The Hi-Hat and Boston’s Jazz Scene

Imagine, if you can, a time when a world-class jazzman would come to Boston on his own, hook up with local sidemen and produce a live album at a nightclub that still sounds fresh and lively three score and ten years later. That time was 1955 and the place was The Hi-Hat, a club named after the drum kit accessory comprised of two cymbals manipulated by a foot pedal that was perfected, if not invented, in Worcester, Massachusetts by musical-instrument manufacturer Barney Walberg.

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The headliner in question was Miles Davis and the sidemen were Jay Migliori on tenor, Al Wolcott on piano, Jimmy Woode on bass and Jimmy “J.Z.” Zitano on drums. The album is Miles Davis: Live at The Hi-Hat – Boston (Jazz Door, 1991). That such an event could have occurred in Boston, handmaiden to New York City’s jazz scene, is remarkable on its own. That The Hi-Hat survived from 1937 until it burned down in 1959 makes its longevity that much more remarkable.

OPENING, COMPETITION, INTEGRATION

The Hi-Hat opened in 1937 at the corner of Massachusetts and Columbus avenues in Boston’s South End, the neighborhood that Brahmin poet Robert Lowell called the “razor’s edge of Boston’s negro culture”; Lowell said he could hear Black music from his open windows in the Back Bay. The club closed for a time in 1955 due to another fire; while this author has no reason to suspect that either blaze was set intentionally, arson was a common ruse for club owners who wanted to cut their losses by collecting on their fire insurance policies.

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Like its New York City counterpart The Cotton Club, The Hi-Hat originally served only white patrons. Bands that played there in its segregated days offered low-volume tafelmusik (German for “table music”) to be listened to while dining and not danced to. Advertisements promoted the venue as “America’s Smartest Barbeque,” a claim that anyone who has traveled west and south of New England will strongly doubt.

SABBY LEWIS, CHARLIE PARKER, BILLIE HOLIDAY, THELONIOUS MONK

The change in format was received favorably and Rhodes decided to expand the entertainment from a trio to a larger ensemble led by Black bandleader Sebastian “Sabby” Lewis, which typically had seven pieces and eight with a vocalist. Lewis wasn’t a native Bostonian, but he had built a large local following, so the choice proved to be a profitable one.

Rhodes wasn’t equipped to recognize musical talent, so at Lewis’s suggestion he hired Ray Barron, a musician and bandleader who hosted a weekly jazz show, to book bands for him. The Hi-Hat booked some of the biggest names in the business, including Erroll Garner, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker. Holiday and Parker began to perform frequently at the club when they lost their New York cabaret licenses due to drug problems and couldn’t perform there.

The other power behind The Hi-Hat throne was Dave Coleman, described by Richard Vacca in The Boston Jazz Chronicles as “a college-trained chemist and frustrated musician,” who “knew the club business,” and had “been bit by the modern jazz bug.”