Singer Ethel Ennis was already an esteemed veteran when she joined the Baltimore Jazz Orchestra as guest soloist and opened the Peabody Institute’s 1998-99 season with a George Gershwin tribute to celebrate his hundredth birthday in Miriam A. Friedberg Concert Hall. The Baltimore Jazz Orchestra was a large ensemble co-founded by the late, indefatigable tubist Edward Goldstein (Prep Certificate ’70; BMED ’76; MM ’78, Tuba) to help promote jazz education, and Baltimore native Ennis was the undeniable choice to bring Gershwin’s beloved, genre-straddling melodies to life. The late Ennis’ career braided music performance, education, and presentation into a rich tapestry of an artist’s life in Baltimore, which is documented and explored in the Ethel’s Place: Celebrating Ethel Ennis, Baltimore’s First Lady of Jazz exhibition currently on view in the George Peabody Library.
In conjunction with this exhibition, the Johns Hopkins Sheridan Libraries, Peabody Jazz Studies department, and Billie Holiday Center for Liberation Arts present a special Ethel Ennis Birthday Bash at 7:00 p.m. on Wednesday, November 29, at Keystone Korner Baltimore. Performers for this intergenerational concert include Peabody faculty artists Brinae Ali and Charenée Wade, the Peabody Jazz Ensemble, and special guests Cyrus Chestnut and the Baltimore School for the Arts Jazz Ensemble. In-person and live-streaming tickets are available online; the event and its reduced admission fees are made possible by generous support from local art collectors and donors Robbye and Kevin Apperson. Proceeds will benefit the Ethel Ennis and Earl Arnett Collection at the Sheridan Libraries, from which a number of the items in the Ethel’s Place exhibition are drawn.
Though Ennis herself never attended Peabody or Johns Hopkins—the university awarded her an honorary doctorate of humane letters at the 2008 commencement—her professional decision to remain a Baltimore-based artist meant her creative life intersected and interacted with Peabody over the decades. She turns up in a 1972 edition of the internal Peabody Notes newsletter as one of the notable jazz names—alongside Charlie Byrd, Lionel Hampton, and Woody Herman—performing at Baltimore’s On Stage Downtown series at Hopkins Plaza. During the 1980s run of her Ethel’s Place club—which brought artists such as Charlie Byrd, Paquito D’Rivera, Astrud Gilberto, Ahmad Jamal, and McCoy Tyner to an intimate cabaret in midtown Baltimore—she’d also participate in education efforts, such as joining then Peabody musicology professor Elliott W. Galkin at the Baltimore Museum of Art for a history of improvisation from the Biblical David’s harp to the present, with Ennis demonstrating jazz improvisation with frequent collaborator Charles Covington, who taught jazz piano at the Preparatory for 20 years.
A photo of a 17-year-old Ethel Llewellyn Ennis, perhaps her first formal portrait, was included in The Storm is Passing Over online exhibit curated by Elizabeth Schaaf, the late, founding director of the Peabody Archives, which explored Baltimore’s rich African-American musical heritage. For that exhibit, Schaaf and Peabody and Johns Hopkins students conducted oral histories with a number of Black Baltimore musicians, including Ennis, who worked in the late 1940s and early ’50s in the city’s red-light district called the Block alongside Peabody musicians. (They paid better than church gigs.)
“Religious and classical, because we had to learn how to do something musically,” Ennis recalls in that interview about what she grew up hearing at home. This ordinary memory from an extraordinary artist is a tiny reminder of the wealth of information archives contain, and why collection benefits such as this Ethel Ennis Birthday Bash are so necessary for preservation. “And when I say we, my brother and I remember not being able to be part of afterschool activities. We had to come home straight from school and we had to learn how to clean, learn how to cook, learn how to sew, and practice our music. And piano lessons started at seven.”