If Commonwealth of Jazz seems to have slowed down in July, it’s not just the heat. Nor am I on vacation. I am hard at work finishing an article about vibraphonist and bandleader Lionel Hampton’s synergistic, lifelong relationship with the Black press.
As COJ is focused on the influence of Black music on integration and public education in Richmond, I haven’t written much about Hampton’s journalism here. But occasionally the projects overlap. I thought I’d share one such excerpt to demonstrate the connection, as well as just to ping your radar. The COJ airship will continue toward her destination after slowly rounding a mountain of over 300 columns by the tireless Lionel Hampton, “The Atomic Man of Music” according to E. B. Rea of the Baltimore Afro-American (1946).
Hampton’s byline pops up all over the place, first in 1938 in the Afro and continuing all the way up to 1994 in Entertainment Weekly. He died in 2002 and his life pretty much spanned the entire 20th century, including rocketing to worldwide fame between 1936-1940 as the face of American integration in Benny Goodman’s swing orchestra.
Louis Armstrong famously traveled with a typewriter and wrote multiple autobiographies. Bassist Milt Hinton was an avid photographer of the jazz set and throughout his career “took more than 60 thousand photos of his fellow musicians and friends.” Hampton—likely aided by his wife and manager Gladys and perhaps others within the Hampton organization—was similarly prolific in print over 56 years.
Hampton wrote for both Black and white publications and “the color line in music” was a frequent topic. One can easily see why artists of his generation felt compelled to generate their own historical record. Even in worshipful reviews (for example, George Frazier’s “Most Exciting Artist of ‘36” in January 1937’s Down Beat), white critics often drew arbitrary lines essentializing jazz musicians:
If 1936 produced an outstanding new personality in hot jazz, Lionel Hampton is probably the man. Actually, of course, the Los Angeles Negro is someone out of a remote and legendary past, but the fact remains that 1936 has been his year of grace.
Hampton, in his own writings, doesn’t deny a unique and potent Black contribution to American music. However, his copious writings on the subject are nuanced and multi-faceted, and he returns again and again to the concept of musical “interracialism” that aligns with Goodman’s definition, “Swing is rhythmic integration.”
Finally, to my point about connections with COJ, in an essay for Swing: The Guide to Modern Music, Hampton editorializes at length about “the old bugaboo of a color line in swing music.” The essay itself is fascinating, but relevant to COJ is Hampton’s mention of an incident in Richmond that also gets some ink in his “Swing” column for the Baltimore Afro (1938-1942).
Having discussed the matter for his peers in Afro columns from October 1939 and February 1940, Hampton finally got around to addressing a predominantly white readership in September 1940:
In Richmond, Va., where signs read “For Whites Only,” I had the unique experience of being the first colored musician to ever appear on the same stage with a white band, when we played there last summer. The daily press started me off on a long piece of serious thought when they highlighted that occasion. Here, then, I said, is really a complex problem facing all musicians, white and black. A pretty definite menace, what’s more.
Hampton recounts how “the experience of working with Benny [Goodman] has built for me a solid appreciation of the mutual improvement obtained through interracialism.” He goes on:
To fully understand this progressive pattern, the analytical must adopt a point of view as much like ours as possible. Rather it should be a group blending, since it cannot be denied that the two groups of musicians do look at life through different eyes.
In addition to documenting a little bit of Richmond history here—which I plan to explore more deeply in a future post—Hampton speaks clearly on the shape and significance of a progressive, multicultural education through the arts. Perhaps that is why, in the spring of 1946, Virginia State College awarded Hampton an honorary doctorate for outstanding contributions in the field of music. Virginia State, of course, was the academic home of revolutionary educators like Undine Smith Moore and a training ground for Richmond Public Schools band director Jay Peters, who played saxophone in Hampton’s orchestra.
Unlike opera or hip hop, jazz so often is a music sans texte. Perhaps what can’t be gleaned from notes and tones quietly resides in writings like those by Armstrong and Hampton. To fully understand complex cultural problems and the progressive pattern in American history, students ought to read these jazz messengers as well as listen to them.