Check out this great article by Nat Hentoff The Shape of Jazz That Was - A native son's look back at jazz in Boston at midcentury.
Another witness to Boston as a cradle of jazz was Malcolm X. He and I later became friends in New York, but I wasn't aware then that in the 1940s, as Malcolm Little, he lived with his sister Ella in Roxbury, where I was also growing up. Malcolm got a job as a shoeshine boy at the Roseland State Ballroom on Massachusetts Avenue, across from the Christian Science Center's Mother Church. The stretch of Mass. Ave. between Huntington and Columbus was, by the late '40s, Boston's answer to 52nd Street in Manhattan with not only the Roseland, but the Savoy Café, the Hi-Hat, Wally's, and a handful of smaller clubs.
Did a job for an architect in the South End. A film crew is coming Monday to shoot his B&B for a new TV series out of LA, being imported from England, to run on the Travel Channel. It's a reality B&B crawl or something. Groomed the gardens, to meticulous British standards. Hope, for his sake, this isn't something that Chef Gordon Ramsey cooked up. Hell's B&B, B&B Nightmares?
Bought my own copy of The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. Reading in both Balm in Gilead and Let the Trumpet Sound, using Google books, one of the most annoying platforms ever invented.
Writing about King's Dialectical Society during his student days in Boston.
The one library that I possess, about 3 feet long and containing almost all the books that I own (having lost and lent no doubt hundreds over the years), is related to black history. And I have an equally deep volume of files.
Image ... Vase. South End, Boston.
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