Jazz Connection Magazine


ANOTHER HONOR - Songster Herb Jeffries was honored at the 2005 Sweet & Hot Music Festival	KNOCKIN' 'EM DEAD - Herb Jeffries, above, sings an invigorating set at
over Labor Day weekend with a plaque, above, on the Walk of Fame at the Los Angeles Airport	the 2005 Sweet & Hot Music Festival on Sept. 3. At vintage age 94, Jeffries'
Marriott Hotel. Jeffries is one of 56 inductees to the Walk of Fame honoring jazz artists.	baritone voice remains warm, silky and intimate.

Herb Jeffries is amazing, simply amazing. There's no other way to put it. At vintage age 94, the original "Flamingo Kid" (because of Flamingo, the hit song he recorded while as band vocalist with Duke Ellington in 1940), is like "Old Man River," who "just keeps rolling along." But he does so with his own unique savoir faire. In fact, Jeffries' warm, silky, intimate baritone voice continues to make males envious and females weak in the knees.

Jazzers who attended the Tenth Annual Sweet & Hot Music Festival over Labor Day weekend at the Los Angeles Airport Marriott Hotel were once again treated to the classy Jeffries' mystic. Jeffries, who incredibly looks and sounds like a man half his age and who gets around these days on an electric motor scooter which he affectionately calls, "My Harley," performed with a slight touch of laryngitis, but you'd never know it. We should all be stricken with such a malady.

From the bouncy Ellington opus, Satin Doll, to the cool midst flavoring of Blue Moon, to the up-beat tempo of It Don't Mean A Thing, to his closing passionate signature tune, Flamingo, Jeffries was swinging hard throughout his 50-minute late afternoon set on Saturday, Sept. 3.

Providing Jeffries with magical support were pianist Marty Harris, bassist Richard Simon, and drummer Frank DeVito. The fleet-fingered Harris was consistently dropping tasty and imaginative licks and chord changes behind the celebrated crooner. In fact, the chemistry was so tight between these four men that a performance highlight included Bye Bye, Baby, a slow blues number in B-flat that showcased Jeffries' penchant for on-the-spot lyrical improvisation and Harris' mastery of the keyboard.

"It is really a therapy for me to work with you," Jeffries said to Harris during show.

Another highlight included the introduction of Liz Lewellen, a protégé of Jeffries whose exotic beauty recalls that of songstress Alicia Keyes. After Ms. Lewellen presented a moving rendition of Lovin' That Man Of Mine, she teamed up with Jeffries for a couple of suave but soul-filled duets of Summertime and I Got It Bad. In short, the pair tore things up.

We hope to hear more from Ms. Lewellen in the future. Her voice, style and phrasing has future star written all over it. And why wouldn't it? She's been tutored by the one and only Flamingo Kid. It doesn't get any better than that.

This stint at the Sweet & Hot was particularly special for Jeffries as he was the recipient of a commemorative bronze plaque along the LAX Marriott's Walk of Fame. The permanently installed plaque is located around the hotel's garden area surrounding the pool.

The Walk of Fame, inaugurated during the first Sweet & Hot Music Festival, was created to acknowledge the contributions of jazz artists and composers responsible for an era known as "The Golden Age of Popular Music."

"Isn't this fun?," said a very grateful Jeffries in his suite at the LAX Marriott after his performance. "Here I am at 94 and for some unknown reason I'm still out here doing it. The Creator has allowed me to keep all my notes. So, I sit here saying, 'Isn't that something?' Here I am now being put on a Walk Of Fame that up until a couple of years ago, you couldn't get on it unless you were dead.. That's like a first."

In addition to Jeffries, other Walk of Fame honorees for this year include Les Brown, Red Norvo, Ira Gershwin, Charlie Parker and Bessie Smith.

Previous honorees include Fats Waller, Ella Fitzgerald, Bix Beiderbecke, Cole Porter, Lionel Hampton, Nat "King" Cole, Johnny Mercer, Glenn Miller, Jack Teagarden, Jelly Roll Morton, Count Basie, Frank Sinatra, Gene Krupa, Hoagy Carmichael, Billie Holiday, Bobby Hackett, Sidney Bechet, Bunny Berigan, Irving Berlin, Bing Crosby, Bob Haggart, Jimmie Lunceford, Artie Shaw, Richard Rogers, Buddy Rich, Wild Bill Davison, Pete Fountain, Mel Torme, Benny Carter, Coleman Hawkins, Harry James, Jerome Kern, Peggy Lee, Teddy Wilson, Earl "Fatha" Hines, Johnny Hodges, Sarah Vaughn, Woody Herman, Sammy Cahn, Rosemary Clooney, Milt Hinton, Tommy Dorsey, Scott Joplin, Lester Young, Tony Bennett and Buddy Collette.

Jeffries is a veteran of Walk of Fame honors. In 2001, he was inducted to the Downtown Newhall Walk of Western Stars in Newhall, CA, a city noted as a site for the making of early Western motion pictures. (In addition to an illustrious career as a band vocalist with Erskine Tate, Earl "Fatha" Hines, and Ellington, and as a solo recording artist, which continues today, Jeffries also owns a unique place in cinematic history as being one of the last original singing cowboys from the early days of Hollywood Westerns. He is best remembered for his role as "The Bronze Buckaroo," the hero of four all-black Westerns from the late 1930s.)

On Sept. 24 of last year, on his 93rd birthday, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce placed Jeffries' star on Hollywood's renowned Walk of Fame with great ceremony and pomp.

Other recent honors include a hiking trail and a stretch of highway named after him near his home in Idyllwild, CA, induction into the National Cowboy Hall of Fame, knighthood in Spain, and an invitation to the White House in June 2003 where he and other performers were part of a special ceremony honoring black musicians.

"It wasn't until my late 80s that writers out there made me legendary," Jeffries said about the recent renewed interest in his career. "They were calling me the legendary Herb Jeffries. Is that what I am? Legendary? That's great. As I got older, I was given other names like 'incomparable.' Wouldn't that have been wonderful if the writers said that about me when I was 50 years old? It was then when I needed it most and I had the energy to fly all over the world. Today I don't have that energy."

So does all the recent acclaim have to do more with age rather than with actual life time contributions? Jeffries thinks it does, in part.

"I think there are some people who actually come to see a phenomenon," Jeffries said. "They know there's a man in his 90's is still out there 'paying the mortgage.' They may say, 'Let's go see this old guy who is still performing. Let's go see if he's got a voice that's any where near as it was when I remember him when he was singing with Duke Ellington.' I think a lot of them come out of that curiosity. Then there are those who have heard me before and like what I do. They fill up the gaps of those who come to see me. I have bigger crowds now than I ever had at the peak of my recording career, and I had some pretty good crowds then."

But by far the most thrilling and most lasting honor Jeffries could ever have received is the recent notification by the University of Southern California to endow a proposed chair in his name at the Annenberg School of Communication.

"I'm really excited about this," Jeffries said. "What an honor! We are still working on the chair at USC but we haven't come to any total agreements on anything yet. There are certain things that I stipulated that are being worked out."

The Annenberg School of Communication at USC has agreed to create a Herb Jeffries endowed fund for Intercultural Communication. Such a chair would enable the school to bring a world-class communications scholars to teach, coordinate, and to provide a strong public voice to an area of study that derives greater attention.

"Intercultural Communication has been my whole life," Jeffries said. "I grew up in the ghettos of Detroit where we had many nationalities as well as many ethnic groups. I'm a mongrel. I have so many mixed bloods in me that I don't know where they start or where they end. I think the trouble with our world today is that we have put entirely too much emphasis on ethnicity rather than nationality. Ethnicity arrives from the epidermis more than where you came from."

The idea behind Intercultural Communication is to learn more about the cultures of each people and realize from whence they came and why their cultures are as such and to advance some purpose that can be improved upon, Jeffries said.

"I believe that we have to break down this whole thing when it comes to race," Jeffries said. "According to the Christian Bible, there's only one race - the human race. We humans are very tribal. If you say you are white or if you say you are black, that identifies what tribe you belong to. That's got to go. My success, whatever it may be or whatever one may think of it as, is that I tried to represent a people during my film days and singing career. My own background is that I'm Irish and Sicilian. My real surname was Ballantino. When I became of the age where the local Mafia came looking for you to join, my mother and I were thinking of ways I could disappear from the area.. What's the way could I disappear? One way I could disappear was to become something other than Sicilian, like Chinese or Indian. Chicago had a multitude black population, so I identified myself more with them.

"Our civilization should be far more intelligent. We can penetrate space but I'll be damned if we can get through the epidermis! We have to look at this picture and turn this world that we are living into a place of construction rather than destruction, and we'll have a much better world in which to live. I'm not saying that it will make it perfect, but it will make it a helluva lot better. And besides, who wants a garden of just one color flowers? Obviously, God didn't."

While on the subject of love, Jeffries mentioned that his newly completed autobiography, aptly titled, The Color Of Love, is due out this coming spring, he said.

"What color is God? God is the color of love," Jeffries said. "God was a man, as we most commonly call him. I have the audacity to call him 'Boss' because if He loves a hundred billion times more than we do, than he also laughs. He has a great sense of humor. I believe that I love all colors. I don't want a garden of one color of flowers. I want a garden of all colors. I think that was God's original idea when He put us down here."

The book is not a kiss-and-tell saga of the Eddie Fisher variety, but rather, a collection of memoirs, Jeffries said.

"It tells of a poor child who came out of the ghetto during the Depression and about people who saw something in me," Jeffries said. "Each time I was lifted a little bit more. I had a desire to be in a better status that they gave me. My stories are about some of those people. Then I tell true stories that were not found in the press. At my vintage right now, I can tell the truth because at 94. What are they going to do? Kill my career?"

One such story Jeffries tells is about former minister and United States Congressman (served from 1945-1967), Adam Clayton Powell, and his fight against racial discrimination in the U.S. government.

"I was living in France after the war and I was doing shows for the servicemen over there. I did a lot of benefits for servicemen in the hospitals. There was a lot of discrimination going on in Europe by our government. Congressman Adam Clayton Powell was requested not to sit and eat in the government commissary. When I was in France, he asked me to help him. He told me that his phone was bugged and that every time he went to go any place to clean up discrimination, the powers that be knew about it ahead of time and by the time he'd get to any place, everything would be covered up.

"When Adam Clayton Powell became a congressmen, Speaker of The House Sam Rayburn, who was very discriminatory, almost to the point of being a bigot, told all the freshmen Congressmen that they should be seen and not heard until they get more experienced as to what Congress is all about. He singled out Adam Clayton Powell claiming that he came to Washington with a 'bomb in each hand.' He warned Powell not to throw them. Powell responded, 'Mr. Speaker, I admire your wisdom and credibility. I respect it. Your are so right. I do have a bomb in each hand. A bomb of Intellect. A bomb of Knowledge. I'm going to throw them the first opportunity I get. ' Adam Clayton Powell helped to integrate the military service."

Also in his book, Jeffries writes about the epiphany he received while recovering from a near-fatal plane crash in 1948, his spiritual development, his past marriages, his admiration for Duke Ellington, and his career in music, among other things.

"I hope people who pick up the book may find things in it that may be of some advantage to them in their walk," Jeffries said.

Herb Jeffries on his "Harley" Herb Jeffries Herb Jeffries Herb Jeffries and Liz Lewellen