Ask jazz pianist Claude Black anything about his nearly 60-year career as a working musician, and his mind automatically goes to the names of the people he’s played with over the years. “Larry Steele, Smiley Farris, Al Grey, Candy Johnson, Dagwood Langford, Calvin Frazier,” he says, a wistful smile crossing his face as he recalls the names of people who were clearly more than mere coworkers, but old and dear friends. Actually, it’s hard to imagine anyone coming in contact with Claude Black and not walking away feeling that they had just made a friend. He’s not only a masterful musician who’s played with many of the all-time greats, but he’s also a genuinely warm and engaging fellow.

Born in Detroit, Black was first introduced to music by his grandmother, who had a piano in her home where he would spend hours practicing. In intermediate school, he started playing French horn with the school band. Down the aisle was another student, Donald Byrd, who later went on to record a string of classic records on the Blue Note label. Black soon grew dissatisfied with the French horn, though, because “you couldn’t swing with it! It’s too legato, the French horn.” So he took up the trombone, an instrument better suited the jazz sounds that were just beginning to emerge in the Detroit area.

When Black was 16, he got his first professional gig at a club called Uncle Tom’s Plantation in Detroit. “The owner of the club, Doc Washington, would hear me practicing the piano by the window at my grandmother’s house as he’d walk by,” Black said. “One day, his regular piano player didn’t show up. “He called the house and said, ‘I hear your boy is really coming along on the piano. Can you send him around?’” In time, he landed a regular gig playing piano with Detroit musician Candy Johnson, although his trombone skills came in handy when the group decided to hire the great Roland Hanna to take over the bench. Nevertheless, from these “humble begin-nings,” as Black calls them, began a career that has taken him around the world and introduced him to a few of the most important people of the 20th century. Over time, word continued to spread about the kid who was a “good player with a good attitude,” and by the early 1960s Black was touring with Capitol recording artist Dakota Staton. From there he began backing legendary R&B/jazz tenor saxophonist Earl Bostic.

In 1965, though, Claude Black received a taste of the jet set lifestyle when he began backing Lady Soul herself, Aretha Franklin. At the time, Franklin was signed to Columbia, which was marketing her (very poorly) as an heir of sorts to Dinah Washington. “Ted White, her husband and manager, kept saying that jazz wasn’t where it’s at,” Black said. “We’re doing OK, but we could be doing a lot better. “So he got her over to Atlantic and she recorded more of the soul-type music, and that’s when things really took off.” When Black started touring with Franklin, she asked him what type of car they should get for touring. Black said a Chrysler station wagon should suffice. But after the success of singles like “Respect,” “Chain of Fools,” and “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman,” Black says the touring group went “from that station wagon to Delta Air Lines and Lincoln Center!” But even with more glamorous trappings and more presti-gious venues, the group still felt the pull of those tumultuous times.

The civil rights movement was continuing to gain ground throughout America, but there was still much that needed to be done. Franklin and her group joined forces with Harry Belafonte and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to mobilize people in the name of social change, and Black’s path crossed with one of the most important figures in American history. Black had the opportunity to speak with King on several occasions over the course of this brief tour, and describes him as a “beaut-iful cat º a wonderful man.” “He had the power to command an audience, and almost hypnotize thousands of people on a nightly basis,” Black remembers. Harry Belafonte would open the show, King then would speak, and finally the Queen of Soul would “build the crowd to a fever pitch,” according to Black, who saw firsthand how King, night after night, would use his preaching to mesmerize and inspire a crowd. He says that in many ways, King and Franklin would move the crowd in much the same way – King through his oratory and Franklin through her music. Despite the positive message and inspiring nature of this tour, there was nevertheless an undercurrent of tension surrounding these appearances – a tension that would come to a horrifying boil the following April.
 

At an earlier stop on the tour, coincidentally in Memphis, Black remembers a stink bomb exploding on stage in an attempt to disrupt the proceedings. Many of the performers were quite shaken up by the incident, but at the next stop on the tour, Chicago, Black approached King and found that the civil rights leader was considerably more philosophical. Black remembers approaching King’s car at a Holiday Inn on Lake Shore Drive. He asked King how he felt about the swirling controversy, and King’s response was chillingly prophetic. Black recalls King saying, “I probably won’t be around much longer, but in the length of time I’m here, I’ll try to do all I can.” Following this historic tour, Black continued to tour with Franklin for a while, but over time, the relative simplicity of soul music proved to be insufficiently challenging for a musician of his caliber. “I had a tendency to fall asleep onstage. I mean, I was awake, but my mind would just wander off while I was playing,” Black said.

He remembers the night when he realized it was time to move on. Franklin was leading the band through the customary finale, “Respect,” from her perch atop a riser that extended out into the audience. Black and the band were vamping over the two-chord coda. Although the crowd was being whipped into a frenzy, Black’s attention was flagging. After a while, he noticed something odd: he was the only one still playing. The other musicians had all stopped, and the crowd had fallen quiet. He looked around and realized that Franklin had fallen off the stage. She suffered a broken elbow. Black realized that no matter how lucrative a gig might be, no matter how many limousines, hotels and jetliners there are, when you don’t notice someone falling off the stage in the middle of a song, you need to follow your muse.

Black went back to his first love, jazz, gigging around the Detroit and Toledo area. In time he fell in with the great bassist Clifford Murphy, who opened his own club in the 1980s. Black started playing with a loose assemblage of musicians, the Murphys, and has played with them regularly for the last 20 years. Murphy and Black have remained at the heart of that group through the years, and according to Black they have formed a musical bond like “a baby bonding with his mother.” The two have developed an intuitive sense for the other one’s playing that borders on the telepathic. “Our thoughts run together,” Black said, “I don’t even have to call the tune. I just start playing and he just falls right in.”
 

Having performed all over the world, Black has had an opportunity to hear all of the different approaches to jazz, but his playing has remained true to the style he developed in the jazz clubs of the Midwest. He said the difference between Detroit/Toledo jazz and East or West Coast jazz can be attributed, interestingly enough, to the weather. On the West Coast, Claude said, “the playing is more laid back because the weather is so nice. Here we have to get ourselves ready for winter, with heavy clothes and long underwear.” The music that manifests itself here, then, has a “directness” to it. It’s hard to pinpoint, he says, but you’ll know it when you hear it. You can hear Black perform with Murphy and the rest of the band most nights at Murphy’s Place, located on Water Street in downtown Toledo. In addition, the group just released a new CD with the legendary tenor saxophonist David “Fathead” Newman, who was Ray Charles’ right-hand man throughout the late ’50s and early ’60s. A new CD featuring Black as front man is scheduled for release in March.

Regardless of his many accomplishments, though, Black has remained a humble figure. He’s never self-aggrandizing, preferring instead to allow his music to represent him. “Life should speak for itself; that’s how you set an example,” he said, and it’s hard to imagine anyone setting a better example than Claude Black. [Murphy's closed in June 2011.]

- By Eric Klinger