Category: Music

July 20, 1969: I was there

Not the Moon, on which the crew of the Apollo 11 spacecraft would land as that Sunday drew to a close (almost 11:00 P.M. Eastern Time). No, Mount Morris Park (renamed Marcus Garvey Park four years later) for one very memorable afternoon, part of that summer’s Harlem Cultural Festival.

On my way home from high school a few days before, I saw an ad on the No. 27 Bronx bus that took me from the IRT’s Sound View Avenue Station on Westchester Avenue and dropped me off at the Academy Gardens (at the Randall Avenue stop just before the bus makes a left turn onto Rosedale Avenue).

By Gind2005 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25730097

Around noon the day Neil Armstrong would do the first “Moonwalk,” I took the No. 6 train (of J.Lo’s debut album fame; she was born four days later) from the same station (now Morrison-Sound View Avenues) to 125th Street to enjoy a Soul Music concert of arguably historic proportions. After the Beatles craze, to which I had succumbed as a pre-teen in 1964, my musical tastes migrated, not to Rock, but to Soul. That set me up for my first Jazz concert in 1971.

If there were other white people among the myriads of black folks forming a sea of ebony across the green field, I didn’t see them. When I asked a gentleman for directions back to the 6 after the show, he nearly lost the cigarette that dangled from his lips. That sort of thing. Distributors of The Black Panther—the newspaper of the The Black Panther Party, not the superhero comic book, which actually predates the Party—hawked their wares indiscriminately and therefore to me.

According to blogger kamau [whose blog has since been deleted from the web] in 2009, “producer Hal Tulchin took over 50 hours of footage of the festival, but was unable to get it aired on the American TV networks of the day. Currently that footage lies languishing in vaults; apart from Nina Simone’s performance [on August 17th] that is making the rounds of YouTube . . .  most of that footage has not seen the light of day.”

Below is the text of the original press release.  (The area code for the whole city then was “212”; “718” for the “outer boroughs” came in 1984.)

The “headliner,” Stevie Wonder, was just 18; Chuck Jackson, now 81, turned 32 two days later.

UPDATE: In 2017, Bryan Greene, General Deputy Assistant Secretary at U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and fellow soul music fan emailed me about my post as it appeared on an old jazz site. We set up a time for a phone interview about my experience; he wrote up the result in an article that captures the time’s politics and culture. It’s in the April-June 2017 issue of his newsletter, Poverty & Race, available online. I hope some of you will take a peek.

The festival is also Greene’s point of departure for a recent Smithsonian article about the Moon anding and the alternative uses that he and others wish NASA’s funds would be put. As you might guess, I’m against governmental boondoggles on principle, but at least the $24 billion mulcted from taxpayers led to a Moon landing; $15 trillion later, U.S. poverty rates are about what they were when President Lyndon Johnson declared a “war on poverty.” 

And the beat goes on. (Yeah, that was from ten years later.)

The above modifies and expands a 2009 post on another site.

City of New York
Administration of Parks,
Recreation and
Cultural Affairs
Arsenal, Central Park 10021

For Release

UPON RECEIPT

For Further Information:

Janice Brophy – 360-8141

SOUL FESTIVAL IN HARLEM

Harlem will host the sounds of soul this Sunday, July 20th, at 2:00 p.m. at Mount Morris Park, 124th Street and Fifth Avenue. The concert climaxes “Soul Music Festival Week.” proclaimed by Mayor Lindsay for July 15th to July 20th.

Stevie Wonder, David Ruffin, Chuck Jackson, Gladys Knight and the Pips, and the Lou Parks Dancers are featured at the Soul Festival, the third concert in the Harlem Cultural Festival 1969, sponsored by the New York City’s Parks, Recreation and Cultural Affairs Administration and Maxwell House Coffee, and produced and directed by Tony Lawrence. Admission is free.

The Harlem Cultural Festival 1969 will continue through the summer with three more concerts at Mount Morris Park, all at 2:00 p.m. A Caribbean Festival on July 27th, featuring Mongo Santamaria, Ray Barretto, Cal Tjader, Herbie Mann, and the Harlem Festival Calypso Band; a Blues & Jazz Festival on August 17 with Nina Simone, B. B. King, Hugh Masakela, and the Harlem Festival Jazz Band; on August 24th, a Miss Harlem Beauty Pageant & Local Talent Festival, featuring La Rocque Bey & Co., and Listen My Brothers & Co.

Sadik Hakim, 1919-1983: Chance Encounter? A Jazz Digression.

It may be, as the Buddhist proverb has it, that when the student is ready, the teacher will appear.  When Sadik Hakim briefly appeared in my life, however, I wasn’t ready, and wouldn’t be for more than a third of a century, that is, until it was too late. So, maybe he wasn’t supposed to be “the teacher,” right? He was certainly, however, “present at the creation” of arguably the world’s greatest music (well, that’s how I’d argue); if I had known then what I learned later, I could have benefited from our chance encounter even more than I did.

He was christened Argonne Thornton a century ago on July 15th in Duluth, Minnesota. On November 26, 1945, this denizen of 52nd Street in its glorious Bebop period had alternated with Dizzy Gillespie on piano on Charlie Parker’s immortal “Ko-Ko” date. (Britt Aamodt tells the story here.)

According to his Wikipedia entry, “Hakim is credited with co-writing Thelonious Monk’s standard ‘Eronel’ and is rumored to have written a few famous bop tunes credited to other composers. He adopted his Muslim name in 1947.”

The most common, and most apt, adjective associated with Sadik Hakim is “unsung.”  Although the average jazz fan cannot recognize his name, I have run into it repeatedly, and unexpectedly, in many jazz biographies. For example, I’ll pick up From Swing to Bop only to read Shelly Manne’s memory of a night at the Onyx on 52nd Street in the early ’40s when big Ben Webster knocked over nearly every table to dissuade some rowdy solider on leave from further pestering his pianist. Or just today, when I consulted Feather and Gitler’s The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazzfor information on a former music teacher of mine, saxist Paul Jeffrey (with whom I took a single, but valuable, lesson in 1974), I learned that Professor Jeffrey had played with Hakim in 1961.

Some of Sadik’s memories of befriending as well as working with Bird are recorded in Bird: The Legend of Charlie Parker, edited by Robert Reisner. Because I had read this book sometime before November 19, 1976, that I was able to appreciate the good fortune of his striking up a conversation with me, a stranger, that night at Bradley’s (70 University Place, 1969-1996).

I was there to see legendary bop-era guitarist Jimmy Raney, who did not disappoint. (He played Bird’s “Billie’s Bounce” at my request, and his son, Doug, sat in for one or two numbers.) During the second set I was, according to my diary, “joined at my table by Sadik (I think that’s it) who knew all the greats. It was great talking to him. After the second set I walked him over to Sweet Basil’s [88 Seventh Avenue South] where George Coleman was blowing an alto [sax] apart. On the way, I recall [to him] somebody from a book on Charlie Parker who had a Moslem name and who knew Bird well. It turns out it was he!! He doesn’t drink or smoke; he lives his religion.  I was very impressed with him.  He’s going on tour now with somebody.”

He accomplished much more than I can summarize usefully in a post, but a quick search will bring you to the most salient facts.  He passed away in June of 1983, about a year after playing “Round Midnight” at the funeral of Thelonious Monk. (Read Hakim’s “Reflections of an Era: My Experiences with Bird and Prez” on my old philosophy site, where one can also read scans of old clippings.)

In 1976 I could not have imagined paying tribute to him this way. Thank you, Sadik, for going out of your way to touch my life, however fleetingly, not in cyberspace, but at Bradley’s. I wish I had gone out of my way to keep in touch, but my self-esteem, or lack of it, wasn’t up to the task. I had foolishly undervalued the evidence of your accessibility and ruled myself out.

Perhaps I’m learning from you after all, Teacher.  Requiescas in pace.

(This post is a slightly  modified version of one that appeared on Tony Flood’s House of Hard Bop” on July 15, 2010; you might also check out my other post on Hakim, “Forgotten Duluthian” from May 8, 2012.)