Speak low

An online talk Friday for the Jazz Education Network about D. Antoinette Handy

“Candidates for the Degree, Bachelor of Music,” New England Conservatory yearbook, 1952

I will be presenting an online seminar Friday for the Jazz Education Network all about the remarkable D. Antoinette Handy. The event is free, online (Facebook Live), and open to non-JEN members with prior registration. It may be recorded, as well.

Prior COJ posts mentioning Handy include “Terri Lyne Carrington, Part 1” and “The Jazz Education Legacy of Virginia State College Music Professor Undine Smith Moore,” among others.

D. Antoinette Handy was born in New Orleans in 1930 and died in Jackson, Mississippi, in 2002. A flute player, she attended NEC, the Paris Conservatoire, and Northwestern. She founded Trio Pro Viva, a chamber music ensemble dedicated to Black composers, in the 1950s and toured postwar Europe and the segregated American South. She even performed at the Five Spot (NYC) one month before Thelonious Monk and Johnny Griffin (a year after Monk and Trane’s famous run there), and would later back touring shows by Isaac Hayes and the Jackson 5 as a member of the Richmond Symphony.

“Concert and Opera Programs of the Week,” New York Times (15 June 1958)

She was Richmond Public Schools’s first artist-in-residence during the 1970s when RPS attempted integration and was subsequently director of the National Endowment for the Arts’s Music division from 1989-1993 (after being assistant director from 1984). She is largely responsible for the public-facing elements of the NEA Jazz Masters Fellowship program. Antoinette Handy contributed decades of work to ensuring jazz received recognition and support as an art form on the same level as other forms of classical music.

“Some people have a very narrow concept of music education. It’s only teaching ABCDEFG. You know—quarter notes, whole notes, and that’s that. And of course I don’t see it that way. I’ll take for instance the University of Massachusetts, I remember, one year submitted an application to the Endowment. It’s a program called “Jazz in July” run by Billy Taylor and Max Roach. And what is it? It’s a program that says that all classically trained musicians must learn to improvise. And I think that that is absolutely fabulous. I wish I had been required to do the same thing. I feel very deprived . . . I never encountered anything in education that we have done.”

—D. Antoinette Handy, oral history interview by Kay Roslyn Thomas (December 2000)

Handy’s publications include Contemporary Black Images in Music for the Flute (LP, 1972), Black Music: Opinions & Reviews (1974), Black Women in American Bands & Orchestras (1981), The International Sweethearts of Rhythm (1983), Black Conductors (1995), and Jazz Man’s Journey: A Biography of Ellis Louis Marsalis, Jr. (1999).

There is no biography of D. Antoinette Handy. Her first book is out of print, as is her 1972 LP Contemporary Black Images. (You won’t find it streaming, either.) Her ancestral home in Mississippi has a GoFundMe to help protect the family’s lineage and memory. The fundraiser was organized by Antoinette’s sister’s granddaughter Patrice Jones (she shares family history on TikTok as thecreoleo), who answers the question “Why is Handy Heights important?” as follows:

Following slavery, over 14 million acres of Black farmland has been lost due to violence, the informal passing of land, unethical laws surrounding heirs' properties, financial hardships caused by income inequalities and discrimination from the United States Department of Agriculture. The fact that my family has held on to this land for more than 100 years is incredible. Handy Heights gave Florence and Emanuel the abilty to send all eleven of their children to either college or trade school, and I am fourth generation college-educated because of this land.

The thing that excites me most about any public presentation of my research on Handy (journal article linked; contact me if your library doesn’t have access) is not the paltry amount of information I have to share. It is the chance that people who knew, worked with, or were influenced by Handy might turn up and contribute more knowledge to this ongoing historical project. Handy, in her first book, wrote that, “Scholars—particularly Black ones—must become active participants in the defining and unearthing of the real Black musical past, as well as the Black musical present.” Handy’s own activity in this arena was prolific and continues to inspire, nurture, and challenge musicians and scholars today.

“I remember when the word jazz was an ugly word. Many of us think that the jazz musician is not a musician. It’s so unfortunate, I feel, that we have to dichotomize music just as we dichotomize the arts...I personally see a trend maybe away from this.”

—D. Antoinette Handy as host of WRFK-FM’s Black Virginia (December 1978)

Click the advertisement below to register for the event.