A Jazz Life, Interrupted

A recently acquired National Museum of American History Archives Center collection, the Maceo Jefferson Papers, 1898-1974, relates to a little-known but extremely interesting jazz musician and composer named Maceo Jefferson (1898-1974). Though possessing an impressive resume that included associations with such notables as Duke Ellington, W.C. Handy, Louis Armstrong, The Blackbirds, and others, he never attained fame for himself. He was a prolific composer and arranger, and lived an extremely interesting and eventful life. The rich archival collection donated by his great-nephew to the Archives Center gives us glimpses into the very earliest years of jazz and life for jazz musicians in the years between the world wars, and it opens up opportunities for researchers and scholars of this era. Only a few of our jazz collections document this formative era. Jefferson’s correspondence (he saved carbon copies of letters he sent--a luxury for a researcher) documents his efforts to have his music recorded and heard by the public. Reading Jefferson’s letters, one gets the sense of a likable, generous man with an ebullient personality and a wry wit, one who made the best of things when his career and life were derailed by circumstances beyond his control.

Jefferson’s early jazz life was probably typical of many musicians in the 1920s and 1930s, as he went from band to band, nightclub to nightclub. Many of these bands and clubs are documented in photographs in the collection. Born in 1898 in Beaufort, South Carolina, Jefferson, who came from musical parents, showed early aptitude for both banjo and guitar. In a document, he described lying awake nights listening to music from a dance hall down the street. He attended the Avery Institute in Charleston for two years, but the deaths of his parents ended his chance for further education. He served with the Coast Guard on a cutter, and with the Navy in World War I, and in a letter he stated that he “saw death staring me in the face dozens of times.” After his military service, he went back to music. He played in a nightclub in Norfolk, Virginia, for two years. He then spent another two years in a nightclub in Washington, where he met Duke Ellington and was one of the original members of his band, the Washingtonians. According to Jefferson’s nephew, he was the original arranger for this act, but Jefferson and Ellington had a falling out. He moved on to New York and worked in a succession of clubs there. He described the transformative experience of seeing and hearing Fats Waller play the piano in the Gaiety Theater. He joined Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds orchestra in 1926 and went on a European tour with them throughout 1927, and another with Leon Abbey’s band in 1928, eventually relocating to Paris. He lived in France for several years, married a Parisian costume designer, Yvonne Runtz, in 1937, and worked with several jazz bands and musicians including Louis Armstrong’s Plantation Orchestra, and then returned to New York. He played in Willie “The Lion” Smith’s band and later toured with blues composer W.C. Handy.

 Photographer unidentified. Jefferson (front row, wearing arm band) with Louis Armstrong (top row, far left) and his orchestra. Maceo Jefferson Papers, No. 1370-0000005.

Photographer unidentified. Jefferson (at left, seated, having his shoes shined) with the Leon Abbey Band. Maceo Jefferson Papers, No. 1370-0000004.

Photographer unidentified. Jefferson (holding banjo) with the Four Harmony Kings.
Maceo Jefferson Papers, No. 1370-0000006.

The late 1930s found him back in Paris. Soon afterward, Jefferson’s life took a radical detour. The Germans invaded Paris in 1940. After the closing of the Moulin Rouge left Jefferson without work, he worked with the Red Cross delivering U.S.-donated food and medicine to civilians and prison camps. In a 1967 letter, he said that “the Germans considered most of us working with the American Red Cross a bunch of spies.”

Photographer unidentified. Photographs taken of Jefferson while he was working for the Red Cross. Maceo Jefferson Papers. Top, No. 1370-0000008. Bottom, No. 1370-0000010.

The Nazis arrested Jefferson three days after Germany’s declaration of war on the U.S. (December 11, 1941), and he spent the next 27 months in an internment camp in Compiegne, France. Compiegne held political prisoners, French Jews, employees of the French government, and resistance fighters to the Vichy government. While imprisoned, Jefferson led an orchestra in the camp. According to his nephew, this may have saved his life. A concert program, hand-made, survives in the collection. The musical pieces played at this concert are an eclectic mix of fox trots, waltzes, hymns, solos, and just one composition by Jefferson.

 Program from a February, 1942 concert held inside the Frontstalag 122, Compiegne, France, led by Maceo Jefferson. Maceo Jefferson Papers.  Top: Cover, No. 1370-0000001-01.
Bottom: Inside text, No. 1370-0000001-02.

Jefferson’s wife Yvonne came regularly to see him in the camp, and bring him food. In a letter he wrote late in life, at a time when he had to make many sacrifices to take care of his wife, he said “she came 72 times to see me…walking from home to the station and after arriving at Compiegne she had three miles to walk to the camp, and that back… she has shown me her courage now it’s my time.”

In a 1967 letter, Jefferson describes his wife Yvonne’s heroic efforts to sustain him during his imprisonment by the Nazis. Maceo Jefferson Papers, No. 1370-0000002.

He was released in 1944 in a prisoner exchange, and returned to the United States in diminished health. At this point he resumed club work and songwriting, and in fact, in his later years he concentrated on composing, on developing new arrangements for old songs, and on getting his music performed and recorded. Letters in the collection document Jefferson’s contacts with performers such as Liberace, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Peggy Lee, and others, offering his compositions for their use. Guitarist Ray Rivera and blues singer Alberta Hunter did accept his offers.

A letter from Tennessee Ernie Ford declining Jefferson’s offer of musical compositions, 1956.
Maceo Jefferson Papers, No. 1370-0000003.

Maceo Jefferson died in 1974, leaving behind a sizable but largely unknown musical legacy. The above-described archival materials comprise just 1/8 of the collection. The other 7/8 contains a couple of recordings, one of which is a very early wire recording, and hundreds of Jefferson’s compositions.


By Cathy Keen, Archivist
Archives Center, National Museum of American History

The Blue Note Photographs of Francis Wolff

For two decades, Francis Wolff photographed every jazz session that Blue Note Records made. He not only preserved a major part of jazz history, but with his remarkable eye, he captured amazing candid portraits of great artists that reveal the joy and intensity of jazz at the point of creation.
--Michael Cuscuna, founder of Mosaic Images

Curtis Fuller at his June 16, 1957 session for "The Opener" at the Van Gelder Studio, New Jersey.  All the photographs shown in this blog were created by Francis Wolff and are from the Archives Center's Francis Wolff Jazz Photoprints collections, National Museum of American History, the gift of Michael Cuscuna and Mosaic Images.

Michael Cuscuna donated twenty-five silver gelatin photographic prints to the Archives Center in 2011, and this April we were pleased to display twelve of these photographs as part of the festivities for Jazz Appreciation Month.  The exhibition, "The Blue Note Photographs of Francis Wolff," will continue until June 30, 2016. It is located in the space outside the Archives Center entrance in the West Wing, on the first floor of the National Museum of American History. Examples of Blue Note LP record albums which utilized Wolff's photographs are included in the exhibition.

John Coltrane and Lee Morgan at Coltrane's September 15, 1957 session for
"Blue Train" (Blue Note) at the Van Gelder studio, New Jersey

Natives of Berlin, Germany, Francis Wolff and Alfred Lion became friends in 1924 when they discovered their mutual interest in jazz.  Like many Europeans, they had an outsider’s enthusiasm for this American art form.  Lion pursued his passion by moving to New York City in 1928, while Wolff remained in Berlin as a commercial photographer. Lion founded Blue Note Records in 1939 and asked Wolff to join him in New York.  Wolff hesitated, although as a Jew his life in Germany was in imminent danger.  He escaped Nazi Germany in the nick of time, and he and Lion released their first jazz recording in 1939.  The company emphasized traditional jazz at first, but by the late 1940s, Blue Note became a major leader in introducing the innovations of modern jazz and avant-garde styles, as well as the talented musicians who created it.  The co-founders of Blue Note treated their artists with consideration and respect, fostering an atmosphere of creativity and excitement.

Alfred Lion and Thelonious Monk at Monk's May 30, 1952 session for
"Genius of Modern Music" (Blue Note) at WOR Studios, New York City

While Alfred Lion supervised the music at Blue Note Records, Francis Wolff handled the business side.  He started photographing the recording sessions as a personal hobby.  His photographs became the label’s trademark when they were incorporated into album cover designs in 1956.  From then on, with his twin-lens, square-format Rolleiflex camera always at hand, Wolff was the label’s official photographer.  His images immortalized recording sessions by the top artists of modern jazz and revealed the camaraderie that made Blue Note a special creative place.  Using an off-camera flashgun held at arm’s length for unposed images, he embraced the interplay of light and shadow with expression and mood, making the musicians with their instruments look powerful and dramatic against deep black backgrounds. The often square or nearly square proportions of Wolff's pictures reflect his talent in utilizing the full 2-1/4 x 2-1/4" format of his camera, composing to the edge. When Lion retired in 1967, Wolff stopped photographing the recording sessions and became the company’s producer until his death in 1971.

Horace Silver at the November 23, 1955 session for "The Jazz Messengers at Cafe Bohemia 

Each year the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) honors selected musicians as “Jazz Masters.”  Many NEA Jazz Masters recorded for Blue Note records and were photographed by Francis Wolff.  Art Blakey—shown below at his January 24, 1962 session for “The African Best”— was one.  Others included Ron Carter, Ornette Coleman, J.J. Johnson, Curtis Fuller, Dexter Gordon, Max Roach, Wayne Shorter, McCoy Tyner, Horace Silver, and Jimmy Smith, all represented in the Francis Wolff collection.

Art Blakey at his January 24, 1962 session for "The American Beat" at the Van Gelder Studio, New Jersey 

Francis Wolff's photographs have been reproduced in book form, notably in The Blue Note Years: The Jazz Photography of Francis Wolff, by Michael Cuscuna, Charlie Lourie, and Oscar Schneider, with a foreword by Herbie Hancock (New York: Rizzoli, 1995); but this is the first time these photographs from the Archives Center's collections, beautifully printed from Wolff's negatives in the Mosaic Images collection, have been placed on public view in the National Museum of American History.  A few days after this small exhibition opened I chanced to mention it in an email to a Spanish friend who also has been a photographer of jazz musicians, and is now a doctoral candidate in the history of photography, Lourdes Delgado. She said that years ago she met the man who printed Wolff's photographs in New York and saw the images. I first met Lourdes when our Museum's Curator of American Music, Dr. John Edward Hasse, introduced her to me while she was living in New York. Wolff photographed musicians at work, during rehearsals and performances, but Lourdes photographed them in their home environments. Dr. Hasse, the creator of Jazz Appreciation Month, is a great Archives Center collaborator, frequently bringing the work of talented photographers of musicians to our attention and facilitating acquisitions, especially in the field of jazz, and his efforts have enriched Archives Center collections enormously.

David Haberstich
Curator of Photography, Archives Center
National Museum of American History      




 

The Duncan P. Shiedt Collection and All That Jazz

The National Museum of American History sponsored a variety of special activities in April to celebrate Jazz Appreciation Month, including special concerts and the opening of the LeRoy Neiman Jazz Café in the Museum, with its colorful mural (painted by Neiman) depicting eighteen jazz masters.  Spearheaded as usual by Dr. John Hasse, the Museum’s indefatigable curator of American Music, Jazz Appreciation Month often focuses on jazz-related acquisitions by the Museum, especially in the Archives Center.  Searching for “jazz” in SIRIS reveals the jazz-related riches of the Archives Center, from the original music manuscripts of famed composer and bandleader Duke Ellington to published sheet music in the Sam DeVincent Collection (arranged by the topics or subjects of songs), to photographs of jazz musicians by many important photographers.

Photograph by John Miner.  Billy Strayhorn playing piano, possibly Chicago, 26 May 1952.
From the Duncan P. Schiedt Photograph Collection, Archives Center, NMAH

Dr. Hasse has located and helped to negotiate most of the Archives Center’s jazz acquisitions over the years, collaborating with our staff to arrange and complete the transactions.  Some of these acquisitions were made possible through personal friendships and professional connections dating back to his graduate work in music at Indiana University, and Indiana, it seems, has been an unusually fertile source of dedicated collectors of jazz-related collections and archives.  This has been of personal interest to me because I also pursued graduate work at Indiana University in Bloomington—not in music, although I knew a number of music students.  Our most recent major jazz-related acquisition was donated by the children of another longtime friend and colleague of John Hasse’s—Duncan P. Schiedt.  Schiedt was himself a distinguished photographer of jazz musicians, but he also collected the work of other jazz photographers, and authored a number of books.  He wrote in the preface to his book Jazz State of Indiana that “Indiana represented something special in jazz history” and that “Hoosier jazz” made a special contribution to the style of many college and professional jazz bands. The Archives Center is just beginning to view the thousands of photographs in this collection.  Shown above is a photograph of jazz great Billy Strayhorn, from the Schiedt collection.

David Haberstich
Curator of Photography, NMAH Archives Center     

Band Aid for American Culture: Brass Bands, Marching Bands, Women's Bands, Jazz Bands...

This October, the Smithsonian Collections Blog is celebrating American Archives Month with a month-long blogathon! We will be posting new content almost every weekday with the theme Discover and Connect. See additional posts from our other participating blogs, as well as related events and resources, on the Smithsonian’s Archives Month website.

Three years ago I published a blog in this space about the Archives Center’s Hazen Collection of Brass Band Photographs and Ephemera and its wealth of photographs of American brass bands.    Below is another example, which was not published at that time, showing the U.S. Indian School Band of Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

U.S. Indian School Band of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, on trip to Long Branch, New Jersey, 1906.  Photographic postcard.
From the Hazen Collection of Band Photographs and Ephemera, Archives Center, National Museum of American History. 

The plethora of bands in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America can be suggested by visual evidence in a number of our other collections as well.  The Underwood & Underwood Glass Stereograph Collection, one of the Archives Center’s original core photographic collections, contains many examples of both American and European marching bands, including military and non-military ensembles.  The murky quality of these images in our online database, SIRIS, is pretty atrocious, thanks to the fact that they represent a transition from videodisc technology to digital.  They were scanned at a very low resolution from analog videodisc images on a television monitor, and the videodisc images themselves were two generations removed from the original glass plate negatives and interpositives (used for making duplicate negatives).  So I’m illustrating one of these photographs in a small size!  Needless to say, we hope to upgrade these scans, and currently are doing so as needed.

White Oak band, White Oak Cotton Mills, Greensboro, North Carolina, ca. 1900-1910.
Silver gelatin stereoscopic interpositive for stereographs published by H.C. White Co., photographer unidentified.
Underwood & Underwood Glass Stereograph Collection, NMAH Archives Center. 

A small but fascinating collection of papers and photographs relates to the career of Helen May Butler, a woman bandmaster who directed an all-female traveling military band from 1898-1913.  The Helen May Butler Collection contains photographs such as these:

"Ladies' orchestra," Providence, Rhode Island, ca. 1900.  Silver gelatin (?) print by unidentified photographer.
Helen May Butler Collection, NMAH Archives Center.

Helen May Butler's Military Band, ca. 1900.  Silver gelatin photographic print, photographer unidentified.
Helen May Butler Collection, NMAH Archives Center.

American music is certainly one of the strengths of the Archives Center collections.  We have other collections related to all-women bands, especially in the categories of jazz and other popular music.  The Virgil Whyte “All-Girl” Band Collection contains photographs, papers, and interviews related to an all-female (except the director!) jazz band from Racine, Wisconsin, which toured during World War II to provide entertainment for servicemen at U.S.O. venues.

Virgil Whyte's Musical Sweethearts, ca. 1943.  Silver gelatin photographic print by unidentified photographer.
Virgil Whyte "All Girl" Band Collection, NMAH Archives Center.

A companion archive is that of the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, a racially and ethnically mixed swing band, whose members were women. They toured the American South and Midwest, and toured overseas with the USO in 1945.

Members of International Sweethearts of Rhythm in performance at Club Plantation, Culver City, California, May 1944.  Silver gelatin print, photographer unidentified.  International Sweethearts of Rhythm Collection, NMAH Archives Center.

Of course, as far as professional jazz bands were concerned, all-male groups were the norm.  The Duke Ellington collection contains hundreds of photographs of his orchestra, and the Scurlock Studio Records include photographs of the African American dance bands and jazz orchestras (including "all girl" bands) which once made U Street, N.W. in Washington renowned as the “Black Broadway.”  

Johnson's Capital Rhythm Girls : acetate film photonegative, 1938.  Addison N. Scurlock, photographer.
From the Scurlock Studio Records, NMAH Archives Center. 

Club Prudhom orchestra, in band box : acetate film photonegative, ca. 1930s.  Addison N. Scurlock, photographer.
The negative is taped for cropping.  From the Scurlock Studio Records, NMAH.  Archives Center.

Music has been an important aspect of the National Museum of American History's collections, exhibitions, and public programs for decades.  The Museum actively collects and displays musical instruments and sponsors concerts.  The Archives Center works closely with music curators to collect original music manuscripts, published sheet music, ephemera, photographs, and other archival materials related to our American musical heritage.  Search SIRIS to discover additional examples of the wide variety of music-related documents we collect. 

David Haberstich, Curator of Photography
Archives Center, National Museum of American History

Jim Pepper: Jazz and Native American melodies

True story: Native American musicians have been involved in jazz from its earliest days. Mildred Bailey (Coeur d’Alene) was the first “girl singer” to front a jazz big band in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Musicians such as “Big Chief” Russell Moore, Oscar Pettiford, Charlie Parker, and many more self-identified as being of Native American heritage. In the 1960s, Native American saxophonist Jim Pepper played with many of the greats of the free jazz scene, including Don Cherry and Ornette Coleman, and was a member of Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra in the in 1970s.  

Handwritten musical score to "Witchi-Tai-To," by Jim Pepper.  From the Jim Pepper Sheet Music Collection, NMAI.AC.062

Aside from his remarkable musicianship, Pepper stands out for having brought Native American musical ideas into jazz itself. Pepper’s mother was Creek and his father was Kaw, and he grew up listening to his father’s father sing Native American Church peyote songs and traditional Kaw melodies. These influences stayed with him, and years later found their way into his composition “Witchi-Tai-To,” which was built around one of the peyote songs Pepper learned from his grandfather. He first recorded “Witchi-Tai-To” with the jazz-rock fusion ensemble Everything is Everything, and it found commercial success upon its release in 1969, reaching #69 on the Billboard Pop chart. Pepper recorded “Witchi-Tai-To” again in 1971 on his record Pepper’s Pow Wow, which featured giants of the jazz fusion scene including Billy Cobham and Larry Coryell, as well as American Indian singer-songwriter Peter La Farge.

Jim Pepper's Selmer "Balanced Action" Saxophone.  26/6293

Jim Pepper continued to be active in both jazz and the Native American cultural community until his death at the age of 50 in 1992. His family donated his saxophone and several of his beautiful handwritten musical scores to the National Museum of the American Indian in 2007.

Pepper made a lasting impression on jazz musicians, Native and non-Native. For example, saxophonist and poet Joy Harjo honored Pepper in her recording “The Musician Who Became a Bear: A Tribute to Jim Pepper” from the Smithsonian Folkways recording Heartbeat 2: More Voices of First Nations Women.  

Michael Pahn
National Museum of the American Indian, Archive Center