NEW YORK (AP) — Bertha Hope was only three years old when she started playing Brahms’ “Lullaby” on the piano just from hearing it on the radio.
“How did you do that?” asked her shocked parents, both entertainers. “That’s when they really started paying attention to the fact that I had some talent that needed to be nurtured,” recalled Hope, who has used that talent to become a jazz pianist, composer and bandleader for decades.
Though Hope, now 88, has toured extensively, recorded several albums and helped support the legacy of her late husband, the jazz pianist Elmo Hope, her talent still needs nurturing. And a new initiative dedicated to the preservation of jazz and the artists who helped build it plans to provide support for Hope and dozens of others.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and The Jazz Foundation of America on Tuesday announced the Jazz Legacies Fellowship -- a new $15 million program that will give 50 artists who are 62 years or older a lifetime achievement award that includes a $100,000 unrestricted grant, professional support and performance opportunities.
“It’s an incredible and very humbling honor,” said Hope, who is part of the program’s inaugural class of 20 fellows. “It will change my life forever.”
Like so many jazz artists, Hope has amassed influence and accolades, but not the millions that stars in other musical genres enjoy. In order to make ends meet, most jazz musicians must tour and teach more than they would like.
Hope says the grant will supplement her income enough to spend some time digging through recordings made at New York’s Boogie Woogie Studio, owned and operated by her second husband, jazz bassist Walter Booker, best known for his time in the bands of Sarah Vaughan and Cannonball Adderley.
“They’ve been in my closet for so long,” said Hope, who was proud that Boogie Woogie would let young musicians record there for free. “I would like to see if they’re worth saving.”
That kind of artistic work supporting both the history and future of jazz is exactly what organizers of the Jazz Legacies Fellowship hoped it would create.
“Jazz is such an extraordinary and quintessentially American art form,” Elizabeth Alexander, president of The Mellon Foundation, told The Associated Press. “People who are playing at the highest levels today, they can trace their genealogy right back to the people who began the art form… So we thought that jazz was at this point where, especially for its elders and its history, there was a lot that we wanted to be able to protect and support. This was the time to do it.”
The Jazz Legacies Fellowship is part of a $35 million commitment to the genre from the Mellon Foundation, the largest philanthropic supporter of the arts in the United States. The foundation plans to donate to the Ellis Marsalis Center in New Orleans, the Afro Latin Jazz Alliance/Belongo in New York, and The Pittsburgh International Jazz Festival, among other organizations.
Jazz pianist Jason Moran – who helped design the fellowship with foundation officials and other musicians, including Terri Lyne Carrington, Christian McBride, Arturo O’Farrill, and Esperanza Spalding – said that like so many in the genre he learned from his elders. And that education often extended beyond music and the stage, though not everyone had been as lucky as him.
“What I wished for these royal beings was more of the kind of support that I feel they have offered the world, especially the musical world,” Moran said. “I think one of the fortunate things is that we have a generation still performing the music that is still a part of this first wave. They created the language that many of us younger musicians have just accepted and kind of pulled into our own.”
Joe Petrucelli, executive director of the Jazz Foundation of America, which will administer the fellowship, said it was meant to provide a bit of security in an “unsteady and unpredictable” profession.
“There’s no retirement plan,” he said. “There’s inadequate health coverage for so many. The life is just a precarious one… We want to make life easier however we can.”
Petrucelli said organizers were excited to specifically help Hope, calling her plans for the fellowship “the best-case outcome.”
“There is this idea of her as this figure of endurance and inspiration,” he said of Hope. “There’s so much affection around her and so much respect and love for her. It certainly makes sense that she’s received this honor.”
Hope says the fellowship validates the work that she has shared with the world and that others have seen value in it.
But she is more pleased to be seen as part of jazz.
“From my point of view, jazz couldn’t have been born any place else,” she said. “It came because of slavery and because of the contact between white and Black people because they were always looking for ways to be free.”
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The 2025 Jazz Legacies Fellows are: George Cables, 80, pianist; Valerie Capers, 89, pianist; George Coleman, 89, saxophonist; Akua Dixon, 76, cellist; Manty Ellis, 92, guitarist; Billy Hart, 84, drummer; Tom Harrell, 78, trumpeter; Bertha Hope, 88, pianist; Roger Humphries, 80, drummer; Carmen Lundy, 70, vocalist; Amina Claudine-Myers 82, pianist; Roscoe Mitchell, 84, multireedist; Johnny O’Neal, 68, pianist; Shannon Powell, 62, drummer; Julian Priester, 89, trombonist; Dizzy Reece, 94, trumpeter; Herlin Riley, 67, drummer; Michele Rosewoman, 71, pianist; Dom Salvador, 86, pianist; Reggie Workman, 87, bassist.
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