Crystal & Alterman Explore Jazz History

Billy Crystal, the multi-talented writer and comedian, is probably not one of the first people you think of when you consider the history of jazz in America. But Joe Alterman, executive director of Neranenah — the Atlanta Jewish music festival and culture series — and a talented jazz pianist, does.

That’s one of the reasons he invited Crystal to join him in a conversation that was pre-recorded and shown as part of Alterman’s program on the history of popular music and jazz at the Sandy Springs Performing Arts Center.

Crystal literally grew up in the record industry. His father managed the family’s record shop next to Grand Central Station on 42nd Street in New York. His uncle, Milt Gabler, was one of America’s most important producers of recorded music in the 1940s and 1950s and was head of artists and repertoire at Decca Records, an industry leader. As a four- and five-year-old, Billie Holiday, the famous jazz singer, frequently took Crystal along when Gabler and Holiday went off to the movies.

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And he was an eyewitness to his uncle’s daily encounters with recording royalty. In addition to Holiday, he was responsible for hits by Peggy Lee, Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, and Louis Armstrong. Although he had no formal music training, he had, in Crystal’s words, “a big heart and a great set of ears.”

The Joe Alterman Trio played at the Sandy Spring Performing Arts Center.

One of Gabler’s first big hits was “Strange Fruit,” a searing indictment of American racism, which became one of America’s first blockbuster protest numbers. The lyrics that are an indictment of America’s history of the lynching of African Americans are still chilling more than 85 years after they were first heard.

“Southern trees bear a strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black bodies swingin’ in the Southern breeze
Strange fuit hangin’ from the poplar trees.”

Crystal recounted how his uncle first decided to record the song. “Billie Holiday went to my uncle, who she’d done a bunch of sessions with, and as he told me, he locked the door. It was a rainy day, and she sang it for him, acapella and he said, ‘I cried like a baby,’ and I said, ‘this has got to be hers. I don’t care if we don’t make $1’ and so, in January of 1939, they recorded ‘Strange Fruit,’ which became the biggest hit for Commodore Records and our biggest, most important song. And you know Time Magazine called that song the song of the century.”

Commodore Records became a major producer of jazz recordings and, in 1940, Gabler started a series of weekly jam sessions featuring such performers as Pee Wee Russell, Red Allen and Zooty Singleton.

The music for Joe Alterman’s program with Billy Crystal came from the selections on this compact disc.

Crystal was born in 1947, and he grew up surrounded by the elite of the jazz world who gravitated to his father’s record store and his uncle’s recording studio. It was where he was first attracted to being a performer.

“Being around all these musicians influenced my comedy. They’re really funny people. These guys were so hip with each other. And then you add in my grandparents who were from the Ukraine. Another grandfather was from Austria, and you had a mostly Yiddish speaking audience. The house smelled of brisket and bourbon and you mix in these musicians. It was an amazing paint palette to draw on as a young entertainer.”

Alterman’s musical selections for the program were taken from a CD that King has produced of 26 of his uncle’s greatest hits. Most of them are familiar to anyone who has even a nodding acquaintance with the Great American Songbook.

Gabler was even a key player in ushering in the rock and roll revolution. On April 12, 1954, he was producing a session at the Pythian Temple Recording Studios in New York. It was for a new band that had recently signed with Decca Records, and they spent most of the session working on a song called, “Thirteen Women.” In the last few minutes, they made a hasty recording of what they thought would be the B side of the recording, “Rock Around The Clock.” Gabler thought it was good enough to release it as the featured recording and the rest is history. Many consider it the beginning of the rock and roll era.

Ironically, it had a major impact on jazz and less than 10 years later, the Commodore record store on 42nd Street closed.

Alterman said he is often asked if jazz is finally dead. “My answer,” Alterman says, “is that jazz is a feeling, and a feeling can’t die. And it’s really thanks to Milt Gabler and others like him that this feeling came out of the air, and we have it to appreciate and enjoy.”