For a few hours Friday afternoon, the clocks at Jefferson Excessive College swept backward to an period of old-school glamour, when the twentieth century was in its high-spirited adolescence, and Black of us from the Deep South have been fleeing Jim Crow by the tens of 1000's for the California Promised Land.
These arrivals helped convert a multiblock stretch of South L.A.’s Central Avenue right into a neighborhood the place jazz giants like Dexter and Duke and Etta and Ella strolled the streets not merely as idols however as associates and regulars. Their music was celebrated and debated nightly within the Dunbar Resort lounge and enacted as a holy ceremony within the Alabam Membership, the Hen within the Basket and that secular temple the Lincoln Theater.
So it was, on Friday afternoon, that the singer and actor Sy Smith, shimmering in a floor-length gold-and-silver robe, knowledgeable an auditorium of curious, barely awestruck youngsters that they'd entered a consecrated house. She had come as a part of a collaboration between Jefferson — which boasts maybe extra well-known Black alums than any college west of the Mississippi — and Muse/ique, the Pasadena nonprofit devoted to creating “radically participating dwell music experiences accessible for all.” The intent was to highlight the connections between Central Avenue’s starry previous and Jefferson’s illustrious heritage.
“As I stand right here and carry out for you, I really feel like I’m acting on sacred floor,” Smith advised her viewers, which included Jefferson’s history-making Black principal, previous and current L.A. Unified College District superintendents and fellow musicians who've labored with the likes of Whitney Houston, Stevie Marvel, Sheila E., Tupac Shakur, the Jacksons and Earth, Wind & Fireplace.
“And that’s a legacy of Jefferson Excessive College,” Smith continued, “and that legacy is one thing they'll’t take away from you, all proper?”
It was a easy segue into her subsequent quantity, “They Can’t Take That Away From Me,” the Gershwins’ 1937 customary immortalized by ... properly, everybody, together with a number of artists who opened and closed exhibits on Central Avenue in its heyday from the Nineteen Twenties to the Fifties. Smith was a part of a musical ensemble that included Earth, Wind & Fireplace music director and pianist Myron McKinley and his quartet and vocalists LaVance Colley and the DC6 Singers collective. They have been joined by members of the Lula Washington Dance Theatre.
Hosted by Rachael Worby, Muse/ique’s inventive director, conductor and founder, the musicians ripped via an hour-plus program of Fat Waller, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington and Hoagy Carmichael classics that served each as a live-action encyclopedia entry on Central Avenue’s efflorescence and a tribute to Jefferson’s outstanding alumnae: Ralph Bunche, Alvin Ailey, Dexter Gordon, Carmen de Lavallade, Stanley Crouch, Juanita Moore, Roy Ayers, Etta James, Dorothy Dandridge, Barry White, Rickey Minor and Kerry James Marshall, only for starters.
The music jumped and juked, soared and ally-oop’d via the auditorium, named for Samuel Rodney Browne, who smashed a secondary-school coloration barrier when he grew to become Jefferson’s music instructor in 1936.
“That is the Hogwarts of music,” McKinley advised the scholars through the lead-in to “Candy Georgia Brown.” “So get your wand and begin doing all that stuff, as a result of the those that got here out of right here modified the music business.”
Amongst these nodding alongside was Dr. Tamai Johnson, the primary Black feminine principal within the historical past of the varsity, based in 1916. Rising up in close by Lynwood, Johnson knew virtually nothing concerning the bygone Central Avenue scene. However she was studying so much.
“Virtually a full semester of historical past in a single live performance, proper?” she mentioned. “I believe I've an obligation to actually simply expose the scholars to partnerships like this that may spark an curiosity within the arts and in studying exterior of the classroom.”
Though the members of the category of 2023 could also be as prone to hail from Zacatecas, San Salvador, Tegucigalpa or Guatemala Metropolis as from Louisiana or Texarkana, Johnson predicted that Friday’s program would translate simply, as a result of “tradition is extra than simply race.”
McKinley, the music director and pianist, who was raised at sixty fourth Road and Cimarron, mentioned he too knew “little or no” about Central Avenue’s glittering historical past and its alliance with Jefferson Excessive. Then, three months in the past, he linked with Worby of Muse/ique, who started filling him in.
“I couldn’t consider that that was such an influential place that we by no means knew about in our technology,” McKinley mentioned. “And for us to not know that and never have fun it and have it proceed, it actually damage my coronary heart. So I used to be actually invested to be part of this.”
Worby, a Leonard Bernstein protegee, conceived and curated the live performance as a part of “A Season of Streets,” Muse/ique’s on-site efficiency collection impressed by L.A. landmarks akin to Sundown Boulevard, Laurel Canyon, Whittier Boulevard and Hollywood and Vine, utilizing music to knit collectively a fragmented metropolis.
She approached her pal Austin Beutner, the well-connected former funding banker, deputy mayor, Los Angeles Instances writer and LAUSD superintendent, who put her in contact with Johnson. Beutner spoke briefly earlier than Friday’s efficiency and put in a plug for Proposition 28, on the poll this fall, which would offer new funding for Ok-12 public college arts and music training.
So did present Superintendent Alberto M. Carvalho, who’d spent the week grappling with a crippling systemwide hacking incident and new check scores exhibiting that 72% of LAUSD math college students and 58% of English college students don’t meet state requirements.
“In my world, democracy and America are one and the identical, jazz and America are one and the identical, which suggests jazz is a type of democracy,” Carvalho advised the scholars.
One other visitor was multi-instrumentalist and composer Dexter Story, whose father went to Jefferson and named his son after Dexter Gordon.
“I used to be a knucklehead. I used to be like, ‘Why is he at all times telling me about Central Avenue?’ It wasn’t till I obtained older that I spotted how a lot heritage there was,” mentioned Story, who described Muse/ique’s live performance collection as a type of cell “social justice.”
After the live performance, college students traded impressions.
“It was fairly magical,” mentioned Rafael Rosas. “You normally don’t see these things in actual life. It’s normally on TV.”
“This educated me a lot,” Daniela Medina mentioned. “I had no concept that this many individuals went to this college and graduated and had these wonderful careers.”
The scholars puzzled if such occasions might occur extra usually. Additionally they hoped that extra children would be a part of the varsity band, or coloration guard. That might be difficult: Hector Artero, who performs within the group, mentioned he had the varsity’s solely working alto saxophone.
“A lot of the gear that we've is outdated and actually run-down,” he mentioned.
With so many issues besetting LAUSD college students — poverty, declining check scores, COVID aftershocks, beleaguered dad and mom — music and artwork can appear to be luxuries. The glory that was Central Avenue can appear to be a dream.
Worby vows to return to Jefferson quickly.
“I don’t consider in drive-by training, and so we’ll be again subsequent yr and the yr after that. We’re not going to make going to Jefferson some nice cri de coeur that doesn’t resonate into the long run. That simply doesn’t work.”
“One thing about these partitions and hallways would possibly breathe chance,” she added.
Because the final notes of “When the Saints Go Marching In” dissolved, the monstrous warmth wave that had clutched town for days started to crack. Scattered raindrops fell on the scholars as they emptied out of their fame-haunted college.
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