Kangsen Feka Wakai
The Houston heat is oppressive, its vastness intimidating and its mood bluesy. Houston is a blues city and for many decades was home to one of the genre’s most influential record labels, Don Ruby’s Duke-Peacock Records.
In fact, some in the business of chronicling the evolution of popular music attribute the later successes of black labels like Berry Gordy’s Motown Records and in later years hip-hop labels to Duke-Peacock’s model.
In fact, Ruby’s record company was once home to BB King then building for himself a sturdy reputation as one of the budding stars in the genre. Today, King is perhaps the most celebrated and respected blues musician alive.
Duke-Peacock Records is now defunct but Houston’s reputation as a blues city remains intact, in fact, often times overshadowing its rich jazz tradition.
Houston, being the big city that it is in the enormous state that is Texas is home to saxophonist Arnette Cobb an embodiment of what in jazz parlance is known as the big Texas tenor sound, a sound so heavy it began a tradition pioneered by Cobb and Lucky Thompson
“The history of jazz in Houston involves legendary musicians such as legendary saxophonist like [Ornette] Cobb and Don Wilkinson who played with Ray Charles for many years. I mentioned them because they lived right in this community,” Howard Harris said.
Harris is the author of the The Complete Book of Improvisation/Composition and Funk Techniques. He is also a clinician, educator, composer, archive and doctor of music.
Harris is also the face, sound and director of Texas Southern University’s Jazz Studies Program, one of only two in the entire state of Texas.
So when Harris throws a party, it is a meeting of sounds, old meets new, and big band meets ensemble. Recently, such a party was hosted in his honor—a sort of collective thank you for all the sacrifices he has made for the program but most of all for jazz.
When Harris throws a party, the sound of legendary trumpeter Barry D. Hall, an alumnus of Duke Ellington’s big band and that of contemporary saxophonist, Kirk Whalum meet.
Whalum is a celebrated inheritor of that legendary Texas sound. He is a former student of Harris and is one of today’s most recognizable sounds in jazz. He owes part of his success to that rich jazz tradition, TSU and his talent.
Houston’s Third Ward neighborhood sits on the fringes of downtown Houston. It is the epicenter of historical black Houston. It is home to Houston’s only Historical Black University, TSU.
Jazz great Cobb lived just walking distance away from the university’s Rhinehart Auditorium and dropped by occasionally.
“When I came here in seventy-one, he [Cobb] will come over anytime we’ll call and talk to the students. And other musicians like Milt Larkin, a trombonist, who had an orchestra. He [Cobb] left for Chicago before eventually moving to New York,” said Harris.
Houston’s Third Ward neighborhood is also home to the historic Eldorado Ballroom that has played host to the likes of Ellington, Ella and Bird. It was at Eldorado that Houston’s black middle-class converged for entertainment.
Houston may not be a jazz Mecca but the spirit of that sound inhabits within the being of the city, which like many great American cities received its own share of blacks that came in search of work and opportunity following emancipation. Houston’s location, about a four-hour drive from jazz’s cradle—New Orleans—did not hurt either.
The consensus among jazz scholars and historians is that jazz came of the blues. The blues, in turn, came out of gospel, and gospel can be trace its source to the field songs and spirituals that played soundtrack to life in the plantation. The spirituals themselves were birth in plantation churches where preachers transformed pulpits into stages.
The convergence of these disparate roots in docks and corners of New Orleans would eventually give birth to jazz, an art form that forever realigned the direction of American popular music and invited the world to partake in the genius of Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis.
In spite of the city’s historical affinity to the blues, jazz found space in Houston even though the city’s bluesy reputation remained intact. Because of this anomaly in the music’s progression in this part of the country, Harris says there weren’t many jazz clubs when he moved from Louisiana.
“Club Ebony here in Third Ward, club Flamingo on the Southeast side and Club Lavique where these legendary guys used to play. But jazz not being the pop music of the day, the attendance was poor so consequently these gentlemen found it necessary to go to New York and Europe where they earned a living and were well respected,” Harris said.
And in the fifties, two locations, the Bastille and the Shamrock Hotel were the city’s most reputable venues that brought in the top performers of the day like the Duke Ellington and Count Basie big bands. It was at the Shamrock Hotel that Harris and the TSU jazz ensemble would play alongside jazz legend, Cannonball Adderley.
The scarcity of venues and a massive following in the city has not tempered the riotous spirit of jazz. It continues to endure in a sea of blues. Over the years, it has survived rhythm and blues, soul, funk, rock and rock and even hip-hop.
Today, there is an attempt at its revival.
“We have one or two clubs now that have jazz on a regular basis; 57th West on Westheimer, Cezannes on Montrose and the Red Cat Jazz Café in downtown Houston,” said Harris.
Actually, a few years ago, Harris did host a weekly jam session at the Red Cat Jazz Café but had a difficult time with some of the musicians sticking to the elements of the music.
“If you are not including what we call straight ahead out of the neo-classical tradition of Charlie Parker then it is not really jazz. In other words, Kenny G is not really looked upon as jazz,” Harris contends, “but then its [jazz] a business too.”
Amongst purists like Harris, jazz is about the sound and much more.
“There is some of us who have a passion for keeping the art form alive; we go to great lengths to do that,” said Harris.
After building the TSU jazz program from practically nothing, Harris’ vision is to transform it into the largest repository of African classical music in the world.
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