Long party for old party

Press, 9 February 1983, Page 21

Long party for old party

Friends, fans and followers of the jazz musician Eubie Blake, whose music featured in the revue "Eubie" on Two on Sunday, celebrated his 100th birthday in New York on Monday with a 24-hour party, describing him as one of God's small miracles.

"That man is the history of jazz, although he says his mother would turn over in her grave if she knew he was playing that kind of music.", said the Reverend John Gerisel.

Mr Gensel planned- the birthday party, assembling an army of jazz and Broadway notables at St Peter's Lutheran Church at the stroke of midnight on Sunday to play- until the stroke of midnight on Monday. "It’s the least we can do," he said. Now confined to a wheelchair Blake did not attend the party in person, but a special phone was set up in his home so he could hear the music played in his honour.

Blake, whose parents were slaves, began as a piano player in a Baltimore brothel and in 1899 composed his first ragtime tune, “The Charleston Rag." By 1915, he was the full collaborator of the black lyricist Noble Sissle, and in 1921

the two broke Broadway's colour bar - presenting the first black musical. "Shuffle Along," on the Great White Way. Blake once recalled that he and the othbr black musicians had to play the entire score without music because

“people didn't believe that black people could read music. They wanted to think that our ability was just natural talent." Soon Blake and Sissle were

writing songs for Noel Coward. Gertrude Lawrence. Sophie Tucker and a host of others, and Blake became one of the founding fathers of the American Society of Composers and Performers. Close friends say he is not bitter about his experiences as a black in a society dominated for most of his life by segregation. “I remember his once telling a television audience: ‘Thank you ladies and gentlemen. you have made the world a better place for me than you did for my mother and father, and it was only done with love’,” said a friend, Phoebe Jacobs. “There is no bitterness in Eubie. He is always upbeat, always improving, always

trying to do what he does better." she added. This desire to improve took him to college at the age of 66 to study a new method of writing 'music — after having written 1000 songs and three Broadway shows.

As a result, he wrote one of his major compositions. “Dictys on Seventh Avenue." as a class project — a piece now played by symphony orchestras.

He wrote his last composition in the late 1970 s for the Boston Pops conductor Arthur Fiedler, who died before getting a chance to perform it. Instead, the piece was played for the first time by the U.S. Army Band on the steps of the White House on June 21, 1980 — the day Blake received the Medal of Freedom award. Although in poor health, he still keeps a pad and pencil by his side in a specially designed room in his Brooklyn house. He had planned to record an album with the blind singer Stevie Wonder, but Mrs Jacobs said Blake’s health would probably not' permit it.