Manhattan Jazz…

…in the day

Every year we pull out the CD with Marian McPartland playing jazz Christmas pieces…her wonderful versions of Silent Night and Jingle Bells and Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas making beautiful holiday music. Marian McPartland played jazz piano pretty much forever while she was alive — more than thirty years on National Public Radio alone. An article by Leonard Feather in Downbeat magazine once famously described her as “English, white and a girl,” and thus unlikely to ever make it in the world of Manhattan jazz, although by then she already had.

For some reason, the arts editor at the New York Times chose to run — just a few weeks ago on Tuesday, December 17, 2024, a famous August 12,1958 group photo by photographer Art Kane of 58 jazz notables in front of an East 126th Street brownstone in Harlem. Marian McPartland is standing in the front row. The photo was taken for Esquire magazine.

McPartland died on Long Island in 2013 at the age of 95, but seeing anew the group photo and playing her Christmas songs here in our apartment made her sort of come alive again for me. And made me remember, too, another wonderful female jazz pianist of the era named Blossom Dearie. Blossom Dearie lived many of the same years as Marian McPartland, but made it alas, only to the age of 84, and died in 2009 in New York City.

I never got to hear Marian McPartland playing live piano in Manhattan, but I did hear Blossom Dearie at the place she liked to play — Danny’s Skylight Room — a few years before she died. My sister Liz and I went there on purpose, with a reservation. It was a small space where you had to squeeze in, with tiny tables for your drinks (barely room for bar food), close by Blossom Dearie and the young, good-looking fellows she hired to accompany her on bass and drums and who made her seem both young and ancient at the same time, which she more or less was.

If I were going to fantasize about a different life I might have lived, it might have to be some combination of Marian McPartland and Blossom Dearie. I’ve loved the life I have lived so far, so a different one would have to be pretty special and remarkable, and I think playing jazz piano in Manhattan in the 1980s and 1990s would be perfect. Of course I would have to have been a highly successful jazz pianist, not a struggling one, because part of the fantasy would be to have had a comfortable apartment with a Central Park view and enough room for a big piano. A fantasy doesn’t have to be reasonable.

Both of my children have gotten to live as adults, at different times in their lives, for a number of consecutive years in Manhattan. So I have been able to spend much time there over the years as a well-cared-for visitor, but never as a resident and surely never as a fantasy jazz pianist. They each have had their pianos, too, come to think of it, whether electronic or real, so I have played the piano in Manhattan, never until now conjuring up Marian McPartland or Blossom Dearie.

If you are going to come back as someone else, why not someone who makes music, right?That would be one good reason to come back as a human, and not as a hummingbird or a German shorthaired pointer.

About the photograph: On YouTube you can find a wonderful documentary about the musicians in the photo entitled A Great Day in Harlem. Choose the version that says “Art Kane, 1958, full”) if you care at all about jazz, black musicians in the 1950s, Harlem in the day, great photography, good planning, making good decisions in the moment, or street-wise young kids recognizing the power of a happening.

May they all rest in peace. Among the musicians, only Sonny Rollins, 94, is still alive. He lives in Woodstock, New York, and said in an interview four years ago, “I have most things figured out.”

I’ll bet he still looks at that photograph once in a while.