop recordings.

He had many CDs recorded as a soloist and band leader as well.

Albert Murray, an influential essayist, critic and novelist who found literary inspiration in his Alabama roots and saw black culture not as distinct from American culture but as essential to it and inextricably bound up in it, died on Sunday at his home in Harlem. He was 97.

Lewis P. Jones, a family spokesman and executor of Mr. Murray’s estate, confirmed the death.

Mr. Murray was one of the last surviving links to a period of flowering creativity and spreading ferment among the black intelligentsia in post-war America, when the growing force of the civil rights movement gave rise to new bodies of thought about black identity, black political power and how African-Americans can live in a society with a history of racism.

As blacks and whites clashed in the streets, black integrationists and black nationalists dueled in the academy and in books and essays. And Mr. Murray was in the middle of the debate, joining or sparring with writers and artists like James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Romare Bearden and his good friend Ralph Ellison.

One of his boldest challenges was directed toward a new black nationalist movement that was gathering force in the late 1960s, drawing support from the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam and finding advocates on university faculties and among alienated young blacks, who believed that African-Americans could never achieve true equality in the United States.

Mr. Murray insisted that integration was necessary, inescapable and the only path forward for the United States. And to those — blacks and whites alike — who would have isolated “black culture” from the American mainstream, he answered that it couldn’t be done. To him the currents of the black experience — expressed in language and music and rooted in slavery — run through American culture, blending with European and Native American traditions and helping to give American culture its very shape and sound.

With a freewheeling prose style influenced by jazz and the blues — Duke Ellington called him “the unsquarest man I know” — Mr. Murray challenged conventional assumptions about art, race and American identity in books like the essay collection “Stomping the Blues” and the memoir “South to a Very Old Place.” He gave further expression to those views in a series of autobiographical novels, starting with “Train Whistle Guitar” in 1974.

Mr. Murray established himself as a formidable social and literary figure in 1970 with his first book, a collection of essays titled “The Omni-Americans: New Perspectives on Black Experience and American Culture.” The book constituted an attack on black separatism.

“The United States is not a nation of black and white people,” Mr. Murray wrote. “Any fool can see that white people are not really white, and that black people are not black.” America, he maintained, “even in its most rigidly segregated precincts,” was a “nation of multicolored people,” or Omni-Americans: “part Yankee, part backwoodsman and Indian — and part Negro.”

The book also challenged what Mr. Murray called the “social science fiction” pronouncements of writers like Baldwin, Richard Wright and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who he said had exaggerated racial and ethnic differences in postulating a pathology of black life. As Mr. Murray put it, they had simply countered “the folklore of white supremacy” with “the fakelore of black pathology.”

The novelist Walker Percy called “The Omni-Americans” “the most important book on black-white relations in the United States, indeed on American culture,” published in his generation. But it had fierce detractors. Writing in The New York Times, the black-studies scholar and author J. Saunders Redding called the essays contradictory, Mr. Murray’s theories “nonsense” and his “rhetoric” a “dense mixture of pseudo-scientific academic jargon, camp idiom and verbal play.”

For many years Mr. Murray and the novelist Ralph Ellison, who met in college, were close friends and literary kindred spirits. In “King of Cats,” a 1996 profile of Mr. Murray in The New Yorker, Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote that the friendship between the two men “seemed a focal point of black literary culture.”

“Both men were militant integrationists, and they shared an almost messianic view of the importance of art,” Mr. Gates wrote. “In their ardent belief that Negro culture was a constitutive part of American culture, they had defied an entrenched literary mainstream, which preferred to regard black culture as so much exotica — amusing perhaps, but eminently dispensable. Now they were also defying a new black vanguard, which regarded authentic black culture as separate from the rest of American culture — something that was created, and could be appreciated, in splendid isolation.”

Like Ellison, Mr. Murray proposed an inclusive theory of “the American Negro presence.” (He disdained the use of the term “black” and later spurned “African-American” — “I am not an African,” he said, “I am an American.”)

Mr. Murray contended that American identity “is best defined in terms of culture.” And for him, American culture was a “composite,” or “mulatto,” culture that owed much of its richness and diversity to blacks.

Yet Mr. Murray was not always sure that whites understood this shared legacy when they embraced black artists. He could be suspicious of whites, asking whether they, even in their applause, nonetheless continued to regard black culture “as so much exotica,” as Mr. Gates put it. Thus Mr. Murray asked whether the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Toni Morrison in 1993 was not “tainted with do-goodism,” and whether the poet Maya Angelou’s readings at President Bill Clinton’s first inaugural echoed a song-and-dance tradition in which blacks entertained whites.

The essential bond between American culture and what Mr. Murray called Negro culture is the shared embrace of a “blues aesthetic,” which he found permeating the works of black musicians, writers and artists and increasingly adopted by whites. “For him, blues music, with its demands for improvisation, resilience and creativity, is at the heart of American identity,” Laura Ciolkowski, a professor of literature now at Columbia University, wrote of Mr. Murray in The New York Times Book Review in 2002. The blues, she added, were to him “the genuine legacy of slavery.”

Mr. Murray himself wrote: “When the Negro musician or dancer swings the blues, he is fulfilling the same fundamental existential requirement that determines the mission of the poet, the priest and the medicine man. He is making an affirmative and hence exemplary and heroic response to that which André Malraux describes as la condition humaine.”

Albert Lee Murray was born on May 12, 1916, in Nokomis, Ala., to middle-class parents who soon gave him up for adoption to Hugh Murray, a laborer, and his wife, Matty. “It’s just like the prince left among the paupers,” said Mr. Murray, who learned of his adoption when he was about 11. The Murrays moved to Mobile, where Albert grew up in a neighborhood known as Magazine Point. In “Train Whistle Guitar,” his largely autobiographical first novel, he called it Gasoline Point.

Through the novel’s protagonist, Scooter, his fictional alter ego, Mr. Murray evoked an unharrowed childhood enriched by music, legends, jiving and jesting, and the fancy talk of pulpit orators and storefront storytellers. As rendered in Mr. Murray’s inventive prose, the adolescent Scooter and his friend Buddy Marshall could imagine themselves as “explorers and discoverers and Indian scouts as well as sea pirates and cowboys and African spear fighters not to mention the two schemingest gamblers and back alley ramblers this side of Philmayork.”

After graduating from the Mobile County Training School, where he earned letters in three sports and was voted the best all-around student, Mr. Murray enrolled at Tuskegee Institute, where he discovered literature and immersed himself in Hemingway, Faulkner, Joyce and Mann. He met Ralph Ellison, an upperclassman, as well as another student, Mozelle Menefee, who became his wife in 1941. She survives him, as does their daughter, Michéle Murray, who became a dancer with the Alvin Ailey company.

Mr. Murray received a bachelor of science degree in education in 1939 and began graduate study at the University of Michigan. But the following year, he returned to Tuskegee to teach literature and composition.

He enlisted in the military in 1943 and spent the last two years of World War II in the Army Air Corps. After the war, the Murrays moved to New York City, where he used the G.I. Bill to earn a master’s degree from N.Y.U. and renew his friendship with Ellison. In 1951, a year before Ellison published his classic work, “Invisible Man,” Mr. Murray rejoined the military, entering the Air Force.

He served in the military, peripatetically, for 11 years — teaching courses in geopolitics in the Air Force R.O.T.C. program at Tuskegee in the 1950s, taking assignments in North Africa and studying at Northwestern University, the University of Chicago and the University of Paris.

After retiring from the Air Force as a major in 1962, he returned to New York with his family and settled in an apartment in the Lenox Terrace complex in Harlem. He began writing essays for literary journals and articles for Life and The New Leader, some of which were included in “The Omni-Americans.”

He also became a familiar figure on campuses, holding visiting professorships at the University of Massachusetts, Barnard, Columbia, Emory, Colgate and other schools. And he resumed exploring the streets and nightclubs of Harlem with Mr. Ellison.

From 1970 to the mid-1990s, as if compensating for his slow start, Mr. Murray published nine books. His second, “South to a Very Old Place” (1971), recounted his return to his Southern homeland. The book later became part of the Modern Library.

In “The Hero and the Blues” (1973), a collection of essays based on a series of lectures, Mr. Murray criticized naturalism and protest fiction, which he said subjugated individual actions to social circumstances. In “Stomping the Blues” (1976), he argued that the essence of the blues was the tension between the woe expressed in its lyrics and the joy infusing its melodies. He saw the blues, and jazz, as an uplifting response to misery.

“The blues is not the creation of a crushed-spirited people,” Mr. Murray said years later. “It is the product of a forward-looking, upward-striving people.”

He next began a long collaboration with Count Basie on his autobiography, “Good Morning Blues,” which was published in 1985, a year after Basie’s death. Along with the writer Stanley Crouch and the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, Mr. Murray was actively involved in the creation of Jazz at Lincoln Center, the institution’s first permanent jazz program.

In 1991 he returned to his fictional alter ego, Scooter, depicting his college years at Tuskegee in the novel “The Spyglass Tree.” Four years later, as he neared 80, Mr. Murray published two books: “The Seven League Boots,” the third volume of his Scooter cycle, and “The Blue Devils of Nada,” another essay collection. Still another collection, “From the Briarpatch File: On Context, Procedure, and American Identity,” which explored in part the “existential implications of the blues,” was published in 2001.

Mr. Murray published the fourth and last novel in his Scooter cycle, “The Magic Keys,” in 2005. The book, which received tepid reviews (it “feels plotted rather than lived,” John Leland wrote in The Times), brings its narrator, whose real name is never learned, to graduate school in Manhattan, where he befriends a thinly disguised Ralph Ellison and Romare Bearden.

Mainstream recognition was slow to come for Mr. Murray. But by the mid-1990s, the critic Warren J. Carson had called him “African America’s undiscovered national treasure,” and in 1997 the Book Critics Circle gave Mr. Murray its award for lifetime achievement. The next year he received the inaugural Harper Lee Award as Alabama’s most distinguished writer.

In 2000, Mr. Murray published “Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray,” which he edited with John F. Callahan. That same year he appeared as a commentator in Ken Burns’s multipart PBS documentary “Jazz.”

The critic Tony Scherman wrote of Mr. Murray in American Heritage, “His views add up to a cohesive, elegant whole, making him a rarity in today’s attenuated intellectual world: a system builder, a visionary in the grand manner.”

He could also write on a personal scale: his first book of poems, “Conjugations and Reiterations,” appeared in 2001. And he was candid in writing about advanced age.

“I’m doing more than ever,” he wrote in an Op-Ed essay in The Times in 1998, two years after undergoing spinal surgery, “but it’s harder now. I’m in constant pain. At home I use a four-pronged aluminum stick to get around. I need a stroller when I’m on the street. At receptions and in airports I need a wheelchair to get down the long aisles.

“But nothing hurts quite like the loss of old friends. There are ways to cope at the time they die. But weeks and months later you realize you can’t phone them and talk: Duke Ellington, Romare Bearden, Ralph Ellison, Alfred Kazin, Robert Penn Warren, Joseph Mitchell. It’s hard to believe they’re all gone.”

Originally published by the New York Times

WBGO, NPR Music and WNCU are offering a holiday special on Labor Day, Sept. 2. The special will feature selected sets from the 2013 Newport Jazz Festival. WBGO’s Josh Jackson will host sets from three stages.

“How diverse was this year’s Newport Jazz Festival? One of my favorite solos … was by an oud player” on the Quad Stage, writes Jon Garelick in The Boston Globe.

“Makeshift dance floors popped up at each side of the … main stage as the Eddie Palmieri Salsa Orchestra got into its groove,” writes Alisha A. Pina in The Providence Journal.

She says the Harbor Stage “was mobbed … as Jon Batiste and Stay Human took them on a New Orleans ride.” The crowd sang and the band played in the aisle. Batiste – age 26 – plays piano, melodica, sings and “won’t rest until [he’s] won you,” writes Ben Ratliff in The New York Times’ review of Newport.

Tune in to member supported WNCU 90.7 and wncu.org to catch the Newport Jazz Festival.

Today is Abbey Lincoln’s birthday! WNCU will air her birthday tribute special at 9pm tonight.

NPR Links:
http://www.npr.org/series/newport-jazz-festival/
http://www.npr.org/event/music/156120628/newport-jazz-festival

Carline Ray, one of the great jazz pioneers, an activist in women’s rights, a performer and educator, and an active member of Saint Peter’s Church, died at Isabella House in Manhattan on July 18, 2013.  She was 88 years old.

Carline is survived by her daughter, Catherine Russell, also a great musician, her sister Irma Sloan, and nieces, nephews, and cousins.

Carline Ray was born 21 April 1925, New York City, New York, USA.

Although her father, Elisha Ray, was a gifted musician, he had been unable to find steady employment in music. Even so, he played with James Reese Europe’s band and was also offered work with the New York Philharmonic. Carline herself sang and played piano, and at the age of 16 entered the Juilliard School of Music, from which her father had graduated in 1925. While at Juilliard, Ray studied composition and she also first played jazz, joining Edna Smith, a fellow student and bass player, gradually becoming adept on this instrument.

In 1946, upon graduating from Juilliard, she and Smith joined the International Sweethearts Of Rhythm. In addition to playing guitar with the band, Ray also sang. In 1948, after the Sweethearts disbanded, Ray joined Erskine Hawkins And His Orchestra as a singer but also played guitar rather than simply sitting idle between vocal numbers. After the Hawkins engagement, Ray and Smith teamed up with fellow Sweetheart Pauline Braddy to form a trio that played in New York clubs, including one managed by pianist and Orchestra leader, Luis Russell, whom Ray married in 1956. At this time, Ray added the Fender bass to her growing arsenal of instruments and she and Smith would sometimes switch instruments. In addition to working with the trio, Ray also played with various other bands, in particular a Latin band led by pianist Frank Anderson.

She continued to study, gaining a master’s degree in voice in 1956. Throughout the next two decades Ray worked constantly, singing and playing all the instruments upon which she was proficient, in a wide variety of musical settings. In 1981 she was awarded a grant to study the acoustic bass under renowned jazzman Major Holley. Comfortably adapting to the differing demands of jazz, popular music, classics, and choral works, Ray was a complete professional, finding in music a lifetime of challenge and fulfillment. Some of her performing credits as bassist include working with Sy Oliver Orchestra, Duke Ellington Orchestra directed by Mercer Ellington, pianist/composer Mary Lou Williams, trombonist-composer Melba Liston, and singer Ruth Brown. Nevertheless, Carline met her share of the prejudice that greets women in jazz. As she remarked to author Sally Placksin, ‘… I would rather be taken seriously as a musician, and the fact that I’m female – I just happen to be female, that’s all’.

In 2005, Carline was the recipient of the Kennedy Center’s Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Festival Award, and in 2008, she received an IWJ (International Women In Jazz) Award.

Carline is also featured in the documentary film ‘The Girls in the Band,’ directed by Judy Chaikin and in 2013 she released her debut recording produced by her daughter Catherine Russell, Carline Ray “Vocal Sides”.

Carline’s memorial liturgy will be held at Saint Peter’s Church later this Fall where her ashes will be inurned.

Catherine Russell announced this morning that her mother, Carline Ray, passed this morning at age 87. She was one of the last surviving members of The International Sweethearts of Rhythm. Below you will find a feature that Arnold Jay Smith wrote on Carline a few years ago.

Her late husband was Luis Russell, Louis Armstrong’s bandleader/arranger/pianist. Their daughter is the singer Catherine “Cat” Russell. Bassist/ vocalist Carline Ray is a name perhaps not as familiar as some other Octos in our file, but she’s been playing with notable jazz personages for decades. In the 1940s, she played with the pioneering all-female band, the International Sweethearts of Rhythm. She was Mercer Ellington’s bassist and singer when he conducted the music for Alvin Ailey’s first Ailey/Ellington modern dance celebration, some 30 years ago. She plays upright and electric bass, piano, and guitar. Her vocal tones are in the rich alto range.

Carline is also an activist and an icon for Women in Jazz both the organization and the movement in general. She’s advised and befriended countless young female musicians who might otherwise not have had the persistence to deal with the hardships of the road: the one-nighters, playing what is largely a male-dominated music, and trying to establish an individual voice while remaining side players. In so doing, she’s earned the respect of musicians of both genders.

Our interview took place in Disneyworld North aka the Times Square area of West 42nd St., New York City in an increasingly noisome restaurant down the block from B.B. King’s and not far from Carline’s apartment. Our conversation belied the lack of intimacy.

“I didn’t expect to be living this long [she was born in 1925], so I didn’t know what to expect,” she confided at the outset. ‘”I’m still excited about meeting interesting people and going to more interesting places.” In 2002 she went to South Africa with dancer/choreographer Mickey Davidson, for whom she played bass. “Davidson’s son, Malcolm, was marrying a South African girl. We briefly toured Capetown and went to Robben Island to see where Nelson Mandela had been incarcerated in that small cell for 26 years. He [and the other prisoners] had to break up rocks with shiny things in them [mica?], and they weren’t allowed sun glasses.” As for the music she heard there, the only “native” music was what was played at the wedding. “It was for tribal dancers, which we heard later at a presentation of dances. They were really letting go. The company was 15-20 strong.”

Carline’s musical exposure began at home. “I was born on the same day as Queen Elizabeth II, only a year earlier, and I don’t carry a purse all the time. My father always had a lot of instruments around the house.” Ray pre was a graduate of Juilliard, specializing in brass, euphonium, tubas, and even a sousaphone, “which I saw him play most often as he played in marching bands,” she remembered. You could sense her admiration as she identified her father as her musical hero. “He went to Tuskegee Institute prior to it becoming Tuskegee University. His was the last graduating class under the presidency of Booker T. Washington. During WWI, he played with James Reese Europe in France.” He was offered a chair at Juilliard, but after Carline was born, a steady paying job at the Post Office seemed a safer bet. When she was 16, Carline applied to and was accepted by the school, but didn’t tell her father, for fear that he would say that they couldn’t afford it. It was a fait accompli when she finally told him. “I was a piano major under a marvelous teacher named Harold Lewis,” she said. Carline remained a piano major for two years. “I decided to change my major to composition under Vittorio Pianini. Ellis Larkins was there when I was. We would corral him into a practice room to play whatever he wanted for us.”

Her turn towards other instruments came when she met bassist Edna Smith, who was a graduate of New York’s High School of Music and Art. “We were standing in line to register [at Juilliard], and we became friends. She was very aggressive when it came to digging up gigs. Up to that time I had been listening to ‘The Street’ [W. 52nd]: Art Tatum, Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday, Red Allen. Edna’s brother, Karl, had a car, and he would pick her up and take us uptown to The Nest, an after-hours place, where musicians hung out. We would also go to the Hollywood, where there would be an old-timer piano night. Young cats would go there as well. That’s where I met Billy Taylor. Art Tatum would be the last pianist to go on. Nobody followed Art.” One night someone asked Carline to sing. To this day she has no idea who even knew that she could sing. “Are you ready for this?” she remarked. “Art asked if it was alright for him to play for me.” She thinks that she did a Gershwin tune, albeit shakily. “Then Tatum asked me, ‘Did I play alright for you?’ I made it my business to get up there more often to hear the likes of Willie ‘the Lion’ Smith.” It was the mid ’40s and the after-hours joints were jumpin’.

Carline was living in Harlem, when one night Erskine Hawkins asked her to come over to the Savoy Ballroom to audition as a singer. Did I mention that she was playing rhythm guitar at the time? After the vocal audition she didn’t recall what she sang, but she did remember that Charlie Buchanan, manager of the Savoy, approached her and said, ”’Young lady, tell you what I’m gonna do. You will never have to pay to come in here again.’ I loved to dance, so that was a major invitation. He was true to his word.” Carline remained with the Hawkins band for about two years. “I did his famous recording of ‘After Hours’ along with reedmen Julian Dash (‘Tuxedo Junction’), Haywood Henry and Jimmy Mitchell,” she said. “Avery Parish, the tune’s composer, was the pianist. There was some jealousy that I was getting more playing time than some of the other players, and I was told by Haywood who was always looking out for me that I would be ‘approached.’ But I was always treated like a lady and acted the same way.”

There were lean, non-musical times, when Carline had to take other gigs such as managing a dry cleaners. But then there were The International Sweethearts of Rhythm and Luis Russell. “We had formed a trio: Edna Smith, bass, Pauline Braddy, drums, and myself on piano,” she said. “Mr. Luis Russell, who was managing a room called Town Hill, came to the Village Door where we were playing. [He was] looking for a group to fill in while another of his groups was held over elsewhere. He hired us sound-unheard because he liked our press photo. The drum kit, the bass, and we piled into my car, and we made it for opening night. We had never laid eyes on Luis Russell prior to that.”

Carline related an occasion when a police precinct captain paid Russell a visit. “They went into Luis’ office scowling. When they came out they were both smiling. I said right there that I had to get to know Mr. Russell better.” The Town Hill gig that was originally booked for two weeks lasted six months. Being a pianist himself, Russell kept the piano well-tuned for Carline and always asked her if “everything was all right.”

Soon, she was dining at his house, where she sampled his native Panamanian cuisine. Things got warmer. “He took me to Basin Street East, where I got to meet Louis Armstrong for the first time,” she said. “We became engaged on New Year’s Eve 1955-56, which was my final year of my Masters at Manhattan School of Music.” The evening was made all the more auspicious because Carline was doing a television show with Leonard Bernstein. “We were doing a choral Christmas and we had to memorize all the music because [Maestro Bernstein] didn’t like having the music in front of us. I gave my brand-new engagement ring to Luis for safekeeping, because I was afraid of it falling off. No one knew we were even keeping company, so when I played Town Hill and they checked my fingers, no ring. Well, right after the TV show, who do you think was waiting for me to give me back my ring? Hubby to be.”

I queried Carline about Luis’s affiliations with Louis Armstrong. “He didn’t talk about it much, but he did leave a steamer trunk, and in it is a box marked ‘Louis Armstrong.’ I don’t know what’s in it,” she told me. “I do remember one time we were at Pee Wee Russell’s house, where he was throwing a wedding anniversary party, when Louis telephoned. Seems he wanted to come over it was after midnight to take home movies of the event. Another time, Louis had asked my husband to go on the road with him, as his regular pianist Billy Kyle was ill. Luis didn’t want to leave his new family, so he recommended another Panamanian pianist, Rod Rodriguez. Louis understood my husband’s desire to stay home and he seemed happy with Rodriguez. That’s about all Luis and I ever discussed about Louis.”

[A fascinating digression as a preamble to her time with the Sweethearts: Her trio was being booked by Nat Lazzaro’s office in the Brill Building, who also booked Stump & Stumpy, the famous tap duo. The story has come down to me that Harold Cromer (Stumpy) was at a rent party and fell over Dizzy Gillespie’s horn, supposedly breaking it. Both Messrs. Cromer and Gillespie confirmed the tale to me. But Carline was there when it happened, and she tells a different story. She says firmly that the horn was never “broken,” as first reported, just bent into its now internationally-renowned shape. And it wasn’t at a rent party. “Edna and I were a duo playing intermission at a [midtown] place called Snooky’s. Dizzy and his group were the headliners. During a break, he and his wife Lorraine went out for a drink. [Singer] Babs Gonzales walked onto the bandstand. When Babs left the bandstand and Dizzy picked up his horn to begin his second set, the bell was bent up. Did Babs accidentally step on something while on the bandstand? I don’t know. Dizzy looked at it and murmured to himself as only he would, ‘What the fuck?’ But when he played it, it worked. To my mind it sounded even better with the bell up. I guess Diz felt the same way because he never looked back.”]

The story of her affiliation with the Sweethearts stems from activity in and around New York’s Brill Building. “Ours was a different group then,” she began. “Jackie King was our pianist; I was playing guitar by that time.”

[Another digression: “One of the instruments in my father’s house was a guitar, and it hung in my room. Edna Smith’s guitarist didn’t like to rehearse, so she asked me if she could borrow my father’s, as we had upcoming gigs.” Quickly and fearlessly, Carline taught herself the instrument.]

The Sweethearts (continued): “Edna [still a bass player] and I were walking to the subway, having left Lazzaro’s office. She had her [electric] bass on her back, and we were off to our respective parents’ homes where we lived she in the Bronx, and me on W. 148th St. A nice-looking brown-skinned man came up to her and asked if he knew her. She replied, ‘Unless you’re a musician, I don’t know you.’ He went onto introduce himself as Maurice King, director of the Sweethearts of Rhythm. It seems he was looking for a group of girls to replace some who were leaving [the band].” In a coincidence straight out of a ’40s movie, it happened that the configuration of Edna and Carline’s group was exactly what the Sweethearts needed: piano, bass, and guitar, which was a very popular trio format. Think Tatum, Nat “King” Cole, and later, Oscar Peterson.

The Sweethearts were opening in St. Louis the next day. Carline was about to graduate from Juilliard, which took priority over all else, so she asked for a delay of a fortnight or so. King agreed, and sent her a ticket on the fabled “Spirit of St. Louis” railroad train. “I had never been west of New Jersey in my life,” Carline remarked. “So here I go, on the road. The guitar I took with me was given to me by Steve Gibson (not related to the guitar family) a custom-made flat top, round-hole Epiphone, which I recently gave to my son-in-law. We had a wonderful time [on the road] with both Erskine Hawkins as well as the Sweethearts, making all the black theaters, including the Apollo in New York and the Howard in Washington, D.C., and others across the country. It was like vaudeville. There were opening and closing acts, dancers and comedians in the middle. We backed them all. Along the way there was ‘Moms’ Mabley. Ella Fitzgerald and Ray Brown were sometimes on the bill. I stayed with the Sweethearts for about the same length of time as with Erskine two years or so. I kept my eyes open and my mouth shut, and I learned a lot.”

Carline was doing a great deal of backup vocal work. Besides Bernstein she worked for Patty Page and Bobby Darin. She was the backup baby on call for so many 1950s pop hits. It was also during this time that Carline met pianist John Browning, who became her teacher at the Manhattan School of Music. “No matter where he was, he would always make it back for my lesson,” she remembered. At MSM at the same time were Donald Byrd and Coleridge Taylor Perkinson. “Perky and I became best friends. He got me my next teacher after MSM, Claire Gelza.”

In 1956, baby Catherine came on the scene. “I took this child with me on gig after gig,” Carline said. “She was old before her time. Luis put her on his lap at the piano and she would tinkle away. One time during a particularly popular TV commercial, I hummed the jingle. She said, ‘No, mommy. You’re in the wrong key.’ And she would sing it for me. Perfect pitch and she couldn’t have been more than five. Not long after that, I met Arnie Lawrence and he hired me for a date in a park in Queens. We were warming up and I had forgotten my pitch pipe, so I turned to Cat and said, ‘Give me a G,’ which she did.” Neither Luis nor Carline had perfect pitch. I’ll leave that as a non-sequitur. (Cue Twilight Zone theme .)

Although I had heard her prior, my first formal encounter with Carline came when she appeared with Mercer Ellington’s band backing the Alvin Ailey Dance Company during their first Duke Ellington season in the late 1970s. “It began when Alvin Ailey wanted to choreograph parts of Mary Lou Williams’s “Mass,” on which I had recorded some vocal parts. Actually, I was wearing two hats: bassist and singer.”

[Carline had picked up the electric bass guitar, specifically a Fender, after hearing it played by Edna Smith. It was Monk Montgomery who first played it with the Lionel Hampton band, after Hamp had made a business arrangement with Mr. Fender. “When I saw Edna’s I thought, ‘Ah. A four- string guitar without the two top strings.’ Edna would lend me her bass when she couldn’t make a gig. I was hooked. I took to it naturally. Never studied.”]

“Mary Lou’s Mass” was a mainstay with the Ailey Company for three or four years in the mid 1970s. Then, in the late ’70s, Ailey began choreographing Ellington’s extended compositions. Carline knew all Duke’s commercial tunes, but was excited to learn the longer things. Ailey presented that opportunity. The first was Ellington’s setting of The Lord’s Prayer, first sung with Ellington by Mahalia Jackson. Carline sang Mahalia’s part. [The conductor was Joyce Brown, who achieved fame in Broadway’s Golden Boy, starring Sammy Davis, Jr., and Purlie, starring Cleavon Little and introducing Melba Moore.]

“I had subbed for Mercer’s bassist, and he liked what I did, so he asked if I could join the band. I was teaching at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, but they hadn’t sent me an invitation letter for the next semester. So the next time it came up, I said to Mercer, ‘Have bass, will travel.”’

When the band backed Ailey/Ellington in some of Duke’s historic long-form masterpieces, Carline was there to vocalize and/or play her electric bass. The repertoire included “Three Black Kings,” “Night Creature,” “The River” (originally composed as a commission from the American Ballet Theatre), and a medley of Ellingtonia called “Pas de Duke.” It was an honor when Down Beat magazine allowed me to review the dance series for the first time. For their 50th Anny in 2008-9, the Ailey Company reprised some of the Ellington pieces. They haven’t lost a step to time (pun intended).

In 1980, at the encouragement of United Jazz Coalition founder Cobi Narita, Carline applied for and won an NEA grant to study upright bass. “I went right to my idol, Milt Hinton. But he was always on the road. My second idol choice was Major Holley, and he became my teacher.” She continued playing electric, as well. “I usually carried my electric when I went on the road, because I heard all the stories of having to pay for another seat on the plane for the upright.” That said, she has mentored others on upright bass.

Carline gives all the credit for forming International Women In Jazz to Narita. But it’s always the purveyors who carry the music to public’s ears and in Carline’s case teach it to young aspirants. Many times Carline was the only female in the bands in which she played. Now, largely thanks to her and other pioneers, there are more all female or female-led bands than ever in our music’s history. There’s even a cable television program called “International Woman In Jazz.” Hosted by vocalist/percussionist Fran McIntyre, the show has been a weekly staple on Manhattan Neighborhood Network since 1995. “Not only did we play [on the show],” Carline explained, “but Fran taught us how to use the cameras and the mixing board. She was one of my students. She calls me her mentor. She ‘mentors’ me to death,” Carline laughed good-naturedly

Regrets: “Women musicians are simply not mentioned in many encyclopedias,” Carline laments. “Ken Burns included Mary Lou, of course. But how many others?” The Burns PBS series, Jazz, also ignored European jazz, Latin jazz and Third Stream, to name but a few omissions. Dare I facetiously rationalize that jazz women are in good company with others who Burns omitted? Among the great women of jazz have been Marian McPartland, Marjorie Hyams, Mary Osborne, and Pat Moran, and that hardly scratches the surface. We owe thanks for the resultant preponderance of females now playing in your local saloons (or at least over their sound systems) to the perseverance of those pioneers.

Unfinished: “I’m not going to add anything more because my life goes on and on and I don’t know what I’m going be doing.”

Originally published at Jazz.com

A local jazz legend died Tuesday on Hutchinson Island when the golf cart he was in was struck by a car coming off the island’s former racetrack.

Click here to view a slideshow of photos of the life and legacy of Ben Tucker.

Savannah-Chatham police confirmed Tuesday afternoon 82-year-old Ben Tucker was the driver of the golf cart struck by a dark blue Dodge sedan on Resort Drive, an approach to Grand Prize of America Avenue on Hutchinson Island.

The car was driven by 52-year-old Robert William Martin, of Spicewood, Texas. Police have charged Martin with racing, vehicular homicide in the first degree and reckless driving, Police spokesman Julian Miller said.

Miller said Tucker was crossing the road in his golf cart when the sedan was coming off the speedway. Tucker was transported to Memorial University Medical Center where he was pronounced dead.

The bass violinist moved to Savannah in 1971 from New York City, becoming a mainstay in the local jazz scene while traveling the world and making music with some of the genre’s biggest players.

For years Tucker owned local jazz spot Hannah’s East where he was known to play bass for Statesboro singer and pianist Emma Kelly. He also was a former owner of WSOK-AM and WLVH-FM.

The car was driven by 52-year-old Robert William Martin, of Spicewood, Texas. Police have charged Martin with racing, vehicular homicide in the first degree and reckless driving, Miller said.

Originally published at savannahnow.com.