John Hammond: a giant of American music
As heir to a Vanderbilt, John Hammond was born in 1910 with a silver spoon in his mouth and ears of solid gold. Growing up in a Manhattan mansion in the 1920s, those ears would perk up at the strange and exciting strains of jazz and blues "race" records wafting up from Victrolas in the servants' quarters below. Soon the boy was spending most of his free time downstairs, spellbound.
Hammond would write many years later that "in the grooves of those primitive early discs ... I discovered a new world, one I could enter easily and as often as I pleased simply by winding the handle of a phonograph."
Before long, the young Hammond would often be spotted in his prep school blazer, boarding an uptown bus for the speakeasies and jazz clubs of Harlem, to experience these thrilling new sounds firsthand. Hard to miss in his you're-not-from-around-here-are-you? wardrobe and perpetually toothy grin, he became a celebrated local jazz booster and Harlem denizen while still in his teens.
The newly minted hipster had surely found his calling (or perhaps it had found him), and over the next 60 years he would promote, cajole, and wrangle America's most indigenous form of music up from dingy cellars to the world's premier stages. Between 1930 and 1984, Hammond discovered, or at the very least jump-started, the careers of a virtual Mount Rushmore of American Music. Benny Goodman, Billie Holiday, Count Basie, Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, and Bruce Springsteen, among others, would all become beneficiaries of his talent-seeking ears and boundless enthusiasm.
Hammond's excursions both downstairs and uptown fueled another life-long passion as well. Author Dunstan Prial writes in The Producer that Hammond "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 by 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."
In 1936, Hammond set about using his newfound notoriety as influential jazz critic and Columbia Records producer to further his two great causes: improvised jazz and racial integration. After years of unrelenting pressure by Hammond, the great swing clarinetist Benny Goodman finally agreed to integrate his band, and his history-making trio appeared on a Chicago stage on April 12, to great acclaim.
Prial notes, "Just twenty-five years old, Hammond had emerged as arguably the strongest force behind the push for an integrated music industry. Little more than a fantasy a few years earlier, Hammond's crusade was rapidly turning into reality." Goodman band member Lionel Hampton put it more succinctly: "John Hammond started a revolution."
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