Richard J. Alley

Feature story for Memphis Magazine

June 2013

PAST

At the turn of the nineteenth century, 359 miles due south of Memphis in a dance hall in a seedy section of New Orleans called Storyville, a man named Buddy Bolden stepped away from his band, wandered off stage-left, and took a solo on his cornet. We now call this improvisation — a breakthrough, that tangential and unteachable musical leap-of-faith that would become the foundation of “America’s indigenous art form.”

Bolden and his band, according to lore, are thought to have been the originators of the brassy stuff that would become “jazz,” a word of uncertain origins that seems to have evolved (believe it or not) among early twentieth-century California baseball writers who used it to describe players who were “lively.”

Lively the music certainly was. It blew through the polished horns soldiers brought back from the Spanish-American War as a mixture, a gumbo stew of African, Haitian, and Creole cooked up in a pot boiled on the fire first lit by John Philip Sousa.

“Throw everything together in the pit of society and something new and beautiful comes out of it,” says John Bass, executive director of the Mike Curb Institute for Music at Rhodes College.

At the same time as this art form began to take shape, if not shortly before, sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta, the children of slaves, were telling their own stories handed down through song and gospel, and put to music made with a six-string and upturned bucket. When mechanization began taking over the work of shoulder and back, and drought turned the mud to dust, the blues would work its way from those front porches that rose no higher than a cotton boll, up Highway 61 and into the big city called Memphis, and onto a street called Beale.

And thus did Memphis become the Home of the Blues, and rightly so. But on the way, it would have to squeeze out the music that first filled those clubs. W.C. Handy, a master of the new New Orleans “stuff” who had been steeped in the blues, came up the road from his hometown of Holly Springs, and did his part to give jazz a Memphis home, but that Delta music had a tenacious grip and let go begrudgingly. The sidemen playing his brassy rags after hours, late into the night, knew that the blues in Memphis paid their bills. It mixed with the smog of barbecue paste and dander from cotton bales along Cotton Row.

Jazz, so it happened, was the music I went after as I grew up in Memphis. I had to chase it down the way others had to seek to learn of foreign literature, the masters of art, or about seminal films. Jazz was everywhere as I was growing up, of course, in films as background scores, in commercials and in stock footage of Broadway or New York nightclub scenes on television. I had been to New Orleans where the notes seemed to rise from the cobbled streets of the Quarter with the steam from a new day. But alas, I grew up in Memphis and, while the nascent notes of a jazz combo might float past like springtime pollen, the Delta blues, Sun Studio  rock-and-roll, and Stax soul were in my face from childhood.

And rightly so. The blues are at home here, everywhere on the Fourth Chickasaw Bluff. Home at all the places previously mentioned, as well at Hi and Royal and Ardent. Home with Jerry Lee Lewis. Home with Justin Timberlake.

But Memphis is also the home of Manassas High School.

Almost three decades after Buddy Bolden stepped into the “jazz” spotlight, Jimmie Lunceford came to Memphis after studying music at Fisk University in Nashville. He became the football coach, taught English, and without any established curriculum and without much more than a love of the “new” music and more than a little know-how, he created what would become the modern-day high-school music program in Memphis.

It was 1927, and Lunceford by now had put together the “Chickasaw Syncopators” from among his Manassas students, eventually taking that group on the road and to New York, into the Olympus of jazz venues — the Cotton Club in Harlem — where the Syncopators would displace Cab Calloway’s as the house band. Following Lunceford from the halls of Manassas were George Coleman (saxophone), Charles Lloyd (saxophone), Frank Strozier (saxophone), and Booker Little (trumpet). All later would play with Memphis jazz pianists Phineas Newborn Jr. and Harold Mabern.

But who are these men? What do their names mean to us as Memphians? These are names that don’t have much weight in the fast-forward pop culture of the twenty-first century. They count for little next to those of Elvis, Johnny, Carl, B.B., Otis, and Isaac.

But consider this: Glen Miller (surely his name still has some cachet!) once said of that former football coach from Manassas High: “Duke is great, Basie is remarkable, but Lunceford tops them both.”

Then consider this: Phineas Newborn Jr., who played piano behind B.B. King on Beale Street and with Willie Mitchell at the Plantation Inn in West Memphis, has been placed in the pantheon of “Jazz Greats” alongside Oscar Peterson and Art Tatum.

Perhaps third time’s the charm: Miles Davis, whose album Kind of Blue is still considered, yes, the most influential jazz album of all time, put together a new band in 1963, and found himself with more than a little piece of Manassas.

From his 1989 autobiography Miles: “Before I left for New York, I had had tryouts for the band and that’s where I got all those Memphis musicians — Coleman, Strozier, and Mabern. (They had gone to school with the great young trumpet player Booker Little, who soon after this died of leukemia, and the pianist Phineas Newborn. I wonder what they were doing down there when all them guys came through that one school?)”
What were they doing? John Bass, whose Mike Curb Institute at Rhodes is dedicated to the research and archiving of Southern regional music, particularly in Memphis, has a theory: They were coming up through church. “You had people playing music in front of audiences from a very early age, and just getting used to the idea of getting up in front of people and playing and honing your skills at a young age,” he says.

In addition, there were the other places to play, the sin as yin to the church’s yang. Places like the Cotton Club in West Memphis, and streets like Lamar and Beale, presented the opportunity to play even at an early age. Charles Lloyd won an amateur competition at The Palace on Beale at the age of 10. (Lloyd told this story at a recent homecoming show at Rhodes last March, saying that Phineas Newborn Jr. approached him backstage after the awards presentation and said, “You need lessons bad.”)

Manassas High School would continue its tradition of music with Professor William Theodore McDaniel taking over as director after Lunceford and mentoring the Manassas Rhythm Bombers with other future successes such as Calvin Newborn Jr., Sonny Criss, and George Cowser. Director Matt Garrett led the band in the 1950s. His daughter, Dee Dee Bridgewater, would go on to become a successful jazz singer in her own right, fronting Sonny Rollins, Dexter Gordon, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, and winning a Tony Award for her role as Glinda the Good Witch in The Wiz on Broadway.

In the same year that Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton moved their fledgling recording studio into the old Capitol Theater on McLemore Ave. and christened it Stax, and smack in the middle of Elvis’ two-year stint in the Army, a group of Memphis musicians assembled to record an album. The first cut on the album Down Home Reunion, recorded on April 15, 1959, at Olmsted Studios in New York City by a band touting itself as “The Young Men From Memphis” — Booker Little, George Coleman, Charles Crosby, George Joyner, Louis Smith, Phineas Newborn Jr. and brother Calvin, and Frank Strozier — is titled “Things Ain’t What They Used To Be.” And certainly they were not. It was a true reunion, many of the players having grown up and played together. That record — get yourself one when you can! — is a love letter of sorts for our hometown . . . (read more)

 

Cover story and photography for The Memphis Downtowner

June 2013

AIA Memphis is 60 years old – structurally sound, aesthetically designed, and moving ahead with the next step in its organized blueprint.

Architects, designers, engineers, and
architecture fans gathered on a
warm, spring night in April to celebrate the
60th anniversary of AIA Memphis. Fittingly,
the gala was held at the Pink Palace Museum,
an iconic, architectural landmark if ever there
was one, with its pink Georgian marble rising
from a sweeping lawn.

The Memphis chapter of American Institute
of Architects was founded in 1953, a time of
eastward expansion for Memphis. New ideas
such as the suburban Poplar Plaza Shopping
Center began taking customers from
Downtown’s venerable, stalwart department
stores, such as Goldsmith’s and Gerber’s.

“Memphis was a hotbed for designers in
the 1950s,” says Heather Koury, executive
director of AIA Memphis . . . (read more)

June 2013

“Because I Said So” column for The Commercial Appeal

June 6, 2013

Setting sail for parts unknown, kids in tow

Brave men first explored our world, traveling great distances into the unknown at even greater risk for the glory of riches and the adoration of kings and queens. I’ve read about these guys. I’ve seen the documentaries. They sailed over the oceans with casks of wine and whole hogs, spices, muskets and gold doubloons. They even took smallpox with them.

You know what you never see? Their children.

How much faster would Ferdinand Magellan have circumnavigated the globe if he’d had a passel of snot-nosed sailors asking when they were going to be there, when they were going to stop and eat, and whether there would be an indoor play land when they did stop.

I propose that Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Ponce de Léon and the like left home for uncharted waters and dangerous lands because they just needed a few hours of peace and quiet; a day without “SpongeBob SquarePants” and being asked: “Where’s Mom?”

It’s time again for our annual vacation, and in the spirit of those great explorers, I took my Sharpie to a map and drew the distance of a day’s drive around Memphis. What I found was that Sharpie does not wipe off an Apple MacBook screen so easily. I also found that we could have gone to Springfield, Ill., Kansas City, Mo., or Cincinnati, Ohio.

But we didn’t. We raised the sails on the Mazda minivan and traveled south — we almost always travel south — and found ourselves in Eufaula, Ala., birthplace of Lula Mae Hardaway, mother of Stevie Wonder, and Motown’s Martha Reeves.

We spent a night at Lakepoint Resort, adjacent to the national wildlife refuge Lake Eufala, and within a 1,220-acre state park. It also had, my kids were thrilled to find, a swimming pool.

Vacation isn’t all fun and games, and we learned some things as we passed a day sightseeing in the antebellum town square where the historic homes and storefronts have been preserved since the Civil War. I learned, for instance, that the pristine nature of the tree-lined streets is due in part to a welcoming party meeting the Union Army outside of town with white flag in hand at the close of the war. It would be like meeting a guest at your front door to ask them to remove their shoes so as not to attract mud and dirt onto your new carpet.

Eufaula was merely a jumping-off point for our vacation, and we soon piled back into our schooner to set sail for Florida’s beaches of South Walton County and the quaint villages along Scenic Highway 30A.

In the small community of Dune Allen, there was only one activity to hold my attention. I spent days sitting on the beach and staring at the horizon, imagining explorers who sailed over it, never knowing what to expect; never knowing there would one day be tourists baking themselves with the backdrop of souvenir stands and pastel condominiums. They never imagined that their descendants would one day willingly pack up their children for a similar voyage, one that has taken us past horizons and history to claim a rectangle of beachfront for ourselves. It’s a new world built from salt and sand that I implore these children not to track into our house.

Permanent link to The Commercial Appeal

Grand prize winning short story “Sea Change” anthologized by Contemporary Media in the e-book FIVE THAT GRABBED THE GOLD.

From the Memphis Magazine blog 901:

Titled Five that Grabbed the Gold, this volume contains the grand-prize winning stories from the Memphis magazine fiction contest from 2008 through 2012.

The authors, several of whom now have published novels to their credit, include Courtney Miller Santo, Richard Alley, David Williams, Ellen Morris Prewitt, and Jackson McKenzie. Each of them won $1,000 for the grand prize and publication of their story in the magazine.

We’re pleased to give area writers a chance to compete in a well-respected contest, which we have sponsored since 1989. And now, by making this book of stories available on Kindle for your mobile device, we give the contest and some our winning authors wider and much-deserved exposure.

Click here to purchase e-book from the Amazon Kindle store.

Memphis Standout profile for The Memphis Daily News

May 24, 2013

There is a surge these days in Memphis boosterism, but there may be no one else with their pulse more on what is new and exciting and worth celebrating in the city than Rashana Lincoln.

As director of community engagement for the New Memphis Institute (formerly the Leadership Academy), Lincoln is charged with selling her greatest passion: Memphis.

Born and raised in Memphis, the White Station High School graduate went on to Clark Atlanta University, a small, historically black college that shares a campus with Spelman College and Morehouse College. She graduated in 1996 with a degree in business marketing.

Lincoln returned home as the Olympics descended upon Atlanta, and became caught up in the campaign for Harold Ford Jr.’s congressional run. She joined the staff as an advance person moving out in front of the campaign team. Lincoln said the experience was “intense, but phenomenal; it really exposed me to every pocket of the 9th District.”

Lincoln enjoyed working with the big-money donors as well as knocking on doors throughout the district and talking to the residents and those most affected by elections and legislation.

“I love people; that’s just my nature,” she said.

It was during the campaign that the importance of voting was instilled in her and it drove her to the University of Tennessee College of Law in Knoxville. Her father had a background in the law and she’d always seen a juris doctorate as “a great vehicle for any number of careers.”

She graduated law school in 2001, and though she never pursued a career in law she said the experience was invaluable. Her mother was ill when she came back to Memphis so Lincoln took over operations and management for the family business, Mayweather Catering … (read more)

“Because I Said So” column for The Commercial Appeal

May 23, 2013

Good seats are still available on ‘Believe Memphis’ bandwagon

I was born and raised in Memphis, weaned during the 1970s on a steady stream of negativity flowing through a city whose dreams had slipped into the river and whose borders had become porous. Everyone, it seemed, wanted out. The grass must have looked greener in the next county over, a neighboring city, any other state.

But things have turned, haven’t they? Negativity is passed from generation to generation like a bad gene, and the only way to arrest it is to flip the off-switch in our DNA. My children are being raised in a new Memphis, one with possibilities imagined from the uppermost reaches of government down to the teacher in the classroom, from the 7-foot-1 defensive player of the year to the CEO to the waitress serving sweet tea.

And it’s borne upon one word: Believe.

It’s a directive being spread around these days on billboards, the airwaves and a little yellow towel, but the attitude has been growing in us all along. We have flipped that switch and begun believing in ourselves and our city, and to proudly share the stories that make us who we are.

Believe Memphis. So powerful is this simple command that it isn’t just for those born and raised here. It’s for everyone everywhere. We are all of Memphis. If you have a favorite pop star and dance to your radio, if you’ve stayed in a hotel, shopped in a grocery store, shipped a package or tasted the perfect pulled pork sandwich, then you are of Memphis. And we’re glad to have you. We welcome you.

The term “bandwagon” gets used in a negative way, but I say come on board. Ours is a wagon that has been hitched in the past to teams of Tigers, a couple of kings, two pandas and a Redbird. It has been loaded into the belly of a purple and orange cargo plane. More recently, it has been pulled behind a 400-passenger paddle wheel steamboat, a fleet of food trucks, and bicycles along a 7-mile Greenline, through a revitalized park, and eventually, it will cross the river over the Harahan Bridge. When there was no one to pull it, we stoked its steam engine with issues of Forbes magazine and the words of bitter columnists from afar. Currently, it’s being pulled by a grizzly bear. So climb on: It’s a bandwagon with an actual band led by Booker T. Jones fresh from a concert of American soul music at the White House.

My children already have their own memories of Memphis to share, their own stories of visiting the Memphis Zoo and the Levitt Shell, of standing riverside to gaze at the water, exploring Midtown’s cafés and riding the trails at Shelby Farms. They’ve visited the farmers markets and Botanic Garden, caught movies at the Summer Twin Drive-In and danced at the Stax Museum. They’re old enough to understand the news they see and hear, and open enough to understand that it’s not all perfect. But they have the sense that it can be changed for the better, and that is a brand new sensation.

I’ve loaded my family aboard this wagon, and I’m stopping the cycle of negativity for my own children. I am of Memphis, and my children believe because they’ve never known any other way.

Permanent link to The Commercial Appeal

“Because I Said So” column for The Commercial Appeal

May 9, 2013

Wanted: a second chance to be a band geek

The story was all over my social media feeds last week. The principal of a low-performing school in Roxbury, Mass., let his security staff go to help pay for more arts teachers. It was another of those stories I ignored at the time, knowing that if I found I was interested in reading it later, then it would be there; stories have a way of circling around and coming back to us. And this one did just that as I sat in the audience twice in the past week for my sons’ band concerts at White Station Middle and High Schools. It’s the type of setting where a story on the importance of funding arts programs in schools might be set to the music of Gershwin.

If you’ve never been to a concert at that level, it is nothing less than extraordinary. I wasn’t in the band in high school. Band geeks, that’s who was in the band. It turns out there is no shame in that. Just the opposite: It’s a moniker worn with pride. There may be no other instance of students working so closely together with their teachers than in a school auditorium as they give a performance everything they’ve got. They all have a stake in it. They’re all trying to make this thing — this arrangement — sound as whole and as perfect as possible. To do such a thing takes more than mere talent: It takes teamwork.

Many of the professional musicians I know all came to their instruments through their secondary schools’ band programs. How many adults today do you know who can show a direct line from middle school to their careers? The conductors on stage this past week — Mr. Wright, Mr. Guinn and Mr. Scott — are the Pied Pipers of our children, leading them into something that, even if they don’t make a job of it, they will use in some way or other their entire lives.

In a recent conversation, Dru Davison, performing arts coordinator with Memphis City Schools, hit on the ability of music to facilitate all learning when he spoke of the many jazz ensembles in the schools and the art of improvisation.

“You can recite someone else’s piece of music, or you can take everything you know about music and create your own, and that kind of creativity and innovation is really what employers are looking for,” Davison told me. “It’s about being college- and career-ready, and if you have kids in a jazz band, you know that they’re showing up on time for every rehearsal or else they can’t perform.”

That school in Roxbury, Orchard Gardens Elementary, has shown a vast improvement in its test scores, in its morale and in its security issues even without the aid of a police force. They’re working as a team now — students, teachers, administration — to make their arrangement the best that it can be.

If I had it all to do over again, would I be a band geek? You bet I would. I would be awful, mind you, but I would try my hand at the saxophone or the clarinet or maybe even the tuba. In lieu of talent, I sit in the audience as a music lover.

I’m a proud parent of public schoolchildren, and I’m with the band.

Permanent link to The Commercial Appeal

Small Business Spotlight for The Memphis Daily News

April 8, 2013

In 2007, Sean Faust and business partner Brad Ellis came together with Memphis music icon Doug Easley to create a company offering full-service audio and video recording and mixing services.

Both Faust and Easley had recording studios that burned in 2005 and New School Media is the Phoenix that has risen from those ashes.

“We had all the ingredients,” Easley said of their new project.

And indeed they do. Easley has recorded music heavyweights from Sonic Youth and Wilco to Jack White, Loretta Lynn and Jeff Buckley.

Faust earned degrees in theater and documentary film production from Syracuse University, has more than 15 years of experience and grew up running sound with his father, saying that his Saturday mornings were full of cables and amplifiers as opposed to cartoons.

Ellis is a writer and director with 10 feature films under his belt, including “Act One,” which claimed Best Narrative Feature, Hometown Award in the 2005 Indie Memphis Film Festival.

The studio is a 3,300-square-foot complex swathed in grass cloth walls, swag lamps, retro seating and original Lamar Sorrento artwork. To take a tour of the facility is to walk through a museum of vintage styles and scenery, ending in a top of the line, 5.1 audio mixing suite, something more akin to mission control at NASA with dim lighting punctuated by bright LEDs and computer monitors … (read more)

Memphis Standout profile for The Memphis Daily News

April, 5, 2013

John Bass earned a Ph.D. in musicology from the University of Memphis.

Specifically, the degree is focused on 16th century music compared to modern jazz pedagogy and how musicians then might have been taught improvisation.

Where does one go with such a degree?

Bass has taken it across Midtown to Rhodes College where he is the director of the Mike Curb Institute for Music. The Curb Institute was established to preserve and promote the distinct music traditions of the South, as well as research its effect on history, economy and social systems.

What better place than Memphis, the genesis of so much in popular music? And what better place for a musician from Mobile, Ala.?

Bass’ father was a physician by trade and also an after-hours banjo player, so Bass grew up with music in his ears and, eventually, a guitar in his hands.

After a typical adolescence spent playing in garage bands around town, Bass took the not-so-typical turn of seriously studying jazz. His high school band director suggested the University of Southern Mississippi, where Bass majored in jazz guitar.

He and his wife, Johnnie, considered Memphis for their respective pursuits and programs. She is an audiologist now with St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and he received his master’s in jazz guitar from Memphis before pursuing his doctorate.

While working on that advanced degree, Bass began teaching guitar as an adjunct professor at Rhodes College, which doesn’t offer a degree in music, per se, yet in the liberal arts tradition students can graduate with a Bachelor of Arts and a major, or emphasis, in music … (read more)

Standout Profile for The Memphis Daily News

March 29, 2013

Willy Bearden is a local filmmaker best known for works such as his 2010 feature “One Came Home” and the Memphis Memoirs series on WKNO-TV.

He produced the video exhibitions for the Cotton Museum and has produced the New Year’s Eve telecast from Beale Street as well as the Blues Music Awards for the Blues Foundation.

The bearded and bespectacled Bearden is a renaissance man with a down-home flair whose talents extend far beyond any single medium.

“I’m a filmmaker, a writer and a storyteller, and I think all of these things are connected, at least as far as I’m concerned,” he said. “I couldn’t be a filmmaker if I weren’t a writer, and I couldn’t be a filmmaker if I didn’t know photography.”

And it’s his photography that will be in the spotlight during an opening reception Friday, March 29, at 6 p.m. at the Leadership Memphis Gallery 363 (365 S. Main St.) during the South Main Art Trolley Tour.

For the show, Bearden culled 10 years of photographs for the 20 or so to be edited, printed and framed.

“There’s a lot of work that goes into it,” Bearden said. “I’ve had a good time going through and choosing things, it’s been interesting to kind of walk back through the thousands of things I’ve shot.”

Ken Hall has partnered with Michel Allen in Allen Projects, a gallery and consulting firm, to curate shows for Leadership Memphis. The Bearden photography installation marks one year for such shows.

Hall has known Bearden for several years and was familiar with his video and production work, but when he saw the still photography for the first time, he wanted to showcase it to the public.

“I was just mesmerized by his great work in still photography,” Hall said. “So immediately – I think the next day – I called him for an exhibition at Gallery 363.”

Bearden, a Rolling Fork, Miss., native, spends a lot of time in the Delta and his photography represents this … (read more)