Where Jazz Put Its Feet Up

By Somini Sengupta, NY Times, Sept. 20, 1998 - Gift article reprinted with permission.

Black Musicians Made Their Homes in Queens
By Somini Sengupta

Sept. 20, 1998

Mona Hinton led a visitor through her Addisleigh Park neighborhood in Queens the other day, recalling the old haunts that she and Milt, the legendary jazz bassist and her husband of 59 years, frequented long ago.

She drove by what was once the trumpeter Jimmy Nottingham's bar, Sir Jimmy's, now a strip of shops and restaurants. On Linden Boulevard, she found Sisters, a diner, now abandoned, where the corn bread would melt in your mouth. Then, she circled around Baisley Boulevard, where once, she remembered as clear as day, stood a nightclub.

''Say,'' she summoned a passer-by, ''you know where Club Ruby used to be?''

''Nope,'' she was told.

She asked another and another, and finally someone pointed to a duplex on the corner of 120th Avenue and Baisley. Out front was a man who ran an accounting office inside. ''Did you ever hear of the name Milton Hinton?'' she asked. ''He used to be called 'The Judge.' ''

He politely shook his head, offering an apologetic smile.

Hardly anyone remembers the things Mona Hinton, 79, does. But not all that long ago, in this city of jazz, Queens was, quite literally, the home of jazz.

The clubs were mostly in Harlem and on Broadway. But Queens is where Louis Armstrong settled for good, in a wood-frame house with a small, second-floor study where he created countless scrapbooks and filled journals chronicling a remarkable life. It is where Count Basie and his wife, Catherine, threw the finest parties of summer, in a backyard that took up a whole city block. It is where Milt and Mona Hinton came after years on the road, spent in ''Colored Only'' motels in the Jim Crow South and in rented rooms in Harlem.

By the late 1930's and 40's, they and other musicians who had flocked to New York City had made enough money to leave the cramped hotels and apartments of Manhattan. While white musicians scattered to the suburbs, African-American jazz musicians, thwarted by segregation, clustered in two corners of Queens: Corona, where Louis Armstrong's wife, Lucille, bought a two-story house in 1943, soon drawing fellow musicians in droves, and southeast Queens, where the composer Clarence Williams and his wife, the singer Eva Taylor, moved in the 30's, with dreams of starting a black artists' colony. The musicians who followed were among the first African-Americans to move into these neighborhoods, helping to establish what would later become a mecca for the city's black middle class.

Mr. Hinton, 88, remembers it this way: ''Colored people like us were just looking for a decent place to live, a quiet place to raise children.''

Today, the Hintons are among the few survivors of that era. The Basies' backyard in Addisleigh Park, a section of St. Albans, has made way for a cluster of houses, and except for the Armstrong house, which is a city landmark, the homes of the other artists are known to only a few jazz aficionados.

Now, however, the history of that era is beginning to be noticed. Flushing Town Hall, an arts center in downtown Flushing, will begin a series of weekend bus tours next month to explore the homes and neighborhood haunts of many of these artists. Last Friday night, a concert in Milt Hinton's honor inaugurated the center's fall jazz series and drew a handful of the old Queens players, including the saxophonist Jimmy Heath. There is also an exhibit featuring the photographs taken by Mr. Hinton, who chronicled the era he helped to shape.

Still, most of that history survives only in the memories of its last living players -- and in Mr. Hinton's photographs.

The other day, in a sunny alcove off their living room, the Hintons sat poring over old photographs and recalling the pictures still vivid in their minds.

There was a photograph of a picnic in Cunningham Park: Miles Davis was embracing a woman Mrs. Hinton remembered to be his wife at the time -- ''Frances, I'm pretty sure that was her name,'' she said -- and the guitarist Barry Galbraith was seated at a picnic table with his wife.

Mr. Hinton has published two books of photographs, mostly of his friends. There is Billie Holiday, dejected by the sound of her own voice at a recording session in Manhattan. There is Dizzy Gillespie, wrapped in a wool coat, sleeping on a bus. There is Mrs. Hinton standing with the trumpet players Doc Cheatham, Mario Bauza and others in front of a ''Colored Only'' motel in Alabama in 1949.

''I wanted to show the way we lived, the conditions we lived in,'' Mr. Hinton said of his photographs. ''Our young black kids -- they don't know the suffering we have gone through, just to get by in the world.''

On these quiet, tree-lined streets, many African-American musicians found respite. To recall the jazz denizens of southeast Queens and Corona is to recall many of this century's musical giants. Mr. Gillespie moved into a house a few blocks from the Armstrongs. Ella Fitzgerald once lived nearby. By the 1960's, a co-op building erected for war veterans became home to Clark Terry, the trumpet player; Cannonball Adderley, the saxophonist, and Mr. Heath, who still lives there with his wife, Mona, in a three-bedroom apartment with a view of Shea Stadium.

''It was a nice atmosphere, coming from the inner city out here to the trees,'' recalled Mr. Heath, who moved to the building, the Dorie Miller Co-ops in Corona, in 1964. ''I was born in the tenements, in West Philly. Manhattan was just like Philly, where I came from. I wanted a little more space, a nicer atmosphere to raise my kids.''

In southeast Queens, James P. Johnson, the pianist and composer, settled close to Mr. Williams's home in Jamaica. In 1929, Fess Williams, the band leader who inaugurated the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem, bought a house in nearby St. Albans. ''The neighborhood was mostly German, and you saw 'For Sale' signs all over the place,'' his daughter, Estella Williams, recalled.

Then, sometime in the 1930's, a white policeman who worked the beat in Harlem sold his house in Addisleigh Park to a black man -- deliberately, as local lore would have it, because he was feuding with a neighbor. In moved Fats Waller to a Tudor-style house on the corner of Sayres Avenue and 173d Street, forever transforming the affluent, white pocket that was once home to Babe Ruth.

The jazz men and women came to Queens for many of the same reasons that others did: to grow tomatoes in the backyard, as many of them remembered doing in their childhood days in the South; to let their children ride bicycles up and down the streets without fear and to give big, welcoming feasts in the summer. They also could rehearse in their basements.

''If someone had a barbecue, you'd just stop by and start eating,'' recalled Clarence Irving, a former jazz record shop owner and a historian of Queens. ''You'd eat as much as you want and then you moved on. There was nobody there that wouldn't eat rice. There was nobody there that wouldn't eat pig feet. It was a culture.''

The Hintons first moved to a Jamaica neighborhood known as Bricktown in 1949, renting an apartment that had been recommended by a friend, J.C. Johnson, a music arranger. Nine years later, they bought a two-story Tudor in Addisleigh Park, where they live today. ''I was raised in Sandusky, Ohio, a small town,'' Mrs. Hinton said. ''I just couldn't imagine raising a child in the city.''

They were a stone's throw from the Wallers' home. Mercer Ellington, the band leader and son of Duke Ellington, was around the corner. Lena Horne bought a house with a low-lying stone fence on 178th Street, and Billie Holiday briefly owned a home nearby, but then moved to an apartment in nearby Flushing. The saxophonist Illinois Jacquet lives there still. Just down the street from the Hintons, the Basies gave their famous backyard barbecues.

''She was a very charitable person,'' Mrs. Hinton said of her friend, Catherine Basie. ''She always gave parties for her charities and social events. They had a fence up, and they had roses covering the whole fence.''

Unlike the Harlem of old or the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn, where many contemporary jazz musicians now live, Queens did not spawn a particular jazz style. Still, jazz historians say, it was vital to the development of the music.

''It created a social stratum apart from Harlem, where a whole generation of musicians got together, made connections, and that affected the recordings they made, the bands they made,'' said Gary Giddins, a jazz critic whose book, ''Visions of Jazz: The First Century,'' was recently published by Oxford University Press. ''It seems to me more sociological than musical.''

Sadly for jazz fans, little of this history has been preserved or publicized. (The Savoy Ballroom has not been designated a landmark for that matter either, they point out.)

''If Donald Manes or somebody like that who had some power, had been a jazz fan'' Mr. Giddins said, referring to the late Queens Borough President, ''maybe something would have happened. It takes somebody to say, 'Hey, this is Louis Armstrong, this is Dizzy Gillespie. These are major American icons.' ''

Phil Schaap, a music historian and disk jockey whose family has lived in Hollis, Queens, for several generations, was a child when the icons moved to his neighborhood. He remembers when Lester Young's wife, Mary, signed up for a library card at the public library in Jamaica, where his mother, Marjorie, worked; she and his father, Walter, a jazz critic, were huge fans of Mr. Young, the saxophone and clarinet player.

Mr. Schaap also remembers when he tried to make the acquaintance of trumpeter Roy Eldridge's daughter, Carol, at her sixth-grade graduation; striving for integration, their schools -- his, predominantly white, hers, predominantly black -- had a combined graduation that year.

And he can never forget the transit strike of January 1966, when New Yorkers were urged to give rides to stranded schoolchildren and when he, a boy of 13, strategically positioned himself along Hollis Court Boulevard, along Count Basie's preferred route to Manhattan. He stuck out his hand when the Count's chauffeur-driven car pulled up, and he rode with the Count all the way into Manhattan.

''My awareness of jazz comes from growing up in Hollis,'' said Mr. Schaap, who is regarded as a living jazz encyclopedia. ''The entire jazz community had moved into my neighborhood.''

They have mostly left by now. Just the other night, Mr. Schaap attended a memorial service for the clarinetist Benny Waters, who once lived nearby.

Today, Hollis is known for another kind of popular music. One of the earliest, most influential rap groups, Run-D.M.C., came from Hollis. The trio A Tribe Called Quest and the one-man cultural empire known as L.L. Cool J. grew up nearby.

A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 20, 1998, Section 1, Page 43 of the National edition with the headline: Where Jazz Put Its Feet Up; Many Black Musicians Made Their Homes in Queens. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe