By Arlene McKanic
The Queens Jazz Trail, held on the first Saturday of the month through June, is one of the city's most unsung, most surprising and most satisfying experiences.
Who would have known that Queens, particularly the neighborhoods of Addisleigh Park (St. Albans), Corona and Jamaica were the homes of as many jazz greats as Bel Air is of movie stars? No wonder Queens is called “The Home of Jazz.”
We handful of tourists left the beautifully renovated Flushing Town Hall at around 10 a.m., and after settling in a small but comfortable touring bus we were treated to a video narrated by the ubiquitous Wynton Marsalis and others that seemed suspiciously like a condensation of Ken Burns' Jazz series, but was so well done and featured so much music that it alone was almost worth the price of the ticket. As we rolled up Northern Boulevard the bus was jumping from feet tapping on the floor.
The first stop was Joe Gibson's Artistic Barber Shop in Corona, near Northern Boulevard and 106th Street, where Louis Armstrong and others used to get their hair cut. The shop, which you will miss if you don't know exactly where it is, is tiny, and every wall is filled with photographs and other mementos from African American history. On one wall are photos of Sidney Poitier, Barbara McNair, and Malcolm X, on another wall there's Pops in the barber chair with Joe cutting his hair, and nearby is a grinning Muhammed Ali at the height of his beauty and power, wrapping tape around his hand. The two original barber's chairs are still there and as you stand amidst so much history you wonder whose molecules are still floating through the air. The tourists were later surprised and honored to learn that Joe had never let anyone into the shop (who wasn't prepared to get his hair cut, I assume) and we were the first group of tourists to enter this space.
After that, the bus paused at Dizzy Gillespie's apartment building and then after a couple of turns ended up at Pops' place. Forget about those descriptions of the house as “modest.” On the outside it's pretty bland, true, but for a neighborhood like Corona, Louis Armstrong's house is manorial: towering, multi-roomed, with an attached garage and a large, gated garden. You can imagine what the house is like on the inside and indeed, we won't have long to imagine for next year it's going to become a museum. Still, the big-hearted Satchmo and his beautiful wife, Lucille, opened their home to the neighborhood children frequently, and there's a famous photo of him sitting on his front steps, blowing his horn, surrounded by adoring kids.
From Pops' house we went on to the Dorrie Miller house. The development and the street it's on was named after a World War II soldier who sacrificed his life to save his C.O. during Pearl Harbor. Saxophonist Cannonball Adderly, trumpeter Nat Adderly and saxophonist Jimmy Heath used to live there, and trumpeter Clark Terry lives there still.
From there we went to the Louis Armstrong archives at Queens College. The exhibit there is called “Red Beans and Ricely Yours,” a common Armstrong sign-off. Red beans and rice is the national dish of New Orleans, where Pops was born, and he was crazy about it to the point that he had to see whether Lucille could cook it properly before he married her. His recipe for red beans and rice is part of the archives. Peggy Schein is the curator for the exhibit and she showed a video featuring Lucille taped shortly before she passed away in 1983. The video also shows the inside of the house and, yep, it's luxurious to the max.
Also in the archives, aside from the recipe, are 650 tapes. Satchmo carried a reel-to-reel tape machine with him everywhere and would tape himself and others just talking and telling jokes – Schein couldn't tell any of the really funny ones, because they were dirty. Also part of the archives are five Selmar trumpets as glittering, gold-plated and holy as chalices, 14 mouth pieces, a cannabis award cup from Denmark (since Armstrong did like to toke a bit – okay, a lot – ) and his little tin of lip salve. There are hundreds of photographs, including one with Pops and his thuggish but effective and mob-averting manager, Joe Glaser, who for 50 percent of Pops' earnings took care of every aspect of his career.
Pops, who loved to eat, was a devotee to the herbal laxative Swiss Kriss, and pressed boxes of the stuff upon all and sundry, including Princess Margaret of Britain. By the way, the archives need money. Contact satchmo.net.
After this the tour proceeded to Addisleigh Park in St. Albans, a place so suburban that it doesn't even look like New York, with lush green lawns, blazing red azaleas, pink dogwoods and Kansan cherries, big, half-timbered houses, and sidewalks that had turned green-gold with carpets of oak and maple flowers. To the tourists it seemed that a jazz great (or a baseball great, including Roy Campanella, Jackie Robinson and Babe Ruth) had lived on every block. Tour guide Coby Knight, himself a musician, pointed out the houses with the familiarity of someone who'd known the occupants, which he had.
The first house visited belonged to the late bassist Milt Hinton. His wife, who usually greets the tour bus, wasn't home, but his neighbor kindly gave out little enamel pins that bore the names of all the places where Mr. Hinton, who worked with everyone who was anyone in the business, had played. (The writer got “Redonda.”)
Later the bus passed the townhouses that were built on land that used to belong to Count Basie, who had built a pool for the neighborhood kids, and then we stopped at Fats Wallers' house, which has a plaque near the front door, even though Fats only lived there one year and a long time ago – he died in 1942. Nearby is the house of composer Mercer Ellington, Duke's son, though the Duke, who always went his own way, never lived in Queens but preferred the urbanity of upper Manhattan.
We saw the huge home that used to belong to James Brown, and when you peek through a gap in the fence you can see that it's partially circled by a moat, and has a bridge that leads to the front door. We saw one of Lena Horne's houses, the house of Brook Benton, and then the homes of saxophonist Illinois Jacquet, who was one of the narrators of the jazz tape, and then, near the edge of the nabe, near the Long Island Rail road tacks, the truly modest house that used to belong to Ella Fitzgerald. When the writer asked tour leader Clyde Bullard why all these people had settled in Queens as opposed to anywhere else, he said it was a combination of the area's more relaxed racial climate, its bucolic atmosphere and its easy access to Manhattan.
At last, tired and very impressed, we headed back to Flushing Town Hall, where we went upstairs and had a delicious soul-food lunch of red beans and rice (not Pops' recipe because there were no ham hocks in it), fried chicken, salad, salmon fillets in sauce and pasta and dessert while we were serenaded by the Bill Jacobs' ensemble.
Make reservations to join the tour. Call (718) 463-7000, ext. 222. The tickets are $75, but it's so worth it!
Reach Qguide writer Arlene McKanic by e-mail at timesledgr@aol.com or call 229-0300, Ext. 139.
