Jazz promoter to share her musical legacy

Lorraine Gordon, impresario of the most famous jazz club in the world, will visit Charleston soon, set to talk about her adventures with a famous musician from the Jenkins Orphanage.

Gordon will deliver the keynote address at a symposium Friday put on by the Charleston Jazz Initiative, a research project looking into the history and legacy of area jazz players.

She's the ultimate jazz fan, and one of her favorites is the late Claddys "Jabbo" Smith, a trumpeter born in Pembroke, Ga., who learned his craft during his early 20th-century stay at the famed Jenkins Orphanage, a Charleston institution founded in 1891 to aid destitute children. Music was one field of study offered there, and its program went on to produce many highly acclaimed players, including Smith (1908-91).

Gordon met Smith in the 1940s, thrilled, she said, about meeting one of her favorite artists. Like most jazz fans of that time, she was an avid record collector. She talks to anyone who will listen about Smith, his abilities and his significance in the history of jazz.

Wynton Marsalis, the famed trumpeter from New Orleans and artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, is a friend of Gordon's. He said in a telephone conversation earlier this year that he and Gordon have had many talks about Smith.

"I knew Jabbo," Marsalis said. "He was one of the greatest." After a question about Gordon, he laughed, then said, "Man, she loves some Jabbo. That's all she wants to talk about, Jabbo, Jabbo."

In the back of her New York club, the Village Vanguard, in January, Gordon regaled CJI principals Dr. Karen Chandler and Tony Bell with story after amazing story about Smith, jazz, American history and any number of other subjects, including Marsalis.

They had trod down the 15 steps of the venerable New York City basement club, center of the known jazz world, to invite Gordon to Charleston.

"He played here one time and I got him to play Jabbo's euphonium," she said of Marsalis. "I wish they would do a special program at Lincoln Center on Jabbo. They do things on all these other musicians, some of them who didn't play all that well, so why not Jabbo?" A master conversationalist, Gordon, now in her 80s, is known around the jazz world for her wit, determination and sense of purpose. She's also known to have the strength of her convictions, holding her ground against anyone.

She took over the Vanguard, as it is affectionately called by fans around the world, upon the death in 1989 of her husband, Max Gordon, who started the jazz shrine six decades ago. Ben Ratliff of the New York Times wrote last June that Gordon "runs the place with soul and integrity." She improvises. Her great sense of humor is glib, witty and sometimes biting.

"The club is wonderful," she said in a recent interview. "It's just zooming along. Last night I stayed to hear (pianist) Renee Rosnes. It was beautiful. I don't enjoy everything I hear, but this was quite lovely. The place was swinging."

Gordon was last in Charleston in 1987 when she accompanied Smith to be honored at the MOJA Arts Festival.

She just released a memoir, "Alive at the Village Vanguard: My Life In and Out of Jazz Time." Since the 1940s, Gordon has personally known all the greats of the jazz world. The book includes Eartha Kitt, Lenny Bruce, Aretha Franklin, Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, Thelonious Monk, Louis Armstrong, Nina Simone, Oscar Peterson, Allen Ginsburg, Andy Warhol, Harry Belafonte, Barbra Streisand, Carol Burnett, Pete Seeger, Leonard Bernstein, Woody Allen, Maya Angelou, Jonathan Winters and more.

She will sign books at the CJI symposium Friday.