Hazel Scott blew up piano jazz in the 1940’s. But when she spoke out against racial segregation and stereotypes, she vanished.
This is her story.
By the time she made her debut at Carnegie Hall at age 20, Hazel Scott had already been playing the piano for 17 years. It was 1941, and she dazzled her audience and critics alike with the marriage of an unlikely pairing: a fusion of classical music and jazz. She opened her performance with Franz Liszt’s Second Human Rhapsody, Johann Sebastian Bach’s Two-Part Inventions and Frédéric Chopin’s Minute Waltz, shifting seamlessly between classical music’s faithful, written interpretations and jazz’s natural intuition with so much spontaneity and wit, she left reviewers speculating about how much the original songwriters would have greatly approved. “It’s a good guess that the composers would not have minded,” wrote one New York Times reviewer.
Throughout the mid-20th century, Scott had become the toast of New York’s jazz and popular music scene. A student at Julliard at 8 years old, the host of her own radio show at age 14, making her Broadway debut at 18, and becoming a star at 19, she was highly praised for her uncanny ability to fill classic works by Bach and Mozart with her own, ad-libbed elements of piano jazz.
Scott’s unique approach to music amassed an enormous following that included many of jazz’s and Hollywood’s elite. Her striking beauty and blinding success in the industry even paved the way for her to host a groundbreaking television show, the first Black American to do so. It was also during this time where she used her influence to promote diversity and inclusivity within the arts and when she married Adam Clayton Powell Jr., one of the most prominent political figures of her day.
So, one can only ask: how could Hazel Scott be all but erased from the history books?
Who’s That Girl?
Hazel Dorothy Scott was born on June 11, 1920, in Port of Spain, Trinidad, an only child to Alma Long Scott, a classically-trained pianist and music teacher, and R. Thomas Scott, a West African academic from Liverpool, England. Alma recognized Hazel’s remarkable feeling and dexterity for playing the piano at only four years old (Hazel had a natural ability to play by ear), and after the breakup of her marriage, she focused her efforts on nurturing Hazel’s talent. She and Hazel, along with her mother, moved to Harlem at the peak of the Harlem Renaissance.
During this time, Harlem was ripe with opportunities for Black musicians, writers, and artists and with Alma being a self-taught saxophonist and pianist herself, Hazel was already performing by the time she reached adolescence. With some assistance from her connections, Alma set up an audition for Hazel at the prestigious Juilliard School of Music when she was eight years old, despite the minimum entry age being 16. Hazel played a virtuosic Rachmaninov’s Prelude in C-Sharp Minor and made a strong impression on the judges. They labeled her a ‘genius’ and granted her a special scholarship, where the school’s director, Walter Damrosch, would teach her privately.
Although her mother had hoped she would pursue a classical career (Scott grew up in a supportive and familial environment surrounded by musical legends like Art Tatum, Lester Young and Fats Waller; they were her mother’s closest friends and fostered her love and appreciation for music), Scott had other plans. In her teens, she played in a jazz band and hosted her own radio show after winning a competition, and gained a reputation as the “hot classicist” for her skills in creating jazz-infused improvisations of classical music. She’d perform in nightclubs playing classical tunes by Mozart, Bach, and Liszt, sped up and syncopated as captivated audiences watched in awe.
She quickly became a star.
The Road to Stardom
Scott’s teenage years weren’t those of a typical teenager. She attended high school during the day and performed gigs in jazz clubs at night, including the renowned Café Society in Greenwich Village, a pioneering nightclub that broke the segregation barrier by welcoming audiences of all races. The club showcased top talents of the era, including Miles Davis and Nat King Cole, and was where Billie Holiday was first discovered. Blessed with a full-bodied, vibrant singing voice and incredibly good looks, Scott was the “Darling of Café Society,” a sexy siren often playing bare-shouldered at the piano. She was the total package; and it landed a recording contract with the Decca record label, her debut album, Swinging the Classics breaking record sales when she was just 20 years old. Throughout her career, between 1939 and 1957, she’d recorded ten additional, highly-esteemed jazz albums.
Always a strong believer that politics and music were closely intertwined, Scott refused to perform in venues that enforced racial segregation, the decision once getting her escorted out of the city of Austin by the Texas Rangers. In an interview with Time magazine, she questioned the legislation. “Why would anyone come to hear me, a Negro, and refuse to sit beside me,” she told the publication.
Hazel Goes to Hollywood
At age 22, and after a triumphant run of performances on Broadway, Hollywood came knocking and Scott shifted her focus towards the film industry. Upon arriving in Los Angeles in the early 1940s, she made a bold decision that few young actresses dared to make—she declined four consecutive roles. All four parts required her to portray a singing maid, and as a Black woman with a classical music education, she found the undertones of such roles to be racist and unacceptable. At that point, Scott had achieved such distinction that she even demanded equal pay to her white counterparts.
“She was Colin Kaepernick before Colin Kaepernick,” Dwayne Mack, a history professor at Berea College, tells The Washington Post. He has researched and written extensively about Scott. “She took a knee by refusing to wear an apron in a movie. She said, ‘I’d rather keep my dignity and my pride and my self-awareness and my Blackness than to sell out.’ ”
Mack added: “She understood how Blacks are depicted and portrayed: as criminals, as savages, mentally incompetent. She wanted broader roles for Black actors, more realistic roles for Black people.”
Until then, Afro-Caribbean actresses in Hollywood were almost always cast as slaves, maids and prostitutes, but Scott had her film contracts stipulate that she would not play any roles that were degrading and subservient. In fact, she had it noted that she would only play herself and Hollywood agreed. Scott was featured in five Hollywood films, including, notably, I Dood It (1943), Broadway Rhythm (1944) and Rhapsody in Blue (1945), and became one of the highest-paid Black entertainers in America.
She was both rich and famous. Even Duke Ellington and Frank Sinatra were fans of hers. She had become so successful that she had her own chauffeur and her hands insured by Lloyds of London. By 1945, at only 25 years old, she was earning $75,000 per year, the equivalent of over $1 million today. However, little did she know at the time her firm stance on equality and racial injustice would drastically alter her fate.
While on the set of The Heat’s On (1943), Scott noticed a scene in which Black and white wives were to wave their husbands off to war, but the Black actresses were dressed in unkempt, stained aprons. She criticized the costumes, left the set, and did not return for three days until the director relented and changed the wardrobe. The aprons were replaced with floral dresses.
However, the studio paid a hefty financial and political price for Scott’s protest, and by 1945, all of Hollywood knew about it and put a stop to any new offers. Her concert dates were suddenly becoming scarce as well.
Harlem’s Power Couple
When Scott met Adam Clayton Powell Jr, he was New York City’s first Black councilman, a Baptist minister and the nation’s most galvanizing leader in the fight for civil rights. He was also married.
Powell and Scott began a secret affair, which ended in Powell’s divorce from his wife of eleven years in 1945. He and Scott were married that same year.
The marriage was controversial, but their fame was colossal. They made a dazzling, fascinating pair, featured on magazine covers and in gossip columns and photographers followed them everywhere. By the late 1940s and 50s, Powell and Scott were one of the most famed couples in the country. “They were stars, not only in the black world, but in the white world. That was extraordinary,” journalist Mike Wallace wrote at the time.
Powell and Scott had only one son, Adam Clayton Powell III. At this time, Powell expected Scott to live in a more traditional, conservative manner, away from the illustrious life she had built. He requested she stop performing in nightclubs, but while he was away on business in Washington, she’d book shows across the country anyway.
In 1950, Scott got a big break, one of which, sadly, very little footage exists today. She was offered her own network show, The Hazel Scott Show. For 15 minutes, three times per week, she played the piano, sang (in one of the seven languages she spoke) and collaborated with the audience. It was the first show ever to be hosted by a Black entertainer, male or female, and it received exceptional ratings and reviews.
Scott was mesmerizing to watch on stage and on TV. One of the incredible aftereffects of her immense talent today is the ‘double piano’ trick, where she’d sit on a single stool with one piano positioned on each side of her and play both instruments simultaneously (many of us might remember watching the 2019 Grammys when Alicia Keys paid homage to Scott with her own rendition of the act).
The Black List
In 1950, right-wing publication Red Channels put out a list of artists in entertainment suspected of sympathizing with Communism. The list included Orson Wells, Leonard Bernstein – and Hazel Scott. During the McCarthy era, it was common for artists to be blacklisted from future employment if they were under the suspicion of being “troublemakers” in any way, even as in Scott’s case, she was not accused of any actual support. Although concerned about the prospective backlash, she bravely testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and while she denied being a communist, she admonished the blacklisting process.
Scott’s speech concluded with a passionate request to “protect those Americans who have honestly, wholesomely, and unselfishly tried to perfect this country,” ending with, “The actors, musicians, artists, composers, and all of the men and women of the arts are eager and anxious to help, to serve. Our country needs us more today than ever before. We should not be written off by the vicious slanders of little and petty men.”
The speech made headlines and Scott was immediately made a target. She was completely blacklisted by the American government and the music industry by default. They intentionally ruined her career and made sure she lost the very support system on which musicians greatly depend – radio spots, bookings, advertisers and managers. A week later, Scott’s TV show was canceled. Her concert bookings also saw a sudden, sharp decline, and although she had earned the equivalent of millions of dollars, the tax implications at the time claimed about 90% of it (the IRS said she owed more taxes than she could pay). Accountants and lawyers mishandled most of the rest.
At around that same time, Scott’s marriage to Powell was falling apart and in 1951, she twice overdosed on pills, surviving both suicide attempts. Stress also sent her into eating binges; she suffered a nervous breakdown and all but disappeared into obscurity.
A Fresh Start
In 1957, Scott and Adam moved to Paris, a city that had gained a reputation for welcoming Black Americans during the 20th century. She and Powell divorced – he remarried in 1960 to Yvette Flores Diago, and she briefly married Swiss-Italian comedian Ezio Bedin.
In Europe, Scott’s music was sought after again. The resilient pianist recorded and released new music, achieving a second wave of success. In 1958, she appeared in the French film Le désordre et la Nuit alongside French movie star Jean Gabin, and her apartment became a meeting place for Black musicians, visual artists and writers, expats and visitors alike.
Despite the circumstances surrounding their arrival, those years spent in The City of Lights possessed a charmed quality for Scott and Adam. Adam recounts what he describes as a revolving door of celebrities who visited almost every week: the Duke Ellington band came to dinner. Billie Holiday flew in to spend Thanksgiving with them. Adam even remembers Quincy Jones playing checkers with him on the floor. They’d also vacation on the beach in Cannes with Lena Horne and Count Basie.
“In those years, what appealed to her – and one of her good friends, James Baldwin – and so many others is that the French view of Black people was very different from that of the United States,” he told The Washington Post.
In 1963, Scott marched with other African American expatriates, including James Baldwin, to the US Embassy in Paris to protest racial injustice and support Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington, but with the peak of her fame behind her, she decided to return home to the States in 1967. By this time, the Civil Rights Movement had driven new legislation that ended racial segregation and provided protection for Black citizens and Scott went back to performing in New York City nightclubs, but Rock n’ Roll was already dominating the music industry and American jazz artists were struggling.
Scott died of pancreatic cancer in 1981 at only 61 years old, survived by her son, Adam. She was buried at Flushing Cemetery in Queens, New York along with other jazz greats including Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong.
Say Her Name
Hazel Scott’s talent and success were simply undeniable, and the omission of her name from jazz archives only highlights the mistreatment of many Black artists in America during the 1950s. When we consider the great female jazz artists of our history, we often think of her peers, such as the incomparable Billie Holiday or Ella Fitzgerald. And while they had become household names, they weren’t any more significantly known than Scott at the time.
However, it is encouraging to see that Hazel’s name has finally regained much-deserved recognition in recent years. In 2020, Adam donated to the Library of Congress a collection of Scott’s belongings, nearly 4,000 items that included sheet music, diaries, contracts, photographs, an address book of famous contacts, and an unpublished autobiography. That same year, BBC World Service featured her in a program entitled Hazel Scott: Jazz Star and Barrier Breaker, and a Facebook video of her performing Takin’ A Chance in 1943 saw over nine million views, shared extensively on social media with the hashtag #BlackGirlMagic.
A courageous symbol of racial equality, Hazel Scott’s groundbreaking achievements opened doors for countless Black female artists who came after her, helping to set new standards for representation. Her legacy must remain a powerful testament to what it means to have true resolve and determination.
Let us never forget Hazel Scott’s name.