Monday, March 30, 2020

'To Scout and Hire the Best Acts'

In his essay on Art Tatum in American Musicians II (1996), Whitney Balliett quotes Marian McPartland on the great pianist: “I think I met him at the Embers in New York in the early fifties, and I spent some time with him at the Sky Bar in Cleveland, where he heard me play.” I was born in Cleveland in 1952 but had never heard of the Sky Bar. How pleasant to think that Tatum and I nearly intersected, though how a white toddler on the West Side of the city, where no blacks lived or worked, could have met the Toledo-born pianist is pure fantasy. Tatum died in 1956. But what about the Sky Bar? 

Online I found links to a book by Joe Mosbrook, Cleveland Jazz History, first published in 1993, with a second edition in 2003. I can’t attest to the reliability of Mosbrook’s scholarship, but he supplies interesting information about a Cleveland I hardly knew existed. In Chapter 12, “Cleveland Jazz Clubs,” Mosbrook devotes a section to the Sky Bar (Page 126):

“Perhaps the most popular and certainly the longest running of the many jazz clubs in the University Circle area of Cleveland was Lindsay’s Sky Bar on Euclid Avenue near East 105th Street.”

He quotes the alto player, composer and arranger Willie Smith (1926-2009) as saying Charlie Parker and Billie Holiday performed there, and adds: “Phil and Rickie [Bash, the club’s owners] made frequent trips to New York City to scout and hire the best acts. Among the other jazz artists who performed at the Sky Bar were Coleman Hawkins, Earl ‘Fatha’ Hines, Dizzy Gillespie, Roy Eldridge, Gene Krupa and Oscar Peterson. They were all treated as stars at Lindsay’s.”

In 1950, the year my parents married, Cleveland’s population exceeded 900,000, making it the seventh largest city in the U.S. Today it’s ranked 52nd. More importantly, Cleveland was able to attract great American (and Canadian) artists. Elsewhere in Mosbrook’s book we learn that Clifford Brown performed at the Modern Jazz Room in Cleveland on a Sunday night, June 24, in 1956. With him were Sonny Rollins, Max Roach, Richie Powell and George Morrow. The following night, after an “informal gig” in Philadelphia, Brown and Powell, on their way to Chicago, were killed in an automobile accident on the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

[Listen to Brown’s “Joy Spring” and Tatum’s “Yesterdays.”]
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2 comments:

  1. Faze5:39 PM

    When my father was at the Cleveland School of Art in the early 1940s, he and his buddies would go to the black clubs at 105th and Cedar to hear jazz. That was sort of daring and naughty thing you'd expect from art students. Now, I park at that same corner every day for work, and often think about Art Tatum practicing his complex runs (which they say he did, for hours at a time) in a dank, afternoon bar in that very space. (A then-unknown Elvis played his first gig north of the Mason-Dixon line in dive bar on 105th and Carnegie - 1954, I think.)

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  2. JJ Stickney1:48 PM

    Mosbrook was a local Newscaster and a huge jazz fan. He was president of the Blues and Jazz Society. The clubs I remember as a white kid from the West side heading East was Lancers and Sir Rah’s. I saw George Benson, Earl Kluge and some others in the early 70s.

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