Jazz Yarns Race Relations

It's nice to think that jazz crosses color barriers, but that's not always the case. In Champaign-Urbana, there has always been a very real line—it's called University Avenue—between the black community and the white community, or between the black community and the University community. The black community lived, and still lives, on the "North End." They had their own network of musicians and musical haunts. If you were really into the music, you were welcome in their environment. Black musicians played in white environments too, but the two races were not often seen mingling together.

The University of Illinois Jazz Band was formed during the Civil Rights movement and the band was into its heyday when Black Power became a movement. Of the black, local, jazz musicians, some were so into the music that they didn't think of their experiences as racist until they remembered events much later. Others had bitter racist encounters that deeply affected them. And still others tried hard to build a relationship between blacks and whites that would bring the community closer together.

We're still working on race relations in Champaign-Urbana today. And we still have hopes that the art of jazz can help bring us together with its emphasis on creativity and community.

Pete Bridgewater, bass player, bandleader, radio host
When I first got into jazz professionally, years ago, right here in Champaign, the black musicians that were here had to go to Springfield and join the black union over there. When they came back here to play the fraternity and sorority jobs, or whatever they got, they had to pay this union the traveling fee, you know, 15%. So I came out of the service and I won't mention any names—the guy has long passed by now and I don't want to embarrass his people—but he was against blacks joining this union. And I talked with him and I said, "You don't have the authority." And he said, "All right, we'll bring it up at the next meeting." So I went to the secretary and I said to him, "How come blacks can't get into this union?" He said, "I didn't know blacks couldn't get in. What's your Social Security number?" So I gave it to him, and for $12 I got my card, and I keep a card even now though I don't play music anymore, just as a representative of the union. I got the rest of the guys in like that, but all up until then, we had to go to Springfield, join over there, and then come back here and pay this union 15-cents on the buck, you know.

Cecil Bridgewater, jazz trumpet player, composer, arranger, educator
My first professional gig, where I had to have a union card and all that, was with a dance band that the high school director had put together. So he explained to me that there was a parking lot in the back and that I could come in through the back door, through the kitchen. I figured that this was because I was 16 years old, under age, and so forth. So we go on and play—I think I was playing third trumpet—and when it was time to take a break he told me that I had to go back in the kitchen. That was fine with me because all the people in the kitchen knew my parents and so they fed me and took care of me and everything. So then we came out and played the second set, and the same thing happened, and then we played a third set. I got paid and went home. It never occurred to me until many years later that this was a racial issue that I didn't comprehend. I could not go out into the audience or into any other part of the building because it was a private club. I could be there on the bandstand and perform, but I couldn't mingle with the people. I had just assumed it was because I was underage.

Morgan Usadel, Discount Records/Record Service/Figaro's
After the first three nights I was in town, I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. The first night I had heard that the House of Chin was a place where you could go to get something to eat and hear jazz. So I went over there and the Don Smith Trio was playing with two saxophonists sitting in: Ron Dewar and a guy named Vince Johnson. And I thought, "This is wonderful." During one of the breaks I talked to Ron, introduced myself, and said that I had some friends up in Madison who would love to hear him and that maybe we could take a road trip sometime. About a year later, we did take a road trip with Don Smith and several other people. Anyways, Ron said that he'd be playing the next couple nights at different places and that I might want to come out. So the next night there was a place called The Brown Jug, just a beer joint next to the House of Chin, and they played completely free jazz. Ron was on tenor, Glen Cronkite was the drummer, and I can't remember the bass player. So Ron said, "Tomorrow you'll have to come out to Pirtle's." And I said "Where's that?" And he said: "It's this bar on the North End. We've got this great organ and two tenors group. It's me and this guy Tony Zamora, Don is on organ, and John Dutton's on drums. It's a really hot band." I didn't know what the North End was, and in those days there was no bus system. So I got in a cab and I said "Take me to Pirtle's." And the driver said "Are you sure?" So I said "Yeah, I guess so. Why don't you just take me." I got there and I'm the only white face in there and everybody's staring at me, but man, that band—it was Tony Zamora's band—was unbelievable! People at Pirtle's were curious about me at first, but then they forget when they see you there more than once. When my friends from Madison would come to visit, I'd take them there too.

Rich Warren, radio host, Nonesuch Concerts
One of the artists we brought to the Channing Murray Foundation through Nonesuch Concerts was Herbie Hancock. I think it was Herbie's sister who was his manager, and she took a liking to me so we had established a good relationship through our phone calls. I wish I could remember her name, because she was a terrific lady. The arrangement was that the band would come in the night before with the instruments and Herbie would fly in the next day to be there for the sound check. So it was this brutally cold winter day in February and there had been lots of snow. And the Ozark flight was three hours late. It was supposed to arrive at 9:30 or 10pm, and it arrived at 12:30 in the morning. We took the instruments over to Channing Murray and locked them up to let them acclimate, and then I took the band to a hotel on University Avenue where I had made reservations. And I proceeded to try to check them in. And the clerk looked at all these… they were all black except for the keyboard player who was white. A funny group of guys. And the hotel clerk started giving me a hard time because he didn't want those black people in his hotel, basically. And he said "Are you paying for these guys? I don't trust them. Why should I let them in here. Are you sure I'm going to get paid?" And I had the Nonesuch checkbook with me and told him I was paying for it and I'd write a check right away. So while the hotel clerk is giving me a hard time, the band starts pointing to each other and saying "I ain't going to sleep with that nigger." Those were their words, not mine. Finally between the band and the hotel clerk I was getting pretty frayed, and it's 1:30am by now. But I picked up the phone and called Herbie's manager, who was in San Francisco, and said: "The band's giving me a bit of trouble here. We agreed that they'd share rooms, right?" And she said "Absolutely. They always share rooms. That's the standard procedure." And I said "Well they don't seem to want to share tonight." And she told me to put one of them on the phone, and next thing I'm hearing is "Yes'm, Yes'm, Yes maam. OK." And this musician puts his arm around the nearest band member and says "I love this guy. We're gonna sleep together tonight." And they sort of winked at me and everything was fine from then on.

Jeff Machota, WEFT jazz host and past president of the CU Jazz and Blues Association
As much as racism exists in society it's going to be reflected in the music, especially in music that is an African American art form. If you think about the young jazz players coming up, they're a lot of young white players. Part of that is, I think, institutionalized racism, who has access to instruments and school programs. A lot of lower income schools don't have the opportunity. That's why jazz in the schools is so important. A lot of the musicians associated with the ACCM up in Chicago, Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians founded in the sixties, strive for education, especially in places that don't have the access and the money to pay for it.

Cecil Bridgewater, jazz trumpet player, composer, arranger, educator
The second U of I Jazz Band tour that I went on was to Russia. It was interesting because it was like being thrown back 40-50 years as far as what we encountered over there. The four of us—Donald Smith, Dee Dee, Maurice McKinley, and me—walked into this little village square and everything stopped because they had never seen black people. And we all had huge afros and so forth, so we were an oddity.

Cecil Bridgewater, jazz trumpet player, composer, arranger, educator
There was a kind of scene in the [black] community on the northeast end—places like the Elks, not too far from where the train station is now. Jack McDuff used to play there often. I played gigs there with Tony Zamora and with "Count" Demon and other people. There was a place off of Poplar Street and Tony used to play there. There was Amvets, another place on Sixth Street, and then Douglass Center. Most of the groups that played there were made up of black musicians in the early sixties, but a number of the students came to sit in and play. Some of those places were primarily all black clientele. But there's a myth that white people going into that kind of a situation was going to get hurt or that there would be some kind of a problem. The same thing has been pervasive in New York in Harlem, that you didn't go in there. But if you conducted yourself in a certain kind of way, usually you didn't get messed with, you didn't get into trouble. And that happened to me on the campus side of town; people stopped noticing my color and I'd just be accepted.

Don Heitler, jazz pianist
We learned a lot about jazz by going down to the black Amvets and the black Elks. The black Amvets had wonderful musicians on weekends. And the black Elks had their feature on Monday nights. I mean they were really great. And they let us come down and listen to the music, and they let us play. They said: "you want to sit-in with the band?" Of course we were young and cocky and thought we were good, so we did it! There was Count Demon…Sweets Perkins would play drums with him when Count Demon sang. I heard Jack McDuff down there a lot. And they had a wonderful piano player on a pretty regular basis named Joe Bradley. The tenor player was Punchy Atkinson—he had all the "Trane" moves down; I think he even talked like Coltrane. He was a wonderful player. And another great bass player was Bill Yancy. And you know, back in those days, I guess we were just naïve or something. We'd go to the Amvets and we were accepted. They knew we were there to enjoy the music, and that's what they were doing too. There weren't very many of us that went there, I never felt any tension. Those were the days!

Nathaniel Banks, trumpet player, bandleader, Director of the U of I African American Cultural Center
It was always other people that saw something in me that I wasn't really paying much attention to. That theme stayed with me throughout the time that I was developing musically. It started with my junior high school teacher. Then I had a high school teacher who was the same way—Mr. Papp. He encouraged me to continue playing and he's the one who got me into the dance band. In those days, black students were marginalized in the educational system, so I was fortunate because a couple of teachers took me under their wing and allowed me to do something with the talent that they saw in me.

Dan Perrino, saxophone player; founder of Medicare 7, 8, or 9; educator; U of I administrator
When I was with Student Affairs, we used to arrange for Tony Zamora to play in the dorms because we wanted to break the racial barriers. He was very, very good at that. He was also very good at that when his group played at Treno's in the mid 1960s. Because people went there without issues; they just went to listen to jazz. You know—whites, blacks, faculty, students, out-of-towners—it didn't matter. The mayors even went there to listen to jazz.

Nathaniel Banks, trumpet player, bandleader, Director of the U of I African American Cultural Center
I came to the U of I campus as part of Project 500, and since I didn't really know what I wanted to do, I applied to the School of Music because I knew I had skills in that area. Cecil Bridgewater encouraged me to get involved with the jazz band. I don't have many good things to say about the School of Music at that time, other than my experiences with John Garvey and the jazz program. I used to talk to jazz musicians who came from black schools to get extra training in the summer, and I'd be so envious. First of all, they were highly skilled, and second, they really related to their departments and to their schools. The U of I just didn't have a nurturing environment for blacks. And that's where a place like the African American Cultural Center really came in. Tony Zamora, when he was director, started a community jazz band called the Uhuru Ensemble. Basically it was just a bunch of black musicians from Champaign and from the campus who came together and played. And that evolved into the Lab Band that was sponsored by the African American Culture Program, which was a great training ground for any of us interested in writing, arranging and directing. That's where I honed some of my skills when it came to conducting bands and small ensembles. The Uhuru Ensemble was able to bring in people like Buddy Terry, Stanley Cowell, and Buddy Montgomery too. I followed Ron Bridgewater as conductor of the Uhuru Ensemble, but I was also one of the graduate assistants that worked for the African American Cultural Program.

Dan Perrino, saxophone player; founder of Medicare 7, 8, or 9; educator; U of I administrator
I was with the School of Music from 1960-1968, and then the Chancellor asked me to become Dean of Student Programs and Services. That was during the troubled '60s, when the University first brought in a large number of black students. I was frustrated because it seemed like we were taking steps backward instead of going forward, and this is where my music background really helped out. The program with the Tony Zamora ensemble was great. And we used to ask him to play in elementary schools to, so that the white children in elementary schools could learn about jazz through these fine black musicians. Tony and Cecil would go to the classrooms and talk to the children after they played, And the kids would touch them, you know. It was really an emotional kind of thing. So after one of these programs with Tony Zamora on campus, I noticed four black students sitting in the corner of the room at Forbes Hall and I decided to go introduce myself and see how things were going for them. They were sort of silent and noncommittal, so I asked them what they missed most from home. And a girl named Carol Pearson said: "I miss music, singing in the choir." And I asked "Oh, your church choir?" And she said: "No, I sang in the All City Chicago Choir." That meant that she had to be pretty good, because I knew the conductor of that choir. Then the others said that they sang in the All City Choir too, and that's when we decided to start the Black Chorus. At the end of the year they performed at the Florida Avenue Residence Hall and they just went over like gangbusters. And then we got a percussion ensemble going, and the Roving Gorilla Theatre, and pretty soon we had the African American Cultural Center.

Dan Perrino, saxophone player; founder of Medicare 7, 8, or 9; educator; U of I administrator
The first mixed band in Chicago—of the prominent bands—was the Benny Goodman Band. He brought in Teddy Wilson and then Lionel Hampton. When they went on the road, they had problems; they couldn't get hotel rooms and so forth. But in Champaign-Urbana it was even more restrictive than the bigger cities. The blending did not start here until the late '50s, and it might have even been the '60s. There was a very fine musician here named Joe Farrell; he was very prominent in New York. He was so good that he could almost walk into any of the black clubs—like Amvets, the American Legion, or the VFW. Because he was such a good musician, he was accepted. But I'm not sure that they would let whites in just to dance or hear music in those early days. It took a while before that happened. When I was in the service, I had to go to Kansas City for a court marshal case. The executive officer knew that I liked jazz and he recommended a place to me. He said: "It's in the black community, so you'll need to take my card." I later learned that he was an editor for the Kansas City Star and he covered jazz, so he was accepted. So there I was in Kansas City and I told the cab driver I wanted to go to this place. He just turned to me and said: "You don't want to go there." But I convinced him that I did. I had to give the card at the door and they about searched me before I could get in. But once they saw that I was there for the music, it was OK. I think I was the only white person there.

Don Heitler, jazz pianist
There weren't many of us that did, but we used to go [to the North End]. Everybody was cool. They knew we weren't coming down to try and break any barriers, see. We wanted to hear the music because we enjoyed the way the musicians who played there—who also happened to be black, and just happened to be playing their butt off…So we wanted to come down and hear them. And they knew that. We didn't have any axe to grind. We weren't representing any libertarian movement to territorially push ourselves into or force any friendships out of political necessity. We just went down there because we enjoyed it. And it was a wonderful atmosphere, wonderful jazz music. And they'd pack the place. Wonderful musicians. It was good. (Excerpted from Jeff Michel's book on Nature's Table.)