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Grammy nominee and former Richmond Jazz Society board member Rene Marie at a Guest Educator concert last year, with saxophonist James "Saxsmo" Gates (Photo by Jerrold Price)
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Vocalist Eve Cornelious at Capital Ale House in 2009 (Photo by Jerrold Price)
The early days of the Richmond Jazz Society were filled with Saturday-afternoon jam sessions and the aroma of fresh seafood.
“We started our first programs in a fish market,” says B.J. Brown, executive director of the 40-year-old society, a nonprofit that promotes jazz music in the region. That first venue, Piranha Seafood on Brookland Park Boulevard, was co-owned by Eric E. Stanley, then a popular R&B and jazz DJ who was, like Brown, one of the society's founders. “It was quite beautiful,” Brown remembers, “with hardwood floors and decorated with paintings by area artists.”
“We were filling a void,” says J. Plunky Branch, music educator and leader of the jazz band Plunky & Oneness. He's often credited as being the founder of the RJS. “At that time, one of the real community needs was a support system for jazz.”
Branch, who had an organization called Branches of the Arts that acted as a fiscal agent for smaller arts groups, placed newspaper ads inviting anyone interested in supporting jazz to meet at The Mosque (today's Altria Theater). “A large crowd came,” Brown recalls of that first meeting in 1979. “Some only wanted to have a social club that met every so often, to drink wine and play jazz records for discussion and camaraderie. A smaller group wanted to create something more lasting, community-minded, educational but still fun.”
RJS President Robert Payne and Executive Director B.J. Brown (Photo by Ed Davis)
The society's first board members — Branch, Brown, Stanley, Pierre Ames, James Bracey, Khari Branch, Nelson Lawson, William Lowe and Robert Payne — hit the ground jamming. “The musician community was primed for it,” Branch says. In its first five years, RJS leased office space, complete with a performance stage; started a still-publishing monthly newsletter; and produced a musical titled “A History of Jazz” for a citywide arts festival called June Jubilee. More importantly, it ignited its Guest Educators concert series, a monthly spotlight that’s still happening.
Along the way, the society picked up important allies: Dorthaan Kirk and Altevia “Buttercup” Edwards, the spouses of jazz legends Rahsaan Roland Kirk and Bud Powell; the late Murry DePillars, the former dean of the School of the Arts at VCU; and musician-educators Billy Taylor and Joe Kennedy. The latter was RJS’ first “mentor,” Brown recalls. “He inspired us to advance and preserve African American classical music, to recognize the Virginia artists who were instrumental in jazz’s development, and to give women their just due throughout all of it.”
The RJS now programs jazz in Richmond-area theaters, schools, churches, malls, parks, museums and libraries. It instituted the Joseph J. Kennedy Jr. Jazz Music Scholarship Fund in 1998 to help advanced music pupils and started a Jazz Academy in 2002, teaching people of all ages the basics of the form every Saturday at Pine Camp Cultural Arts and Community Center.
“Any musician who can play jazz music is actually creating a miracle.” —B.J. Brown, executive director, Richmond Jazz Society
In 2017, Brown and the RJS curated an exhibition at The Valentine called “Virginia Jazz: The Early Years” that will be displayed again soon at the Black History Museum & Cultural Center of Virginia. It pays tribute to in-state artists like Ella Fitzgerald, Don Pullen, Charlie Byrd and Richmond's own Lonnie Liston Smith. “Any musician who can play jazz music is actually creating a miracle,” says Brown, a Richmond native who grew up in a Byrd Park home filled with music. “The musician's ability to compose music while they are playing it — improvisation — is the one thing that makes people love jazz and fear it.”
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Visitors to the "Virginia Jazz: The Early Years" exhibition at The Valentine (Photo courtesy Richmond Jazz Society)
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Richmond-based Johnson's Happy Pals at a 1929 performance in New York (Photo courtesy Richmond Jazz Society)
Grammy-nominated singer and songwriter René Marie credits the society for launching her career more than 20 years ago. “It's hard to put into words how important an organization like this is,” she says. “You might think they're only servicing this small group of jazz musicians, but it touches so many people.” There was a time, in her early years, when the Virginia native was working with RJS once a week. “I was part of a group called 'Make Music With Me,' and we would go into schools with different configurations of musicians and talk about and play jazz to the students.”
Those outreach programs continue today under the name of the late longtime sparkplug James S. Bracey Jr. “When we started RJS, we were the ‘game changers’ who increased our city’s awareness and appreciation of jazz as an art form on the same level as a symphony, an opera or a ballet,” Brown says. “Our mission was and still is ‘to educate the public about jazz music, to preserve its history and to advance the music as an American art form.’ ”
