Hazel Scott

At 61 years old, Hazel Scott has this physical status:

Hazel Dorothy Scott (June 11, 1920 – October 2, 1981) was a Trinidadian-born jazz and classical pianist, guitarist, and actor.

She was a popular and well-known performing artist from the 1930s to her death, and she appeared in numerous films.

Hazel was taken by her mother to New York City at the age of four as an outspoken critic of racial discrimination and segregation.

Scott was given scholarships from the age of eight to study at the Juilliard School, early as a musical prodigy.

She started playing in a jazz band in her youth and was on radio at age 16. During the 1930s and 1940s, she was well known as a jazz singer.

In 1950, she became the first black American to host her own television show, The Hazel Scott Show.

Her career in America slowed after she testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee during the McCarthy period.

Scott then migrated to Paris in the late 1950s and began to perform in Europe, not returning to the United States until 1967.

Early life

Hazel Dorothy Scott, the sole child of R. Thomas Scott, a West African scholar from Liverpool, England, and Alma Long Scott, a classically trained pianist and music tutor, was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, on June 11, 1920. The family migrated from Trinidad to the United States in 1924 and settled in Harlem, New York City. By this time, her parents had divorced, and Scott lived with her mother and grandmother.

Scott could now play whatever she likes on the piano. She developed advanced piano techniques and was branded a child prodigy thanks to her mother's care and instruction. Professor Paul Wagner of the Juilliard School of Music accepted her as his own pupil a few years ago when Scott was eight years old. Alma Long Scott's All-Girl Jazz Band, which Scott played the piano and trumpet in 1933, was her mother's group in Alma Long Scott's All-Girl Jazz Band, where she performed the piano and trumpet.

Personal life

Though a Catholic, Scott married Baptist minister and US congressman Adam Clayton Powell in 1945. Adam Clayton Powell III, the couple's first child, but after a divorce in 1960, they separated in 1960. Powell's marriage reignited controversies, since the couple's affair began when they were married. Powell married his secretary at the end of 1960.

Scott married Ezio Bedin, a Swiss-Italian comedian who was 15 years old at the time, on January 19, 1961; the couple divorced a few years later before returning to the United States.

Scott was also a member of the Bahá Faith. Vic Damone's career began in late 1968, and she was a visitor at Vic Damone's debut. She was welcomed by Damone to the audience by recalling that he was a usher for her performance. This may have been Scott and others at the Paramount Theatre in November 1942. In 1968, Damone told the audience that she had just recently been at a Bahá's fireside, an informational meeting of the faith, at his house, and had joined the faith – Scott was moved and in tears. Following heartfelt conversations with Dizzy Gillespie, she joined the faith. Scott performed at a New York award dinner in October 1970, a bleak Christmas for Little Love in Your Heart, a recipient of the US National Spiritual Assembly's Daniel Jordan. Whitney Young, Executive Director of the National Urban League, who was speaking at the event, praised her singing. As part of a ship-and-shore conference of Bahá's, a musical called "The Sounds of a New World" was held in Kingston, Jamaica, co-presented by Scott with Dizzy Gillespie, Seals and Crofts, Linda Marshall and others.

Hazel Scott, a doctor from Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, died of cancer on October 2, 1981. She was 61 years old and survived by her son Adam Clayton Powell III. Louis Armstrong, Johnny Hodges, and Dizzy Gillespie (who died in 1993) are among the many singers buried at Flushing Cemetery in Queens, New York, including Louis Armstrong, Johnny Hodges, and Dizzy Gillespie (who died in 1993).

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Career

Hazel Scott began appearing on radio programs for the Mutual Broadcasting System as a "hot classicist" by age 16. She appeared with the Count Basie Orchestra at the Roseland Dance Hall in the mid-1930s. The Cotton Club Revue of 1938, Sing Out the News and Priorities of 1942 were among her early musical theatre appearances in New York.

Scott performed jazz, blues, ballads, Broadway, and boogie-woogie songs in many nightclubs throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Artists of all races and ethnicities were able to perform at both the downtown and uptown Café Society branches from 1939 to 1943, thanks to Barney Josephson's vision to create a platform for artists of all races and ethnicities. Her appearances earned national attention for the art of "swinging the classics." Scott was earning $75,000 ($1,128,882 today) per year by 1945.

Scott was one of the first black women to be recognized in major Hollywood films, as Lena Horne. She refused to be cast in Hollywood as a "singing maid" and she turned down the first four roles she was given for this reason. She maintained that she had final cut privileges when it came to her appearances when she first began acting in Hollywood films. In the otherwise all-white cast of The Heat's On (MGM, 1943), she appeared in the films I Dood It (MGM, 1944), Broadway Rhythm (MGM, 1944) (Columbia, 1943) and Rhapsody in Blue (Warner Bros, 1945). She appeared in five Hollywood films in total, always insisting on the credit line "Miss Hazel Scott as Herself" and wearing her own clothes and jewelry to protect her image. "A costume in which she felt stereotyped blacks" was her last break with Columbia Pictures' Harry Cohn. In the 1940s, she appeared in Café Society's From Bach to Boogie-Woogie concerts in 1941 and 1943 at Carnegie Hall, in addition to her film appearances.

The Hazel Scott Show, the first person of African descent to have their own television show in America, premiered on the DuMont Television Network on July 3, 1950. "Hazel Scott has a nice little show in this modest box," according to Variety, its "most engaging part" being Scott herself. The show became so popular that it had to repeat three times a week. On the show, Scott performed with jazz musicians Charles Mingus and Max Roach, who were among the supporting cast members.

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