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The Forum: Hazel Scott: Jazz star and barrier breaker

Hazel Scott

07/05/2020 GMT

Hazel Scott: Jazz star and barrier breaker

BBC World Service - The Forum, Hazel Scott: Jazz star and barrier breaker

An exceptionally talented musician who always stood her ground

A Trinidad-born pianist and singer who wowed America with her talent but whose progressive views were held against her.

A child prodigy on the piano, then a glamorous jazz and popular music entertainer, a civil rights campaigner and the first black American woman to host her own TV show: for the first three decades of her life, Hazel Scott’s rise to fame was vertiginous.

Born in Trinidad in 1920, Scott was the headliner in some of New York’s most fashionable clubs by the time she was twenty. A couple of years later she became one of Hollywood’s highest paid entertainers and then married one of the most high-profile US Congressmen of her day. Their celebrity lifestyle regularly featured on newspaper front pages, Scott’s records were selling well and her syndicated TV show was given double airtime because it was so popular. And then, almost overnight, she vanished from public view. What happened?
That's one of the questions Rajan Datar discusses with Scott's biographer and actor Karen Chilton; Loren Schoenberg, saxophonist, bandleader and Senior Scholar of the National Jazz Museum in Harlem; and playwright, lyricist and broadcaster Murray Horwitz.

(Image: Hazel Scott in the 1950s. Credit: Archive Photos/Getty Images)

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