![]() Her star turn came when Alma and close family friend, jazz legend Billie Holiday, hatched a plan to have Hazel audition for club owner, Barney Josephson. While still a teenager, Scott shared the bill with the Count Basie Orchestra, hosted her own radio show on WOR, and made her Broadway debut in the hit 1938 musical, Sing Out the News. ![]() It wasn’t long before her career caught up to her talent. Hazel gave a rousing audition of Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C-Sharp minor, after which, school director Frank Damrosch decided to make an exception for the child prodigy-she promptly began private study under the tutelage of staff professor Oscar Wagner. Keenly aware of her daughter’s musical gift, Alma insisted she audition at the prestigious Juilliard School at age eight, ignoring the school’s minimum age requirement of 16. Powell III, who generously shared with me his mother’s personal effects, journal writings, musical transcriptions as well as hours, weeks and months of delightful conversation I still cherish, that enabled me to piece together what Hazel called her “kaleidoscopic life.”īorn in Port-au-Spain, Trinidad on Jand raised in Harlem at the height of the artistic and literary renaissance, Scott’s early musical talent was cultivated by her mother, Alma Long Scott-a concert pianist who would eventually become a self-taught jazz saxophonist and leader of her own all-girl band. Nonetheless, it was the help of her son, Adam C. And it was more than just research, it was an unearthing-at times a treasure hunt, at other times a wild goose chase where every archival clipping, every show notice, rare photograph, interview, and feature in the Black press was hard to come by but of immeasurable value.Īnd what an embarrassment of riches it would have been to have had the chance to converse with the coterie of musicians with whom she considered some of her closest friends-Duke Ellington, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie, Lena Horne, Art Tatum and Mary Lou Williams. But for a vast majority, it was a name they simply didn't know.Ī headliner at New York City’s first integrated nightclub Café Society between 19, Hazel Scott was one of the highest paid Black entertainers in the world and one of the most famous…yet, over time, her legacy was lost in history.Īs is the case for most biographers, research for the book was a thrilling but arduous affair and happened over the course of many years. ![]() Some recalled her gorgeous image and captivating performances in big Hollywood pictures like I Dood It and Rhapsody in Blue, while others remembered her solely as the wife of the first Black congressman from the East Coast, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.
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