The Three Crucibles of American Jazz: New Orleans, Kansas City & Where?

Clifford Brown (top) and Betty Roché

Steven Leech and I have several things in common: We're writers, bibliophiles, lovers of jazz and were born and raised in Wilmington, Delaware, which along with New Orleans and Kansas City was the third -- and routinely overlooked -- crucible of American jazz. Following are excerpts from Leech's recently published Wedgehorn Manifesto: A Cultural Treatise From the Underground:

When Clifford Brown's star rose for four short years in the early 1950s, it had shone over a long legacy of jazz from Wilmington that stretched back to the time when band leader Paul Whiteman took jazz out of saloons and speakeasies and into the concert hall. Yet Wilmington's jazz past is shadowy and nearly unknown. It lives on as mostly the talk of reminiscing old-timers. But on Wilmington's first and only radio station during the Jazz Age in the late 1920s it was alive and vibrant and grew and matured in the 1950s and early 1960s when it slipped into America's jazz mainstream.

Wilmington arrived late with its own radio station, but when WDEL went on the air in 1928 it hit the ground running and played the music of the city's jazz artists. On Thursday nights in 1931, Daisy Winchester and Crash Peyton had back-to-back shows. Crash was Wilmington's answer to Bing Crosby and Daisy sang in the city’s speakeasies. . . . Another of Wilmington radio's jazz singers was Sarah Dean with piano virtuoso Marita Gordon.

Real history was made in both Wilmington jazz and radio when Henry "Peck" Morris' Radio Boys brought the sound of horns and drums to the air waves. The cats were out of the bag and, as it turned out, they were all over the city.

The early 1930s was a time of rapid and drastic social change. Prohibition was over by 1933, but the jitterbugs found they had no jobs. . . . Often the only gigs were private affairs called rent parties, raising only money enough to keep some poor soul from being evicted. When FDR's New Deal began to kick in in the late 1930s, people could go out again and the little out-of-the-way clubs started coming back. . . . Best among the artists was the Claude and Artie Wells Band with their star on sax, Coleman Allen. . . .

Wilmington's first notable jazz success grew up on East 12th Street. Her name was Betty Roché. When she was a teenager her parents moved to Atlantic City and it wasn't long after that Betty joined the Savoy Sultans, who played regularly at the Savoy Ballroom in New York City. When singer Ivie Anderson left Duke Ellington's band in the early 1940s, Duke was on the lookout for a good singer. He found her at the Savoy.

Betty's bad luck was that she sang with Ellington during World War II when there was a shortage of shellac to make records and the musicians' union held a long strike against the recording industry. . . . There are no commercial recordings of her and the Ellington band from this period. After a short recording stint with Earl Hines in 1944, Betty finally recorded "Take the A-Train" with Ellington in 1951.

Before World War II depleted the ranks of local jazz musicians, Wilmington was roiling with the sound of jazz. Clubs all over the East Side were pouring their sound into the streets where youngsters would sprinkle sand on the sidewalks to do soft shoe steps they called The Sand. . . .

The most exciting and long lasting of the East Side clubs was the Club Harlem at 9th and Poplar streets. The hottest of Wilmington's jazz bands played . . . like Jimmy Hinsley and His Maniacs, featuring singer Daisy Winchester. On another night you'd find Battell Curry and His Swingsters, featuring Bernice Burns, with a "Red Hot Floor Show." . . . A high point of these heady times was a recording that Daisy Winchester made with an up and coming band called the Tympani Five led by future superstar Louis Jordan. . . .

When Wilmington's service men and women returned from World War II, the jazz scene was back in full swing. . . . Shortly before V-E Day, the Club Harlem reopened under new management and became the Club Baby Grand . . . regularly featuring a new local band called the Aces of Rhythm. Daisy Winchester was back on the bandstand as singer. The band was formed by brothers Willie and Robert "Boysie" Lowery and included Mr. Horse Collar, Billy Jackson, Bud Lowery, Jimmy Turner and Robert Townsend.

Along with two music teachers from Howard High School, Harry Andrews and Sam Wooding, Boysie Lowery began to influence and teach a new crop of local jazz musicians, chief among them a young Clifford Brown. Even in high school "Brownie" showed talent enough to form his own jazz trio with Donald Criss, now known as Rashid Yahya, and Bobby Burton, who later had a short stint with Lionel Hampton's band. Some of Boysie's students later found success in the jazz mainstream like vibraphonist Lem Winchester and pianists Gerald Price and Matthew Shipp. . . .

It was on the Morrie Sims show in 1952 that the first commercial recording by Clifford Brown, a member of Chris Powell's Blue Flames, was played on local radio. The song, about a Wilmington woman, was entitled "Ida Red." . . .

The Club Baby Grand began to attract nationally known artists. Among them were Lester Young, Dinah Washington, Horace Silver, Stan Getz and Jimmy Scott. But it was a 1949 Dizzy Gillespie gig at the famed Odd Fellows Hall at 12th and Orange streets that would make history. When one of his trumpeters, Benny Harris, was a no-show, Dizzy's old friend Boysie Lowery suggested that a young Clifford Brown fill in. When Dizzy heard Brownie play the word began to spread, and the rest was jazz history.

Brownie took the jazz world by storm, helping to revitalize modern post-war jazz. He recorded with a veritable who's who of jazz over a span of four short years and contributed to a new sub genre of bebop called "hard bop," but his short and meteoric career ended tragically on June 26, 1956 in a car crash on the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

. . . Tragedy continued to stalk Wilmington’s jazz scene. In January 1961, Lem Winchester died in a bizarre shooting accident at his first professional gig . . . A week later, Betty Roché recorded her final solo album on the Prestige label before succumbing to ill health. A year later, the East Side started to come down because of the Poplar Street A urban renewal project, decimating a vital part of the city's jazz scene as almost all of the clubs from the early 1930s were destroyed. . .

When riots and martial law wracked the city following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King in 1968, the death knell for Wilmington's jazz scene was sounded. But no death had occurred. Only a long retreat. . . . That place from which had sprung so much of our past culture, from Daisy Winchester and Alice Dunbar-Nelson to Betty Roché, Clifford Brown and Lem Winchester lay devastated with soldiers patrolling the streets as if it had been a war zone.

© 2008 Steven Leech. All Rights Reserved.