The Ghosts of Harlem: Sessions with Jazz Legends (review)

The Harlem Renaissance has meant much to African Americans: unfettered aspirations, cosmopolitan expressions, racial pride, and a sense of place. For many Americans, "Harlem" north of 110th Street in Manhattan invokes not the Dutch (from whose city Haarlem the name was taken and evolved to its present spelling), but the gifted African Americans who crafted there a new urban identity with words and music. The Harlem Renaissance is often celebrated; its decline and afterglow is told less often and all too quickly. Hank O'Neal's Ghosts of Harlem offers an unblinking look at the end of a fabled era.

In his introduction, O'Neal tells the prior history of this publication. The first edition was published not in English but in French (Les fantômes de Harlem: l'histoire du quartier mythique du jazz [Levallois-Perret: Filipacchi, 1997]); it consisted of portraits and edited interviews originally conducted in English, then translated into French by Florence Paban. The book became a cult item, even in American jazz shops. One purchaser, Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun, asked O'Neal why there was no English-language edition, and his subsequent assistance on the author's behalf helped to pave the way for the present publication.

Any page of that French edition or of this new American one shows what captivated Ertegun. Each of the interviews is preceded with a full-page portrait of the speaker taken by O'Neal with a large-format view camera. Additional shots of the performing venues as they looked in the 1980s and 1990s are given in a separate chapter. Historical photographs from the Renaissance period, whether of the speakers or of the individual people and places discussed at length, and reproductions of 78 rpm jazz record labels are placed wherever appropriate in the interviews. The production values for the French edition were very high, although the dark toning made most of the photographs seem like they were taken under overcast skies. In the new American edition, the illustrations are rendered better, bigger, and brighter than before. A few of the portraits—such as that of Buck Clayton—may seem more natural in the French printing. But other pictures are better examined in this second presentation. For example, the picture of Clayton rehearsing a group of musicians during a 1990 Chiaroscuro label session for Milt Hinton's album Old Man Time (Chiaroscuro 310) includes in the background Hinton at his bass and Red Richards at piano. The French reproduction (p. 245) blankets Hinton and Richards in darkness, while the present edition (p. 271) reveals them well enough to be identifiable.

The premise of the interviews, and hence of the book, was how and why jazz disappeared from the Harlem musical scene. Jazz didn't merely fall out of favor within that neighborhood, it seemed to have vanished. When it could be heard in the 1980s—such as at Small's Paradise where O'Neal could find it at the time—jazz seemed to be making odd reappearances rather than an abiding return. Through his record label Chiaroscuro Records, O'Neal was a colleague with many jazz musicians great and good. In the mid-1980s, he began asking about the decline of jazz in Harlem with the veterans he knew, and with the late John Hammond. From their remarks and suggestions, O'Neal sought additional former participants in Harlem jazz, often meeting them for the first time. His strategy was to pose to each musician the same basic set of approximately twelve questions. For me, the most telling answers were often elicited by these: (1) Where [and in what year] did you first work [as a musician] in Harlem, either for pay or just jamming? (2) Describe the audience. Was it black, white, or mixed? (3) When you weren't performing, where did you hear the best music and who was your favorite band? (4) When did you notice the music scene beginning to...