American Masters: ‘The Disappearance of Miss Scott’
Streaming on PBS.org
PBS’s major offering for both Black History Month and Women’s History Month is an excellent documentary on a pianist and occasional singer and composer, Hazel Scott. It is exceptionally well-titled, “The Disappearance of Miss Scott,” with a mystery implied.
At the height of her fame, Hazel Scott (1920-81) was one of the most popular entertainers in the country — and yet, over the last 60 years or so she has become so completely forgotten that I was somewhat surprised that producer-director Nicole London was able to find about 30 people who had even heard of her to serve as “talking heads” in the film.
Scott flourished in the visual mediums, which is why she was such a big star in movies, making more of them in the mid-1940s than any other African-American performer except for Lena Horne. She was also triumphant in nightclubs, concert halls, and, eventually, television, though less so on radio and recordings.
Scott was a virtuoso player of the European classical repertoire as well as jazz and popular songs, which explains why her specialty was creating swing-style and even boogie-woogie adaptations of Chopin, Rachmaninoff, and their colleagues. In the film, a contemporary keyboardist, Jason Moran, offers a convincing argument that her playing was nothing less than extraordinary; even so, much of her surprisingly small body of recorded work seems somewhat gimmicky today, what with all that emphasis on “swinging the classics.”
Because Scott was such a visually potent performer, she makes for an especially powerful subject for a documentary, and Ms. London’s film is appropriately crammed with excellent footage of her from half a dozen major Hollywood movies, as well as numerous television appearances and miscellaneous clips.
Hazel Scott. Via PBS
One of Ms. London’s strongest moments is a dramatic account of Scott standing up to studio moguls during the production of the World War II-centric 1943 musical “The Heat’s On.” She has two numbers here; one is titled “The White Keys and the Black Keys,” and, in a commendably non-preachy way, it subtly sings the praises of racial integration. Scott is shown performing on two keyboards, one the traditional white keys with black sharps and flats, the other with black keys and white accidentals.
Her other number in the film is a swinging adaptation of a traditional military march, “The Caisson Song.” As the film’s interviewees point out, this patriotic number celebrates Black soldiers and the women who love them; Scott objected to the soiled aprons those women wore as costumes. The artist refused to film until the aprons were removed, thereby disrupting production and incurring the wrath of that most vindictive of studio heads, Harry Cohn.
The documentary contends that this rebellious action “cost her her entire movie career,” but actually both “Broadway Rhythm” (1944) and “Rhapsody in Blue” (1945) were to follow. It’s also worth noting that Scott was part of that generation of African American performers whom, like Lena Horne and Nat King Cole, were able to insist on being presented under more dignified circumstances than earlier artists such as Ethel Waters and Bill Bojangles Robinson, and were never costumed as maids, butlers, or other domestics.
Ms. London’s film presents Scott as a crusader against segregated audiences – a mission in which she was empowered by her marriage to the most notable civil rights leader of her day, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the reverend and congressman. Powell (1908-72) was a towering figure in both spiritual and political life; as the comedian Nipsey Russell famously quipped, “NAACP stands for Never Antagonize Adam Clayton Powell.”
Along with the now even more obscure pianist Bob Howard, Scott was also one of the first African Americans to host a TV show. She also defied the Joseph McCarthy-ites, though perhaps not as much as she might have.
What “The Disappearance” does not tell us is that Scott and Powell rather despicably threw one of her major benefactors, Barney Josephson, the Café Society impresario, both to the wolves and under the bus. Scott and Powell directly named him as a communist, thereby ending his career in the music business for many decades.
It’s difficult to blame them, since these were, as Lilian Helman put it, “scoundrel times,” when the only way to keep getting work was to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee. Further, Josephson was certainly a name that the committee already knew; his brother Leon was a highly aggressive Soviet agitator. Yet the Powells’ actions were hardly heroic.
“Disappearance” is marred by some rather garish computer-animated sequences, but it’s well-served by the enthusiasm and knowledge of its interviewees, from scholars like Loren Schoenberg, Mark Cantor, and Ashley Kahn to 21st century musicians like Mr. Moran and saxophonist Camille Thurman.
Hazel Scott didn’t compose jazz standards like Fats Waller, Mary Lou Williams, or Thelonious Monk; she didn’t have hit records like Nat King Cole or Billy Eckstine, or give us a huge body of recorded work to result in Mosaic Records-style boxes, like Oscar Peterson or Erroll Garner. Nonetheless, she left an indelible imprint on American culture, one that deserves to be remembered in spite of her unfortunate disappearance.
