Rhythm Is My Beat chronicles Freddie Green’s life (1911-1987) and jazz career from his days growing up in Charleston, his music studies in the 1920s at the Jenkins Orphanage where he toured with the orphanage band as a vocalist and learned upholstery as a trade, to his nearly 50-year career as a legendary rhythm guitarist with the Count Basie Orchestra from 1937-1987.  By Basie’s own account, Green was the pulse of the band, and along with Basie, Jo Jones, and Walter Page, he set the band’s pace and helped to define American swing.  Together, they were arguably the definitive swinging rhythm section of the big band era.  Green, who was hired by Basie and was the longest serving member of the band, is universally acknowledged as the greatest rhythm guitarist in jazz history.

Referred to as Mr. Rhythm, Freddie Green’s guitar technique was so unprecedented and innovative that it is often characterized as an art form.  Drummer Louie Bellson in Alyn Shipton’s A New History of Jazz, describes Green’s unique technique this way:  “Freddie Green…was one of the greatest rhythm players I ever heard in my life…he had a certain stroke with the right hand, that really was a great marriage to the right hand of a drummer, to the right hand of a bass player, and the right hand of a pianist.  It was something that you had to watch.”  From his early gigs at the Black Cat Club in Greenwich Village to his work with drummer and bebop rhythmic innovator Kenny Clarke, the development of jazz was enriched when impresario John Hammond recommended Green to Basie as a replacement for Claude Williams.

Rhythm Is My Beat includes interviews with guitarists and other musicians as well as jazz scholars who provide their analysis of Freddie Green’s sound.  It also includes some great stories – a successful feat by author-son to personalize and demystify his musician-father.  One of them is what the critic and namesake of the National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters Award for Jazz Advocacy, A.B. Spellman, once recalled at a CJI event in 2005:  “Of course, he [Freddie] had an affair with Billie Holiday, who said that he was one of only three men whom she ever loved…you can hear them together on some of Billie’s greatest records.” These and other stories of Green’s life and career will be highlighted in the following series of events at the College of Charleston:

Thursday, August 27 – 7:00 pm – Avery Research Center / 125 Bull Street

BookChat / Signing and Reception with Alfred Green

www.freddiegreenrhythm.com

Green will tell stories about his father’s young life in Charleston, his legendary career with Count Basie and his orchestra, and the innovative guitar technique of Freddie Green

Friday, August 28 – 3:30-5:00 pm – Recital Hall, Simons Center for the Arts / 54 St. Philip Street

Jazz Repertory Class / Tyler Ross, C of C Professor of Guitar

Special Guest: Michael Pettersen, Guitarist, Freddie Green Historian

Prof. Tyler Ross opens up to the public his jazz repertory class with guitar and other jazz students to hear Michael Pettersen discuss Green’s guitar technique. Pettersen’s work on Green is documented at www.freddiegreen.org.

Saturday, August 29 – 7:00 pm – Recital Hall, Simons Center for the Arts / 54 St. Philip Street

Book Presentation with Alfred Green

Special Guest:  Adam Parker, Arts Editor, Post and Courier

Green will provide an informative, interactive and entertaining presentation about Freddie Green followed by a

Q & A with Adam Parker; a book signing will immediately follow the event

Concert by Franklin Street Jazz Ensemble, Quentin E. Baxter, Musical Director

20 Franklin Street in Charleston, the original home of the Jenkins Orphanage, is the inspiration behind this ensemble and its music.  The band will play compositions by Freddie Green as well as other music that is associated with or influenced by Green and the Count Basie Orchestra.

The events are sponsored by the Arts Management Program and Jazz Studies Program/Department of Music in the School of the Arts, Avery Research Center, and Barnes & Noble/College of Charleston Bookstore at the College of Charleston; BME, LLC, Bell Digital Media, Jazz Artists of Charleston, Jenkins Institute for Children, and the Charleston Jazz Club; and funded by the Charleston Scientific and Cultural Education Fund.  For information on Freddie Green and Rhythm Is My Beat, see www.freddiegreen.org and www.freddiegreenrhythm.com. For more information on the events, email chandlerk@cofc.edu, or call 843-953-5474 or 843-953-6301.

About the Author: Alfred Green, a retired social worker, photojournalist and former Vice President of Book Production at Academic Press Inc. in San Diego, was born in New York City in 1938 where Count Basie’s bands served as the backdrop for the author’s transition from adolescence into adulthood. As a freelance photographer with membership in the American Society of Magazine Photographers, Green’s assignments were both domestic and international. He covered the 12th Organisation of African Unity (OAU) Conference in Kampala, Uganda. His photographs have been exhibited at The Museum of Fine Arts in Springfield, Massachusetts, Studio Museum of Harlem, Ford Foundation, Multi-Cultural Gallery in San Diego, and the Diana Galleries in New York. He received a Masters degree in Social Work from the University of Southern California and retired from the Los Angeles Unified School District as a Mental Health Consultant.  He lives on the West Coast with his wife, Judy.

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.

Rivers is a master bebop player, somewhere around Charlie Parker and Sonny Stitt, with whom he played in Chicago in the 1970’s.  When Rivers returned to Charleston he gigged in many bands on keyboards before he and his late wife, Fabian Rivers, formed Rivers and Company. Rivers has taught for decades in Charleston County public schools. He founded, leads and accompanies the Morris Brown AME Church Gospel Choir.  His trademark on the alto is “April in Paris.” He performed with the Charleston Jazz Initiative Legends Band in 2010 and is featured on its first CD recording.

Photo Courtesy of Alice Keeney

Kenny was a band director for Charleston County schools for thirty-two years before retiring in 1991.  He taught at Laing High School, C. A. Brown High School, Burke High School, Courtney Middle School, and the Jenkins Orphanage. While at C.A. Brown High School, the school’s musical production of Hello Dolly (1970) was the first to sell every seat at Charleston’s Gaillard Auditorium for three performances.

Kenny has performed as bass violinist for the Ebony Fashion Fair for several years and with such musical greats as Lou Rawls, Teddy Pendergrass, and Dizzy Gillespie.  He has also performed for the Piccolo Spoleto Festival, MOJA Arts Festival, and with most of the jazz musicians in the Charleston area. Currently, Mr. Kenny plays with the Davis Archer Band at major hotels and island resorts, and is the director of the Melody Chimes Ensemble at Calvary Episcopal Church in Charleston.  He has been featured in two motion picture films — The Notebook and Consenting Adults.

CJI’s Jack McCray lists him in his 2007 book, Charleston Jazz.  He performed with CJI’s Legends Band in 2010 and is featured on its first CD recording.  Kenny prefers to be called a “Good Sideman” as his ensemble career has spanned over 50 years. 

Photo Courtesy of Jack Alterman

Caldwell has appeared in Porgy and Bess, Clay Rice’s musical production Lowcountry Legends, and has studied with the late June Bonner who performed with the Metropolitan Opera.  She is a master of accents, accurately recreating the tonalities of speech which are important to both jazz and blues.

Caldwell has a long list of performances as a jazz and blues singer.  She is a vocalist with the Charleston Symphony Orchestra Pops Concert, as well as a featured artist for the Lowcountry Aid to Africa annual galas in Charleston.  Other performances have included the Indigo Jazz Concert, Japanese National Anthem, Charleston Symphony Orchestra Gospel Choir, Charleston Jazz Orchestra of the Jazz Artists of Charleston, and wrote and performed a short story to a sold-out crowd at South of Broadway Theatre Company in North Charleston.

Caldwell performs regularly in Charleston with the Magnolia Singers at Praise House, The Jazz Factory, and with a combination of great jazz musicians at several of the finest restaurants in Charleston — Mercato and McCrady’s.  She performed with the Charleston Jazz Initiative Legends Band in 2010 and is a featured vocalist on their first CD recording.

Photo Courtesy of Tony Bell

Charlton would then go on between the age of 3 and 16 to study and/or take lessons on the piano, organ, trumpet, violin, and cello.  In the summer of the 1988, he was the principal trumpeter with the United States Collegiate Wind Band.  This ensemble was comprised of some of the best high school musicians in the United States.  The United States Collegiate Wind Band toured over 9 different countries in Europe playing in some of the best concert halls in the world.

In 1994, Charlton received a Bachelor of Arts in Music from South Carolina State University.  It was at SCSU that he would learn such important lessons in performance, songwriting, arranging, and teaching.  He would return to the Lowcountry and join 6 other musicians to form the band SKWZBXX (pronounced – “squeeze box”).  The band would play from 1995 to 1999, release three CDs to great Regional success, and tour the East Coast and Southeastern region of the United States.  It was also during this time that he would meet, befriend, and share the stage with such performers and members of bands including the O’Jays, Jerry Butler, Fred Wesley, and Hootie and the Blowfish, to name a few.

In 2000, he became a public school music teacher and band director.  He has worked at the elementary, middle, and high school levels as well as an adjunct jazz trumpet instructor at the College of Charleston.  With such a vast background, he is in demand as a lecturer, performer, clinician, and arranger for many school bands, professional artists, and their recording projects.

Currently, as a performer, Mr. Singleton leads three groups under his name:  The Charlton Singleton Trio, The Charlton Singleton Quintet, both of which perform traditional jazz music, the Charlton Singleton Band (contemporary jazz/r&b/funk) and he is the Artistic Director/Bandleader of the Charleston Jazz Orchestra (CJO) under the auspices of the Jazz Artists of Charleston.  Mr. Singleton is also the Organist/Choir Director for Our Lady of Mercy and St. Patrick Catholic Churches in Charleston.  Singleton was the bandleader/trumpeter for CJI’s Legends Band in 2010 and its first CD recording.

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.

Group Code:  CHASJAZZ

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