Shirley Scott, attention, art monsters & a little neuroscience

"How had I never heard of her?”

This email doesn’t want to be like your other emails.

For Halloween, this email dressed up like a mimeograph.

This email dreams of a physical form, especially a toe to tap. Because this email, which is about queen of the organ, Shirley Scott, can really swing.

“I always thought that I would be a musician. That’s what I thought when I was a little girl, and when I was big girl, and when I was a young woman and an old woman.”

Shirley Scott was born into a musical family in a musical neighborhood in Philadelphia, 1934. In interviews, everyone lives “around the block” from Shirley Scott. John Coltrane, Red Garland, Philly Joe Jones, Coatsville Harris. He lived around the corner, she says. Everybody lived around the corner!

If you don’t have a Hammond B3 in your garage, as I do, Coltrane may be the only familiar name. But imagine Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich waving to each other from their front porches.

The musical neighbors played at the club her father ran out of the basement of their home, and Shirley asked questions while the musicians set up their instruments. She played piano seriously from age six; by the time she was 18, she knew trumpet and organ, too.

“Did anyone take me aside and show me easier ways to make the changes or things about the organ?” she said to reporter Barbara Gardner in the October 25, 1962 “Annual Keyboard Issue” of Downbeat magazine. “No! No! Nobody ever did that for me.”

Before youth culture hijacked popular music, the organ trio was a thing, the music heard in clubs and bars, a craze that lasted until the ‘70s and picked up again in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Jimmy Smith was king of the craze with a blazing, face-melting style. Shirley was the queen with her own manner of playing, a lighter touch, the New York Times wrote in her obituary, less dependent on the blues, and with some of the most influential organ trio recordings of her time to her name. She recorded more than 50 records in her lifetime.

“Shirley Scott is no longer just a commercial commodity,” Gardner wrote. “She is becoming a jazz artist.”

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“One afternoon I was flipping through jazz records and saw an image of Shirley and assumed it was going to be a vocalist,”musician C.F. Watkins told me. She was at her favorite record store in New York, Record Shop in Red Hook. “I thought somehow I had missed a Betty Carter or Billie Holiday contemporary — how had I never heard of her?”

I put her record on and slipped the headphones over my head at the listening station and just kept waiting for a crooning jazz vocal to come on. When I never heard a vocal but instead these soulful B3 organ chords I looked on the back of the sleeve and saw that Shirley Scott was not a vocalist at all, she was the organist! And I felt partially ashamed that I had assumed a beautiful woman in the ‘50s could not be an instrumentalist— and such energy and soul — the music wasn’t pretty or romantic in the way you usually encountered female musicians from that time.

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