Kicha's photos with the keyword: Musician

Revella Eudosia Hughes (1895 – 1987), was a singer, musician and recording artist. She was one of the best known and most successful African American sopranos of the first half of the 20th century. A musician and performer whose repertoire ranged from classical to jazz, Revella Hughes began developing her talent under the tutelage of her mother in Huntington, West Virginia. Born July 27, 1895, to George and Anna B. Page Hughes, Miss Hughes began piano lessons at age five. Although she began school in Huntington, she transferred to her mother’s alma mater, Hartshorn Memorial College, in Richmond, Virginia, and received her diploma for completion of the course in music in 1909. She then attended Oberlin High School in Oberlin, Ohio, graduating in 1915. While at Oberlin, Miss Hughes took courses in the Conservatory and began choral work that was to prove the foundation of her later career. She sang with the high school girls’ choir, the Oberlin Musical Union and the First Methodist Church choir. She also played violin in the high school orchestra and composed a rally song for the high school. From Oberlin, Miss Hughes went to Howard University in Washington, D. C., where she studied voice and piano. Upon receipt of her bachelor of music degree in 1917, she remained in Washington to teach at the Washington Conservatory of Music for one year. She then became director of music at Orangeburg State College in South Carolina, while continuing to perform in a series of concerts and recitals. By 1920, Miss Hughes was in New York, studying voice under George Bagby. During this period she developed her repertoire and appeared with such artists as Paul Robeson, Roland Hayes and Marian Anderson. A highlight of the early period in New York was Miss Hughes’ appearance as principal soloist at the Mayor Hylan Peoples’ Concerts in September 1921 in Central Park. She was the first person of her race to be so featured. While a student of Walter Kiesewetter, voice coach for Metropolitan and Chicago Opera singers, Miss Hughes also performed for the New York City Police Department Police band banquet at the Hotel Astor in May 1922. She also recorded on W. C. Handy’s black Swan record label. In 1923, Miss Hughes’ career took a radical departure when she was offered a contract to become the choral director for the Broadway production of “Shuffle Along," featuring the music of Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle. She went on tour with the road company to major cities, including Chicago and Saint Louis. This change in career effected a change in her personal life as well, ending the marriage she had contracted in 1920 with Layton Wheaton, a New York dentist she had met at Howard when they were both students. From the road company of “Shuffle Along,” Miss Hughes accepted the lead in “Runnin’ Wild,” and toured with that show through 1925. In addition to the theater, she also performed on the radio, beginning in 1923 on WHN, New York, and appeared at motion-picture houses as part of the live entertainment. Notable among these presentation-house appearances were her performances on the B. F. Keith circuit in Huntington, West Virginia, and at Chicago’s Regal Theater. By 1930, after appearing in “Hot Rhythm” at New York's Colonial Theater, she had formed the Four Bon-Bons, a quartet comprised of Georgette Harvey of "Runnin' Wild" and "Porgy," Musa Williams and Lois Parker, the Bon-Bons had the distinction of appearing on nationwide Columbia Broadcasting System broadcasts where their race was not mentioned. They were also singled out to participate in an experimental television broadcast. The Depression ended the golden years of the Harlem Renaissance that had injected black music and literature into the mainstream of American culture. This period also brought about another major shift in Miss Hughes’ career. In 1932, she returned to Huntington to take care of her widowed mother in her last illness. Over the objections of some townspeople who decried her show business associations, she secured the position as supervisor of public school music in the then segregated schools. She created the band at Douglass High School, and took her young musicians out into the community, where they performed at major civic events and for white civic groups. After placing first in the West Virginia High School Music Contest (Negro) for three consecutive years, her high school musicians won a permanent trophy. In less than ten years, Miss Hughes had transformed a non-existent music program into one that won state-wide recognition. She also found time to complete a master’s degree in music at Northwestern University. At the death of her mother, Miss Hughes returned to New York to develop yet another phase in her career. Declaring that she had “left her voice with her students back in Huntington,” she perfected and toured with “An Informal Hour of Music,” on the Hammond organ, a program that summarized her musical career. Beginning with several classical pieces, she then gave a jazz treatment to light classical numbers, added some Latin-American rhythms, and ended with compositions by Duke Ellington, Fats Waller and W. C. Handy. Playing primarily in supper clubs on the East Coast, she made several appearances in West Virginia. A highlight of this period was in 1953 when she toured Europe and the Middle East with the Gypsy Markoff she for the U. S. O. She served as arranger for the group in addition to performing on the organ. Miss Hughes retired from full-time performing in 1955. After a twenty-five year hiatus, she was "re-discovered" and brought out of retirement by the Universal Jazz Coalition for the Women's Jazz Festival in New York in 1980. She then began a new round of appearances. And was named distinguished alumna by Howard University in 1984 and received an honorary doctorate of music from Marshall University in 1985. She died in New York City on October 24, 1987, at the age of ninety-one years. In 1988, she was inducted posthumously into the Huntington, West Virginia, Wall of Fame. She is buried in Spring Hill Cemetery in Huntingon, West Virginia. Sources: Revella E Hughes Papers/Special Collections Department, James E. Morrow Library Marshall University, Huntington, West Virginia

Clora Bryant remains a sadly under recognized musical pioneer. The lone female trumpeter to collaborate with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, she played a critical role in carving a place for women instrumentalists in the male dominated world of jazz, over the course of her decades long career proving herself not merely a novelty but a truly gifted player regardless of gender. Born May 30, 1927, in Denison, Texas, Bryant grew up singing in her Baptist church choir. In high school, she picked up the trumpet her older brother Fred left behind upon entering the military, joining the school marching band. She proved so proficient that she won music scholarships to Bennett College and Oberlin, instead opting to attend the Houston area Prairie View College, joining its all-female swing band, the Prairie View Coeds. The group toured across Texas, in the summer of 1944 mounting a series of national dates that culminated at New York City's legendary Apollo Theater. Although one of the band's lead soloists, Bryant nevertheless transferred to UCLA in late 1945 after her father landed a job in Los Angeles; there she first encountered the fledgling bebop sound, and began jamming with a series of small groups in the Central Avenue area. In the summer of 1946 Bryant joined the all female Sweethearts of Rhythm, earning her union card and quitting school soon after. Around this time she befriended Gillespie, who not only offered her opportunities to perform with his band but also served as Bryant's mentor for the remainder of his life. When the Queens of Swing lost their drummer, Bryant rented a drum kit and won the job, touring with the group until 1951, at which time she returned to L.A. and to the trumpet, backing Billie Holiday and Josephine Baker during their respective performances at the Club Alabam. She relocated to New York City in 1953, gigging at the Metropole and appearing on several television variety shows. She even toured Canada, but ultimately returned to southern California in 1955, two years later cutting her sole headlining LP, Gal With a Horn, issued on the tiny Mode label. Bryant spent the remainder of the decade on the road, with long engagements at clubs in Canada, Chicago, and Denver. She also played Las Vegas opposite Louis Armstrong and Harry James. While performing with James, Bryant caught the attention of singer Billy Williams, joining his touring revue and backing him during a showcase on The Ed Sullivan Show. In 1960, she also appeared in the Sammy Davis, Jr. motion picture Pepe. After quitting Williams' band in 1962, Bryant again returned to Los Angeles, teaming with vocalist brother Mel to put together a song-and-dance act. The duo toured the globe for well over a decade, even hosting their own television show during a lengthy engagement in Melbourne, Australia. In the late '70s, Bryant replaced the late Blue Mitchell in Bill Berry's big band, but after several years out of sight she made international headlines in 1989 after accepting Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's invitation to play five dates in the U.S.S.R., becoming the first female jazz musician to tour the Communist nation. A 1996 heart attack and subsequent quadruple bypass surgery rendered Bryant unable to continue her career as a trumpeter, but she continued to sing, at the same time beginning a new career on the lecture circuit, discussing the history of jazz on college campuses across the U.S. Honored by Washington, D.C.'s Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts with its 2002 Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Festival Award, Bryant was again celebrated with the 2004 release of Trumpetistically, a documentary profile that took filmmaker Zeinabu Irene Davis some 17 years to complete. Bryant died August 25, 2019 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. She was 92. Sources: All Music, Artist Profile by Jason Ankeny; James J. Kriegsmann, Sr., Photographer

At New York's Royal Roost. Herman Leonard, Photographer Jazz: A History of America's Music; by Geoffrey C Ward and Ken Burns NY Times By: Peter Watrous April 26, 1990 Dexter Gordon, one of the great tenor saxophonists and a charismatic figure in the jazz world, died of kidney failure yesterday at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia. He was 67 years old, and had entered the hospital on March 18 for treatment of cancer of the larynx. He lived in New York City. During the last seven years, Mr. Gordon, who began his music career in 1940 with Lionel Hampton's orchestra, was semiretired from music. Instead he had been making movies, starring in '' 'Round Midnight,'' Bertrand Tavernier's 1986 film about an expatriate jazz musician down on his luck in Paris. Mr. Gordon's performance in the role, which closely mirrored his own life, won him an Academy Award nomination for best actor. He had recently finished filming ''Awakenings,'' with Robin Williams and Robert De Niro, in which he was cast as a patient in a psychiatric ward. But it is as a musician that Mr. Gordon will be remembered. With a huge hard tone and with ascetic pared-down lines, Mr. Gordon, one of the first tenor saxophonists to play be-bop, influenced countless musicians, including John Coltrane. Mr. Gordon's playing owed much of its spareness and clarity to the influence of the saxophonist Lester Young; he added the complexity of be-bop and a more muscular tone. But while many be-bop musicians played improvisations that were detailed and embroidered, Mr. Gordon's playing was plain and smooth, like polished marble. His music had humor. He was a master of the musical quotation, and he would often insert a funny aside into an improvisation as comic relief. Studying the Clarinet Mr. Gordon was born in Los Angeles on Feb. 27, 1923. He began studying the clarinet when he was 13, and was soon performing with other young local musicians, including Charles Mingus and Buddy Collette. During World War II and immediately after, Los Angeles had a flourishing jazz scene based on Central Avenue, where celebrities and soldiers would mingle in the many clubs. Mr. Gordon was a major figure there, playing saxophone with the best of the musicians, among them Sonny Criss, Benny Bailey, Art Farmer, Hampton Hawes, Carl Perkins, Larry Marable and Leroy Vinnegar. Though his first professional job, with Lionel Hampton's band, kept him on the road for the first three years of the 1940's, Mr. Gordon regularly returned to Los Angeles. In 1943, Mr. Gordon made his first recordings as a band leader. A year later, after working with Louis Armstrong and Fletcher Henderson, he joined the Billy Eckstine Orchestra. It was with Mr. Eckstine that he first came to true national prominence. Mr. Eckstine's orchestra was at the vanguard of jazz; Dizzy Gillespie was its musical director, and Charlie Parker, Gene Ammons and Mr. Gordon were in the reed section, while Sarah Vaughan played piano and sang with Mr. Eckstine. It was a band that young musicians looked to for new musical directions. 'He Was an Innovator' ''Coming up as a kid interested in new sounds, we all would listen to Billy Eckstine because it was an all-star band,'' the saxophonist Johnny Griffin recalled yesterday from Chicago. ''I was playing like Ben Webster, but then I heard Dexter. He was an innovator. Lester Young was his god, but out of Lester he fashioned something that everybody copied. He had his own sound, which all great musicians have. Dexter had a way of articulating that was his own. There were few musicians who had such a big sound.'' During the late 1940's and early 50's, Mr. Gordon staged epic tenor duels with another great West Coast saxophonist, Wardell Gray. And he recorded be-bop classics, including ''Bikini Blues'' in 1947, for the Dial label in Los Angeles. But by the mid-1950's, Mr. Gordon was a heroin addict and spent time in prison. By the 1960's, like many of his be-bop confederates, Mr. Gordon moved to Europe, first to Paris and then to Copenhagen. In Paris, he lived in a hotel in the red light district, with Mr. Griffin and the drummer Art Taylor. They lived next door to the French jazz patron Francis Paudras, who was taking care of the ailing pianist Bud Powell. ''Dexter was a sweetheart,'' Mr. Taylor said yesterday in an interview in New York. ''He was the first really modern tenor saxophonist. We had wonderful times. Dexter used to take me out to dinner, and we would eat two or three dozen oysters, go to fine restaurants and just enjoy the food.'' Mr. Griffin said yesterday: ''Dexter was a showoff. He was always funny and had a lot of wit. He was extremely well read.'' A Return to Glory During his years abroad, Mr. Gordon's career in the United States evaporated, even though he continued making a series of brilliant records for the Blue Note label, starting in 1961 and ending in 1965. In Europe, he continued to regularly perform, teach and record. In 1976, he tried making a comeback in New York City; his show, at the Village Vanguard in Greenwich Village, won him great acclaim. A year later, Mr. Gordon returned to live in the United States, remaking his reputation with a series of incendiary shows in which he played as well as ever. He had incorporated much of the modern harmony of the 1960's in his improvisations, and his performances were notable for the euphoria he could create. Mr. Gordon is survived by his wife, Maxine, of New York; two daughters, Robin and Deirdre Gordon, of Los Angeles, and three sons, Mikael Solfors of Sweden, Benjamin Gordon of Denmark, and Woody Louis Armstrong Shaw of New York.

This famous jazz guitarist was born in Indianapolis, Indiana. Montgomery came from a musical family, in which his brothers, Monk (string bass and electric bass) and Buddy (vibraphone, and piano), were jazz performers. Although Wes was not skilled at reading music, he could learn complex melodies and riffs by ear. Montgomery started learning guitar in his late teens, listening to and learning recordings of his idol, the guitarist Charlie Christian. Instead of using a guitar pick, Montgomery plucked the strings with the fleshy part of his thumb, using downstrokes for single notes and a combination of upstrokes and downstrokes for chords and octaves. This technique enabled him to get a mellow, expressive tone from his guitar. George Benson, in the liner notes of the Ultimate Wes Montgomery album, wrote that “Wes had a corn on his thumb, which gave his sound that point. He would get one sound for the soft parts, and then that point by using the corn. That's why no one will ever match Wes. And his thumb was double-jointed. He could bend it all the way back to touch his wrist, which he would do to shock people.” Montgomery toured with vibraphonist Lionel Hampton's orchestra from July 1948 to January 1950, and can be heard on recordings from this period. Montgomery then returned to Indianapolis and did not record again until December 1957 (save for one session in 1955), when he took part in a session that included his brothers Monk and Buddy, as well as trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, who made his recording debut with Montgomery. Most of the recordings made by Montgomery and his brothers from 1957-1959 were released on the Pacific Jazz label. From 1959 Montgomery was signed to the Riverside Records label, and remained there until late 1963, just before the company went bankrupt. The recordings made during this period are widely considered by fans and jazz historians to be Montgomery's best and most influential. Two sessions in January 1960 yielded The Incredible Jazz Guitar of Wes Montgomery, which was recorded as a quartet with pianist Tommy Flanagan, bassist Percy Heath and drummer Albert “Tootie” Heath. The album featured one of Montgomery's most well-known compositions, “Four on Six.” Almost all of Montgomery's output on Riverside featured the guitarist in a small group setting, usually a quartet or quintet, playing a mixture of hard-swinging uptempo jazz numbers and quiet ballads. In 1964 Montgomery moved to Verve Records for two years. His stay at Verve yielded a number of albums where he was featured with an orchestra, and during this period Montgomery's music started to shift in to the territory of pop music. One notable exception is 1965's Smokin' at the Half Note, which showcased two memorable appearances at the famous New York City club with the Wynton Kelly Trio. Wes continued to play outstanding live jazz guitar, as evidenced by surviving audio and video recordings from his 1965 tour of Europe. By the time Montgomery released his first album for A&M Records, he had seemingly totally abandoned the straightforward jazz of his earlier career for the more lucrative pop market. The three albums released during his A&M period (1967-68) feature orchestral renditions of famous pop songs (”Scarborough Fair,” “I Say a Little Prayer for You,” “Eleanor Rigby,” etc.) with Montgomery reciting the melody with his guitar. While these records were the most commercially successful of his career, they are now poorly regarded by some fans and critics. Many jazz and rock guitarists today list Montgomery among their influences including: Carlos Santana, Jimi Hendrix, Pat Martino, Lee Ritenour, Pat Metheny, George Benson, Pete Smyser, Chris Standring, Eric Johnson, Yoshiaki Miyanoue and Joe Satriani. By some accounts, Montgomery has been the most influential jazz guitarist of all time, whose style has transcended into other forms of music, including Rock 'n' Roll, Soul, and Rhythm and Blues. Many songwriters and composers have written musical tributes to him, including Stevie Wonder and Eric Johnson. He died of a heart attack at his home in 1968. Montgomery's home town of Indianapolis has named a park in his honor. IN.gov; JazzBluesNews.Space; Marcel Witte, Artist

Eric Dolphy (1928 - 1964), was one of several groundbreaking jazz alto players to rise to prominence in the 1960s. He was also the first important bass clarinet soloist in jazz, and among the earliest significant flute soloists; he is arguably the greatest jazz improviser on either instrument. On early recordings, he occasionally played traditional B-flat soprano clarinet. His improvisational style was characterized by a near volcanic flow of ideas, utilizing wide intervals based largely on the 12-tone scale, in addition to using an array of animal-like effects which almost made his instruments speak. Although Dolphy's work is sometimes classified as free jazz, his compositions and solos had a logic uncharacteristic of many other free jazz musicians of the day; even as such, he was definitively avant-garde. In the years after his death his music was more aptly described as being “too out to be in and too in to be out.” Dolphy was born in Los Angeles and was educated at Los Angeles City College. He performed locally for several years, most notably as a member of the big band led by Roy Porter. Dolphy finally had his big break as a member of Chico Hamilton's quintet, with Hamilton he became known to a wider audience and was able to tour extensively through 1958, when he parted ways with Hamilton and moved to New York City. Dolphy wasted little time upon settling in New York City, quickly forming several fruitful musical partnerships, the two most important ones being with jazz legends Charles Mingus and John Coltrane, musicians he'd known for several years. While his formal musical collaboration with Coltrane was short (less than a year between 1961-62), his association with Mingus continued intermittently from 1959 until Dolphy's death in 1964. Dolphy was held in the highest regard by both musicians - Mingus considered Dolphy to be his most talented interpreter and Coltrane thought him his only musical equal. Coltrane had gained an audience and critical notice with Miles Davis's quintet. Although Coltrane's quintets with Dolphy (including the Village Vanguard and Africa/Brass sessions) are now legendary, they provoked Down Beat magazine to brand Coltrane and Dolphy's music as 'anti-jazz.' Coltrane later said of this criticism “they made it appear that we didn't even know the first thing about music ... it hurt me to see (Dolphy) get hurt in this thing.” The initial release of Coltrane's stay at the Vanguard selected three tracks, only one of which featured Dolphy. After being issued haphazardly over the next 30 years, a comprehensive box set featuring all of the recorded music from the Vanguard was released by Impulse! in 1997. The Complete 1961 Village Vanguard Recordings carried over 15 tracks featuring Dolphy on alto saxophone and bass clarinet, adding a new dimension to these already classic recordings. A later Pablo box set from Coltrane's European tours of the early 1960s collected more recordings with Dolphy for the buying public. During this period, Dolphy also played in a number of challenging settings, notably in key recordings by Ornette Coleman (Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation), Oliver Nelson (The Blues and the Abstract Truth) and George Russell (Ezz-thetic), but also with Gunther Schuller and Max Roach among others. Dolphy's recording career as a leader began with the Prestige label. His association with the label spanned across 13 albums recorded from April 1960 to September 1961, though he was not the leader for all of the sessions. Prestige eventually released a nine-CD box set containing all of Dolphy's recorded output for the label. Dolphy's first two albums as leader were Outward Bound and Out There. The first is more accessible and rooted in the style of bop than some later releases, but it still offered up challenging performances, which at least partly accounts for the record label's choice to include “out” in the title. Out There is closer to the third stream music which would also form part of Dolphy's legacy, and reminiscent also of the instrumentation of the Hamilton group with Ron Carter on cello. Far Cry was also recorded for Prestige in 1960 and represented his first pairing with trumpeter Booker Little, a like-minded spirit with whom he would go on to make a set of legendary live recordings (At the Five Spot) before Little's tragic death at the age of 23. Dolphy would record several unaccompanied cuts on saxophone, which at the time had been done only by Coleman Hawkins and Sonny Rollins before him. The album Far Cry contains one of his more memorable performances on the Gross-Lawrence standard Tenderly on alto saxophone, but it was his subsequent tour of Europe that quickly set high standards for solo performance with his exhilarating bass clarinet renditions of Billie Holiday's God Bless The Child. Numerous recordings were made of live performances by Dolphy, and these have been issued by many sometimes dubious record labels, drifting in and out of print ever since. 20th century classical music also played a significant role in Dolphy's musical career, having performed and recorded Edgard Varèse's Density 21.5 for solo flute as well as other classical works, and participated heavily in the Third Stream efforts of the 1960s. In July 1963, Dolphy and producer Alan Douglas arranged recording sessions for which his sidemen were among the leading emerging musicians of the day. The results were his Iron Man and Conversations LPs. In 1964, Dolphy signed with the legendary Blue Note label and recorded Out to Lunch (once again, the label insisted on using “out” in the title). This album was deeply rooted in the avant garde, and Dolphy's solos are as dissonant and unpredictable as anything he ever recorded. Out to Lunch is often regarded not only as Dolphy's finest album, but also as one of the greatest jazz recordings ever made. After Out to Lunch and an appearance as a sideman on Andrew Hill's Point of Departure, Dolphy left to tour Europe with Charles Mingus' sextet (one of Mingus' most underrated bands and without a doubt one of the most exciting) in early 1964. From there he intended to settle in Europe with his fiancée, who was working on the ballet scene in Paris. After leaving Mingus, he performed with and recorded a few sides with various European bands and was preparing to join Albert Ayler for a recording. On the evening of June 28, 1964, Dolphy collapsed on the streets of Berlin and was brought to a hospital. The attending hospital physicians, who had no idea that Dolphy was a diabetic, thought that he (like so many other jazz musicians) had overdosed on drugs, so they left him to lie in a hospital bed until the “drugs” had run their course. The notes to the Prestige nine-disc set say he “collapsed in his hotel room and when brought to the hospital he was diagnosed as being in a diabetic coma. After being administered a shot of insulin (apparently a type stronger than what was then available in the US) he lapsed into insulin shock and died.” Dolphy would die the next day in a diabetic coma, leaving a short but tremendous legacy in the jazz world, which was immediately honored with his induction into the Down Beat magazine Hall of Fame that same year. Coltrane paid tribute to Dolphy in an interview: “Whatever I'd say would be an understatement. I can only say my life was made much better by knowing him. He was one of the greatest people I've ever known, as a man, a friend, and a musician.” Dolphy posthumously became an inductee of the Down Beat Jazz Hall of Fame in 1964. Sources: All About Jazz; Photographer, Charles 'Chuck' Stewart

Since 1851, many remarkable black men and women did not receive obituaries in The New York Times. With Overlooked , they've added their stories to their archives. NY Times Overlooked No More: Valaida Snow, Charismatic ‘Queen of the Trumpet’ By Giovanni Russonello Feb. 22, 2020 Popperfoto (Getty Images) She was not just a master musician, singer and dancer; she was also a teller of tall tales whose interviews could be as much a performance as her stage act. Valaida Snow in an undated photo. She was a big name in Europe and Asia as well as in black communities across the United States, often giving some of the first jazz performances on major international stages. A singer, a dancer, an arranger, a master fabulist, a virtuoso trumpeter adept at a half-dozen other instruments, too: Back when being all these things could also mean being a pop star, Valaida Snow was a sensation. From the age of 5, when she began stealing the show as a member of her father’s performance troupe, Snow lived her life onstage, and on the road. She became a big name in Europe and Asia, just as much as she was in black communities across the United States, often giving some of the first jazz performances on major international stages. And she often graced the movie screen, helping to bring black music from the vaudeville stage into the audiovisual age. African-American newspapers and the international press celebrated Snow both for her immense skill and for her novelty as a female trumpet master. She encouraged that coverage and bent it to her ends, telling tall tales and making her interviews as much a performance as her stage act. “She pursued her life and career confidently, indomitably and even defiantly,” her biographer, Mark Miller, wrote in “High Hat, Trumpet and Rhythm: The Life and Music of Valaida Snow” (2007). “In fact and fiction both, it is a life to celebrate.” Snow was in Denmark during an extended engagement when Nazi Germany stormed across Europe in the early years of World War II. But she refused to decamp for the United States and ended up imprisoned — though it was in a Copenhagen jail, not a German concentration camp as she later claimed. When she was finally shuttled out of the country, she returned to the United States physically diminished. Though she worked hard to reclaim the spotlight, she died in 1956, at 52, in ill health and relative obscurity. “The unfortunate thing about her legacy is that she wasn’t recorded as much as many of her peers,” Tammy Kernodle, a musicologist at Miami University in Ohio, said in a phone interview. “But she was a greatly respected musician on the vaudeville circuit, and even amongst male jazz musicians themselves.” Dashing and charismatic, Snow earned the nicknames Little Louis — a reference to Louis Armstrong’s influence on her — and Queen of the Trumpet, given to her by W.C. Handy, who himself was known as the Father of the Blues. That appellation often appeared below her name on the 78-r.p.m. records she made. Yet Snow’s stardom appeared to have an implacable ceiling. While many musicians held residencies in New York or Chicago clubs during the 1920s and ’30s, often catapulting to famous recording careers, Snow stayed on the road, possibly because club owners and promoters did not see women as viable bandleaders. “This conversation about chronicling the evolution and the progression of jazz has always been rooted in recordings,” Dr. Kernodle said. “She spent a lot of time in Europe during a key time when jazz was being documented in recordings — she’s back and forth, and that back-and-forth doesn’t give her an opportunity to amass a catalog in the way that many of her peers did.” Still, at the height of her success, Snow lived in sumptuous style. She rode in a convertible, often with a chauffeur; had a personal servant; and even acquired a pet monkey. And she kept her coterie coordinated. “The chauffeur, the footman and the monkey were all to dress alike,” the cabaret singer and pianist Bobby Short recalled fondly. Valada Snow was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on June 2, 1904, the eldest of four children in a musical family. (She later added an “i” to her name, possibly to clarify its pronunciation.) Her sister Lavada later claimed that their father, John, had been a Russophile, and named his first-born child after the city of Vladivostok. Valada’s mother, Etta, was a music teacher who had attended Howard University and taught her children to play instruments and sing. John, who went by J.V., was a minister who assembled a troupe of child performers known as the Pickaninny Troubadours, presenting them at black theaters and vaudeville stages across the South. By the time she was 5, Valada had become the show’s star. By adolescence, she was proficient on nearly a dozen string and wind instruments. Her bailiwick as a child was the violin, but her stage act also included singing, dancing and even an escape-artistry act. At 15, Snow married Samuel Lewis Lanier, a fellow entertainer, but he was physically abusive, and she soon left him. Her father had recently died and the Troubadours were no more; a period of drifting set in. It wasn’t until 1921, when she joined the popular revue “Holiday in Dixieland,” that she began to make her name on the national stage. Snow held a long residency the next year at a Harlem cabaret run by the famed proprietor Barron Wilkins, bringing her new levels of attention. Then she set off on the road again. In 1924, Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle cast her in “In Bamville,” the follow-up to their smash hit musical “Shuffle Along.” It traveled to New York the next year under the name “The Chocolate Dandies,” but received unsympathetic reviews and soon closed. In many of those negative reviews there were two exceptions: Snow and her co-star Josephine Baker, whose own career was just taking off. Snow mounted a few tours of the United States with small jazz bands, but it was a three-year jaunt across Europe and Asia beginning in 1926, when she was 22, that established her as a star. She traveled to London and Paris with the producer Lew Leslie’s “Blackbirds” revue, and then joined the drummer Jack Carter’s octet on a tour of China and Southeast Asia. “She is important in terms of helping us gain an understanding of the spread of jazz to Europe, particularly after World War I,” Dr. Kernodle said, adding that Snow helped “shift the context of jazz away from the early Dixieland style.” Back in the United States, Snow took a prominent role in another musical, “Rhapsody in Black,” which Leslie had built largely to showcase her talents, though Ethel Waters was billed as its star. It gave rise to a long rivalry between the two. Snow directed the production’s 60-person stage band, though it was known as Pike Davis’s Continental Orchestra. Over the latter half of the 1930s, Snow recorded roughly 40 sides in studios across Europe, including her signature song, “High Hat, Trumpet and Rhythm.” But she never made a commercial recording in the United States as a trumpeter. In the mid-1930s, Snow met and married Ananias Berry, a 19-year-old dancer who performed with the Berry Brothers, a family troupe; the new couple developed a stage act and toured together. But their age difference drew negative publicity — especially after Samuel Lewis Lanier, Snow’s former husband, took her to court on allegations of bigamy, claiming their long-ago marriage had never been officially annulled. It all led to tensions between Snow and Berry, and the marriage did not last. Starting in 1940, while living in Europe, Snow found herself stuck for two years in Nazi-occupied Denmark, staying even after her manager had fled. Mr. Miller’s biography revealed that she had spent only 10 weeks in custody at two Danish prisons. She had developed a dependency on oxycodone and was said to have participated in petty robberies, though no charges were ever filed. Her imprisonment could have been an attempt by the authorities to protect and house her during difficult times, as Mr. Miller surmises, or it could simply have been unlawful. Over the latter half of the 1930s, Snow recorded roughly 40 sides in studios across Europe. But she never made a commercial recording in the United States as a trumpeter. Snow was able to leave Denmark in the spring of 1942 on an American ship that had come to rescue refugees. Back home where her return was front-page news in black newspapers she told stories of having been held at a concentration camp “for eight horrible months,” and sometimes beaten. The Amsterdam News reported that she was “the only colored woman entertainer on record to have been interned in a Nazi concentration camp.” Whatever the truth, by the time she returned, Snow was worse for the wear. Some reports suggested that her weight was down to 76 pounds. Friends said she carried an air of sadness that would never fully go away. She married again in 1943; her third husband, Earle Edwards, was a former performer who became her manager. The couple moved to Los Angeles, where she was seen as a mentor and inspiration to the young musicians turning Central Avenue clubs into a hotbed of modern jazz innovation. In 1949, performing at Town Hall in New York, she received her first and only mention in The New York Times: a paragraph-long review. Snow died of a brain hemorrhage on May 30, 1956, during an engagement at the Palace Theater in New York. “She was survived,” Mr. Miller wrote in his biography, “by her husband, Earle, her sister Lavada, her brother Arvada and her stepbrother Arthur (Artemus) Bush — as well as a mythology that had taken on a life of its own.”

How a Black Man From Missouri Transformed Himself Into an Indian Liberace New Republic by Liesl Bradner September 12, 2015 Before Liberace, there was Korla Pandit. He was a pianist from New Delhi, India, and dazzled national audiences in the 1950s with his unique keyboard skills and exotic compositions on the Hammond B3 organ. He appeared on Los Angeles local television in 900 episodes of his show, “Korla Pandit’s Adventures in Music”, smartly dressed in a suit and tie or silk brocade Nehru jacket and cloaked in a turban adorned with a single shimmering jewel. The mysterious, spiritual Indian man with a hypnotic gaze and sly grin was transfixing. Offstage, Korla—known as the "Godfather of Exotica" — was living the American dream: he had a house in the Hollywood hills, a beautiful blonde wife, two kids, and a social circle that included Errol Flynn and Bob Hope. He even had his own floral-decorated organ float in the Rose Bowl parade in 1953. Like most everything in Hollywood, it was all smoke and mirrors. His charade wasn’t his stage name—it was his race. Korla Pandit, born John Roland Redd, was a light skinned black man from St. Louis, Missouri. It was a secret he kept until the day he died. A new documentary, Korla, explores Pandit’s extraordinary life and career. Filmmakers John Turner and Eric Christiansen grew up in the Bay Area watching Korla on TV and listening to his music. The two worked together for 35 years at KGO-TV in San Francisco, where Korla had a live show in 1964. Both fell under his spell learning the truth in a Los Angeles Magazine exposé in 2001, three years after Pandit’s death. “He was a slight man with a beatific smile who was spouting pearls of wisdom about how we could get along better and the universal language of music,” Turner told me. “Why question a person like that?” As legend has it, Korla was a child prodigy born in New Delhi to a Brahmin priest and a French opera singer. When he was 11, Korla was sent away to England and then to America for classical training at the University of Chicago. Pandit’s invented life closely mirrored his real one. John Roland Redd was one of seven children born into a musical family. His spirituality can be traced to his father, a Baptist minister. His mother was of Creole ancestry. Most importantly, his talent was real. Relatives interviewed recall that, at age three, John could learn a song once and have it memorized. “It’s the definition of a myth,” said record producer Brian Kehew, who worked with Korla in the mid-1990s. “The reason his story rings true is there’s truth in it. I never questioned the concept. He looked like an old Indian man,” Kehew continued. He was one of few people who managed to catch a glimpse of his straight, jet-black hair free of its turban. Americans fascinated with the east eagerly accepted this charming figure and his mystical interpretations due to their minimal knowledge of the Indian culture and customs—by and large, Americans were only exposed to swami stereotypes in TV and film. Which is probably why nobody disputed his fantastic story, although he was notably uncomfortable when Indian fans asked to meet him after his gigs. “He wasn’t the first person to pass as a white man in order to get ahead, he just passed as an Indian man wearing a turban,” a childhood friend remarks in the film. (Christiansen: “In hindsight, he said he was Hindu but Hindus don’t wear turbans. Sikhs do, but they don’t wear jewels on their turban.”) It wasn’t the first time Redd had passed as something other than black—Korla Pandit was just one of his incarnations. After arriving in Los Angeles, he began playing jazz and R&B but quickly realized he could make more money playing Latin tunes as “Juan Rolando”. Passing as Mexican, he was able to join the whites-only Musicians Union. Soon he was playing supper clubs and lounges, on top of a gig providing eerie background music for the “Chandu the Magician,” occult radio show. As “Cactus Pandit” he played for Roy Rogers’ cowboy singing group, “Sons of the Pioneers.” In Korla Pandit, though, Redd had found a winning formula. He took the organ, an unpopular instrument associated with soap operas and roller skating rinks, and made it sexy and magical. “I really think he really became that person,” Christiansen said of his transformation. “He was more Korla Pandit than John Roland Redd. His makeover into Korla informed his music, not the other way around.” His wife, Disney animator Beryl June DeBeenson, was the architect behind his mystique and final metamorphosis. In 1948, the couple met the television producer Klaus Landsberg at Tom Brenenman's Restaurant; he offered Korla the daily TV show that would make him famous. Pandit had only two requirements: First, that he’d provide music for the “Time for Beany” puppet show; and second, that he would not speak on camera. “I think they both recognized that becoming Korla Pandit was an opportunity for him to gain a level of fame that he couldn’t have as a black man,” said Allyson Hobbs, assistant professor of history at Stanford University and author of A Chosen Exile, an examination of racial passing in America. In 1951 Pandit signed with Louis Snader, a California theater owner and TV producer, whose telescriptions—short film clips used as fillers on local stations across the country—gave Pandit national exposure. After a contract dispute in 1953, Snader replaced him with another eccentric pianist who also had a secret: Liberace. “[Liberace] used the same sets and took credit for his staring into the camera and breaking that wall," said Christiansen. “He felt like Liberace stole his soul.” Five years later, in 1956, Korla Pandit went north to San Francisco for another show. During this time, he also recorded 13 albums for Fantasy Records, whose roster included Chet Baker, Dave Brubeck, and Lenny Bruce. “What he was doing in terms of reinventing himself wasn’t that unusual by Hollywood or music industry standards,” Turner said. It was a time when anyone could become anybody. “Korla’s story shows us just how fluid identity was in the 1950s,” Hobbs said. “Often people passed for survival doing things they couldn’t if they were living as black person. In doing that they lost a lot. They had to separate from family to fully inhabit a new life.” Redd’s family had a different understanding of the pressures of passing, however. “They felt he was very authentic and were very close to him,” Hobbs said after meeting family members at a recent screening in San Francisco. As Korla’s career waned in the ’60s, he was relegated to playing supermarkets and pizza palaces, teaching piano, and occasionally attending speaking engagements as a spiritualist. In the ’90s, near the end of his life, the Tiki-lounge music revival gave Korla one last career resurgence and cult following. He recorded with The Muffs, and made a cameo appearance in Ed Wood. One of his last performances was a sold out show at the legendary Bimbo's 365 Club in San Francisco. “In my mind the movie is not about Korla’s false story or deception,” Kehew said. “That doesn’t matter to me compared to how good he was musically. If you want to be up on the stage in a spot light you have to be more interesting than the person on the street,” he continued. “That’s what Korla managed to do.” Korla Pandit: www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQHaglomIU0