Who is the great Hazel Scott?

Hazel Scott, referred to as the “Darling of Café Society” was a Trinidad-born multitalented woman who left her reckoning force in music, television, and politics. Hazel Dorothy Scott was born in Port-au Spain, Trinidad on June 11, 1920. Following the separation of Hazel Scott’s parents, she moved to Harlem, New York City in 1924 with her mother and grandmother where she was raised. 

Early Beginnings

The only child of R. Thomas Scott, a West African scholar from England, and mother Alma Long Scott, a classical-trained pianist, Hazel Scott was raised with vast intelligence and art and destined to embody it. At the young age of just 3 years old, Scott began playing piano amazingly accompanied by her talented ear. Hazel once described that she would scream anytime one of her mother’s piano students hit a wrong note and was able to start playing piano by ear. Instead of becoming the concert pianist she thought she desired, Alma Scott soon decided to dedicate her life to cultivating her daughter’s talent. According to Smithsonian Magazine, Hazel Scott stated, “She was the single biggest influence in my life,” and the two were very close. While in the states, her mother Alma Scott worked as a maid and taught herself the saxophone enabling her to become a part of Lil Hardin Armstrong’s orchestra in the 1930s.

Thank you, Mama Scott

Alma’s involvement with music made the Scott household always inundated with cultured musicians and therefore beneficial for Hazel Scott’s budding passion for music. In 1933, her mother organized the Alma Long Scott’s All-Girl Jazz Band where Scott regularly performed the piano and trumpet in. She was mentored under the tutelage of great jazz artists like Art Tatum, Lester Young, Billie Holiday, and Fats Waller, whom she stated she considered like family. 

Child Prodigy: From Julliard to Onward

At the age of eight, Hazel was a child prodigy who auditioned for the world-renowned Juilliard School of Music. Although the standard student had to be at least 16 years old, her performance of Rachmaninoff’s "Prelude in C-Sharp Minor" was enough for Professor Oscar Wagner to accept her into the school and take her under his tutelage. In addition to being a prodigious musician at 16, Hazel hosted her own radio show on WOR after winning a local competition and performed gigs at night, even landing a performance alongside the Count Basie Orchestra at Roseland Ballroom. Shortly thereafter, she starred on Broadway in "Sing Out the News." Throughout the 1930s and 40s, Hazel performed jazz, blues, and boogie-woogie songs in addition to classical ballads and Broadway musical theatre. Her New York musical theatre appearances included "Cotton Club Revue of 1938," "Sing Out the News," and "The Priorities of 1942." Although she was not limited to a single genre or instrument, she is best known for being a trailblazer and eclectic virtuoso in jazz and classical piano. Barney Josephson's nightclub, Café Society (New York's first integrated club), debuted Hazel and further prompted her stardom. According to Kristin McGee's "Swinging the Classics" in "Some Liked it Hot: Jazz Women in Film and Television," her performance of "Swinging the Classics" in the jazz scene reached national prestige. By 1945, Hazel was earning $75,000 (about $1,065,111 currently) a year. This was only the beginning.

Career

Like her dear friend Lena Horne, Scott was one of the first Afro-Caribbean women to star in major Hollywood roles, oftentimes playing herself, such as in "I Dood It" (MGM, 1943), "Broadway Rhythm" (MGM, 1944), "Rhapsody in Blue" (Warner Bros, 1945), and was the only Black woman, besides Lena Horne, in an all-white cast of "The Heat's On" (Columbia, 1943). Scott was such an established force to be reckoned with by the time she starred in Hollywood movies that she was successfully able to challenge the studios' treatment of Black actors, demanding the same pay as her white colleagues and refusing to play subservient roles, which Black actors were constantly cast in. She also starred in Café Society's "From Bach to Boogie-Woogie" concerts in 1941 and at Carnegie Hall in 1943. She was one of the first Black entertainers to refuse to perform for segregated or all-white audiences. In her contracts, there was a written clause that required forfeiture if there was a segregated audience, stating, "Why would anyone come to hear me, a Negro, and refuse to sit beside someone just like me?" she told Time magazine. Hazel Scott was also the first African American person in America to have her own television show, "The Hazel Scott Show," which premiered on the DuMont Television Network on July 3, 1950. Variety reported that "Hazel Scott has a neat little show in this modest package," its "most engaging element" being Scott herself. On "The Hazel Scott Show," Hazel interviewed a plethora of notable people and wowed the nation's television audience with her on-air performances and singing in one of the seven languages she spoke.

Speaking Out: Social Justice, Racism, Discrimination, and Controversy

Hazel Scott fought for justice both on and off the stage. While starring in The Heat’s On, during a scene where Hazel played a WAC WWII sergeant, Hazel was angered by the dirty apron costumes she was given to wear. She staged a strike for three days until the studio removed the apron from the scene. While this incident short-lived her film career, Hazel does not regret her defiance saying, “I've been brash all my life, and it's gotten me into a lot of trouble. But at the same time, speaking out has sustained me and given meaning to my life.” In 1949, Scott brought a lawsuit against the owners of Pasco, a Washington restaurant, when a waitress refused to serve Scott and her traveling companion, Mrs. Eunice Wolfe because they were Black. Scott’s unapologetic outspokenness against racial discrimination inspired African Americans and Civil Rights Organizations to pressure the state into enacting the Public Accommodations Act in 1953. At the peak of her career, she began a romantic affair with the Harlem preacher/politician Adam Clayton Powell Jr. who at the time was also making a bid for the U.S. Congress.

Scott and Clayton Powell: The Dynamic Match Made in Black America

The couple emerged from secrecy and married in August 1945. As Smithsonian Magazine wrote, "she was the grande vedette of Café Society, and he was the first Black congressman from the East Coast. 'They were stars, not only in the Black world but the white world. That was extraordinary,' commented journalist Mike Wallace at the time." The two had one son, Adam Clayton Powell III, and settled in Washington.

1950s Political Controversy: Red Scare and Scott Blacklisted by HUAC

During the United States Red Scare of communism, notable entertainers in the industry were blacklisted, including Hazel Scott. Her association with Café Society, a suspected place where communists would gather, and her civil rights efforts made her a target of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Her name appeared in Red Channels: A Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television in June 1950. She was not a member of the Communist Party nor a communist sympathizer. Therefore, in an effort to clear her name, she requested to appear voluntarily before the committee on September 22, 1950. She delivered her own prepared statement, stating that she was not a communist nor supported the Communist Party. However, she did support Benjamin J. Davis's run for City Council, arguing that he was backed by socialists, a group that actually hated communists. In her closing statement, she expressed her frustrations with the mass amount of false accusations against entertainers and performers and that they would not be "covered with the mud of slander and the filth of scandal" when proving their loyalty to the United States.

After hours of interrogative questioning, her final statement was such:            

“…may I end with one request—and that is that your committee protect those Americans who have honestly, wholesomely, and unselfishly tried to perfect this country and make the guarantees in our Constitution live. The actors, musicians, artists, composers, and all of the men and women of the arts are eager and anxious to help, to serve. Our country needs us more today than ever before. We should not be written off by the vicious slanders of little and petty men.” 

Her efforts were applauded by the entertainment and public communications industry, unlike the government, who still found her a suspicious threat. A week after her testimony, The Hazel Scott Show was canceled, and concert bookings became more and more sparse.

Around the same time, her marriage to Powell ended, and they divorced in 1960. In 1961, she married Ezio Bedin, a Swiss-Italian comedian, but they divorced a few years later.

In 1951, Scott suffered a nervous breakdown.

Starting Over: An African American in Paris

Upon returning to health, Scott found refuge performing in Europe and settled in Paris for a while with her son and a burgeoning Black community. Her apartment became a regular jam session and hangout spot for other American entertainers in Paris, like James Baldwin, Lester Young, Mary Lou Williams, Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, and Duke Ellington. While in France, she starred in Le désordre et la nuit in 1958. Her piano tunes became more relaxed and less of her old "boogie-woogie" style. In the states, she sporadically performed in Cavalcade of Stars and guest-starred on CBS's Fay Emerson's Wonderful Town musical series. During her visit to the U.S., she also recorded Relaxed Piano Moods with Charlie Mingus and Max Roach, which has been considered one of jazz's most important recordings of the twentieth century and inducted into the National Public Radio's Basic Jazz Record Library. In 1963, she marched with numerous African American expatriates, including James Baldwin, to the U.S. Embassy in Paris in support of the March on Washington during the Civil Rights Movement.

Death: Not the end but the beginning of a legacy

In 1981, Hazel Scott died of pancreatic cancer. She was only 61 years old and survived by her son, Adam Clayton Powell III. She was buried in Flushing Cemetery in Queens, New York, near other musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Johnny Hodges, and Dizzy Gillespie. Hazel Scott was a trailblazer before her time. She is a legacy in the jazz world who had dual success in classical music as well as Broadway musical theatre, and was one of the first artists to fuse jazz, boogie, and classical music. Not only was she a virtuosic piano player and brilliant musician, she was dangerously smart, multitalented, multilingual, beautiful, a star in film, television, radio, and a Civil Rights activist ahead of her time. All the while, she was one of the first African American women to accomplish all of these feats. Hazel Scott is an inspiration to artists after her, like Alicia Keys, who, at the 61st Grammy Awards, said before a performance that Hazel Scott was one of their biggest inspirations, especially after seeing Scott play two pianos simultaneously, which Keys learned to do as well. Thank you, Hazel Scott, for your impact and legacy! After 100 years, she still lives on.