The Producer

1
THE BASEMENT ON EAST NINETY-FIRST STREET
In a home fit for a king, John Henry Hammond, Jr., found sanctuary in the basement with the servants. It was always warm and cozy down there, and the servants, usually so stiff and formal upstairs, laughed and joked with the boy when he came downstairs to visit them. But, as Hammond would recall, both in his memoirs and in countless interviews, the main attraction, the thing that drew him downstairs again and again, was the music. The year was 1918, and among the songs the seven-year-old boy heard on the servants' battered old Grafonola was Sir Harry Lauder's raucous "Roamin' in the Gloamin'." It became his favorite song, and he learned every word. "Music, especially music on records, entered my life early to become the catalyst for all that was to happen to me," he wrote many years later. "In the grooves of those primitive early discs I found in my house, I discovered a new world, one I could enter easily and as often as I pleased simply by winding the handle of a phonograph."
It wasn't as if the rest of the family disliked music. To the contrary, music was a constant presence throughout the house. It was just that Hammond didn't like the music the rest of the family was listening to. On the upper floors of the Hammonds' majestic five-story mansion just off Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, the boy's mother, father, and four older sisters listened to the great opera tenor Enrico Caruso, as well as to standard classics by Beethoven, Brahms, and Mozart. The music wafted like a soothing breeze up and down marble staircases and in and out of oak-paneled rooms. A brand-new Victrola record player, the latest advancement in early-twentieth-century audio technology, ensured the highest-quality sound. It was enough to make the boy more than a little sleepy.
Down in the basement, the mood was decidedly more upbeat. According to Hammond's sister Rachel Breck, John was often found perched on a chair in the corner of the servants' quarters, his feet dangling well above the ground, one toe tapping instinctively to the bouncy rhythms of the early blues and jazz records favored by the mostly black household staff. Hammond himself would often recall his fascination with the servants' emotional response to the music, which ranged from laughter to tears, or perhaps an impromptu dance. It was, he said, his first exposure to the visceral power that popular music could wield.
When John Hammond, Jr., was born on December 15, 1910, the Hammond family lived in one of the more spectacular private homes in Manhattan. The Hammonds—John; his mother, Emily; his father, John senior; and four older sisters (Rachel was three years older, Alice five years older, Adele seven years older, and Emily nine years older)—resided at 9 East Ninety-first Street in a limestone mansion located a half block to the east of Central Park between Fifth and Madison avenues, an area that remains to this day one of the most exclusive in the world. Mrs. Hammond's sister, Florence Adele Sloane Burden, lived with her family in equally grand accommodations next door. The girls had received matching mansions as wedding presents. John Hammond's cousin Frederick Field, who grew up in a Vanderbilt-funded mansion on Fifth Avenue a few blocks south, would later note acidly that the Hammond and Burden homes "boasted an elegant feature which our house lacked: a drive-in entrance so that you could walk into the house from your coach or automobile without exposure to the stares of the less privileged."
The Hammond mansion was designed to re-create the ambience of a European chateau. No extravagance was overlooked: eighteenfoot ceilings and marble stairways, paneled walls and gilded moldings, rooms furnished with heavy damask curtains, crystal chandeliers, tapestries, and Oriental rugs. A suite of reception rooms on the second floor included a library, a ballroom, and a music room that could hold as many as three hundred guests. The suite was often filled to capacity with Mrs. Hammond's society friends, who came to hear duets performed by John on violin and his mother on piano. Elevators were located in the front and rear of the home, but the children were cautioned to use them sparingly. John Hammond, Sr., issued frequent reminders that each ride cost twenty-five cents in electricity.
The museum-like surroundings were more than a little oppressive. "You had to have a sense of humor about it while growing up in these luxurious surroundings or else you could go a little crazy," said Rachel Breck. The home also included a regulation-size squash court on the fourth floor with a balcony for spectators and a locker room where players could change into their athletic togs. Instead of squash, the Hammond sisters used it for roller-skating and as an impromptu art gallery after an afternoon of painting.
Because the home was a gift from his wealthy in-laws, John Hammond, Sr., always considered the mansion something of an embarrassment. "It was one more reminder that he was married to a wealthy woman and expected to live in a house he could never have afforded to buy himself," John Hammond, Jr., observed many years after his father's death. While the father may have had little say over his family's living arrangements, or even the furnishings of their house, he was determined to raise his children how he saw fit. And he was adamant that his brood not fall into the vicious cycle of idleness and extravagance that sent a handful of his Vanderbilt in-laws into early graves.
A principled and hardworking man, John senior dedicated himself both to his family and to helping maintain the Vanderbilt fortune in his various roles as banker, lawyer, and railroad executive. One of six children, he was born in 1870 in Louisville, Kentucky, to a Civil War hero. After the war, the family moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, where General Hammond became a land speculator. As a teenager, John Hammond, Sr., won scholarships to Phillips Exeter Academy, then to Yale, where as a sophomore in 1889 he learned that his father had died unexpectedly. Despite his being the younger of the two Hammond sons by about a year, John senior took on the role of head of the family even as he earned a law degree from Columbia University.
Family pictures taken when he was in his mid- to late thirties reveal a handsome man just under six feet with a bit of a paunch and light brown hair that gradually receded into baldness. As a respected lawyer and executive, John senior rose each morning, took a carriage down Fifth Avenue to his law offices in lower Manhattan, and stopped most nights on the way home for a cocktail—a man apparently comfortable in his role as a Gilded Age captain of industry.




In the summer of 1919, when John Hammond, Jr., was eight, the family boarded a private railroad car in New York and headed west. John's father had been asked by the board of the New York Central, the huge railroad founded by Cornelius Vanderbilt, which he served as a director, to determine whether the company needed a spur across the northern region of the Grand Canyon. Determined that his children should share in the experiences common to children outside the family's rarified circles, John senior brought the whole family along, ostensibly to expose them to the hardships of Western travel.
"Hardship" is a relative term, of course. The Hammonds' private car included lavishly upholstered living quarters and a huge master bedroom for the mother and father. The first stop west of Chicago was St. Louis, where a handful of railroad executives and their wives, all of them dressed in their summer finest, anxiously waited for the wealthy family from New York. Rachel Breck, who was twelve at the time, recalled the thermometer hitting 112 degrees that day. "The only way to cool off the car was to open all the windows," she remembered. "But that allowed in all the soot and dust from outside, and the family all wound up hot and filthy." The crowd gasped when the Hammonds stepped off the train looking as if they'd ridden the last hundred miles on horseback.
From St. Louis, the family continued west across the Great Plains and into Utah, where they swam in the Great Salt Lake, then headed into the picturesque desert just north of the Grand Canyon. Since the area was federal land that had only recently been opened to the public, there were no lodging facilities available, requiring the family to sleep on cots inside Army tents. The children all responded with gusto except for John, who remained aloof throughout the trip, expressing no interest in roughing it like the cowboys of lore. In his autobiography, he wrote that the only part of the trip that had any lasting impact on him occurred during a stop in the southern Utah mining town of Kanab. One Sunday morning, as Mrs. Hammond was reading a Sunday-school lesson to the girls, the boy discovered a player piano at the inn where the family was staying. Incredibly, the piano somehow emulated the sound of a banjo. "I ran to the piano to find out how this was done and discovered that the instrument had been manufactured by Wing & Son of New York," he later recalled. "I took off the front panel and there was a row of little jangles which the piano hammers struck when the middle pedal was depressed. I thought that piano was the most intriguing instrument I had ever heard."
The trip further exposed a growing rift in the household. The father and his daughters seemed tolerant of life's foibles, more willing to let go and have a little fun than the mother and son. "I was very much like my father," Rachel Breck recalled. "I love peace and quiet and I hate arguments and fights. John lived to be a critic of every kind. Even when he was tiny, he would go to church with Mother, who was very religious and very intense, and he would say when, literally, he was about four or five, ‘Mother, how can you take me to a church where the first soprano was singing off-key?'"
In his autobiography, Hammond recalled an uneasy distance between him and his father and cited the forty-year difference in age as the primary cause. His sisters believed the emotional chasm had everything to do with their brother's strong artistic inclinations. The elder Hammond was an eminently practical man; his son was almost defiantly impractical.
The boy's love of "race" or "popular" music set him apart from his sisters from an early age, and his mother encouraged his curiosity, initiating violin lessons well before Hammond reached his teens. His sister Rachel recalled playing with the other wealthy children who lived in the neighborhood, sometimes tossing balls from rooftop to rooftop. Her little brother usually went off on his own, absorbed in his music, usually the blues and jazz he was hearing in the basement. "My sisters and I always said that John grew up in a different house than we did. He saw the house from such a different point of view than all of us. It was extraordinary. We wouldn't have known that we grew up in the same place."
Musical curiosity turned to passion, and passion soon bordered on obsession, a predicament that sometimes led to conflicts between the children. There was the time the boy's collection of piano rolls disappeared while he was away at camp, for example. Hammond, an avid collector before he reached his teens, also began collecting the piano rolls that were inserted into a player piano located on the fourth floor of the family home. According to Hammond's version of the story, he spent the summer of 1921, when he was ten years old, at the Lone Pine Camp in the woods of New England. Left behind in Manhattan was an "irreplaceable" collection of piano rolls by such keyboard luminaries as Lem Fowler, James P. Johnson, and Fats Waller. When Hammond returned from camp at the end of the summer, he was horrified to learn that his sister Rachel had given the rolls away to the Salvation Army. "It broke my heart, but she just didn't appreciate their value. She understood her strange little brother no better than her sisters," he recounted. Eight decades later, Rachel Breck disputed her brother's version of the story. As she tells it, the fire department arrived for an inspection one day while her brother was away. The inspector told Mrs. Hammond that the stacks of loose piano rolls created a fire hazard and something needed to be done. Mrs. Hammond solved the problem by giving the rolls away to charity.
None of the Hammond sisters was musically inclined, and their father was tone-deaf. Emily Hammond and her son, meanwhile, were passionate about music.
Hammond also inherited from his mother a blunt sense of self-righteousness. When he thought he was right, nothing could persuade him otherwise. And, like any passionate crusader, he came to think that if you weren't with him you were against him. Emily Hammond and her son "lived on another plane," according to Rachel Breck. "They were gifted in their own way, and they were privileged in their own way, and because they could afford to be their own person, I believe, maybe they didn't see the world as realistically as perhaps it is."
Emily Vanderbilt Sloane Hammond was the great-granddaughter of Commodore Vanderbilt, who at his death in 1877 was by far the richest man on earth. Emily's mother was Emily Thorn Vanderbilt, the daughter of the Commodore's oldest son and primary heir, William Henry Vanderbilt. Notwithstanding the Commodore's penchant for referring to him as a "blatherskite," William, or Billy as he was known, doubled his family's fortune in the ten years after his father's death. But if Emily Sloane ever feared that her Vanderbilt inheritance wasn't enough to sustain the lifestyle to which she was accustomed, she could always tap into the fortunes of her father's family. William Douglas Sloane, John Hammond's maternal grandfather, had earned the right to marry a Vanderbilt girl by being born into the family that founded the upscale W. & J. Sloane carpet and furniture retail chain, furnisher of many of New York's most luxurious Gilded Age mansions.
Like most rich families of that era, the Hammonds split their time between the city and a country home in Westchester County about thirty miles north of New York City. The property was a working farm with barns for dozens of Guernsey cows, as well as poultry houses for chickens and several acres for vegetable gardens. But John, who suffered from severe allergies, was a city child from his earliest days and was always happiest on the tiny bustling island of Manhattan. There were no antihistamines in those days, and allergy sufferers did just that—suffered. So instead of joining the family in tennis, track and field, and swimming, he hid away in his room on the top floor of the huge home listening to records on his private Grafonola, even in winter when the room was unheated.




By the time Emily Sloane married John Hammond, Sr., on April 7, 1899, at the age of twenty-four, she was already a "prodigious woman … considered odd by her friends, terribly earnest and undaunted by any challenge," as her son would later describe her. "When she wanted to do something, she did it even though it was often difficult and sometimes strongly resented." Growing up, Emily shunned the debutante balls and endless society gatherings that permeated the lives of her girlfriends. Emily's idea of a good time was playing the piano at Sunday school. Family members recall how in Lenox, at the Vanderbilts' country home in western Massachusetts, the teenage Emily would haul herself up onto a stump in the woods and preach sermons to her brothers and sisters.
Emily Hammond's faith was always a driving force in her life, and members of her family were prominent among the upper crust of Protestant clergy in New York City. Her first cousin Henry Sloane Coffin gained a reputation as a forceful speaker and an eloquent writer while leading the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church from 1905 to 1926. He later served for twenty years as president of the Union Theological Seminary, a repository for distinguished liberal theologians, where he fought for improved educational opportunities for immigrants and equal rights for women and blacks. Coffin was eventually elected moderator of the General Assembly, the highest position within the American Presbyterian Church.
In stark contrast to many of her Vanderbilt relatives, who attended church each week in their Sunday finest, Emily was fiery, not ostentatious, in her religious practice. "We prayed every morning on our knees as a family to make the world a better place," one of her daughters recalled. Religion offered Emily an opportunity to assuage her apparent guilt at being arbitrarily born into such wealth and splendor while just a few blocks away the poor and unwashed masses lived in squalor.
Emily Hammond wasn't the first Vanderbilt woman to channel her prodigious energy into social reform. One of her role models was her aunt Alva Vanderbilt, who, after growing bored in her role as undisputed queen of New York and Newport society, became a powerful force behind the woman suffrage movement. Alva married Willie Vanderbilt, one of the Commodore's much-sought-after grandchildren, in 1875, but later divorced him when she got word of his philandering. Not one to live out her days as a rich, lonely martyr, she was well into her fifties when she found her true calling—that of social reformer. Unlike her aunt Alva, however, Emily never became politically active. Instead, she preferred personal crusades against smoking and drinking alcohol, a cause of constant conflict in the family.
Hammond believed his mother accepted the social and racial conventions of her era because her sheltered life essentially isolated her from reality. "Racial minorities were beyond her reach," he wrote. "Blacks were porters and laundresses. The poor existed and were to be helped, yet even the dispensation of charity must begin, if not at home, within the circumference of familiar territory." Consequently, Emily was comfortable establishing a home for young white Christian girls who had come to New York to perform in the theater. But she gave no thought to helping to eradicate teenage pregnancies or to addressing any of the myriad other social ills that plagued the immigrant tenements a few blocks to the east on Second Avenue.
While her only son's religious fervor largely faded as he grew older, Emily's faith never wavered, and her energies found a number of different outlets over the years. When five-year-old Rachel came down with a bad ear infection, Emily, on the advice of a friend, turned to Christian Science, which advocates prayer in lieu of medical treatment. Miraculously, Rachel got better, and Emily immediately started attending Christian Science meetings, and to the dismay of some family members she took her young son with her. She would remain a practitioner of Christian Science well into her old age, shifting allegiances only after her husband died in 1949.
Hammond's affiliation with this unconventional religion pushed him even further away from his classmates, who thought it odd that he had not been vaccinated against the common illnesses of the day and that he, sneezing and coughing in the dead of winter and clearly in the throes of a bad cold, prayed to God for a swift recovery.
One of the few things about Christian Science meetings that Hammond enjoyed was the movement's singers—one in particular, a black woman named Nevada Vanderveer, whom he heard in a church on West Ninety-sixth Street. Something else he took away from the Christian Science movement was the way in which followers believed in their ability to determine their own fates. He would later claim to find that aspect of Christian Science distasteful, but anyone who knew him in his adult years recognized right away that here was a man who believed wholeheartedly that he could determine not only his own fate but also the fates of those he sought to help. It was a personality trait not everyone found attractive.
Hammond spent his early teens absorbing the doctrines of several branches of Protestantism while circulating between Henry Sloane Coffin's Presbyterian services, his grandmother's Episcopal services, and his mother's Christian Science services. Although he eventually drifted away from organized religion, he always remained aware of the powerful influence his mother held over him as a child, and he summed up his early years as follows:

Until I went away to school I lived the life of a coddled little rich boy, tolerant like my mother of weaknesses and sins in others, intolerant of any fall from grace in myself, ignorant as Mother was of the world beyond our island of social and financial equals, except to realize that there were people out there who were not like us. I shared her religious fervor, her prejudices, and her saintly resolve to set an example for others, then to forgive them when they failed to measure up to it. Like her, I was already the reformer, fired with her energy, certain in the right, oblivious to physical infirmities which all right-minded flesh could overcome, an inheritor of the guilt and therefore the obligations of wealth.

In the early 1920s, as Hammond was approaching his teens and around the same time he was embarking on a spiritual search, he began explorations of a more secular nature. Not yet out of grade school, he started making his first excursions into Harlem. "The house [on East Ninety-first Street] was so big the family never knew whether I was in or not and I used to sneak out of school and either walk or take the trolley to the middle of Harlem and just roam around and look at the theaters and everything," he once said. "I was too young to go to a nightclub or anything. I didn't smoke and I didn't drink and I was a complete boyscout. But I got to meet musicians. They used to look at me and think I was crazy—white kids weren't supposed to like music like that."
Consider the image: a boy not more than ten or eleven standing on the corner of Madison Avenue and Ninety-sixth Street. He was wearing a pair of thick corduroy shorts, knee-high blue socks, black patent leather shoes, and a blue blazer with matching cap, both emblazoned with the ornate insignia of St. Bernard's School. He was smaller than his classmates, and when they walked past going to Central Park, the boy studiously avoided eye contact. When they asked him to join them, he always declined. His disdain for childish pursuits caused them to regard him as a serious, solitary child. How could they think otherwise? After all, the boy had once written "Harding for President" on the blackboard, and he was fond of quoting from the Bible.
John Hammond peered down Madison Avenue and saw the uptown bus approaching. He stole a glance in both directions to make sure there were no teachers or other nosy adults watching, then jumped aboard and dropped a nickel in the fare box.
Recalling these memories years later in a radio interview, Hammond clearly relished describing his own extraordinary sense of adventure.
The bus headed north along Madison Avenue, lined at the time on either side by dingy tenements filled with refugees from unpronounceable places across Eastern Europe or from the overcrowded slums of the Lower East Side. The neighborhood was only a few blocks from East Ninety-first Street, but it may as well have been separated by an ocean. Somewhere north of 120th Street the faces turned from white to brown. When the bus pulled to the curb at 135th Street, the boy could hardly contain his excitement. He climbed down onto the sidewalk—and all around him was Harlem.
This was the Harlem that would inspire Carl Van Vechten's bestselling novel Nigger Heaven, the Harlem of W.E.B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes, and, most important to a young music lover, the Harlem of the conductor James Reese Europe, the cornet player Johnny Dunn, the singer Mamie Smith, and the songwriter Noble Sissle, each of them early and influential practitioners of the romping new music known as jazz who would soon be joined in Harlem by Louis Armstrong, Fletcher Henderson, and Duke Ellington. This was the Harlem that set young John Hammond's heart racing.




Harlem was first settled by Dutch farmers in the mid-seventeenth century and remained sparsely populated up through the American Revolution. Located about ten miles north of the village of New Amsterdam at the southern tip of Manhattan, Nieuw Haarlem could be reached via an Indian trail that veered slightly to the west as travelers headed north from Wall Street. Large sections of the trail were used to establish the path of what would later become Broadway. The completion in the 1830s of the Harlem Railroad, which connected upper and lower Manhattan, was the first catalyst for rapid development. Another boost came in the 1880s, when construction of the elevated railroads along Second, Third, Eighth, and Ninth avenues was completed. For a brief period in the late nineteenth century, Harlem was one of the most fashionable neighborhoods in the city. German immigrants arrived and built the brownstone homes that remain one of Harlem's defining characteristics.
By the start of the twentieth century, many blacks had discovered that Harlem offered an opportunity to escape the violence and discrimination they encountered downtown. Real estate agents who were looking to fill the apartment buildings that had risen along Lenox Avenue north of 110th Street proved surprisingly color-blind. They sought only to find tenants who could afford the rents, a factor that helped create in Harlem a core community of middle-class African-Americans. Still, the neighborhood remained populated predominantly by Eastern European Jews until World War I, when overcrowded conditions led to an exodus to newly developing neighborhoods in the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn. At that point blacks replaced the Jews en masse. During the 1920s the black population of Harlem more than doubled from 80,000 to about 200,000. Many of the newcomers arrived from the South, former sharecroppers in search of jobs and a place where they could act as they pleased.
Nigger Heaven, published in 1926, caught the mood and atmosphere that attracted so many blacks:

It was the hour when promenading was popular—about eleven o'clock in the evening. The air was warm, balmy for June, and not too humid. Over the broad avenue, up and down which multi-hued taxicabs rolled, hung a canopy of indigo sky, spangled with bright stars. The shops, still open, were brilliantly illuminated. Slouching under the protecting walls of the buildings, in front of show-windows, or under the trees, groups of young men congregated, chattering and laughing. Women, in pairs, or with male escorts, strolled up and down the ample sidewalk.

Van Vechten described middle-class blacks in his novel, and they were reveling in a neighborhood that allowed blacks a sense of opportunity and freedom of expression heretofore unknown in America. The Harlem Renaissance was in full swing.




Starting on 135th Street near Lenox Avenue, Hammond would pass in front of the Lincoln Theater. Too timid to buy a ticket or to sneak inside, he would huddle near the door, unnoticed since he barely reached the waists of most of the theater's patrons. Heading west along 135th Street, he would drift in and out of music stores, spending his small allowance on the jazz and blues records that had become his obsession. Shortly he would come to the upper reaches of Seventh Avenue, home to several other large theaters that catered primarily to black patrons. Turning south on Harlem's version of Broadway, the boy would pass the massive Lafayette Theater at 132nd Street. Right next door was Connie's Inn, an elegant basement club where white gangsters mingled with the city's top black entertainers. Bending over into the stairway entrance to get a closer look, Hammond saw only his own reflection in the mirrors and polished brass. Everything else was darkness and smoke, and his imagination was fired.
Hammond didn't know it at the time, but he had reached "The Corner," the intersection of 131st Street and Seventh Avenue, or quite simply the vortex of all that was happening in Harlem. At 126th Street the boy would pass in front of the Alhambra Theater, where in 1927 he would hear the blues singer Bessie Smith for the first time. Turning east on 125th Street, Hammond would soon find himself in front of the Apollo Theater, whose doorman, a kind young black guy who admired the boy's sense of adventure, began to keep an eye out for him and, according to Hammond's sister, made sure he got back downtown on the right bus.
It turns out John Hammond wasn't the only jazz hound checking out Harlem for the first time in the early and mid-1920s. In fact, most of the top musicians at this time were beginning to make their way east from Chicago to New York, where the clubs paid better and the music, like the city, seemed a little more adventurous.
Jazz's journey to New York began early in the twentieth century in New Orleans, where men such as Jelly Roll Morton, Freddie Keppard, King Oliver, Kid Ory, Zutty Singleton, Johnny Dodds, and eventually Louis Armstrong turned traditional marching-band music on its ear. One of the first legends to emerge from this period recalls how in 1916 Keppard and his Original Creole Band rejected an offer to record their down-and-dirty songs. Keppard was said to be afraid that other musicians would steal his style. His reluctance proved significant: it meant that the first jazz recordings weren't made by a black band. A year later, a group of white musicians called the Original Dixieland Jazz Band made a series of records that caused a sensation and are now considered the earliest recorded jazz music.
By the early 1920s, the scene had shifted to the South Side of Chicago, where discrimination was less of an issue than in New Orleans. It was in Chicago in 1925 that Armstrong put together an all-star lineup to record his classic Hot Fives and Hot Sevens records, now regarded as perhaps the finest jazz recordings ever made. The crowds at Chicago's jazz clubs included a group of white teenagers, several of whom attended the same high school, Austin High, on the city's West Side. Among this group there were the future musicians Frank Teschemacher, Bud Freeman, Jimmy McPartland, and a bespectacled young whiz on the clarinet named Benny Goodman.
But by the end of the decade—an era later dubbed the Jazz Age—Harlem was the place to be. The clarinetist Mezz Mezzrow (best remembered for turning Louis Armstrong on to marijuana) recalled:

Just on Seventh Avenue alone, going north from 131st Street, the line-up was: a barbershop, a drugstore, the Performers and Entertainers Club and under it Connie's Inn, then the Lafayette Theatre, then a candy store, the Hoofers' Club down in the basement, and finally Big John's famous ginmill. Around on 132nd Street were Tabb's Restaurant, and next to it the Rhythm Club, where you could call any hour of the day and night and hire a musician. And back on 131st Street, soon as you turned into it, you found a fine rib joint called the Barbecue, the entrance to a gang of upstairs halls where top bands like Armstrong's and Count Basie's and Jimmy Lunceford's and Cab Calloway's and Erskine Hawkins' used to rehearse, and a speakeasy and night club called the Bandbox. Most important of all, there was an areaway running all around the corner building there, a wide alley with entrances from both Seventh Avenue and 131st Street. This alley led to the Lafayette's backstage entrance and also to a special bar in the rear of the Bandbox, and here it was that most of our social life was spent … [A]ll the cats from the show[s] would come out in the alley and mingle with the other great performers of Harlem who were appearing at the Lafayette, and they would be joined by visitors from all over, including a lot of white musicians.

And at least one nonmusician—a tall, skinny white kid, always impeccably dressed in a Brooks Brothers sport coat, button-down oxford shirt and tie, and well-pressed khaki slacks. In interviews after he became well known, he liked to contrast his youthful appearance with those of the musicians he was meeting. His prep-school manners, he said, cut an incongruous figure, to say the least, in Harlem nightlife. Nevertheless, sipping lemonade, he became a familiar figure at the Alhambra and Lafayette theaters, Connie's Inn, and Small's Paradise, hearing the likes of Bessie Smith, Luis Russell, and J. C. Higginbotham.




If the early history of jazz is a quilt pieced together with equal parts fact and fancy, the same might be said of Hammond's early forays into Harlem. He told the stories many times, and over the years embellishments often became the foundation for further embellishments. But the main thrust of his accounts is true: that he ventured alone into neighborhoods not generally frequented by rich young white kids, searching for the music from the records he had heard in the basement on East Ninety-first Street. "I started as a record collector when I was about ten years old in 1921," he said in a 1981 television interview. "And I found a record by a piano player called James P. Johnson, and James P. Johnson wrote, well, the original ‘Charleston,' and he was one of the great piano players of all time. He had a record called ‘Worried and Lonesome Blues,' which he made on the old blue label at Columbia Records in 1922, and this is the record that changed my life."
Hammond would later recall that he had to travel to Harlem to purchase records made by his favorite black artists because none of the downtown record stores carried them.
Emily Hammond was an enthusiastic amateur piano player, and the Hammonds owned a box at the Metropolitan Opera House, where the family, dressed in their evening attire, would attend productions. Hammond was also taken to Carnegie Hall to hear classical performances by the New York Philharmonic. But he simply found something lacking in classical music. By his own account, it didn't hit him in the solar plexus, didn't make the hair on the back of his neck stand up, like the raw and emotional blues of Bessie Smith. It didn't make him grin and tap his foot, like the rollicking boogie-woogie piano of James P. Johnson.
Jazz was having another effect on him as well, an effect that was more cerebral than emotional. As Hammond observed in his memoirs, as well as in numerous interviews, he sensed from an early age that there was a reason this music was as deeply passionate as it was. It was uniquely American music, written by and played for people who had known the harsher realities of life firsthand. In particular, it was music by and for people whose skin color kept them perpetually at the bottom rung of American society. Listening to this music helped awaken Hammond to the vast class differences that separated him from the servants in the basement.




Hammond graduated from St. Bernard's School in 1923. After a short stint at Browning, another elite private school, Hammond, now fourteen years old, announced that he was ready to start making his own decisions. One of his first (and one that he would later call one of the most important of his life) concerned where he would spend the next four years preparing for college. Already an iconoclast, he rebelled against the plan for him to follow in his father's footsteps, first to Phillips Exeter Academy, and then on to Yale. Hammond wanted to attend Hotchkiss, a slightly less renowned prep school in Lakeville, Connecticut, tucked away in the northwest corner of the state. In laying out his argument in favor of Hotchkiss, he offered up the following points: first, Exeter was too far from home, and its location in the mountains of New Hampshire promised bitter-cold winters; Hotchkiss was only two hours from New York by train. Second, his cousins Osgood and Frederick Field, his neighbors from a bit farther down Fifth Avenue, had attended Hotchkiss and returned with glowing reviews. Finally, Henry Sloane Coffin had recently moved to Lakeville, and often graced the Hotchkiss chapel with his eloquent and impassioned sermons. John Hammond, Sr., relented, and in the fall of 1925 John Hammond, Jr., began life as a Hotchkiss "prep."
Hotchkiss, founded in 1891 on about sixty-five acres of bucolic countryside in the foothills of the Berkshire Mountains, has sought over the years to separate itself from other prestigious New England prep schools by emphasizing its liberal curriculum, one that stresses personal enlightenment over individual accomplishments. "Whom do we hope to meet on the afternoon of the last commencement?" asks the rhetorical question posed in one piece of Hotchkiss literature. "Do we look for a man or a woman who has learned to trust the unique and specific value of his or her own mind? … Do we mean to discover individuals on the order of Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson or Archibald MacLeish, or do we want somebody who thinks that the sum and zenith of all human experience is a killing in the bond market and a house in Palm Beach?"
At the time Hammond attended, no one embodied the school's high-minded sense of purpose more than a young English teacher named John McChesney. Hammond and Frederick Field praised him extensively in their respective memoirs. Like his cousin, Hammond found McChesney's charismatic mix of devil-may-care insouciance and intellectual depth extremely stimulating. An avowed socialist and agnostic, McChesney took delight in challenging his students to think and live beyond the sheltered lives into which they had been born. Frederick Field wrote: "He influenced a whole generation of Hotchkiss boys. He never said, ‘Get going. Grow up. Spit that gold spoon out of your mouth before you choke on it. Find out what the world is all about. Get started on your own and your friends will do all we can to help.' But without saying so in so many words, he conveyed that message."
Another role model was George Van Santvoord, the school's new headmaster, a Rhodes scholar and veteran of World War I. Upon arriving in Lakeville, a bastion of old-money Republican conservatism, Van Santvoord promptly became chairman of the local Democratic Party. These were the types of men whom John Hammond would admire throughout his life, and on whose actions and philosophies he fashioned his own persona.
Hammond played first violin in the Hotchkiss orchestra, and in the banjo club he played something called a mandobass. He was also a member of a jazz club called the Society Syncopators. During his senior year, and apparently at his urging, the banjo club performed a concert with a spiritual tinge titled "Plantation Echoes."
During his first two years at Hotchkiss, Hammond was content to adjust himself to life at boarding school while pursuing his musical education under the auspices of the school's violin instructor. But he was never entirely satisfied with his progress, and he eventually asked Van Santvoord for permission to make regular trips into New York to take lessons from Ronald Murat, a teacher in whom he had more confidence. The headmaster relented in the fall of Hammond's third year, and the teenager was allowed to take a train into the city every other weekend. "This was an unprecedented liberty. No Hotchkiss student had ever been allowed to leave school except for vacations, or to accompany his family to a nearby restaurant on Sundays," Hammond recalled. The fact that he didn't drink, smoke, or chase girls probably played an important role in Van Santvoord's decision.
As far as the headmaster knew, every other Saturday Hammond took a cab into the nearby town of Millerton, where he caught an afternoon train into New York. After arriving in the city, he dutifully attended his violin lesson, and then went home for a quiet dinner with his family. The next morning he returned by train and was back in Connecticut by early afternoon.
Inevitably, though, Hammond sneaked off to Harlem to listen to jazz. He would later claim that on the way to his very first lesson in the Morningside Heights neighborhood, south and west of Harlem, he happened to pass the Alhambra Theater, and as luck would have it, Bessie Smith was on the bill. "After my two hour lesson I went home to dinner at 91st Street, then, telling my family I was off to play string quartets, hurried uptown to hear Bessie. I had her records by then, and I considered her the greatest blues singer I had ever heard. I still do," he wrote years later. The story has been disputed by at least one biographer of Smith, who said it's unlikely that she appeared at the Alhambra during that period. It's a good story, nevertheless.
For the next two years, Van Santvoord's leniency made it possible for John to gain an unmatched musical education. "Every two weeks I traveled to New York for my lesson, then discovered the Lafayette Theater, the Club Saratoga … every jazz joint and speakeasy where jazz was played. I also became a much improved violinist. Needless to add, George Van Santvoord became my Hotchkiss hero."
At fifteen, Hammond sat for a photograph with his violin cradled in his lap. He looks every bit the sensitive musician. Pensive, he gazes straight ahead through soulful brown eyes set widely apart on either side of a prominent nose. His full lips reveal no trace of a smile. Wavy hair is combed to the side, held firm by handfuls of gel.
An interesting character portrait of the young man can be drawn from his senior yearbook. Hammond received one vote as "most likely to succeed" and seven votes as "most pious" and was voted far and away the "most pessimistic." He also received five votes for being "in the biggest fog," one vote for being the "most absentminded," and one for being the "class sleuth." And he was the landslide winner as the school's "worst woman hater."
One quotation under his picture in his final Hotchkiss yearbook reads: "His religion is at best an anxious wish." The other quotation reads simply, "Rationally speaking." The blind faith espoused by his mother had apparently been replaced by a wistful curiosity tinged with skepticism and born of a newfound sense of self-assurance in his own intellectual capabilities.
On a dewy late-spring morning in June 1929, the graduating class of Hotchkiss and their families gathered with the faculty in the school's chapel for a final ceremony together. While many of his graduating classmates were preparing to board cruise ships bound for Europe in order to spend a few final carefree weeks touring the Continent before entering college, Hammond had already packed his bags for a trip to Portland, Maine, where he would spend the summer working for a small newspaper. It was during those several months as a reporter in Maine that his instinct for aiding the underdog came to full bloom and he first learned to cast a critical eye in the service of one noble cause or another.
Copyright © 2006 by Dunstan Prial