Women in Jazz Month is celebrated annually in March. It is a time to recognize and honor the contributions of female vocalists, composers, bandleaders, and instrumentalists. Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan are jazz icons who are ensconced in the GRAMMY Hall of Fame.
With a voice that evokes Ella and Sarah, 24-year-old Samara Joy McLendon has already achieved GRAMMY recognition.
Samara Joy won the 2023 GRAMMY awards for Best Jazz Vocal Album and Best New Artist for her second album, “Linger Awhile.”
Samara Joy won the 2024 GRAMMY for Best Jazz Performance for “Tight.”
Samara Joy co-wrote the soulful and defiant “Why I’m Here” featured in the Netflix film “Shirley.”
With a voice that belies her age, listening to Samara Joy is, well, a joy.
I want to kick off Women’s History Month with Claudette Colvin who on March 2, 1955 refused to give up her seat to a white woman while riding a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. The school student refused to move to the back of the bus when ordered by the bus driver. Claudette’s defiance led to her arrest. She was charged with violating Montgomery’s segregation ordinance, disturbing the peace and assaulting a police officer.
Claudette was a member of the NAACP Youth Council but the civil rights organization did not want the rebellious teenager to be the face of the bus boycott. Respectability politics forced the 15-year-old to take a back seat to Rosa Parks who nine months later similarly refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus.
Claudette was one of the four plaintiffs in the court case that challenged segregation on Alabama buses. The case, Browder v. Gayle, went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court which on November 13, 1956 ruled Alabama’s segregated bus system violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Montgomery Improvement Association voted to end the 381-day Montgomery bus boycott on December 20, 1956.
Colvin was almost lost to history but she is getting her flowers.
Sixty-six years after her arrest, Colvin’s record was expunged. A Black man, Judge Calvin Williams, signed the order to seal and destroy her juvenile court records.
Brother Malcolm X was gunned down at the Audubon Ballroom on February 21, 1965.
The Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Educational Center is hosting an evening of prayers, performances and reflections to commemorate the 59th anniversary of the assassination of “our own black shining prince,” El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz.
February is the shortest month but it packs a cultural wallop. I cannot think of a better way to kick off Black History Month than with “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X.” Composed by Anthony Davis (music), Thulani Davis (libretto) and Christopher Davis (story), the groundbreaking opera was workshopped at the Trocadero Theater in 1984 and premiered at the American Music Theater Festival in 1985 (the official premiere was at the New York City Opera in 1986).
The Metropolitan Opera’s staging reimagines Malcolm “as an Everyman whose story transcends time and space.” From the New York Times’ review:
The epigraph of Anthony Davis’s opera “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” is a quote from an interview in which, asked about the cost of freedom, Malcolm responds, “The cost of freedom is death.”
That tension — between hope and reality, between liberation and limitation — courses through a new production of “X” that opened at the Metropolitan Opera on Friday, in the work’s company premiere. This staging dreams of a better future, with a towering Afrofuturist spaceship that, at the beginning, appears to be calling Malcolm X home. But the beam-me-up rays of light are pulled away to reveal a floating proscenium, gilded at the edges and decorated with a landscape mural. It is a replica of the podium at the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan, where he was assassinated on Feb. 21, 1965.
Presented by Great Performances at the Met, “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” premieres beginning February 4, 2024 (check local listings) on PBS and PBS App.
The Association for the Study of African American Life and History designated “African Americansand the Arts” as the theme for Black History Month 2024. African Americans used art to both survive and escape enslavement:
The suffering of those in bondage gave birth to the spirituals, the nation’s first contribution to music. Blues musicians such as Robert Johnson, McKinley ‘Muddy Waters’ Morganfield and Riley “BB” B. King created and nurtured a style of music that became the bedrock for gospel, soul, and other still popular (and evolving) forms of music.
In his address to the 1964 Berlin Jazz festival, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke about the importance of jazz in paving the way for the Civil Rights Movement:
Jazz speaks for life. The Blues tell the story of life’s difficulties, and if you think for a moment, you will realize that they take the hardest realities of life and put them into music, only to come out with some new hope or sense of triumph.
This is triumphant music.
[…]
Much of the power of our Freedom Movement in the United States has come from this music. It has strengthened us with its sweet rhythms when courage began to fail. It has calmed us with its rich harmonies when spirits were down.
Lee Morgan personified the power of art. Lee grew up in Tioga, a neighborhood in North Philly, surrounded by railroad tracks, factories belching smoke and warehouses. Art empowered him to see beyond his immediate environment and imagine a future as a jazz musician. Within months of graduating from Jules E. Mastbaum Area Vocational/Technical School, Lee joined the Dizzy Gillespie Band and recorded his first album for Blue Note Records.
An organizer of the Jazz and People’s Movement, Lee secured his place in history with “The Sidewinder,” a rare crossover hit that was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2000.
The Nicetown-Tioga Library and All That Philly Jazz are cohosting a community celebration of Lee Morgan and Tioga’s cultural heritage on Friday, February 9, 2024.
The event is free and open to the public. To reserve a spot, go here.
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