jazz stories

BY MICHELE WALLACE

In fall of 1963, when my sister Barbara and I were 11 and 12, we were moved from the Bronx (663 Westchester Avenue) into a three-bedroom apartment at 345 West 145th Street in Harlem. We were so excited and enchanted by the larger space that we convinced our mother to allow us to remain in the apartment overnight (it was late) and she bedded us down in the bathtub. That’s just how small we were, that we could sleep head to foot in the bathtub together. By the time we woke up, the move was in full progress.

The building was built in the 1950s and it still stands. That apartment was previously occupied by only one other person, Dinah Washington, the brilliant singer who died soon after.

Not only was she a famous and proficient jazz and gospel singer (originating in Chicago) with a long history among aficionados of African American music, in the building she was a local legend who had occupied the largest corner apartment, the penthouse. Her parties, which were languorous and well attended by the music greats of the time and often stretched into the night, were the stuff of local legend. Another jazz legend lived in the building in the C section, which is where Mom’s sister Aunt Barbara lived. His name was Johnny Hartmann, and I will never get enough of the album he did with John Coltrane but at that time he was just another famous person in the black world (which was not the white world) who lived in the building. It was one of the benefits of segregation that we all lived together, rich and poor, famous and not, Duke Ellington, W.E.B. Dubois and Count Basie, just around the corner. Louis Armstrong never left his home in Corona Queens because by the time the white hotels wanted him to stay, he didn’t want to stay.

A large collection of jazz and classical lps accompanied us to 345, the move executed by Burdette Ringgold, who had married Faith in 1962.

Aidan Levy, a music historian who teaches at Columbia University has recently published a biography of Sonny Rollins called Saxophone Colossus, which focuses heavily on his early life in Harlem on Edgecombe Avenue. He has included a photograph of Sonny Rollins when he was a teenager (the property of Faith and Burdette Ringgold Estate) and would use a eyebrow pencil to draw a mustache on his upper lip in order to slip into Birdland and other jazz clubs to hear the greats—Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Thelonious Monk. Levy included stories as well about his friendship as a teenager with Faith, attending her 14th birthday party at her home at 363 Edgecombe Avenue, 4th floor front, where they had a chance to play a clandestine game of post office in a closet. In this game, one child signals to another that he or she has a postal delivery. The postal delivery is a kiss. Sonny Rollins who had a crush on Faith called for Faith who gave him his kiss. But when her turn came, she called Earl Wallace, “a hip, silver-tongued pianist who would become her first husband.”

He never recovered from his childhood crush on Faith, Levy writes.

But what none of the so-called Sugar Hill gang ever recovered from was their passionate love for jazz and the musical education provided from growing up in Harlem surrounded by so much Avant Garde African American music and culture, and the informal contest which pitted them against the dominant educational values in the arts: classical was king in the classroom and jazz was the black sheep.

Faith’s Jazz Stories are represented here by prints executed with the assistance of master printmaker Curlee Holton. Mom has been surrounded by Jazz aficionados much of her life. As a child there was her mother who took her to see great performers at the Apollo Theater when she was quite small. She had asthma. Therefore her doctors deemed kindergarten and first grade not entirely safe spaces. Instead Momma Jones, who had aspired to be a dancer and participated in dance competitions in her teens (partnered by her boyfriend Thomas Morrison who would later become her second husband) took her to the Apollo and other Harlem theaters to see Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald and Billy Eckstine, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, all the greats. As she would later tell me in an interview with her in 1978, “you would never ever want to go downtown to be entertained.”

So Faith’s relationship to the jazz tradition is long and yet the series Jazz Stories didn’t emerge until after 2007 when she was already 77 years old.

From the time Faith was a child in the 1930 through my own adolescence and youth in the 1960s Harlem was a Mecca of live music from block to block—jazz from multiple eras, blues in the bars and gospel in the storefront churches on every block—as well as the record shops which broadcast the latest R&B hits to the sidewalks.

All Faith’s circle of friends were either ardent jazz fans or aspiring soon to be successful musicians themselves. Meanwhile the classics of jazz in the form of stereo lps provided the background to everything in our lives particularly once we had moved back to Sugar Hill and 145th Street.