Hazel Scott was born in Trinidad in 1920. She grew up in New York City listening to her mother play classical music on the piano. When she was just 8, she auditioned to attend Juilliard School of Music and was given a special scholarship on the spot.
Scott then acquired a taste for jazz. Her improvisation skills grew quickly as she started to play in clubs, soaking up everything she could from the likes of Art Tatum, Lester Young and Fats Waller.
It was at the Café Society in Greenwich Village where she solidified her career. Scott was billed as “The Darling of Café Society,” with crowds packing the club to hear her masterful improvisations as she “jazzed up the classics.”
Politics were heavily intertwined in her music. If a club was segregated, she refused to perform. When the Texas Rangers kicked her out of a club in Austin, Scott said, “Why would anyone come to hear me, a Negro, and refuse to sit beside someone just like me?”
When Hollywood came calling, she ended up on a list of suspected Communist sympathizers after she refused to participate in a film where Black actresses were given only dirty aprons to wear.
When she testified before the House Un-American Activities committee, she denied being a Communist and fiercely attacked the blacklisting process.
“The actors, musicians, artists, composers and all of the men and women of the arts are eager and anxious to help, to serve,” she said. “Our country needs us more today than ever before. We should not be written off by the vicious slanders of little and petty men.”
Credits
Host: Vernon Neal
Producer: Dan Nass
Writers: Andrea Blain and Scott Blankenship
Executive Producer: Julie Amacher
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About Rhapsody in Black
Where we turn up the voices of Black artists in the world of classical music, with host Vernon Neal.
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