nothin City’s Black Music Roots Celebrated | New Haven Independent

City’s Black Music Roots Celebrated

Brian Slattery Photo

When I was in Paris, they’d say, and now from New York…’” said Jesse Cheese” Hameen II, and I’d jump up and say, no, New York didn’t do this. New Haven did this.’”

Hameen (pictured), the chair of jazz and rock studies at Neighborhood Music School, was among those asked to take part in the New Haven Board of Alders Black and Hispanic Caucus 2015 Black History program, which centered on black music in the Elm City.

Born and raised in New Haven, Hameen began touring the world as a drummer in 1963, on gigs that ranged from Curtis Mayfield to Pharoah Sanders. But he always circled back to New Haven.

Every time I came back to New Haven, the people would come out and support me,” he said. They also said, you better do good, because we invested in you.’”

Hameen, Alder Jeanette Morrison (pictured), and celebrated music educator Dr. Charles Warner all reminisced at Friday’s event (which took place int he Hall of Records) about New Haven’s jazz scene in the mid 20th century, when Dixwell Avenue was a corridor of clubs pumping out music and people dressed in their best every Saturday night. Hameen name-checked the Playback, while Warner called the Monterey Club the birth of jazz and blues in New Haven.”

In 2008, Hameen had told the New York Times that jazz was kind of dying” in New Haven, but it’s building up now.” He was even more upbeat on Friday.

Now we have some young people making a name for themselves,” he said, singling out 25-year-old jazz pianist Christian Sands, who grew up in New Haven and has since appeared at the Grammys and the Kennedy Center.

Warner echoed that sentiment. So much music is being made right here by the known and the unknown,” he said. Black music in New Haven is alive and well. We have what we have, and nobody can take it away from us.”

In demonstration, a singer from Varick Memorial A.M.E. Zion Church collaborated with two young musicians from Music Haven on a classic spiritual.

Music Haven kept the audience clapping with Bill Withers’s Lean on Me” and a medley of Motown hits. Singer Joseph Hill offered a rendition of Lift Every Voice and Sing.” And Baub Bidon laid down a spoken-word piece that traced the history of thought from its beginnings to the present day — right there in the room, with an improvised ending.

Before the assembled crowd lined up for a dinner provided by Cast Iron Soul, Morrison took the microphone again to effuse about the general positivity she felt in the room.

This is what I want to see when I open up the paper, or when I click on the New Haven Independent in the morning,” she said.

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