Updated 'Jackson Street After Hours' Adds New Riffs to Seattle's Jazz History
Earlier this month, University of Washington Press published the second edition of author and jazz critic Paul de Barros' seminal Jackson Street After Hours: The Roots of Jazz in Seattle. Originally released in 1993, the book traces the roots of Seattle's jazz scene from its beginnings in the early 1910s, through its raucous peak in the '40s and '50s, and to its fizzling off during the early 1960s.
Throughout it all, de Barros brings to life important and influential figures, like club owner Russell "Noodles" Smith, pianist Ray Charles, singer Ernestine Anderson, composer and trumpeter Quincy Jones, bassist Buddy Catlett, and musician and composer Frank Waldron, with sparkling anecdotes about how Black jazz musicians and clubs thrived in Seattle despite racial segregation and Prohibition. de Barros spent years conducting oral histories and original research to craft a narrative about Seattle's jazz scene that, at the time, was under-told. This new edition features updated information and anecdotes, maps of Seattle's jazz district, and several new vintage photos.
Ahead of several speaking engagements across the city, the Emerald spoke with de Barros about the reception of the first edition, facts and stories he added, and what he hopes people can glean from this period in Seattle's history.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Jas Keimig: Jackson Street After Hours was originally published over 30 years ago. What made you want to update it now?
Paul de Barros: Oh my God, so many reasons. But one of the main reasons was that I — and so many other people — had done so much more research. There just was a ton more stuff out there. David Keller had been working on the book about the Black musicians' union, and that came out after Jackson Street. He found out all these details that I never discovered. Quintard Taylor did his history of the Central District. I had only read his Ph.D. thesis since the book wasn't out yet [when I published]. What else? Oh my God, Ashley Harrison really dug in deep on the Black & Tan, in a way that I never had. Tanya Woo discovered those murals at the Louisa Hotel in the Club Royale, which, you know, I never even knew where that place was, much less that there were murals there. Brad Holden and Pete Blecha nailed down where all the roadhouses were in a way that was really wonderfully detailed.
I went out with a whole bunch of people — like Stephanie [Johnson-Toliver] from the Black Heritage Society and [then-Earshot Jazz executive director] John Gilbreath — and we dug up all this new information doing the Jackson Street Jazz Trail, which exposed me to the actual physical buildings of places I'd been writing. I found the historic photographs, which took a long time. Plus the other thing that happened between 1993 and now is that the internet happened. So all these Black newspapers and all of these resources were all digitized now. Back in the late '80s, early '90s, I had a great assistant, a guy named Theo Dzielak. He's credited right there on the first front page of the book. He sat there at the special collections at the University of Washington for hours, days, weeks, months, combing through these newspapers on microfiche. Now you want to know something about [jazz musician and teacher] Frank Waldron? You just type in his name, and every article he's ever mentioned in pops up [online]. There was just tons of stuff to add, and then I will say, there were also mistakes in the book that I wanted to correct.
You got to see the real-life impact of your book on our historical understanding of the Jackson Street scene and Seattle jazz history. What was some of the feedback that you got?
Well, I mean, I said it mostly in the new introduction. It was really gratifying to me when people like [tenor saxophonist, trumpeter, and bandleader] Floyd Standifer and [multi-instrumentalist and bassist] Buddy Catlett would say, "Man, you got it right, and you changed everything for us." I moved to Seattle in 1979, and Floyd, Buddy, [saxophonist] Jabo Ward, and [pianist] Ernie Hatfield, they were all still playing. But most of the people I talked to didn't make the connection to those people and a rich and robust jazz past. Some musicians like Marc Seales, I think he really understood, and he gravitated to those musicians and realized they were the elders in the community. But a lot of people didn't treat them that way. They were just like, "Who are these old guys?" And when the Jackson Street book came out, it answered that question, and then people thought, "Oh, these are really our elders. This is our legacy." So I think it made me feel really good that [the book] made that connection between the past and the present, which had been sort of interrupted.
Why was there such a lack of connection or understanding between generations? Do you think that because there wasn't really — outside of Black newspapers — a greater historical recognition of it at the time, that it created this gap between some of the jazz elders and the people that came in later in the century?
I don't think so. I mean, that's definitely a factor everywhere, not just Seattle. Black newspapers were the only newspapers that you could really depend on to keep track of Black culture until the '60s. But even if all those people had been written about in local newspapers, people don't read old newspapers. … My experience of Seattle is that it experiences wave after wave of new people. In the '40s, the new people were Black people from Texas and Oklahoma, and then, you know, in the '50s, there were engineers coming to work for Boeing. When I came here in the late '70s, there was this wave of college graduates who were coming in to seek their fortune or look for their future in some way. Then that happened again in the '80s. Then it happened again with Microsoft, and happened again with Amazon. We've always been a city that has experienced just wave upon wave of newcomers, and that doesn't really help you create a sense of legacy or history.
Plus, we're a young city. We've only been around since 1851, and tradition doesn't mean anything here. It's starting to, but in new young places, especially in the West, the idea is to reinvent yourself and forget about the past. I know that's certainly true in San Francisco. Legacy and tradition aren't the kind of factors that they are in places like Boston, New York, Atlanta, or Detroit, for that matter. But if you compare Seattle to a place like Pittsburgh or Detroit, people in those cities were well aware of who their jazz greats were in the past. People kind of knew that Quincy Jones came from here, but they never heard of Dick Wilson. And they certainly hadn't honored Buddy Catlett and Floyd Standifer in the way that they should have been doing. So I don't know if I can answer that. But I was glad to be part of the remedy.
When you finally decided to crack everything back open, what were the most or some of the most important additions you wanted to make to this edition of the book?
Well, I think giving Frank Waldron a stronger place in the early history [of the scene] was really important. In the first edition I called [clarinetist and pianist] Oscar Holden the patriarch of Seattle jazz. I think with the second edition, I would at least amend that to say that he and Frank were the two patriarchs. Nobody's having a contest, but Frank Waldron's role here was so seminal. Not just that he taught Quincy and Buddy and the people in the '40s, but that he taught the very first generation to play jazz in the '20s. If Frank hadn't come here, that probably wouldn't have even happened — he was an extraordinary character.
What else? This may be minor for a lot of people, but since the first book came out, Mark Miller, great jazz writer up in Toronto, has covered the Canadian scene for decades. He discovered that there was really this hot scene in Vancouver, B.C., in 1919 when they had a prohibition too.
A lot of these cats that came through here — like Jelly Roll Morton and Bill Bowman, who owned some of the clubs — they came from Chicago to Vancouver and then down here, Oscar Holden included. He came to Canada from Chicago, and then he came down here. So that was a big one, filling out some of the early jazz people around Jelly Roll Morton, getting some of the roadhouse stuff correct and straightened out.
In 2024, we lost Quincy Jones. He was such an important figure around the world, but got his start here. In crafting the second edition, did you want to build more on his story for this new release?
One of the things I had to do was to finish everybody's story. I left everybody in 1993: Ernestine, Floyd, Quincy, and Buddy. Most of them had died, so I had to get their death dates in there. Sometimes it was difficult to find out for somebody not as famous as Quincy Jones. I still have never found a death date for Dee Dee Hackett. It's driving me crazy. I know she died in Oregon somewhere, but nobody in Oregon seems to know. Anyway, I had to flesh out the end of their careers. Luckily, with Quincy in 2008, he was invited to give the commencement speech at the University of Washington. So the [Seattle] Times asked me to do a Sunday story about him for Pacific Northwest Magazine. I went down to his house and hung out with him for an afternoon and got to catch up. So I had really caught up with Quincy up to 2012, and then I'd seen him again in Monterey because I wrote the program notes for the Monterey Jazz Festival when they featured him there a few years ago. The thing about Quincy Jones was, I mean, he was this incredibly famous guy who knew everybody in the world, but he never forgot about Seattle. He really liked Seattle, and he treasured his old friends. He would come back and hang out with Buddy. He never forgot about the city.
With this new interest in Seattle jazz history and with this new edition, what are you hoping people take away from this new version of Jackson Street After Hours?
My main hope is just that the information is out there again. That book came out 33 years ago, and it was really hard to get for about 10 or 15 years. A lot of people who've moved here since then don't know a darn thing about this history. So what I hope is that it reaches the people that it hadn't reached before. There's plenty of people who already know all about it, and they might have fun reading the new edition because there's lots of new stuff in it — quite a bit of new stuff. It's not just tweaked. It's really got a lot of new information. But for somebody who's never seen it at all, who's maybe 15 years old or 25 or 35, and came here to work at Amazon and has no idea this even happened, because there's no real visible place to pick up on that, you know. We're trying to make the jazz trail a little more visible with plaques and stuff like that, but there's no obvious reason that you would know this happened in Seattle unless somebody told you about it.
The Emerald's arts coverage is supported in part with funding from 4 Culture and the City of Seattle's Office of Arts & Culture. The Emerald maintains editorial control over its coverage.
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