A few years ago, I was at a jazz event at the Brandywine Workshop in Philadelphia when an older man with gray hair and gray beard got up to speak. Most people in the room knew who he was, but I didn’t.
I had been to the Brandywine for events a few times before, but I didn’t recall him. I realized that he was the same person I’d just seen as a younger man on an album cover hanging on a wall at the Philadelphia Clef Club that night. He had recorded a famous song decades ago – “I Need Your Loving.”
That man, Don Gardner, died recently. He had quit singing and the music business years ago, spending the rest of his life teaching young people and developing in them a love for jazz.
Gardner’s legacy is set.
I sat down with Gardner that night and wrote a blog post about his life and Musicians’ Local 274, one of several black unions that he and other major African American musicians organized in the early half of the 20th century when they were denied membership in the white union. Here’s how I started the post:
I hadn’t much noticed the gray-haired man with the cane until my buddy Rebecca mentioned that he was someone famous. She spoke his name, and I recalled seeing his young face with a wide smile on one of the album covers displayed at eye length along a wall in another room.
Don Gardner’s cover was among several from the archives of the Philadelphia Clef Club and was on display at the Brandywine Workshop as part of a celebration of jazz in the city recently. When the program started, Gardner was asked to speak, and that’s when I learned who he truly was. He was both the director of the Clef Club and had been a noted jazz singer, although I did not recognize his name.
He was apparently full of stories about many famous African American jazz musicians back in the day, because someone asked him to tell one of his stories – which he told both reluctantly and tersely.
You can read the rest of that fascinating interview here.
