Hazel Dorothy Scott
Born: June 11th 1920 in Port of Spain, Trinidad
Hazel Scott was pulled from her birth city at the age of four and moved to New York, where she lived with her mother Alma, a pianist and music teacher, and her father Thomas, a West african scholar. Early in her youth she gravitated to the piano that her family members played before her. One fateful day her grandmother tried to sing her to sleep with a lullaby but wound up nodding off before Hazel. Hazel snuck away to the piano bench and began pressing down those ivory keys, learning those sounds for herself. After the commotion proved to loud the grandmother awoke with a start to find a four year old Hazel Scott playing, from memory, her lullaby.
I feel it only fair here to mention you can find a beautiful telling of Hazel Scott’s life on the podcast: The Memory Palace, by Nate Dimeo, which I pulled a lot of inspiration from in my retelling.
When Hazel was eight she caught to attention of Juilliard professor Frank Damrosch for her interpretation of Rachmaninoff, skewed to fit her eight year old hands. She learned the classical and found it frustrating, so she changed it so she could play it. Eager to support her gift, she garnered supported at the school and learned musical theory, musical interpretation, and pushed her gift into the churches, clubs and concert halls of New York. At the age of sixteen Hazel Scott was combining the classical with the modern, the old with the rhythm and syncopations of jazz. She sang and played alongside her mother and even landed a gig at the famous Greenwich Village Cafe Society, where stars like Langston Hughes, Eleanor Roosevelt and Billie Holiday attended. She had struck a figurative and very real chord with the musical language of New York. She also became the first African American to have her own TV show, “The Hazel Scott Show” which appeared on DuMont television network on July 3rd, 1950.
Hazel Scott pursued the civil rights of all minorities, and she married the first black congressman of Connecticut, Adam Clayton Powell Jr. She looked at the roles of blacks in Hollywood and decided at the start that she would not play to segregated audiences, she would not let her band use the colored entrance, and she would never play a maid or a fool on the silver screen. She fought hard and she fought smart to make all treat her and her fellows as equals, and this made her a target.
When the Red Scare swept through the nation, Hazel Scott found her name in Red Channels: A Report on Communist Influence in Radio and Television, citing her performance for a communist party members election gala a decade prior. Hazel Scott voluntarily appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee to argue her involvement stating that her support of this candidate was based on his influence from the current socialist founders in the current government. She argued that this man was a Socialist and that they had been fighting the Communist threat longer then anyone, and as such were allies to our cause.
A week later her show was cancelled and her slowly career spiraled down to small gigs and empty theaters. He marriage fell apart and she attempted suicide twice only to be diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. She died on October 2nd, 1961 at Mt. Sinai Medical Center in New York. She left behind an only son Adam Clayton Powell III, and only grandson Adam Clayton Powell IV, he read this at her funeral, a poem by Langston Hughes:
To Be Somebody,
Little girl
Dreaming of a baby grand piano
(Not knowing there’s a Steinway bigger, bigger)
Dreaming of a baby grand to play
That stretches paddle-tail across the floor,
Not standing upright.
Like a bad boy in the corner,
But sending music
Up and down the stairs
And out the door
To confound even Hazel Scott
Who might be passing!
Oh!
Little boy
Dreaming of the boxing gloves
Joe Louis wore,
The gloves that sent
Two dozen men to the floor.
Knockout!
Bam! Bop! Mop!
There’s always room,
They say,
At the top.
Fear is a revolting dictator, it can promise you safety if you shun the world, the beautiful reality around you, for a flicker of stability, however false it is.
Hazel Scott was a treasure we squandered. My hope is we can learn from her story and find the truth in all things, so we don't have to be afraid anymore, so we can transform like her music, classic yet new.
