Anders Svanoe published research of Sonny Red in The Annual Review of Jazz Studies in 2007. Like Sonny, Joe's family moved to Detroit from the south. Anders conducted many interviews with Detroit musicians. Below are mentions of Joe Brazil from Anders' research.
"I remember seeing Red a few times down at Joe Brazil's. I first started to play drums by going down to Joe Brazil's. The way I got there was Doug Watkins, the bass player, pulled me over there since Doug and I went to the same high school. Anyway, he was telling me to go sit in, and I told him that I wasn't ready yet. But he told me to come on by there anyway. So I went there and sat in with Barry on piano, Joe Brazil [on alto saxophone], Donald Byrd [on trumpet], and Doug Watkins on bass. They played a tempo, extremely fast, and somehow or another I kept that tempo, and that's what opened the door for me. They said that the next time they were going to give me a call, and they did." - Frank Gant
"Joe Brazil was important on the scene and a good friend of Coltrane's. That was perfect for Trane. This was a place, just free to him, to play as long as he wanted to." - Tommy Flanagan
"I remember one session that we did at Joe Brazil's place. We did a lot of jam sessions down there. Sonny was there and sometimes Barry, Ko-Ko [Kenneth "Cokie" Winfrey], the tenor player, used to live down at Joe's place, so he'd always be there for the sessions. That was around 1955 or 1956. I lived right down the street, so I was there a lot." - Kiane Zawadi
Chamber Music America and the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers have for the second time selected the Steve Griggs Ensemble for an Adventurous Programming Award. This honor recognizes the ensemble's programs that blend history and original music to recognize important but often overlooked stories in Seattle (A Cup of Joe Brazil, Panama Hotel Jazz, Listen to Seattle, and Sound in Stone). The award will be presented at the CMA conference in New York City on January 10.
Boxley's in North Bend will be hosting a Jubilee for Joe Brazil in commemoration of Joe's passing on August 6, 2008. Come listen to saxophonist Steve Griggs, guitarist Milo Petersen, bassist Chuck Kistler, and drummer Greg Williamson on August 7 at Boxley's, 101 W North Bend Way, North Bend, WA 98045.
Yesterday I listened to a 1967 tape of Stokely Carmichael addressing a full gymnasium of supporters at Garfield High School in Seattle. The transcript can be found at http://www.aavw.org/special_features/speeches_speech_carmichael01.html. The tape is part of the Joe Brazil Collection. Stokely also spoke to 3,000 people at the University of Washington. Stokely talks about Beethoven being black. Joe said the same thing a few years later at Whitman College.
This is Joe Brazil's house in Detroit. His neighbor told me that the musicians would enter and exit from the door on the side that led into the basement. There used to be a fence that obscured the doorway. One New Year's Eve, several folks fired guns in the back yard. The vinyl siding is missing now because a woman in the neighborhood is stealing it.
Joe said in an interview that bassist Paul Chambers lived here with him. I wonder if Paul Chambers introduced Joe to John Coltrane when Paul and John were visiting Detroit in Miles Davis' band.
In the last few years Joe lived in Detroit, he shared the house with bassist Ali Jackson.
A tape in the Joe Brazil collection labeled "Thad Jones at the West End" contains an announcer saying, "How about a hand for Thad. Thank you, Freddie Froo. Freddie Froo on the drums, Joe Brazil on the alto, Ernie Farrow on the bass and Abe Woodley on the piano."
Grateful for the attentive audience and passionate performance at Jack Straw on January 14. It is a joy to share the story of Joe Brazil with people unfamiliar with his life. Jay Thomas, pictured here on trumpet, played his first jam session with Joe. Susan Pascal, vibraphonist out of the frame to the right, is married to Dave Pascal, who worked in a band with Joe. In the audience was a student from one of Joe's History of Jazz classes. Stories of musicians are a backbone of the jazz tradition. Blending new music and old stories is at the heart of my artistic practice. Thanks to Jack Straw for supporting this project through discounted studio time.
I visited Brazil's hometown of Detroit, looking for his ghost. I wasn't really sure what I would find. I hoped to stitch together a story from finding out where he lived and talking to people who knew him.
To understand the surroundings of Joe's childhood, I had to know more about that place and time. The year of Joe's birth was when Ford Motors consolidated manufacturing at its River Rouge Complex.
Raw materials were shipped into the world's largest integrated factory, a mile long and a mile a half wide, for 90,000 workers to make steel and glass and assemble the Model A, successor to the Model T. In Detroit, Brazil's childhood was surrounded by this hub of American manufacturing. Brazil's story was Detroit's story. Detroit's story was America's story. As an American, I needed to know my story.
But by the time I visited Detroit decades later, American manufacturing was a distant memory, like Brazil himself. The city's population had shriveled to 40% of its high in 1950. Six decades of urban decay left tens of thousands of buildings abandoned, houses empty, lots vacant. I was searching for traces of a dead man in a ghost town.
Coincidentally, my visit to the remains of Detroit fell on Halloween, a night to remember the dead. These days, people from Detroit called Halloween "Devil's Night," when many structures, always targets for arson, ignited in greater numbers. In the history of Devil's Night, 1984 was the worst. Eight hundred fires burned across the city.
After decades of destruction, Detroit had thrown in the towel, declaring bankruptcy in 2013. Only skeleton crews of firefighters and police were left to protect this ghost town from arson. Infrastructure was so emaciated that fire precincts didn’t have an automated alarm system. Instead, a central dispatcher sent a fax with the fire's location to the closest station, where the incoming fax paper would knock a perched empty soda can to the floor so that the firefighters would hear and respond. I hoped fire stations had enough of a budget to keep paper trays full on their fax machines.
I ventured to the Detroit Public Library, in search of Joe's addresses in old City Directories. Hopeful for clues, I reached to open the Library's front door, but paused to read a posted sign. A three-day curfew had been declared, stretching from six at night to six the next morning for everyone under 18, not to keep them safe, but to discourage them from lighting fires in the dark. At least the materials in the library were safe from flames.
Inside the cavernous library there were few patrons and fewer librarians. I found shelves laden with thickly bound City Directories. I pulled the tome from 1928, the year after Joe was born, and leafed through its thin pages. I scanned columns of names and found the entry for Joe's parents, Hilliard and Ida Brazil at an address on Illinois Street. This residence was in a neighborhood known as Paradise Valley, a neighborhood just north of downtown that absorbed many of the 80,000 blacks migrating from the south during the decade of Joe's birth. Many black businesses -- drugstores, salons, restaurants, nightclubs, theaters, and bars -- served the residents of Paradise Valley and the adjacent neighborhood of Black Bottom. Joe had told an interviewer, "I grew up in a poor... ghetto area around what you call downtown Detroit."
In the directory, Joe's father was listed as "Laborer." According to this listing, Joe, his older brother Zodis, and his parents shared a dwelling with Louis Steinberg, Mrs. Gertrude Williams, Louis Williams, and Richard Collins. I imagine that in the residence where Joe turned one, quarters were close, and pennies were pinched. If they had a radio, maybe they heard Irving Berlin's "Blue Skies," the song used in the first feature film with synchronized recorded dialog, The Jazz Singer.
Ida and Joe Brazil
The 1928 volume was the only directory that listed Joe's parents together. Each following year, Hilliard was listed at a new address and moved in with his younger brother Moses in 1934. Ida lived nearby with her two sons and three other tenants. She was listed as "Maid." All of the Detroit addresses for Joe's parents were within a few blocks of each other.
"I always kind of enjoyed music," Joe told an interviewer, "and my mother sang in like church quartets and choirs and that sort of thing. I’m from a family just raised by my mother because my father and mother separated."
Hilliard and Ida divorced in 1940. I chuckled at Ida's 1941 entry, listing her as a "widow" even though Hilliard was living a few blocks away. Was Ida's ex "dead to her?" Would Joe have thought the listing humorous? I chose to think he would.
With Joe's parents separated soon after he was born, and divorced when he was fourteen, I imagined that Joe did not have a close relationship with his father. Ida's parents lived nearby in Detroit; but Hilliard's had stayed home in Georgia. Was Ida the main adult in Joe's life?
I let my mind drift. Joe had attended the large, all-city Cass Technical High School. In between home and school were many music venues, usually dark during daylight hours. On Woodward, the main arterial toward downtown, stood the large Greystone Ballroom, with room for 3,000 dancers, and the Paradise Theater, a 2,000-seat hall that hosted the Detroit Symphony until 1939 and national jazz acts like Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong after 1941. Joe may have strolled past jazz venues on sides streets, past bars with names like Club Tuxedo, Harlem Cave, or Cozy Corner, seeing deliveries arrive and catching earnest sounds of a combo rehearsing through an open door. In the decades the Motown sound, local blues and jazz flourished and fertilized the musical ground in Detroit for Barry Gordy's crops to come.
City directories in the Detroit Public Library yielded the following information about places where Joe Brazil and his relatives lived:
1928-29
Hilliard (Ida) Brazil
Laborer h 1020 Illinois
with Louis Steinberg
Mrs. Gertrude Williams
Louis Williams
Richard Collins
1929-30
Hilliard Brazil
Laborer R 13526 Lumpkin Ave (H)
1930-31
Hilliard Brazil
Autoworker h 2289 Maple
1931-32
Harrison Hill Laborer R 984 E
Vernor Hwy Apt 17
1932-33
Harrison (Queen V) Hill h 1427 St.
Joseph
Harrison Hill Driver City Garbage Plant r 3137 Brush Apt 10
1934
Hilliard Brazil Laborer r
12903 Riopelle
With Moses Brazil
James Warsaw
1935
Mrs. Ida Brazil h 1034 Theodore
With Fred L Dodson
Samuel Hollis
1936
Hilliard Brazil
Laborer h 1014 Hendrie Ave
Apt 11 (Seeman Ct. Apts)
Mrs. Ida Brazil Domestic h 1008 Benton
1937
Hilliard Brazil
Laborer h 1014 Hendrie Ave
Apt 11
Mrs. Ida Brazil Maid h 5941 Rivard
With John Stokes
Ben Anthony
1938
Hilliard Brazil
Laborer h 1014 Hendrie Ave
Apt 11
Mrs. Ida Brazil Maid h 5941 Rivard
With John Stokes
Ben Anthony
Stanford Cooper
1939
Hilliard Brazil
Laborer h 1014 Hendrie Ave
Apt 11
Mrs. Ida Brazil Maid h 5941 Rivard
With John Stokes
Ben Anthony
Stanford Cooper
1940
Mrs. Ida Brazil Maid h 5941 Rivard
With Henry Peoples
Ben Anthony
Stanford Cooper
1941
Mrs. Ida Brazil (widow Hilliard) h 5941 Rivard
With Roosevelt Muller
Ben Anthony
Stanford Cooper
1942
Joseph Brazil 15763 Woodingham
1944
Hilliard Brazil
536 Holbrook
1945
Hilliard Brazil
536 Holbrook
1947
Hilliard Brazil
536 Holbrook
1948
Hilliard Brazil
536 Holbrook
Ida Brazil 17846 Fleming
1949
Hilliard Brazil
536 Holbrook
Ida Brazil 17846 Fleming
1951
Hilliard Brazil
536 Holbrook
Joseph Brazil 17846 Fleming
1952
Hilliard Brazil
536 Holbrook
Joseph Brazil 17846 Fleming
1953
Zodis Brazil
(Rosalin J) Coremaker Ford h 2452 S. Deacon Ave
Hilliard Brazil
5125 Helen
1954
Joseph Brazil Laborer Chrysler h 17846
Fleming Ave
With Ali Jackson
1956
Zodis Brazil
(Rosalin J) Coremaker Ford h 2452 S. Deacon Ave
1957
Joseph Brazil Laborer Chrysler h 17846
Fleming Ave
Joe Brazil first joined the Detroit Federation of Musicians, Local 5, on August 17, 1955. There must have been a few time lapses, because there is an additional application dated December 23, 1959, and a reinstatement memo dated March 1, 1961. He was expelled on March 31, 1964. He listed his instruments as alto and tenor saxophone, and piano (although I believe he also played flute on occasion). He was also a tool maker (he stated it was a union job, but didn't state which union).
