Jack Arthur McCray, 1947-2011

November 11, 2011

Jazz advocate Jack McCray dies

With a tendency toward self-effacement, McCray was an untiring advocate of jazz and helped create a “scene” in which local musicians could thrive. In recent years, he played a key role in establishing the Charleston Jazz Initiative, in partnership with College of Charleston arts management professor Karen Chandler.

Jack Arthur McCray, an iconic figure in Charleston and jazz impresario who did more than anyone to assert the cultural significance of the music he loved, was found dead Wednesday evening in his Coming Street apartment. He was 64.

He died of natural causes, probably Monday night, according to the Charleston County Coroner’s office.

He had been coping with some health problems in recent months, friends and colleagues said, and complained recently of a cough and some numbness in a leg. On Oct. 30, his birthday, he was forced to cancel a family gathering because of sudden back pain.

“We tried to get him to see a doctor, but he wouldn’t go,” said Leah Suarez, executive director of Jazz Artists of Charleston, a presenting organization McCray helped found in 2008.

With a tendency toward self-effacement, McCray was an untiring advocate of jazz and helped create a “scene” in which local musicians could thrive. In recent years, he played a key role in establishing the Charleston Jazz Initiative, in partnership with College of Charleston arts management professor Karen Chandler.

The program, started in 2003, is just one method of institutionalizing and legitimizing a dynamic music history unique to South Carolina. The initiative has succeeded in archiving thousands of images, documents and recordings that, together, reveal the rich and important legacy of the area.

Jazz Artists of Charleston was formed by Suarez and other local musicians, with McCray serving as a rallying point. In late 2007, after years of promoting the growth of live performance in the area, McCray thought that the time was ripe for an institution that could formalize the presentation of jazz and capitalize on the jazz culture he had celebrated for so long, Suarez said.

A longtime employee of The Post and Courier, McCray began his journalism career in 1985 as a sports copy editor and writer, became an editor of the neighborhood editions, then turned his attention to arts and culture. He retired from the newspaper in 2008, then went on to become a freelance jazz columnist for the newspaper’s weekly entertainment magazine, Charleston Scene.

McCray is the author of “Charleston Jazz,” a history of how the genre evolved in the Holy City.

Drummer Quentin Baxter first met McCray during a gig in 1993 at the Music Farm. McCray came for an interview and proceeded to ask unusual questions, Baxter said.

“He made you think,” Baxter said. “He asked penetrating questions about the music itself.”

He was writing not just about a particular gig but about the way that gig fit into the larger matrix of jazz in Charleston. It was a kind of dialectic, an ongoing conversation that helped to motivate local players, Baxter said.

“He made musicians feel as though Charleston was an important place, and the way he wrote, and how much he wrote, promoted the music to a point where managers of establishments wanted a piece of the pie.”

Before long, the musicians he supported would be playing regularly in restaurants, bars, theaters and festivals in the city.

Born in the Ansonborough neighborhood of Charleston during the Jim Crow era, McCray attended Buist Elementary then C.A. Brown High School, where he played trumpet in the band under George Kenney before transferring to Burke High School.

As a teenager, he spent summers with relatives in New York City, an experience that exposed him to a lively cultural scene that would influence his worldview and cement a love for the big city, according to longtime friend and writer Walter Rhett.

He attended Claflin College in Orangeburg in the late 1960s and was among the group of students protesting segregation and school policy in February 1968 when state troopers fired buckshot into the unarmed crowd. Filled with fear, and horrified at the bloody mayhem, McCray fled the scene as fast as his feet would carry him, toward the infirmary up the hill, he said in an interview earlier this year.

That event would become known as the Orangeburg Massacre.

Married in his 20s, he and his wife Sandra had two children, Terry and Krystal, before separating.

In the years that followed, McCray would cultivate long-lasting relationships with people of all stripes, advance his love of music, and advocate on behalf of young people. He was essentially a cultural anthropologist determined to show the connections between music of different regions, and between music and cultural identity.

“To be able to interact with so many different kinds of people on so many different levels was always amazing to me,” Chandler said. He was expert at explaining cultural evolution, she said. “But the way he was able to articulate it was so right on, so crystal clear. You never left a conversation with Jack saying, ‘I’m not sure what he meant by that.’ ”

When Osei Chandler (no relation to Karen) moved to Charleston from New York City in 1977, McCray was one of the first people he met, and the two men forged a lasting friendship.

Chandler soon was on WSCI radio hosting the Wednesday night Jam Session, a program devoted to jazz. McCray helped, sometimes acting as co-host. When Chandler was offered a second show, to feature Caribbean music, McCray began co-hosting more often, and eventually took over the jazz program, Chandler said.

The two men were on the air together several weeks ago for Chandler’s current reggae show called Root Music Karamu, and McCray lately had been expressing an interest in returning to the radio as a regular host, Chandler said.

In 1981, they started a soccer team called the Little Peles, which was part of Charleston’s youth soccer association and meant to provide urban black children a chance to play the game. Chandler was president and head coach. McCray, too, was a coach, and later a referee.

“He was probably the first black soccer referee in the state,” Chandler said, setting an important example for young people.

The team won the state championship that first season.

At about the same time, McCray’s interest in advancing the cause of jazz was crystallizing. A 1979 jam session in the Green Room of the Dock Street Theatre led to a slot in the 1980 Piccolo Spoleto Festival. The series — 14 events in 10 days — was called “Jazz After Hours.” Many people guessed it would flop, but patrons lined up around the corner of Market Street waiting to hear innovative jazz, co-organizer Osei Chandler said.

“Then what he did was he assembled local jazz musicians for a series of jam sessions all around town,” Chandler said. “These cats were cab drivers, school band leaders, other retired musicians.” There was a core group with others invited to sit in. “That was phenomenal.”

Mayor Joe Riley called McCray a lost “treasure” and his death a loss for the community.

“He was such a fine, friendly, happy, genuinely nice person, with a wonderful smile that was genuine and spirited and nourishing for anyone who came in touch with him,” Riley said.

He worked hard to prove that Charleston’s musical tradition was an essential part of American history and that the city, which produced the famous Jenkins Orphanage Band, deserved to be recognized along with New Orleans as a seat of jazz, Riley said. “And his work and study was quite convincing.”

The Jenkins band produced musicians who played in Charleston and who went elsewhere, taking the local jazz sensibility elsewhere to influence others, he said.

Karen Chandler said her friend was a deep thinker who read voraciously and emerged over the years as “Charleston’s cultural icon.”

He was a visionary and optimist who, decades ago and despite many obstacles thrown in his path, dared to imagine a Charleston cultural landscape at the center of which proudly stood jazz, she said.

“If there’s anything that we take from all of this sadness, it’s that (we) have created it and have to continue it, in his honor and memory.”

Rhett said the notion that music and community are inseparable is at the core of McCray’s philosophy.

“This is one of the few times that I’ve actually been angry at God,” he said. “Jack’s death for me resonated through every level of life and spirit. Who am I going to brainstorm with? Who’s going to be the living library for Charleston? How am I going to un-archive all the ideas that he didn’t write down?”

In jazz, Rhett said, musical expression depends not only on sound. It requires silence, too. It requires a space in which sound and energy, wit, love and joy can swirl freely.

“Jack’s death is the ultimate space,” he said.

Funeral arrangements are being handled by Harleston-Boags Funeral Home.

Reach Adam Parker at 937-5902.

Charleston Jazz Initiative Legends Band – CD Release

Legends, CJI’s first recording, features music from the early 20^th century to 2010 that documents Charleston’s influence in the jazz performance traditions of many of this country’s big bandleaders, sidemen, and soloists. It marks the first CD recording of tunes composed, arranged or performed by musicians of  Charleston and South Carolina’s rich jazz legacy.

In June 2010 during CJI’s Legends Festival, the CJI Legends Band, an eighteen-piece big band, performed and completed a live and studio recording.  The concert was recorded live at Sottile Theatre on June 5, and the next day, musicians completed a studio recording at Charleston Sound in Mount Pleasant, SC, the area’s premier recording studio.

A $40,000 Access to Artistic Excellence grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), helped to fund the CD and is a significant national distinction for CJI’s efforts, Charleston’s flourishing jazz scene, and the city’s rich jazz legacy.  It marks the first time that the federal arts agency has awarded funds to promote, record, document and preserve the jazz performance and historic traditions of Charleston.

Highlights of the CD include compositions, solos, and performances by several Legends Festival guests including NEA Jazz Masters Slide Hampton^TM and Jimmy Heath; Florence, SC native and tenor saxophonist Houston Person; drummer/percussionist Tootie Heath; John Williams, baritone saxophonist, 25-year veteran of the Count Basie Orchestra and Orangeburg, SC native; Joey Morant , trumpeter, touring musician and Charleston’s jazz ambassador; and Charleston jazz legends, Lonnie Hamilton III, George Kenny, Oscar Rivers Jr., Ann Caldwell, Quentin Baxter, and Charlton Singleton.

CD selections include features by Slide Hampton and Jimmy Heath — Hampton’s world premiere, “Gullah Suite: A Tribute to Buddy Johnson & John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie,” a CJI-commissioned tune in three movements, and Jimmy Heath’s “Without You, No Me,” his tribute to Dizzy Gillespie.  Hampton’s premiere and Heath’s composition will be the first time compositions by these two NEA Jazz Masters have been performed and recorded live in Charleston with local and nationally-recognized musicians.

Other featured new music includes “437 Race Street,” a big band composition by Joey Morant that highlights a familiar street on Charleston’s east side; and “Brother Blake,” a 2005 CJI-commissioned work by Quentin Baxter that is a tribute to William Blake, Jenkins Orphanage Band director from 1920-1958.

Other CD selections include jazz standards popularized by Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and Erskine Hawkins — bands in which many Charleston/South Carolina musicians were featured as sidemen (Cat Anderson, Freddie Green. Jabbo Smith). The CD also includes tunes that have been composed, arranged, and performed by South Carolinians’ Dizzy Gillespie, Buddy Johnson (“Since I Fell for You”), Fud Livingston (“I’m Through With Love”), Julian Dash (“Tuxedo Junction”) and Freddie Green (“Corner Pocket”).

The musicians of the band are professional local and internationally-recognized instrumentalists, several featured soloists, musicians of the Franklin Street Five, a Jenkins Orphanage Tribute band debuted by CJI in 2005, and featured guests. Charlton Singleton, a CJI musician since 2003 and artistic director of the Charleston Jazz Orchestra (CJO) – Charleston’s resident big band orchestra under the auspices of the Jazz Artists of Charleston (JAC), served as bandleader.

Charleston Jazz Initiative Legends Band CD

Dr. Karen Chandler, Executive Producer

Jack McCray, Producer; Author, Liner Notes

Quentin Baxter, Engineer and Producer

Charlton Singleton, Bandleader

Tony Bell, Photographer

Colin Quashie, Graphic Design

Reeds

Oscar Rivers Jr.

George Kenny

Mark Sterbank

Lonnie Hamilton III

John Williams

John Cobb

Trumpets

Joey Morant

Chuck Dalton

Cameron Handel

Charlton Singleton

Trombones

Teddy Adams

Timothy J. Robinson

Mitchell Butler

Phil King

Rhythm

Tommy Gill, piano

Kevin Hamilton, bass

Quentin Baxter, drums and percussion

Vocals

Ann Caldwell

Tony Burke

Modern Jazz in Charleston: 1950-2000

Saturday, June 6, 2009 – 12:00-3:00 pm

Hot Jazz…Hot Charleston! 

CJI’s 4th Annual Return to the Source event explored the social and musical perspectives of Charleston’s contemporary jazz scene with two events.

JAZZ!  Art Quilts in Performance

Juke boxes, disc jockeys and live artists were woven like threads in Harlem and Charleston nightclubs.  Renowned quilter, educator and jazz advocate, Dr. Marlene O’Bryant-Seabrook, presented her quilts to celebrate this cultural heyday of art, music and craft in an exhibition and artist talk.  The quilts are featured in a documentary catalog by the Charleston Jazz Initiative and may be purchased at the Avery Research Center Gift Shop.    www.cofc.edu/avery

Conversations in Jazz

CJI’s niche program, Conversations in Jazz, featured jazz producer, columnist, author and CJI’s co-principal Jack McCray with those who experienced Charleston’s rollicking Golden Age of Jazz.  On stage were musician Calvin “Piano Calvin” Alston; community historian Walter Rhett; former broadcasters Theron Snype and Philip LaRoche ; former club owner Ernest Pinckney; and musician-educator George Kenny.  Playing bebop at the gig was Charleston drummer and CJI music director Quentin Baxter and his ensemble.

Saturday, June 6, 2009 – 12:00-3:00 pm
Avery Research Center, 125 Bull Street
College of Charleston, Charleston, SC
Free and Open to the Public
For more information:  (843) 953-5474 or (843) 953-7609

THE SOUTH CAROLINA HIT PARADE

March 22, 2008

THE SOUTH CAROLINA HIT PARADE, produced by CJI’s Jack McCray, featured musical arrangements, for the first time, by jazz musicians native to Charleston and other places in South Carolina who left an historic jazz legacy. This music was performed by some of the finest musicians who actively work Charleston’s contemporary jazz scene.  They make up the Charlton Singleton Orchestra, the debut of a 20-piece big band led by CJI musician, Lowcountry native, trumpeter, composer and arranger, Charlton Singleton.

The orchestra’s rhythm section included CJI’s popular ensemble, the Franklin Street Five, a Jenkins Orphanage tribute band, led by CJI music director, Quentin Baxter. Rounding out the section was bassist Kevin Hamilton, and pianist Richard White, Jr.  They were joined by Robert Lewis on alto saxophone; saxophonist Mark Sterbank and arranger of several concert tunes; trumpeter Chuck Dalton; baritone saxophonist John Cobb; vocalists Tony Burke and Ann Caldwell, Charleston’s first lady of jazz; Fred Wesley, Jr., former bandleader for James Brown; guitarist Lee Barbour, one of the best young jazz guitarists in the country, according to guitar giant, Joe Beck (Miles Davis’ first guitar player); and more!

The repertoire for the evening included the songbooks of the Count Basie and Duke Ellington Orchestras.  A highlight of the concert was the 1931 Fud Livingston hit ballad, “I’m Through With Love.”  This is one of Livingston’s most lasting compositions that he produced with Matt Malneck.  The tune was arranged for CJI and the orchestra by Charleston arranger and musician, John Slate. Also featured were jazz tunes composed by or associated with musicians from Charleston and South Carolina including:

Dizzy Gillespie (1917-1993) – Cheraw native and one of the country’s most celebrated jazz musician, composer and bandleader; pioneer of modern jazz namely bebop and one of its master trumpet players; with Dizzy, Charlestonian and jazz historian Dr. Wilmot “Al” Fraser wrote his autobiography – To Be or Not To Bop:  The Autobiography of Dizzy Gillespie

Freddie Green (1911-1987) – Charleston native; Count Basie’s rhythm guitarist for 50 years; by Basie’s own account, Green defined American swing; regarded as the greatest rhythm guitarist in jazz history, hands down; his collection was recently donated to the Avery Research Center (CJI Archives)

Fud Livingston (1906-1957) – Charleston native; saxophonist and arranger prominent in the 1920s-40s who arranged for Benny Goodman, among others; he wrote several popular ballads related to Charleston with his musical collaborator, Robert S. Cathcart, Jr. – “Easter Bells” and “Springtime in Charleston”; CJI is currently arranging his collection for online access

Buddy (1915-1977) and Ella (1923-2004) Johnson – bandleader brother and vocalist sister team from Darlington; toured with a large blues band throughout the country, mainly in the south performing to sold-out crowds in the 1940s and 50s; performed at the Cotton Club and Savoy Ballrooms; Buddy’s 1947 hit, “Did You See Jackie Robinson Hit That Ball” was used in the motion picture film “The Jackie Robinson Story”

Bubber Miley (1903-1932) – Aiken native and Jenkins Orphanage Band musician; trumpeter with the Duke Ellington Orchestra; he created the signature “jungle” sound for the orchestra – his trumpet solos are unsurpassed; he co-wrote several compositions with Duke including “Black and Tan Fantasy” and “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo”

3rd Annual Return to the Source

June 7-9, 2007

June 7th - Jazzin’ the Spirit (A Jazz Picnic) – 5-7:30 pm – Robert Mills Manor - 20 Franklin Street

• Click to hear The Post and CourierSpoleto Today Podcast about this event and others with Jack McCray (interviewed by Harriet McLeod).
• Scroll down to Podcast 3 (5/23/07) and click on“Thirteen Previous” with Geoff, Dan and Harriet talking to Jack.   The interview begins at 2:30 and ends at 7:20.
• The City of Charleston’s Housing Authority, Jake McGuire Savage Foundation and the Charleston Jazz Initiative hosted a jazz picnic at the former home of the Jenkins Orphanage.
• Music was provided by the Franklin Street Five, a Jenkins Orphanage Tribute Band led by noted drummer Quentin Baxter…Imagination, a local neo-gospel and jazz youth band led by pianist Demetrius Doctor… and featured the debut of CJI’s Jenkins Orphanage Reenactment Band!  The band was organized by Rachel Dowling, the daughter of Jenkins Orphanage administrators, the late Sarah and John Dowling, and David Richardson.

June 8th – South Carolina Jazz Diaspora (CJI Symposium) – 6-9 pm New Tabernacle Fourth Baptist Church – 22 Elizabeth Street

• Click here to read “Jazz promoter to share her musical legacy,” A celebration honoring the Jenkins Orphanage Bands, Freddie Green, Count Basie’s rhythm guitarist for nearly 50 years, and Jabbo Smith, rival trumpeter of Louis Armstrong…plus the debut of CJI’s Edmund Thornton Jenkins Chamber Society organized by Rachel Dowling
• Keynote Address — “Jabbo and Me: One Mo’ Time” with Lorraine Gordon (shown right), Owner of the Village Vanguard (one of the most famous jazz clubs in the world), New York City…plus a booksigning of Alive at the Village Vanguard: My Life In and Out of Jazz Time (Hal Leonard, 2006)
• Conversations in Jazz with special guests… Al Green, son of Freddie Green, Palm Coast, FL (pictured bottom left); Michael Pettersen, guitarist, arranger & Freddie Green historian, Evanston, IL (pictured bottom center); Jeffrey Green, biographer of Edmund Thornton Jenkins, West Sussex, England (pictured bottom right)
• Other special guests included CJI Advisors — A.B. Spellman, former Deputy Chairman, ,National Endowment for the Arts; Dan Morgenstern, Director, Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University; and Larry Ridley, Executive Director, African American Jazz Caucus, New York City, as well as visiting jazz historian, Dr. Rainer Lotz, Bonn, Germany
• Encore Screening of “Song of Pumpkin Brown” by filmmaker Brad Jayne…musical score by drummer Quentin Baxter
• Music was provided by the Edmund Thornton Jenkins Chamber Society; Celeste Laribo, Associate Pastor, The Net International Ministries, Inc.; Daniel Davis, Concertmaster, Charleston County School of the Arts Orchestra; and Darren Shuler, Minister of Music, New Bethel Sounds of Praise Pentecostal Fellowship Ministries, Inc.

June 9th – Booksigning – Nineteenth Century Freedom Fighters: The 1st South Carolina Volunteers (Arcadia, 2006) – 4-6 pm
Avery Research Center – 125 Bull Street

• Booksigning and discussion about the Civil War’s 33rd Regiment, South Carolina’s US Colored Troops from authors Bennie J. McRae, Jr. & Cheryl Trowbridge-Miller
• Presentation on black American military bands…influences of early jazz & Jenkins Orphanage musicians by special guest Wolfram Knauer, Director, Jazz-Institut, Darmstadt, Germany

Other Events:

• June 2nd – Piccolo Spoleto Festival’s Sister City Jazz Block Party: A Tale of Two Cities – 7-11 pm US Custom House – Concord & Market Streets
• Celebrate the jazz legacies of Charleston and New Orleans with Fotos for Humanity, Big Daddy & the Salty Dogs, Quiana Parler & Friends, & Skipp Pearsons’ All-State All-Star Jazz Band

REGRETFULLY CANCELLED TROPICAL STORM BARRY
Special thanks to our 2007 major donors and sponsors … College of Charleston (Arts Management Program; Dean’s Office, School of the Arts; Office of the Provost; and the Avery Research Center); Charleston County Council; City of Charleston Housing Authority; Jake McGuire Savage Foundation; Office of Cultural Affairs/City of Charleston; Arcadia Publishing; Hal Leonard Publishers; National Park Service; First Citizens Bank; Coca-Cola Bottling Company; Herzman-Fishman Foundation; Jeffrey Green; Barbara Burgess and John Dinkelspiel; Charleston Place Hotel; and New Tabernacle Fourth Baptist Church.

2nd Annual Return to the Source

May 29, 2006

Sister City Jazz: A Gullah and New Orleans Dialogue
May 29, 2006 – Blacklock House and Gardens, College of Charleston

The program included live music by students from Charleston County School of the Arts Jazz Band, unveiling of “CJ,” an original painting by artist, Jahsun, guest presentations, and “Conversations in Jazz” with oral history accounts from:

• Quentin Baxter (Charleston), Jazz Percussionist; Adjunct Professor of Jazz Percussion, College of Charleston; drummer with Rene Marie and Monty Alexander; CJI Resident Musical Director
• Jonathan Bloom (New Orleans, LA), Jazz Percussionist; Music Educator, New Orleans Public Schools; former Director, New Orleans All City Jazz Outreach
• Jeffrey Green (West Sussex, UK), Historian and Author; biographer of Edmund Thornton Jenkins: The Life and Times of An American Black Composer, 1894-1926

CJI Official Launch Return to the Source

June 2-4, 2005

Robert Mills Manor and Avery Research Center, College of Charleston

• A Jazz Tribute to William Blake (June 2) at Robert Mills Manor, 20 Franklin St. (home of the former Jenkins Orphanage) honoring former Jenkins Orphanage band director, William Blake with Quentin Baxter and the Franklin Street Five; commissioned work (“Brother Blake”) by Baxter; and the jazz debut of LaToya Smith
• CJI Jazz Symposium and Exhibition Opening including “Charleston Cradle of Jazz” (June 3) with Carolyn Jabulile White, viewing of Jenkins Orphanage Band outtakes by University of South Carolina (USC) Newsfilm prepared by Julie Hubbert of USC Music Department; unveiling of “Baby James,” an original painting inspired by artist, John Carroll Doyle; live jazz by the Quentin Baxter Jazz Ensemble Conversations in Jazz with Jenkins Family and Friends; scholarly presentations; Photojazz, an exhibition by documentary photographer, Jim Alexander featuring 33 photographs of celebrated jazz musicians and Charleston sidemen; and the inaugural gathering of the CJI Circle with a presentation by Kathleen Wyer Lane, collector of family source material on the Avery Normal Institute, Jenkins Orphanage, and several Charleston jazz musicians.

Presentations and oral history accounts by:

• Keynote Speaker, A.B. Spellman (Washington, DC) (pictured below), Poet, former Deputy Director, National Endowment for the Arts; author of Art Tatum: A Critical Biography and Four Lives in the Bebop Business
• Dan Morgenstern (Jersey City, NJ) (pictured left), Director, Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University; former editor of Downbeat; six-time Grammy-award winner for his liner notes; author of Jazz People and Living With Jazz
• Jeffrey Green (West Sussex, UK) (pictured below), Historian and Author; biographer of Edmund Thornton Jenkins: The Life and Times of An American Black Composer, 1894-1926
• Larry Ridley (New York, NY) (pictured below), Bassist, Executive Director, African American Jazz Caucus,Inc., an affiliate of the International Association for Jazz Education, and Jazz Artist-in-Residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York City
• Wolfram Knauer (Darmstadt, Germany) (pictured below), Director, Jazz-Institut Darmstadt, Germany; author of several books including Jazz in Europe and essays for the International Dictionary of Black Composers
• Alvin Batiste (Baton Rouge and New Orleans, LA) (pictured below right), Clarinetist; Educator at New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts; author of several scholarly articles including “Charleston: Another Cradle of Jazz?”
• Rachel Dowling (North Charleston), organist and daughter of former Jenkins administrators, John and Sarah Dowling
• Barbara Braithwaite (Charleston), granddaughter of Reverend Daniel Jenkins
• Stanley White (Charleston), grandson of Reverend Daniel Jenkins
• Jomo Zimbabwe (Boston), grandson of Reverend Daniel Jenkins and nephew of Edmund Thornton Jenkins
• Elizabeth Carter Prioleau (Charleston), 1920s resident of Jenkins Orphanage; played piano at the orphanage and her brother, Wilbur, played trumpet
• Rollins Edwards (Summerville, SC), Jenkins era musician; drummer; alumnus of the Count Basie, Buddy Johnson and Willie Jackson bands
• Kathleen Wyer Lane (New York, NY), Marketing Consultant; collector of family source material on the Avery Normal Institute, Jenkins Orphanage, Arthur Briggs and Tommy Benford
• Jim Alexander (Atlanta, GA), Documentary photographer; photographs include those of Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie, Eartha Kitt and sidemen from the Jenkins Orphanage Bands including Cat Anderson, Freddie Green and Speedy Jones.

From Avery to Erskine Hawkins: Remembering St. Julian Bennett Dash

July 2, 2004

(A Program of the Avery Grand Reunion) – July 2, 2004
Avery Research Center, College of Charleston

The program included live music by the Quentin Baxter Jazz Ensemble including“Tuxedo Junction,” co-written by Julian Dash, a media display of source material donated by the Dash Family, and Conversations in Jazz with oral history accounts from:

• Brothers of Julian Dash — Roger Dash (Palm Desert, CA), Avery graduate, 1945 — John Thompson Dash (Charleston), Avery graduate, 1948 — Ernest Dash (Inglewood, CA), Avery graduate, 1951
• Clifton Smalls (Brooklyn, NY), native Charlestonian; pianist and jazz band leader who recorded with Dash; former member of the Carolina Cotton Pickers; relief piano player for Earl “Fatha” Hines;
• recorded with, and served as musical director for the Jimmie Lunceford Orchestra, Billy Eckstine, Eartha Kitt, Ella Fitzgerald and Sammy Davis, Jr.

Return to the Source: Remembering Legendary Bassist, James Lee Jamerson

September 18-19, 2003

Avery Research Center and Sottile Theatre, College of Charleston

A two-day tribute honoring Motown and Funk Brothers bassist and Edisto Island native, James Jamerson. Programs included music by the choirs of the New First Baptist Church of Edisto Island, The McKnight Brothers, and the Black Velvets; the Charleston premiere of the Grammy-award winning documentary, “Standing in the Shadows of Motown;” a display of Jamerson source material acquired from donors, Anthony and Felix McKnight; a James Jamerson Proclamation from the City of Charleston; and “Conversations in Jazz: James Jamerson” with oral history accounts from:

• Ann Jamerson (Detroit, MI), James Jamerson’s widow
• Anthony McKnight (Charleston), First Cousin of James Jamerson; President, South Carolina Chapter, Motown Alumni Association Bob Lee (Los Angeles, CA), Jamerson historian-bassist

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