BLOG 4<\/b><\/p>\n<\/p>\n
After going to jail twice in three weeks during February 27 -March 15th 1960, bomb threats in the dormitories nightly on our college campuses and a march downtown after our Attorney Z. Alexander Looby\u2019s home was bombed in Nashville, The Nashville Student Nonviolent Central Committee (NSNCC) decided to go on a RETREAT\u2026TAKE A BREAK! We went into the mountains of Tennessee to the Highlander Folk School for a weekend. It was there that I first met the Dave Brubeck Quartet (Eugene Wright, Bass, Paul Desmond, Alto Sax, Joe Morello, Drums and Dave Brubeck on Piano). They were stationed in New York. <\/p>\n
And when I won that Scholarship to Juilliard, Paul Desmond and Eugene Wright would become my first musical friends in New York. A many a mornings, Paul and I would meet at the neighborhood restaurant, have breakfast (He loved to eat burnt bacon with his waffles) and then invite me back to his place on West 55th Street and we\u2019d end up with me singing songs from the classical Purcell and Bach, while Paul accompanied me on the piano. He was a classical musician playing Jazz. <\/p>\n
Eugene Wright lived up the street at the Wellington Hotel, when he was in town, and when I visited him, he would talk to me about life and Music. He always said to me then and even now when he\u2019s 96 years old in a nursing Home in California that I was to \u201ckeep doing what you are doing!\u201d They would call me up and tell me where they were going and that I was to come there and my name would be at the door, once inside look for them at a table. I had not yet done my first solo gig. <\/p>\n
I remember how popular \u201cTake Five\u201d became, played by Paul Desmond on saxophone with the Dave Brubeck Quartet. You have never heard such smooth skill and beautiful quality in a saxophone. When not working, they\u2019d take me out to concerts nightly at \u201cThe Birdland\u201d and other Jazz venues to hear other musicians like \u201cOrnette Coleman,\u201d \u201cJohn Coltrane,\u201d \u201cSarah Vaughan\u201d and Dizzy Gillespie. They were literally exposing me to a music that later on I\u2019d come to sing. I was their \u201clittle sister\u201d from the South. They were so proud to be with me because of their respect for what we had done in the South as students, \u201cSit-Ins\u201d, \u201cFreedom Rides\u201d and organized the \u201cMarch on Washington 1963.\u201d <\/p>\n
I didn\u2019t know then that I would end up working with Count Basie and His Orchestra as his guest star at the Tropicana Blue Room in Las Vegas in 1968. I didn\u2019t know that I would end up singing with the great Edward \u201cDuke\u201d Ellington in his \u201cSacred Music Concerts\u201d in Los Angeles at the Temple Emanuel and in San Diego in the 1970\u2019s. (1976) (http:\/\/americanhistory.si.edu\/archives\/d5301.htm ). I didn\u2019t know then that I would have my first jazz Audience as a guest of the great Singer Joe Williams at the Jazz Gallery in Greenwich Village. I didn\u2019t know that I would end up in the 1970s founding THE ELLINGTON TREE semester long project at the University of South California. I didn\u2019t know that I would end up Coordinating all the concerts for the California Afro-American Museum to accompany the Smithsonian Institute traveling Exhibit \u201cBeyond Category: The Music of Edward Duke Ellington.\u201d The Louie Belson Orchestra, the Bill Berry Band, The H. B. Barnum Orchestra, Gerald Wilson, Trombonist\/Composer Tom McIntosh of \u201cShaft,\u201d Art Hillery and Pianist Patty Bowen were just a few of the participants.<\/p>\n
Copyrights by Angeline Butler 2020<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
BLOG 4 After going to jail twice in three weeks during February 27 -March 15th 1960, bomb threats in the dormitories nightly on our college campuses and a march downtown after our Attorney Z. Alexander Looby\u2019s home was bombed in Nashville, The Nashville Student Nonviolent Central Committee (NSNCC) decided to go on a RETREAT\u2026TAKE A […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":230,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-209","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-highlight"],"metadata":{"_edit_lock":["1607702291:230"],"_wp_old_date":["2020-11-20","2020-11-29"]},"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n