Perspective: McCarthyism silenced this Black icon. Now dancers are making noise.
, titled “The Disappearance of Miss Scott,” is also in production, though the release date has not been announced.
a 1943 film starring Mae West, Scott refused to sing and play the piano in a scene where other Black women danced in dirty aprons streaked with grease and oil.Hazel Scott: The Pioneering Journey of a Jazz Pianist, From Cafe Society to Hollywood to HUAC No matter — she moved to television, and in 1950 became the first Black American to host a weekly TV show built around herself, with no guest artists, just Scott and her backup band, including future jazz greats Charles Mingus on bass and Max Roach on drums.
Her husband thought this was a terrible idea. Their son, Adam Clayton Powell III, was 5 or 6 years old at the time and remembers an argument over dinner. With her livelihood gone, Scott moved to Paris, where she led a smaller musical life. Yet while the American public may have forgotten her, fellow jazz musicians hadn’t.
But when Scott returned to New York in the 1960s, she struggled to find work in the shadow of Miles Davis, Motown and the Beatles. She died in 1981 at age 61, unknown to most — except for her musician friends. Gillespie, Powell said, joined him at his mother’s bedside as she lay in a coma, suffering from cancer. The great trumpeter put a mute in his horn and played softly for her, and just before she died, Powell said, “she opened her eyes and smiled.