Dec 17, 2024 9:58 AM
Tabla Master Zakir Hussain, 73, Succumbs to Illness
Tabla master Ustad Zakir Hussain, one of India’s reigning cultural ambassadors and a revered figure worldwide…
Gerald and John Clayton at the family home in Altadena during a photo shoot for the June 2022 cover of DownBeat. The house was lost during the Los Angeles fires.
(Photo: Paul Wellman)Roy McCurdy and his wife had just finished eating dinner and were relaxing over coffee in their Altadena home, when he heard someone banging on his front door. “Our neighbor said, ‘You gotta get out, man, there’s a big fire in the back,” recalled McCurdy, the drummer best known for his work with Cannonball Adderley. “I came out looking, and the whole [mountainside], it was all red. All the neighbors were getting their cars packed up. … We just grabbed what we could and got out, went to a hotel, and finally wound up over here at my daughter’s.” The windstorm and resultant fires that ravaged much of Los Angeles mere days after ringing in the new year have terrorized entire communities here, and the jazz community has been hit especially hard. Altadena has been home to jazz musicians for many, many decades, dating back to the 1960s and ’70s, when the remnant effects of discriminatory redlining laws in the Los Angeles area led to many Black families being drawn to this quaint mountain town just to the north and west of Pasadena.
McCurdy went back to his neighborhood the next day, only to find houses on his street burning one by one as they lit up in a chain like a giant fuse, headed straight for his home. Thankfully, firefighters arrived and stopped the burn from reaching his property. Sadly, many of his neighbors lost their homes, including his own son.
Bennie Maupin was also at home the night of the fires, and while he has safely evacuated to the campus of Soka University in Aliso Viejo, his home of 30 years has been lost. “Everything is destroyed, man. Everything. I’m mostly concerned about my friends, the elderly people who lived basically alone. I’m doing OK. But it’s a real disaster for many of them,” he lamented. “Tell everybody thanks for their heartfelt feelings.”
Louis Van Taylor, for many years a saxophonist with the funk pop group Kool and the Gang, has been living in Altadena since 1975. He returned home from a gig that night, only to promptly leave his house again and for the last time, losing everything except for the horns he had played earlier in the evening. He recalled the vibrant presence of many jazz artists who lived nearby.
“I remember when Tootie Heath used to live off of New York Drive,” he said. “I remember that Billy Childs used to be in the area. Robert Kyle used to live in Altadena. Bennie Maupin and John Clayton. Funny thing is, I was just starting to warm up to John, going over to his house, [asking him for] orchestration lessons. So now that’s gone.”
This writer has also been to Clayton’s home, invited there by the master bassist and bandleader to interview him and his son, pianist Gerald Clayton. We conversed in his studio, a serene, spacious room with windows and skylights that cast warm sunlight throughout, onto beautiful wooden cabinets that displayed his many albums and awards, and held uncountable scores and charts he had composed over his illustrious career. It’s all gone, including his prized possession, the bass Clayton’s mentor Ray Brown played on for most of his life.
Clayton and his wife happened to be in New York, being honored with the Bruce Lundvall Visionary Award by the Jazz Congress during an annual meeting at Jazz at Lincoln Center, when word of the fires reached him. He managed to make it through the ceremony, soon after confirming the terrible news about his home. Somehow, he managed to press on with his festival duties, which included performing a tribute to the guitarist Russell Malone, who died last year.
“I had to work to be in the moment at the award ceremony,” Clayton said in a social media post. “I dug as deeply as I could to focus on everyone’s energy and the positivity centered around me as the awardee. It was a fabulous event.”
He called it “a day of simultaneous celebration and grief.”
In recent years, Altadena began to attract younger people looking for an affordable place to buy a home. Many of those people are artists and musicians who became part of a new generation that formed close-knit bonds with each other and with those who had lived there a long time. “I just think of this place that I love so, so much,” said saxophonist Hailey Niswanger, a mainstay in DownBeat’s Critics Poll as a rising star on alto and soprano saxophone. She moved to Altadena three years ago. “It’s the first place that like felt like home for me.” She, like Clayton, was not in Los Angeles when the wind and fire struck. She had to ask her partner to gather up as many of her instruments and personal keepsakes as he could before fleeing. He was not able to grab everything. “The hard drives that were lost — there’s music I wrote throughout my life that I never recorded professionally. There’s bootlegs of songs and ideas and compositions. All my pictures pre-2021. My childhood blanket,” she recounted, despair welling in her voice. “I think about gifts that my musical mentor gave me, and vintage books that he had from his life, and my grandma’s jewelry — and it just kind of goes on and on and on.”
There are many others. In Pacific Palisades, this writer once visited composer Vince Mendoza’s home, elegant but modest only by comparison to the mansions built next to him in the years after he moved there. But the fires were uncaring as to whom they unleashed their fury on. Trumpeter Bobby Bradford, age 90, finds himself homeless, as do saxophonists Dale Fielder and Steve Lehman, pianists Jeff Lorber and Miro Sprague, guitarist Jamie Rosenn, drummer Joel Taylor and more.
The jazz community has rallied to help those who have lost everything. A spreadsheet has been created that identifies as many artists as possible known to have lost their homes, linking to their Go Fund Me pages. As of this writing, those GFM’s have raised nearly $13.5 million for the victims. Organizations like MusiCares, NAMM and the California Jazz Foundation and jazz clubs such as Sam First are spearheading their own fundraising efforts.
“The gratitude I feel for other people showing up for us, the donations and the gifts and the places to stay, and it’s just so much attention ... . I’m so grateful, but I’m so overwhelmed, too,” Niswanger said.
Clayton wrote this to his supporters: “The love you show for me and my family affects me in ways that I can’t truly convey to you. You already know I’m a crybaby. I’m sad and devastated about my house — that’s another kind of crying. The tears that you bring are tears of overwhelming gratitude and thankfulness that you are in my life.”
“As a long-time resident of Altadena,” said Van Taylor, “I was very proud to be living in an enclave of talented musicians and a pretty well-rounded community, and I always felt a sense of — and I still do — a connection to Altadena because it provided that diversity of not only players but a fan base of just regular people there, so I feel, probably like a lot of people, that there’s a good future out of this devastation.”
He continued: “I believe Altadena will be rebuilt, and I think there will be opportunities perhaps out of all this to increase the visibility, of availability of the arts ... . So I feel inspired even though this is devastating ... . I look forward to the future of the resurrecting the inspiration and all that history, and all that good stuff that Altadena represents.” DB
“Watching people like Max Roach or Elvin Jones and seeing how they utilize the whole drum kit in a very rhythmic and melodic way and how they stretched time — that was a huge inspiration to me,” Hussain said in DownBeat.
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