Sarah McLawler at Harlem Speaks! March 30

Jazz Museum in Harlem Celebrates Women's History Month

Legendary Organist Sarah McLawler at Harlem Speaks!

Sarah McLawler, Organist/Vocalist: March 30, 2006
Cobi Narita, Producer: April 13, 2006
Delilah Jackson, Historian: April 27, 2006

Hammond B-3 organist and singer Sarah McLawler is the jazz museum's Harlem Speaks guest on March 30, 2006.

She was raised in the church with gospel music, and studied organ at an Indiana Conservatory. Influenced heavily by the music of the big bands, McLawler used to sneak into clubs in Indianapolis to hear Lucky Millinder's big band, with whom she ended up going on the road. She later formed an all-woman band, the Syn-Co-Ettes. They spent some time as a house band at Chicago's Savoy Club.

After meeting Richard Otto, a classical violinist who also performed jazz, at a residency at a Brooklyn club, she married him and the two spent years touring and recording together. As fixtures on the New York jazz scene in the 1950s, they became close to with the likes of Milt Jackson, Errol Garner, Dinah Washington, Cab Calloway, Nat Cole, Tony Bennett, Sammy Davis, Jr. and others. Washington was so taken with her playing, she once offered to be her manager.

During the 1950s, McLawler recorded singles for the King and Brunswick labels that are now collectors' items: “I Can't Stop Loving You" “Love, Sweet Love," as well as “Red Light" “Tipping In" “Let's Get the Party Rocking" and “Blue Room." Her recordings with her husband, violinist Richard Otto include “Somehow," “Yesterday" “Body & Soul" for Brunswick, and “Babe in the Woods" “Relax, Miss Frisky" “Flamingo" “Canadian Sunset" and “At the Break of Day" for Vee-Jay.

McLawler continues to breathe life into jazz standards, performing major shows at the Newport Jazz Festivals and the Newark Jazz Festival. She's lived in Harlem for many years, and regularly performs at Chez Josephine restaurant in midtown Manhattan.

A beacon of jazz for over 40 years in New York City, Cobi Narita joins the Harlem Speaks roster on April 13, 2006. She carved a unique position for herself in the jazz world by founding a nonprofit educational group, the Universal Jazz Coalition, in the late 1970s. The group's purpose was to help musicians manage their own business affairs when they lacked managers and bookers. This led to her becoming a concert promoter and producer. Narita even hired well- known musicians to teach workshops for newcomers. Soon she noticed that women were having even more difficulty than young, struggling men in jazz, so she founded a women's jazz festival in New York to give women a chance to play in public. The festival is housed at Cobi's Place in Manhattan at 158 West 48th Street, fourth floor, between Sam Ash and Manny's.

The April 27, 2006 guest, cultural historian Delilah Jackson, has worked with Cobi Norita to co-produce numerous tap concerts and film showings at Cobi's Place. She is founder and artistic director of the Black Patti Research Foundation (named after Sisseretta Jones who organized the most prestigious group of touring black troubadours at the turn of the century), and has amassed one of the most extensive collections of African American expressive culture anywhere-- more than 1000 rare slides, photos, and vintage films documenting the performances of musicians, singers, actors and dancers of Harlem during he 1920s and 1930s.

Bobbi Humphrey, special guest of Harlem Speaks on March 16, 2006, told story after story of her youth, her early career in New York, her cognizance of the history of jazz as well as her philosophy on life and music.

Her family lived across the street from a juke joint in which Humphrey heard the blues as she slumbered in the front room of the family home in Dallas, Texas. She regularly attended church in those days, so she was also marinated in gospel music. At school, she learned about European classical music, and became enamored with the flute upon hearing a beautiful flute part of Tchaikovsky's Peter Gunn at the age of 11. But she didn't pick up the instrument until she was 15, by when she had taken to jazz.

She progressed on the instrument rapidly, so much so that when Dizzy Gillespie judged a solo competition in Texas where she took second place, he urged her to go to New York. “He told me that he voted for me," Humphrey remembered, “and that if I went to New York I would find a place in the music industry, while no one would remember the guy who won."

So, she took her country self to New York intent on getting a recording contract. Eliciting barrels of laughter, Humphrey related her experiences upon arriving to New York and meeting a crazy person who called himself “the wild man," and being rescued by none other than flute virtuoso Hubert Laws, who met her in his Porsche, which she thought was a Volkswagen!

Literally within days, she found herself on a bus with the Duke Ellington Orchestra, with whom she played “C Jam Blues" at a venue in New Jersey, and then at the Apollo Theatre Amateur Night, where she met members of the Four Tops and Stevie Wonder, who became her life- long friend.

She also told the audience the tale of walking into the United Artists building, only to discover that the offices of Blue Note records were there. With youthful confidence and naivet she sauntered to the front desk in hot pants, and announced that she was there because she was ready to make a record! The secretary was so impressed, and moved at seeing Humphrey's disappointment after being told that she had to have an appointment before seeing Dr. George Butler, that she took Humphrey's 8-track tape recording of her playing and gave it to her boss.

Within days, Humphrey got a call from Butler, who signed her immediately. She soon recorded a straight-ahead Blue Note date with Philadelphia trumpet legend Lee Morgan, who then played on her first recording date a few months later.

She also discussed her own hit recordings; her social and cultural contributions via civic engagement; and her business dealings with Warner Brothers as a manager of R&B singer Tevin Campbell, and why she doesn't buy the notion that playing fusion and “cool jazz" is selling out: “When someone once asked me if I had 'sold out' I told him that I hoped my recordings sold out at the record stores!" She believes her music is based in love, and reaches the hearts of people.

After fielding questions from the audience, she concluded the evening by explaining the basis for her love of Harlem, where on any given day she can be found at her “office" at Nubian Heritage on 126th and Fifth Avenue, or restaurants such as MoBay Uptown or the new eatery/ club Baton Rouge. The bi-weekly Harlem Speaks series is produced by the Jazz Museum in Harlem's Executive Director, Loren Schoenberg, Co-Director Christian McBride, and Greg Thomas Associates. The series occurs at the offices of the Jazz Museum in Harlem, located at 104 East 126th Street, between Park and Lexington Avenues, from 6:30pm-8:00pm.

This discussion series is free to the public. To view the photo archives of Harlem Speaks go to: http://www.jazzmuseuminharlem.org/ hs_photos.html