The story of Columbia Pictures mogul, Harry “The Horror” Cohn blacklisting Scott from Hollywood after she walked off of a production for three days due to the costuming of black actresses is true.
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She refused traditional subservient roles, and also demanded full control of her wardrobe. Scott had it written in her Columbia Pictures contract that the only character she would reflect would be herself. With her poise, beauty and curvaceous physique, Hollywood came calling.
Martin Luther King witnessed his first non-segregated performance attending Scott’s show. Scott, one of the highest-paid musicians of her time, had it written into her performance contract that her audiences were to be integrated, canceling or either not performing (at one point minutes before curtain) should the management ignore the agreed commitment. It was also where Billie Holiday first performed the haunting, “ Strange Fruit. Scott’s performances were so dynamic she garnered the name “The Darling of Cafe Society.” Cafe Society, which opened in 1938, was the first integrated night club in New York that hosted guests like Langston Hughes, Nelson Rockefeller, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Orson Welles. Her most significant break came when Holiday, who knew Scott from the time she was a teenager, purposefully ended a gig three weeks early at Cafe Society, suggesting the house manager occupy her absence with Scott. In addition to her Julliard training, she was mentored by the top musicians of the day, conveniently, in her own home. Naturally, Scott also became an active participant. In successfully becoming part of the jazz scene, she attracted top icons the likes of Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and Fats Waller to her Harlem apartment where jam sessions were regular occurrences.
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During the Depression, Scott’s mother, also a classically-trained pianist, learned how to play the saxophone as a means of survival. To say that Scott took the jazz world by storm would be somewhat incorrect. Her expertise was her jazz-inspired syncopated runs and glissandos that breathed contemporary life into classical music along with her husky vocals ( her breathy version of Qu’on Est Bien will make you look up its translation). She moved from Port of Spain to Harlem New York at the age of 4. The better part of Trinidadian-born piano prodigy Hazel Scott’s career spanned the Swing Era that took place from the 1930s through the mid-40s (Swing is a derivative of jazz,). Her fans included icons the likes of Duke Ellington, Lena Horne, Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday and Nat King Cole, to name a few, yet when In 2019 Alicia Keys hosted the Grammys, and performed on two pianos simultaneously, when she acknowledged Hazel Scott, the crowd barely reacted. She played Carnegie Hall, was an outspoken civil rights advocate, had a 15-year high profile marriage with the first black New York City councilman and prominent boisterous civil rights activist Adam Clayton Powell and her hands were insured by Lloyds of London. In 1950, she became the first black woman to host her own television show. At 15, she performed with Count Basie and toured with her mother’s all-female orchestra. She was playing the piano by the age of 2 and by age 8, she was enrolled in Julliard, (where the admission age was officially 16). Traditional routes are not taken and even though the journey is uncertain, in Scott’s capable hands, the unexpected is entirely welcome. She detours you, channeling melodies of her own interpretation, yet somehow the amalgamation forms seamlessly, making one recall how unpredictably beautiful a detour can actually be. Her hands fly up and down the keyboard, each finger exacting in its notes, the result of a beautiful collision of resonation, a converging of Chopin, Rachmaninov, Gershwin, and master pianist Art “The Boss” Tatum.
At times she wills the piano to sound as enchanting as a harp in one instance and then bangs out the bottom bass of boogie-woogie at another. Like diverging from a well-known road, Scott’s sound is lush and intoxicating, making additional instruments unnecessary. Hearing Hazel Scott evokes clinking cocktail glasses in a dimly lit smoke-filled room with meticulously coiffed women and sophisticated men. “I’ve always known I was gifted, which is not the easiest thing in the world for the person to know, because you are not responsible for your gift, only for what you do with it.”- Hazel Scott
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