gentrifying detroit...or not

Much has been made in the media about Detroit's comeback. Graduate students in my Gender, Race and the Urban Space course addressed this issue last spring while reading Thomas Sugrue's study on the origins of America's urban crisis. Sugrue looks at events occurring after World War II, namely the uneven distribution of postwar prosperity as a chief source of African American challenges in Detroit. I took the photograph up top in 1994. This store sidewalk sign was near downtown Detroit, not far from Eastern Market. I loved the reference to Alaga, or Alabama and Georgia. It's always interesting to see tensions between the rural and the urban. For example, I recall a chicken place on the east side with Alabama in its name. Save a lay-over at the airport years ago, I have not been to Detroit since 1998. I hope to show the film on Grant there some day. It will be good to see up close the changes, or lack of change, in the city's built environment and people. I know casinos are there as are community gardens. I have also heard there's still work ahead even with gentrification in certain areas. As a historian who is presently attentive to how African Americans leaving the place with which they have long been associated - cities - I wonder about the implications for Detroit. Along the way, I'll continue thinking about the urban spaces that Grant Green saw before death in 1979. He was born in St. Louis and lived in Brooklyn and Detroit. Sounds of the city are certainly present in pop and R & B music, the Motown label included. How does black urban life in America bubble up in his contributions to jazz? It's worth thinking about since so much of what he created was completed during he years to which Sugrue is attentive. How much of his music was a response to the crisis in question? Was any of his music a celebration over merely surviving this crisis and so much more for as long as he could? After all, he did own a beautiful house on Detroit's west side. That said, he experienced many financial struggles as did many musicians. The second photo is of his house on Greenlawn and the third is documentary still shot of Grant Jr. walking on the rooftop on a loft building above Niki's Pizza in Detroit's Greektown neighborhood.

remembering the final comedown

I recently ordered a copy of the soundtrack for the 1972 motion picture "The Final Comedown." Grant performs on it.  Although this period of Grant's career is dismissed by some fans of his music, I look forward to listening to it again (I have a vinyl copy that I never touch) as I continue being curious about his life, his motivations and his music. Directed by Oscar Williams and starring Billy Dee Williams, this film was one of several from the so-called "blaxploitation" era. This CD for this soundtrack had not yet released when we started working on the film years ago.

Wade Marcus composed and conducted the music, which was produced by George Butler for Blue Note Records. The musicians on this album include Irving Markowitz and Marvin Stamm, trumpet and flugelhorn; Phil Bodnet on flute, piccolo, alto saxophone and oboe; Harold Vick, alto and tenor saxophone; Julian Barber and Harry Zaratzia, viola; Seymour Barab, Charles McCracken, cello; Eugene Bianco, harp; Warren Smith, marimba, tambourine; George Devens, vibes, timpani, percussion; Richard Tee, piano, organ; Cornell Dupree, guitar; Gordon Edwards, electric bass, Grady Tate, drums; and Ralph MacDonald, conga and bongos. .

Over the years, I have often listened to a KSD interview Grant did with the late disc jockey Leo Chears. It must have been done in the early 1970s as songs from "The Final Comedown" are heard in the background.

Grant seemed to be in good spirits as he talked to Chears. I remember reading an interview in which he said he wanted to "get with some strings," meaning violins. I wonder if this soundtrack was something he wanted to do, or had to do during this transitional moment in jazz.

At the time of the interview, Vietnam was still a social fact. There was a hostage crisis in progress and it was very hot. Chears mentioned the heat index. It must have been the middle of summer. I also remember Grant talking to Chears like he was an old friend and I suspect he was just that given their ties to the greater St. Louis area. I only learned recently that Chears was a native of Lamar, Mississippi. At the time we met, he lived in East St. Louis, Illinois, just over the river from St. Louis.

Anheuser-Busch Company was a long-time supporter of Chears' show. In fact, many know that he was known as "The Man in the Red Vest," which he wore in part to help promote the brand. The name apparently came about when he wore a red vest to a meeting with beer company representatives to discuss sponsorship. They would eventually purchase several red vests for him.

Prior to working as a disc jockey, he served in the U.S. Army and worked for the U.S. Postal Service. Learn more about his life via this obituary.

Chears was among the many incredible supporters of music made by musicians like Grant. He gave us a tour of East St. Louis while he shared as much as he could about Grant's life. May they both rest in peace.

documentary inspires teaching (and vice versa)

This memoir helps paints the beatnik scene.

I also appreciate how much Tupac's work serves as an archive.

One of the real joys experienced while seeing this documentary to completion has been observing how much my interest in Grant Green's life, not just his music, overlaps with my teaching and research at the University of Alabama. I am presently thinking through the components of an HY 430  course for next semester tentatively titled "From Bebop to Hip Hop: Young America and Music." It is an undergraduate seminar so the course is mostly geared toward the students writing a research paper. One of their most essentials tasks will be using an archive - perhaps sheet lyrics in the UA's Hoole Special Collections - that will help them sort through how young people exert some measure of control over their lives via music, performing it or listening to it. There will be an effort to be inclusive, which is to say see the issue from all political and social perspectives.

Because the course has to be pitched at the right level, in order to bring in some of the concerns of young people in the late 1950s and 1960s through the 1970s through the present day, I am thinking of assigning a memoir I read as a young woman on the life of Hettie Jones, former wife of Amari Baraka and a book a poems by Tupac Shakur.

Right away, they will have some sources permitting them to sense what was happening in the backdrop of a lot of the music to which some of them listen today (indeed, music samples of music from this fertile moment of  recording: the 1950s and 1960s will figure in).

Along the way, they will have shorter readings uncovering more information about specific music genres as well as on-the-ground social developments like the black freedom struggle, the beatnik period, the arrival of bebop, Motown, and yes, hip hop. Postwar wealth, urban changes and rising conservative climate in America as well grassroots movements of more recent years will also be topics on which to focus. I look forward to working with this new group of students.

As I continue finishing this film, it will also be great to see Grant's life inside of certain historical developments. As mentioned earlier on this blog, as a young African American man, he performed alongside white musicians in the short-lived St. Louis beatnik club The Holy Barbarian in 1959, upsetting many. His 1965 recording "The Selma March," which was part of National Public Radio (NPR) Civil Rights playlist five years ago, and 1969 "Cease the Bombing" speak to the issues of the time.

He was a resident of St. Louis' Mill Creek community, a target of urban renewal/"black folks removal," as the late Sylvia Shabazz, Grant's childhood friend, once said. All this as Gaslight Square, a strip of nightclubs on Olive Street, some in which he performed, flourished from the early 1950s through the mid-1960s. He went on to live in New York and Detroit where he died in 1979. Not unlike many musicians and artists, he lived so much of the music he recorded. Try listening to Kendrick Lamar's "Sing About Me," which samples Grant's "Maybe Tomorrow," and not hear the tragic timelessness, but also specific histories, in the music of many people, including young America.

infamous intersection

Grant Jr. standing at a famous San Francisco intersection.

This San Francisco intersection appeared on a 1964 album cover.

Another memorable moment had while documenting Grant Green's life: standing at the Grant and Green intersection in San Francisco while driving from St. Louis, where we wrapped up filming  in 1995.  This corner appeared on the cover of his 1964 album "Street of Dreams."  I can't be sure, but I believe the intersection became quite popular after that album.

It is amazing what a young boy who grew up in St. Louis could do for two streets hundreds of miles from his home (and one in the greater San Francisco-Oakland region, which has been seeing more gentrification than easily discussed, according to several news reports). If you're interested, historian Robert Self provides historical context in a broader narrative dating back to the New Deal era , something that interests in me as I continue researching black Miami's racial and spatial politics.

I never met Larry Young, who plays organ on the "Street of Dreams" date, but did have the pleasure of meeting Bobby Hutcherson, who played vibes, and his wife, Rose, twice. I also spoke to this date's drummer Elvin Jones before his passing in 2004.

Up top is a photo of Grant Jr. standing at this intersection. At the time, we were on our way to Villa Montalvo, now the Montalvo Arts Center, where I had a two-month residency to write a biography on his father's life.

By the way, if you use the keywords "Grant Green San Francisco" in a Google search, you will see how some local businesses invoke these two words. For example, there is a little bar that does as much. If memory serves, in 1995 we saw a laundromat with Grant and Green in its name, too.

Graphic designer Reid Miles and Frank Wolff, photographer and founder of Blue Note Records, the label on which the elder Grant first made a name for himself, did an amazing job on numerous album covers, which have been featured on posters and in books. Here's one site that presents some of them. Tina Brooks' True Blue is among my favorites.

One of Reid Miles' incredible covers for Blue Note.

Unrelated: I received an email this week from Bob Andersen, the Director of Photography, for the film. I welcome hearing from others who helped us make this film. We started working on it 20 years ago and have been out of touch. Again, it's a privilege and pleasure to finally see it through to completion.

Finally, owing to this Labor Day weekend, I've offered Grant's "Lazy Afternoon" via a Youtube clip. It's from the "Street of Dreams" date.