![]() The sorts of micro-environments which nurtured a young Ellington, sustained a successful Shirley Horn, and trained current jazz newcomers Kush Abadey and Ben Williams are disappearing. Petersburg Philharmonic Hall in Washington, she is just a neighbor when she holds forth at Alexandria’s La Porta’s Restaurant.įor the past two decades, Washington has been filling up with newcomers competing for space and driving up rents. ![]() Jazz Diva Sharón Clark may be a superstar when she performs in Russia’s St. Musicians and audiences arrive through the same door and share the same space so that distance and boundaries shrink. Public institutions – unlike the recording and film industries or the musical theatre – rarely have separate stage entrances for performers. Many local performers move among several of these genres freely. The Washington area’s more than 2,000 professional musicians, their non-professional colleagues, students, friends, families, and audiences sustain important Blues, Gospel, Jazz, R&B, Go Go, Bluegrass, Gallic, and Classical music communities overflowing with talented masters. On any given evening of the year, Washington musicians are performing on a half-dozen continents. Large – and, at times, overly bureaucratic - institutions rarely provide opportunity for celebrity.Īs a result, Washington’s music community gets overlooked even as dozens of Washington-reared jazz lions make their mark in New York, Washington-based musicians such as Afro-Bop Alliance and Shirley Horn win Grammy awards, and Washington bands such as the legendary Fugazi define entire musical genres. For musicians, institutions provide steady incomes and medical insurance. military – rather than around a star system. Like the Neapolitan “music machine” of the eighteenth century, Washington’s musical environment has formed around large institutions – schools, churches, colleges and universities, the Smithsonian, the Kennedy Center, and the U.S. has long been – and continues to be – a music city. For every Duke Ellington, Marvin Gaye, and Roberta Flack who left town to make it, there was a Shirley Horn, Buck Hill, Bo Diddley, Keter Betts, Chuck Brown, and Charlie Byrd who remained in D.C. Often times, the musicians were not “local” in that they played around the world. was full of such places where folks from all walks of life came together with the city’s best musicians effortlessly and unceremoniously. It was the high spot of billiard parlors…Guys from all walks of life seemed to converge there: school kids over and under sixteen college students and graduates, some starting out in law and medicine and science and lots of Pullman porters and dining-car waiters.” But for Ellington, far more important was the fact that the best piano players in town hung out at Holliday’s as well. Holliday’s, Ellington wrote, “was not a normal, neighborhood-type poolroom. In his memoir Music Is My Mistress, Duke Ellington fondly recalled whiling away the days of his youth at Holliday’s poolroom in Washington, DC.
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