10 stories of women. (3) Hazel Scott for
@[Taddi] Hazel SCOTT " A Foggy Day " !!! Grandma Margaret has just dozed off when she is awakened by the sound of a piano. "It must be one of Alma's students," she thinks. Her daughter Alma is a good classical pianist and a respected teacher back in Trinidad and Tobago in the early '20s. She gets up to welcome the student and nearly has a shock: the one playing the piano is her granddaughter Hazel.
Hazel is two and a half years old.
Frank Damrosch is in his office. He is the founder of the prestigious Juilliard School in New York and is very busy. But he is distracted by someone playing Rachmaninoff’s "Prelude in C-sharp minor." The pianist is reworking and transforming some passages of the piece! Damrosch decides to stop them immediately, but he meets the astonished gaze of Paul Wagner, his audition director: the one playing is an 8-year-old girl, her hands are too small, and she is adapting the piece to her capabilities while performing. That girl is not just a small prodigy, a natural talent. That girl is a genius.
Hazel will be the first student admitted to the Juilliard School before turning 16.
Marcus Mosiah Garvey is speaking to the members of his UNIA at Liberty Hall, as he does every week. He doesn’t notice, among the black uniforms of the Black Cross Nurses and the men of the Universal African Legion, a girl of no more than thirteen, tightly holding her father's hand as she listens to him, moved.
"I am a man, I demand the opportunities and treatment of a man." Words that will be etched in young Hazel's mind.
Count Basie and his orchestra are the main attraction at the Roseland Ballroom. His friend Alma Scott, who has meanwhile become an appreciated jazz musician and friend to the famous names of Harlem, has asked him to debut her daughter Hazel. Count doesn't care that the girl is not even 15 years old, and rightly so.
It’s the beginning of an amazing career.
Barney Josephson is a Latvian Jewish man who opened the Café Society down in Greenwich Village in '38. "The wrong place for the right people," the only place where skin color truly didn't matter. He decided to have that beautiful black girl play, the one Billie Holiday talks about all the time. Billie is only five years older than Hazel and considers herself her big sister. Barney and Billie listen in silence, and Barney realizes he did well to listen to “Lady Day.”
Hazel will become the brightest star of his venue.
The members of the HCUA, the anti-American activities committee led by that drunkard Senator McCarthy, are poor, stiff idiots unaware of the judgment history will have on them. Before them sits a beautiful and courageous woman worth infinitely more than they are. Hazel is a star: even cinema has opened its doors to her besides Broadway and she is about to be the first.
