Although Baltimore's connections to things like the "Star-Spangled Banner" and Edgar Allan Poe never lack for widespread attention, another of the city's claims to fame deserves a bigger boost. That's the aim of an engaging new book, "Music at the Crossroads: Lives and Legacies of Baltimore Jazz."
In addition to the appeal of the subject matter, the way the book came to be has its own attraction. It was produced and published largely by students of Loyola University Maryland, which has a student-staffed, faculty-mentored publishing company on campus.
The 406-page book contains a collection of essays on such luminaries as Eubie Blake, Billie Holiday, Chick Webb and Cab Calloway. A section on innovative artists covers the careers of Ethel Ennis, Ellis Larkins, Cyrus Chestnut and others. There are chapters on Baltimore's once-thriving jazz district along Pennsylvania Avenue and the rich history of the Left Bank Jazz Society.
The story behind the book starts in November 2008 with Frank Graziano, a New Yorker who was a junior at Loyola then.
"I was in a book publishing class," he says. "We had to come up with an idea for a book that was economically feasible, and you had to find someone to write it. I had gone through five or six other plans that didn't work. I had been listening to jazz around that time, discovering it, and thought I could do something with that."
Learning how many jazz artists had ties to Baltimore, Graziano thought about a book on that subject.
"I did the first thing you do to see if a project is worthwhile," he says. "I looked online. The only mentions about Baltimore jazz I found were in books on African-American history and culture."
Once settled on his topic, Graziano began looking for a writer. After a few dead ends, he e-mailed the Baltimore Jazz Alliance. "There was no name on the e-mail address," he says, "so I didn't know who I was writing to."
It turned out to be the president of the alliance, Mark Osteen — or Dr. Osteen, as he is known by students at none other than Loyola University, where he's an English professor. Small world.
The Montana-born Osteen is also a jazz saxophonist who has performed for years in the Baltimore area.
"When Frank approached me, I was reluctant, but a voice kept saying, 'You should do this,' " Osteen says. "Baltimore has a great jazz history. That history evaporates if no one follows it up." (He and Graziano are credited as the editors of "Music at the Crossroads.")
Osteen found an ideal outlet in the university's publishing business, Apprentice House. "The students do original research, and they do the editing and the designing," Osteen says.
He began recruiting participants for the book in the spring of 2009. A few he knew from their playing in the Loyola Jazz Ensemble; others came to his attention during a course he taught last fall, "Blue Notes: Literature of Jazz." Recommendations for other students came from the history department and elsewhere.
In the end, eight students joined the project, along with a few outside contributors, all facing an April deadline. The students were not a particularly musical group — their list of majors includes biology, economics and journalism.
"Some of them didn't have any kind of knowledge of jazz," Osteen says. "The beauty of students that age is that they are not completely formed in their interests. By the end of the year, the students all came to love jazz. They're into that world now."
Cathleen Carris is a case in point. She took the assignment of recounting the history of the Left Bank Jazz Society, which was launched in the 1960s and presented concerts for the better part of three decades, many of them at the Famous Ballroom on North Charles Street.
"For my chapter, you didn't have to have a music background," Carris says. "Researching part of Baltimore's history was right up my alley."
Contacts led the writer to source material from a founding member of the society, including meticulous notebooks that chronicled appearances by an eye-popping list of jazz greats — John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, Maynard Ferguson, Carmen McRae, Coleman Hawkins, George Benson, Ahmad Jamal; the bands of Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Woody Herman.
"That was incredibly impressive." Carris says. "And so was the number of things the society was doing for the community. First of all, it was an interracial society. It contributed to a lot of organizations and helped out with music in the schools. There were separate chapters of the society in two penal institutions in Maryland. I was amazed at everything the society did."
The Loyola students edited one another's work and that of the outside contributors. "It definitely got crazy at times," Carris says. "There were many late nights arguing about commas. But we were very open to criticism. We all just wanted a really good book. We're certainly very proud of it."
Carris and her colleagues periodically went to jazz concerts in Baltimore while working on the project. "I haven't gone to any since going back to New Jersey," Carris says, "but half of what I have on my iTunes now is jazz."
Jennifer Nordmark, an undergrad from New Jersey studying writing and political science, plays trombone in a jazz ensemble at Loyola. Her essay for the book is devoted to Eubie Blake, the imaginative pianist and songwriter who got his start playing in Baltimore's bordellos.
"I had no idea what I was getting into," Nordmark says. "I spent the summer of '09 mostly at the Maryland Historical Society. There were boxes and boxes to go through — there must have been five boxes just of Christmas cards sent to him. I didn't really know much about Baltimore jazz. The more I researched Eubie, the more I began to see how he really did contribute to jazz in ways that others built on."
Graziano's chapter on Baltimore-born Chick Webb brings a welcome reminder of the extraordinary drummer and bandleader whose death at the age of 30 in 1939 was a major loss to jazz. (His funeral at the Waters AME Church, where Ella Fitzgerald sang "My Buddy," was attended by thousands.) Graziano discusses how Webb's creative life owes much to his experiences growing up here.
Bob Jacobson, vice president of the Baltimore Jazz Alliance and one of the nonstudent contributors to the book, wrote essays on pianist Ellis Larkins, the first African-American enrolled at the Peabody Conservatory, and innovative composer Hank Levy, who directed the jazz band at Towson University. "They were outstanding practitioners whose work wasn't well known enough," Jacobson says. "I wanted to try to spread the word about them."
Throughout the book, the city is as much a character as the musicians in it. "We wanted to salvage some history of Baltimore that the current generation doesn't have," Osteen says. Adds Jacobson: "There isn't a Baltimore style of jazz, like there is a New Orleans style. But there may be something about the environment here that is an influence."
The book makes plain how things have changed for jazz. The days when fans could go from the Cotton Club and the Ritz on one end of Pennsylvania Avenue to the Crossroads and Red Fox on the other "are gone forever," Osteen says. "They're not going to come back."
The last chapter, by Loyola senior Andrew Zaleski, a New Jersey resident majoring in English, examines the jazz scene in contemporary Baltimore. There are plenty of downer comments from those he interviewed, but a glimmer or two of hope for the future as well.
"I had no idea there is still plenty of jazz in the city," says Zaleski, who sampled the musical action at the four jazz venues left — Caton Castle, New Haven Lounge, Wine Cellar and An die Musik — while working on the book. "There are world-class musicians here who could play with anyone. Just being exposed to them was great, learning how jazz is being kept alive, hearing echoes of John Coltrane and Miles Davis in the playing. That was pretty cool."