Cheesy Grits: Excursus: David Mannes and the Music School Settlement for Colored People (Part 2 of 2)

The Music School Settlement for Colored People opened initially as part Lincoln House Settlement sometime around 1911. Given that it initially charged but 25 cents per lesson, it should come as no surprise that it was pressed for funds from the outset. But David Mannes was nothing if not well-connected, and fascinatingly enough, well connected to the African American music community.

And indeed, it was his friend James Reese Europe, conductor of the Clef Club Orchestra (and later of the renowned Fighting 369th "Harlem Hellfighters" Marching Band) who proposed to Mannes that the Clef Club play a benefit concert for the new Music School Settlement. More ambitious still, the venue proposed was nothing less than Carnegie Hall.

Now Reese's Clef Club itself was rather an odd group: while it could be called an orchestra, it was what could be called a "pick-up" orchestra, in other words, a group of freelancers/spare-timers. Given that there were far more musicians in Harlem than venues for them to play, Europe had hit upon the idea of simply gathering them together to play whenever and wherever. It was as much a matter of the opportunity to keep their musical chops in shape as it was to play for a paying audience.

Mannes and his Music Settlement Board lost no time in taking up the offer from James Reese Europe: with the connections they had, they were able straightaway to rent Carnegie Hall, the home of the orchestra for which Mannes was concertmaster. James Reese Europe meanwhile assembled and rehearsed his musicians.

Mannes would take in some of the Clef Club rehearsals and was somewhat aback by their method of preparation:

"The orchestra being composed of professional jazz-players, barbers, waiters, red-caps, bell-hops and such, it was possible for them to attend rehearsals only at times when they were free. The orchestra, then, could only be rehearsed in sections, men dropping in at odd moments, in a seemingly lackadaisical manner, to receive individual instruction and then to be rehearsed in groups. Even in the final rehearsal, the orchestra was not complete. I wondered if this scattered and disorderly rehearsal attendance could produce anything but chaos."

"Mr. Europe called for fourteen upright pianos which Mr. Elbridge Adams, a high official with the American Piano Company, provided with alacrity. These pianos were placed back to back and were played by fourteen of the best jazz players in town. Two hours before the end of the final rehearsal, late in the afternoon, a few of us came to listen to those sixty five men playing bandolas, guitars, a few violins, 'celli, a few basses, flutes, saxophones and one bassoon (the player having learnt to master its participation in the program in a week's time). The large battery of drums and traps was very imposing and seductively rhythmic. In addition to their orchestral numbers, they sang while playing, and the wonder of it was that some of the fine bass voices were among the performers of instruments scored in the treble clef and vice versa....Very few people realize how difficult it is, for instance, to play the violin and to sing simultaneously the harmonically correct bass passages. The great surprise to the listener, however, was the beautiful soft sound of this strange conglomeration of unassorted instruments...."

"And big Jim Europe was an amazingly inspired conductor...."

The announcements having gone out, the tickets sold like proverbial hotcakes, and the house was packed by, amazingly enough considering the times, an unsegregated audience. On May 2, 1912, a jazz concert was presented for the first time at New York City's venerable and now venerated Carnegie Hall. And everyone had a wonderful time. Mannes reports that this single concert generated some $5,000 for the Music School Settlement.

The Clef Club benefit concert was so singular that it now has its own section of the current Carnegie Hall website entitled Welcome to Day One of Jazz at Carnegie Hall, complete with a program and a picture of the 125-member Clef Club Orchestra. (Mannes had apparently not seen the full orchestra rehearse, as he reports a body half the size of the one pictured.) Reviews appeared in the New York Age and Musical America and even the Gray Lady herself, the New York Times eventually showed up for a review, albeit a patronising one.

In late 1914 (as detailed in a New York Age article dated 15 April 1915), composer J. Rosamond Johnson, brother of James Weldon Johnson, would become the new director of the Music School Settlement. As part of his reorganization of the School, he sought a new facility. David Mannes was at the ready and helped the School to purchase a large building at 4-6 W. 131st St. The School quickly took up residence in its new space.

Although Mannes would soon step back from both the Third Street School and the Music School Settlement in order to devote his time to opening his own music school, J. Rosamond Johnson kept the School humming along with continued benefit concerts at Carnegie Hall and at other notable venues in Manhattan, as well as a slate of recitals by well-known artists. His primary aim, though, was to showcase the music of black composers and performers, such as Will Marion Cook and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Roland Hayes and Emma Azalia Hackley.

On 6 Dec 1919, Lucien H. White, music critic of the New York Age published the following quiet note in his column "Musical Notes":

"I am informed that the activities heretofore conducted at the Music School Settlement, 4-6 West 131st [S]treet, are to be transferred to the David I Martin Music School, West 136th St. Since the resignation of J. Rosamond Johnson as superintendent, the school has been without a head...."

I don't know enough of Johnson's biography to be able to say why he left the Music School Settlement. But, whatever the reasons, they sufficed, and that was the end of Harlem's Music School Settlement for Colored People. The music faded into the past as the building at 4-6 W. 131st St. awaited its next tenant: the nascent Boys' Welfare Association.


Notes:

1) The Mannes quotes regarding the Clef Club rehearsals for the Carnegie Hall concert come from David Mannes, Music is my Faith (W.W. Norton: 1938) pp. 217-18.

2) This being after all a family history blog, I would be remiss in failing to point out that Granddad Ralston had several cousins who played for the Clef Club. They were the sons of Hattie Thorne DesVerney, Brougham and Arthur, Jr. There being no list of the members of the Clef Club who actually performed at Carnegie Hall, we are left to speculate. But if you had the chance to play at Carnegie Hall, would you have missed it?

3) There was at least one other Charleston connection to the Music School Settlement: Eugene Mikell, who was bandleader for the Jenkins Orphanage Band for a time, was also an instructor at the Music School Settlement. He would of course go on to be James Reese Europe's assistant with the Fighting 369th Marching Band, and would take over after Reese's untimely death at the hands of an enraged drummer.