![]() Hosted by Rachael Worby, Muse/ique’s artistic director, conductor and founder, the musicians ripped through an hour-plus program of Fats Waller, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington and Hoagy Carmichael classics that served both as a live-action encyclopedia entry on Central Avenue’s efflorescence and a tribute to Jefferson’s remarkable alumnae: Ralph Bunche, Alvin Ailey, Dexter Gordon, Carmen de Lavallade, Stanley Crouch, Juanita Moore, Roy Ayers, Etta James, Dorothy Dandridge, Barry White, Rickey Minor and Kerry James Marshall, just for starters. They were joined by members of the Lula Washington Dance Theatre. Smith was part of a musical ensemble that included Earth, Wind & Fire music director and pianist Myron McKinley and his quartet and vocalists LaVance Colley and the DC6 Singers collective. ![]() well, everyone, including several artists who opened and closed shows on Central Avenue in its heyday from the 1920s to the 1950s. It was a smooth segue into her next number, “They Can’t Take That Away From Me,” the Gershwins’ 1937 standard immortalized by. “And that’s a legacy of Jefferson High School,” Smith continued, “and that legacy is something they can’t take away from you, all right?” Unified School District superintendents and fellow musicians who have worked with the likes of Whitney Houston, Stevie Wonder, Sheila E., Tupac Shakur, the Jacksons and Earth, Wind & Fire. “As I stand here and perform for you, I feel like I’m performing on sacred ground,” Smith told her audience, which included Jefferson’s history-making Black principal, past and present L.A. She had come as part of a collaboration between Jefferson - which boasts perhaps more famous Black alums than any school west of the Mississippi - and Muse/ique, the Pasadena nonprofit dedicated to making “radically engaging live music experiences accessible for all.” The intent was to spotlight the connections between Central Avenue’s starry past and Jefferson’s illustrious heritage. So it was that the singer and actor Sy Smith, shimmering in a floor-length gold-and-silver gown, informed an auditorium of curious, slightly awestruck teenagers that they had entered a consecrated space. Their music was celebrated and debated nightly in the Dunbar Hotel lounge and enacted as a holy rite in the Alabam Club, the Bird in the Basket and that secular temple the Lincoln Theater. Those arrivals helped convert a multiblock stretch of South L.A.’s Central Avenue into a neighborhood where jazz giants like Dexter and Duke and Etta and Ella strolled the streets not merely as idols but as friends and regulars. 9, the clocks at Jefferson High School swept backward to an era of old-school glamour, when the 20th century was in its high-spirited adolescence, and Black folks from the Deep South were fleeing Jim Crow by the tens of thousands for the California Promised Land. For a couple of hours Friday afternoon, Sept. ![]()
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