Joe Alterman, Jimmy Heath, Bill Charlap, and WABE's H Johnson
In my last blog post, I shared many of the reasons I’m thankful that music is in my life. One being the incredible people it's brought to me. As we enter Black History Month and mark two years since his passing, I wanted to reflect a bit on one of those special people, someone who I became especially close with during my exploration of “What Is Jewish Music?” during my first year as Executive Director of this organization - the legendary saxophonist and composer, Jimmy Heath.
A bonafide jazz legend, I grew up idolizing Jimmy Heath and will never forget the first time I got to hear this National Endowment For The Arts Jazz Master live. It was the summer of 2005, at the Blue Note in New York, and I couldn’t believe I was hearing the man and sound I’d heard so often on recordings create right in front of me. Not only did I love the way he played, but I also loved how he smiled nearly the entire evening, stood up and danced whenever he felt like it, and playfully egged on and joked around with his bandmates. It was obvious that he took the art extremely seriously, but himself, perhaps not so much.
I had a feeling he was a funny person and confirmed this a few years later when I was a student volunteer at the 2011 National Endowment For The Arts Jazz Master Awards. He asked me where the bathroom was. “It’s time to see Henry Pissinger,” he said.
Shortly after I moved back to Atlanta in 2016, I heard that Mr. Heath, who was then 88, had moved here too, to be closer to his family. I’d heard rumors of people occasionally seeing him out, but I didn’t get the chance to see him here until the Opening Night of our 2019 Atlanta Jewish Music Festival, when Jimmy came out to hear his good friend Bill Charlap perform the Leonard Bernstein songbook at the Atlanta History Center.
Being my first event as Executive Director and having different vision for the organization as my predecessor, I was tasked with explaining it all in my pre-show speech that night. Here’s a portion of that speech:
Here's what I'd like you to know about the festival. The truth is that, while you may think of the horah/Klezmer music when you hear the words Jewish music, Klezmer music is already a genre of its own. Jewish music, however, is not a genre of music. It's much more than that. Consider Jewish people like Alan Lomax, who traveled the country and the world documenting rural musicians, seeking along the way to convince them of their worth by playing their music back for them; or Milt Gabler, the only one willing to record Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” after Columbia Records and John Hammond turned it down; or Alfred Lion, Frances Wolf, Norman Granz, people who are responsible for the documentation of so much incredible American music and got into the music business just as much out of their love for the music as much out of their hate for the prejudice they saw to the musicians they loved. These are people who preserved and championed the roots of black American culture, helping elevate street life to the realm of high art. And that's what I want to reflect here: what Jews have contributed to the world of music. Music's for everyone and, as a musician myself, I find my Jewish pride as a musician comes from knowing how we’ve worked with others to shape and create music that‘s hard to imagine living without. I believe that while Jewish music isn't a genre of music, it encompasses many. After months of exploration, I choose to define the Jewishness of the music by its story, not necessarily by its melody. There is a Jewish imprint on nearly every genre of American music and the stories within are stories that are uniquely Jewish but also uniquely American. These are stories - like Bernstein’s - that we can all identify with and celebrate together.
As the audience applauded the end of my speech, I noticed Jimmy’s applause too, but I became nervous when he approached me at the end of the concert that night and said, “I’d like to talk to you about your speech.” Being a 92 year-old African-American legend who had lived through almost everything I spoke about - and having been an artist on Jewish-owned record labels for which I suspected he wasn’t paid his due - I didn’t know what to expect. But it turns out I didn’t have reason to worry. “You were spot on,” he told me, and he said that he had lots of stories about Jews and Blacks, Jews he had known and worked with that he’d be happy to share with me.
I asked him if he wanted to hang out sometime, to which he said yes, but not at the Waffle House like I proposed (He called it the “Awful House.”). We exchanged phone numbers, and I was surprised to see him call me the very next day with an invitation to join him a week or two later at a student concert at Clark Atlanta University’s Ray Charles Performing Arts Center.
We arrived about an hour before the doors opened, which was a treat because we had to make conversation for an hour. We really bonded during that time, during which Jimmy shared stories about performing with Erroll Garner in Paris in 1951 and, among many others, Ray Charles who he said was pretty cheap and “tried to get me to write an arrangement for him for only $500!”
We finally took our seats and were surprised to discover that the jazz portion of the evening was after intermission. The first set featured marching band music by John Phillip Sousa, during which Jimmy playfully saluted the band from his seat many times. He was having fun poking fun, but in a mid-concert whisper he explained to me why he wasn’t the biggest fan of Sousa’s music: it brought him back to his days in the marching band in high school in North Carolina where the black schools only went to 11th grade while white schools went to 12th. “They thought we were going to be janitors so why do we need the extra grade?,” he told me, before smiling and playfully saluting the band again.
During intermission, he told me it was time to see “Mr. Leaky,” further endearing himself to me with the same bathroom humor he first shared with me years ago. As we stood doing our separate business at adjacent urinals, Jimmy said, “What’s wrong with America? You don’t rest in the restroom! And some of my best friends and greatest Americans were named John! John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie,’ John Coltrane…it shouldn’t be called a John. In other countries they just call it a toilette. It shouldn’t be called a rest room; you don’t rest in it. Sometimes I call it the mess room. I make a mess and get out.”
By the time the concert ended we were two peas in a pod (pun intended), constantly joking around together. I was at such as ease with him that I almost forgot that Jimmy was a 92 year-old legend and not one of my buddies I grew up skipping Saturday school with. That is, until we bumped into the Jazz students who had just performed, all of whom were jaw-dropped to be in the presence of the master. The professor told Jimmy Heath that he teaches about him in his Jazz History class, to which 92-year-old Heath responded, “I am Jazz History!”
The next week I made the first of many trips up to his house in Lawrenceville and, immediately upon entering for the first time, I was again reminded of the rarified air I was in. His wife welcomed me into their home and brought me into Jimmy’s office. Jimmy was on the phone at the moment and motioned with his finger that he would be just a minute. He began telling the person on the other line about me: “My new young friend Joe Alterman just arrived. We’re going to talk about Blacks and Jews and the Jews in music that I knew.” I couldn’t hear the man on the other line, but they began discussing the subject. Eventually, Jimmy hung up the phone and apologized for the delay, adding, “But I couldn’t hang up on Walter Theodore ‘Sonny’ Rollins!” Wow!
I turned my recorder on and we began to speak. While Jimmy seemed mostly prepared and interested in sharing stories of the Jews he’d known (people who, at the time, I saw as being “coincidentally being born Jewish”), it’s not that I wasn’t interested in that, but I really wanted to hear his thoughts on the relationship between Jews and African-Americans in the Music Business, and I began to ask him the questions that related more to the potentially contentious aspect of this important relationship. Sure, like I said in my speech, Jews did preserve and champion the roots of Black culture but, like Charles Hersch wrote in his book “Jews and Jazz,” "when the dust cleared, it seemed the Jews usually wound up holding the assets and the blacks were left holding the keys to a lot of Cadillacs,” and I was really curious to get Jimmy’s thoughts on this. Here’s some of that conversation:
Joe Alterman: The relationship between Jews and blacks is a hugely important one that is both extremely prolific, complicated and deeper than it often appears on the surface. Take the band called the Symphony Sid All-Stars, which featured you, [Jimmy’s brother and famed bassist] Percy, Miles, JJ Johnson, Milt Jackson and Kenny Clarke. But it was named for the Jewish deejay Symphony Sid…
Jimmy Heath: Well, he had a big rep.
JA: But it wasn’t named for any of the band members and some people today say, "Well, that's just like the Jewish businessman to put his name on the band that he's not in.” What do you say to that?
JH: Well, he had a rep for playing jazz in New York, and that was big. And so he took the band on the road. He loved the music! And he was a deejay. That's his thing. He was a big-time deejay, a jazz deejay, bigger than anybody else in the country for playing jazz!
There were guys in Chicago, I remember deejays in Chicago and stuff, but Symphony Sid was like the one that everybody talked about, because he was in New York, the jazz capital of the world.
JA: I found a quote from Cedar Walton where he said that he was in heaven when he heard Symphony Sid say his name on the air, even when he mispronounced it.
JH: It got the audience, so we laid with it.
JA: So, it was okay?
JH: It was okay, and we all could accept when we went to Cleveland, Ohio, or someplace like that, and the brothers from the hood came out to hear the jazz, and a brother asked me, "Well, who's Symphony Sid?"
I said, "He's the deejay."
He said, "Well, what does he play?"
I say, "He plays records. He plays us on the air!”
I continued…
JA: When I look at the Jews that were in the music business, although it‘s important to keep in mind that they did have a business to run and keep open, it often feels like a balance between being good businessmen and being greedy.
JH: Yeah, yeah. There were some gold diggers. And some other people that are really artistically connected. Some are financially connected, and some are philanthropists such as Daphne Orenstein, and Maria Fisher. Now Maria Fisher is the one…she was a member of the Beethoven Society, but she loved Monk's music, and she's rich, and she helped to start the Thelonious Monk Institute.
JA: I was curious what you thought of someone like Irving Mills. While he puts his name as co-composer on Duke Ellington pieces that he didn’t compose, Duke is quoted saying, "He always preserved the dignity of my name." Cab Calloway said, "He broke so many barriers for us that you couldn't count them." So it's like a balance between doing really good stuff and kind of shady stuff.
JH: Well, they were making money off of the art, but they also had the ability to present the art to more people. It's a give and a take. You know, if you ain't got nobody to put it out on the market, and you've got all this great music and nobody hears it, what the hell is happening? If the people have the connections with the general public, you know, you've got to take the…and they’ve got to make some money out of it. That's how I like to figure those.
JA: I found this quote from Ben Sidran [There Was A Fire: Jews, Music And The American Dream] I wanted to read to you. I'm curious if you would think this is a good sum up, in a way. It says, "The Jews preserved the roots of black American culture. These small independent labels were responsible for preserving a huge spectrum of American music, from Thelonious Monk to Muddy Waters, and in the process helped elevate American street life to the realm of high art. And not just the manufacturing and marketing of this music was in Jewish hands. For example, bebop was difficult for many jazz fans to comprehend, but Jewish writers such as Leonard Feather, Nat Hentoff, Dan Morgenstern, Ira Gitler and Nat Shapiro took up its cause, explaining to the average fan just why this new music was important, while Symphony Sid similarly championed its cause." So it's like preserving and championing. Would you agree with that?
JH: Yeah. Yeah. I would have to. If I didn't have Orrin Keepnews to record me and put my record out, then I wouldn't have been nothing.
Here comes two companies in my lifetime that tried to…black companies, and they didn't do well. They didn't have the connections. About the biggest word in any language is connections, and there are all kinds of connections, good and bad. But the connections to the world, a lot of the Jewish people had the connections in the movie industry and everything, you know?
And sometimes they would present stuff that was very degrading, but we had to go through a period. It became different along the way, and now up until this guy Trump took over, and now he's trying to turn the clock back. But you know, in my life, I owe so much to Dr. Howard Brofsky, jazz trumpet player, and Maurice Peress. They're both Jewish friends of mine forever. They're the ones who got me a gig at Queens College as a professor. I had done one year or so up in Connecticut, Housatonic Community College up in Bridgeport, and then I did one in City College in New York, because John Lewis was going to teach a semester and then he decided not to and I got a gig up there. From that, I got the gig at Queens College. Queens College is basically Jewish. Most of the professors at Queens are Jewish.
JA: I read where one of the highlights of Mezz Mezzrow's life was when he got put in the colored wing of the jail he was thrown into. He often described himself as a link between the races. Leonard Chess grew up in Chicago's “Jew Town", which was considered a buffer zone between the white neighborhood and the black neighborhood. And then Charlie Parker successfully convinced club owners and audience members that Red Rodney was an albino, and had him sing the blues. And then I've heard it argued that Benny Goodman was able to serve as a cultural bridge between both the black and white musical worlds, because he like many other Jewish artists was able to understand both. It seems like from these quotes there's like a scale of white to black, and Jews are somewhere in the middle. Is that true? You know what I'm trying to say? It's a …
JH: Yeah, yeah, but you know, there's another guy, Fields his name was. Played with Lionel Hampton, and when he went down South he'd put on pancake makeup and shit. And would be disguising himself as ...Yeah, because he's a white guy.
JA: Well, is it weird? Like when Mezz Mezzrow says, "I'm a link between the races," is that offensive or is that true?
JH: If he felt that way himself?
JA: Yeah.
JH: Yeah, I can't deny that.
I think that there's a closeness in our history. There's a closeness in being dissed by other races of people that's in common. We have that in common, yeah…
When we went to Europe with the Clark Terry Band [1974], [Jewish saxophonist] Arnie Lawrence and I decided to be roommates. When we went to Germany, man, Arnie was nervous. He was scared about everything. I said, ‘Now you know how I feel in America. It’s not comfortable, is it?’”
Looking back on this conversation now, I can tell that I was looking to hear something negative, but Jimmy wasn’t having it. Sure, that all existed, both in the business and in his life, but Jimmy wasn’t bitter about it and chose to see the positives and the light - that which helped his career and that which brings people together. He reminded me of an older African-American gentleman I met who interrupted one of my first speeches about the Black/Jewish relationship in American Music. This man, who could sense how uncomfortable - almost apologetic - I was speaking about the questionable business decisions of certain Jewish record executives, interrupted me to make me feel more comfortable. “Listen,” he told me. “It was a business.”
Eventually, our eye-opening conversation led Jimmy to his computer, where he opened his iPhoto app and walked me through hundreds of photos from his life for the next few hours. There were so many treasures. Photos with Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis and so many more, but I’ll never forget one photo of Jimmy conducting his first big-band in the late 1940s. Just in front of Jimmy’s baton stood Charlie Parker, and behind Parker sat a young John Coltrane.
Jimmy and I really bonded over the “Jewish thing.” Over the next few months, his health started to fail, and he was in and out of different hospitals and doctor visits. I’d often get a quick call from him exclaiming one thing to me. “Joe! Guess what? My doctor today was Jewish!”
Throughout it all, Jimmy’s humor and instinct for seeking the light never failed him. One day I called him and asked how he was doing. “Not too well…To be or not to be: that is the question!,” he responded, before letting out a big laugh.
Shortly after turning 93, he exclaimed to me, "I'm way uptown now!" Then he asked, "How old are you?" "30", I told him. "Damn," he said. "You're not even at the park yet!,” before following it up with: “The thing about the Park is once you get in you never get out!” [Central Park begins at 59th Street and ends at 125th Street]
I’ll never forget the last time I saw him. We were standing at his doorway as I was about to leave his house. It was a beautiful, bright and totally clear-sky kind of day. As he opened the door for me to depart, he looked up at the blue sky and, with a big smile on his face, clasped his hands together and exclaimed, "Thank you God." He then turned back to me and said, "Sonny [Rollins] and I talk a lot about not fearing death. Sonny says that we did what we came here to do and that something better's coming." He then paused briefly before adding, "Man, I made it to 92. And I was the gangster of the family! My brother Percy was a Tuskegee Airman, and he only made it to 82."
A beautiful, powerful and real moment, Jimmy's gratitude was palpable, I could still feel it long after heading home - and I still do whenever I think of Jimmy today.
Without music, Jimmy and I would probably have never been brought together. While the “Jewish thing” brought us even closer, meeting special people like the incredible Jimmy Heath is just another example of why I’m so thankful to have been gifted the love of music.
To check out my full interview with Jimmy Heath, click here.