📍Watts, Los Angeles, CA 90002, USA
1922 – 1945“I was born in April 1922 on an army base in Nogales, Arizona, where my father, Charles Sr., was a sergeant. My mother died when I was a few months old, and my father moved us to Watts, a mixed, working-class neighbourhood in the south of Los Angeles, of small houses, railway tracks and open lots, where Black, Mexican, Japanese and white families lived side by side. My father married again, and my stepmother allowed only church music in the house, but I heard Duke Ellington on the radio and fell in love with jazz. A block from our house, an Italian tile setter named Simon Rodia was building his towers, tall spires of steel and concrete covered in broken pottery, glass and shells, and we kids would bring him scraps of broken dishes and bottles. I watched him build parts of them, tear them down and build them again, and later I thought of my music that way: spontaneous, but carefully built. My father gave me a trombone, but I couldn't get anywhere with it, so he traded it for a cello. I loved the cello, but I couldn't read music fast enough to join the youth orchestra, and in those days a Black cellist had no future in classical music. At Jordan High School, my friend Buddy Collette told me he would let me into his swing band if I played bass, so I took up the bass, and I studied with Red Callender and later with Herman Rheinshagen of the New York Philharmonic. I went on to play with Louis Armstrong, Lionel Hampton and Duke Ellington, and to lead my own groups, writing Goodbye Pork Pie Hat and Fables of Faubus. The Watts Towers still stand, and Watts remembers the boy who carried broken plates to Rodia.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today