Lessons From Harlem

When I moved to New York City in 1980 at the age of 22, I almost never went near 125th Street, the unofficial boundary of Harlem, even though I lived only two blocks away in Morningside Heights, across the street from Riverside Church. Harlem, of course, was the beating heart of Black New York: the Harlem Renaissance, the Schomburg Library, the Apollo Theater, Sylvia’s Restaurant. It was also, less than two decades after the scarring riots of the 1960s, a place where white people just didn’t go. I’d heard the stories—junkies, drugs, guns, violence—and internalized the warnings. Little could I have imagined that by my late 20s I would find myself a fixture on Harlem’s main thoroughfare, one block east of the Apollo, playing harmonica with a Mississippi-born bluesman named Mr. Satan, or that we would break into the national market with the release of our debut album, Harlem Blues. The whole experience demolished the way I’d been programmed to think about Harlem, to put it mildly.

It began one August evening in 1981 when I heard music filtering through my 18th-floor window, along with a warm breeze off the Hudson River. The sound was raucous, tinkling, propulsive. Intrigued, I walked up the hill from Broadway and found myself in the middle of a huge block party, a thousand people strolling, chattering, mingling, lazing back. This, I would learn, was part of the Jazzmobile summer concert series that ran every Wednesday evening. The Jazzmobile itself, a drive-in stage, was parked in the middle of the plaza at the top of the hill, facing the marble steps and high white columns of Grant’s Tomb.

I was, I quickly realized, one of a handful of white people in an otherwise all-Black crowd. Although I felt my whiteness acutely, I soon began flowing north with other strollers toward the food vendors and men in colorful robes selling essential oils. Sweet incense drifted through the humid summer air; I heard every sort of accent—Caribbean, African, hard-edged Bronx. The vibe was peaceful, relaxed, buoyant with an energy that came from somebody blowing hell out of a trumpet mixed with tinkling piano and drums. I bought a plate of curried goat on dirty rice with stewed cabbage and sat down on an open stretch of marble bench. I ate slowly, kept my eyes open without staring at anybody, soaking it all in. The way people greeted each other—loudly, happily, demonstratively—made the occasion feel like a family reunion.

Later, I squeezed back through the crowd, getting close to the stage. A sign next to the Jazzmobile said, “Dizzy Gillespie and his Orchestra.” The Dizzy Gillespie? There he was, big-bellied in a blue T-shirt, mopping sweat off his face with a white towel. His trumpet was bent, angling up toward the darkening sky. He leaned against the front of the piano, relaxed and informal, and sang “Swing low, sweet Cadillac, comin’ for to carry me hooooooooooooome!” as everybody around me, the whole plaza, roared and cracked up. Later, as I headed home, I could hear Dizzy and his band playing on behind me, the music rippling with good feeling.

Summer Wednesdays at Grant’s Tomb became something I looked forward to. I saw Art Blakey’s band up there in 1982 with Wynton and Branford Marsalis; the same band a few years later with Donald Harrison and Terence Blanchard; singer Betty Carter, who swaggered and yelled at her rhythm section; an aging Lou Donaldson playing “Alligator Boogaloo”; Dr. Billy Taylor on piano, lecturing us between songs about the history of jazz. All the energy of the crowd fed into the music. I knew there was magic at work, but what exactly was it composed of?

I hadn’t yet had the stunningly obvious insight that the people who attended these events, Harlemites descending on Morningside Heights, just wanted to be free. I hadn’t yet realized that every single element of those Wednesday evenings at Grant’s Tomb—the sputtering high-note solos, the potpourri of smells and tastes from the Caribbean and beyond, the styling and profiling and mutual checking out of young men and women and those who had once been young and were hanging on regardless, the loud greetings, slapped hands, and bumped elbows, the flowing movement of bodies easing gently past one another, the lack of assigned seating, the majesty of white marble and the down-home practicality of the tenting and cooking equipment back behind it, the free-for-all entrepreneurialism, the lack of a cover charge—was part of the whole. The musicians felt that whole for what it was, harmonized it and punched it up, and sent it back into the crowd, the soundtrack of free people grooving on freedom.