Portlanders: Preserving Black History with Albina Music Trust

And again, we are thankful for the Albina Music Trust because that is exactly what it is. It is an entrustment about the music that happened in this small little city called Portland, Oregon. I always say that Portland was God's little secret, you know, in a lot of ways. It really was. We are blessed. Yeah, yes we are. My name is Calvin Walker and you might say I'm the Zelig of Portland music. We are backstage with Calvin Walker. We just did an electrifying performance. I was very impressed with

that. Thanks a lot. One fateful day, I think it was around 2015, 2016, I get this call from this guy. He says, "My name is Bobby Smith." Bobby was a DJ at X-Ray Radio. Yeah, meeting Calvin Walker was the spark that got Albina Music Trust off the ground. Every Friday night I was hosting musicians to come into the studio, tell a little bit of their story, and we could listen to their music. And a lot of what we're doing here this evening started with the conversations that we had, right? It's tru

e. About black music in Portland, Oregon, from Interstate to Mississippi, Fremont to Lombard, those beautiful times that we used to have in that neighborhood because it was our neighborhood. Pretty soon, more and more musicians were coming in, bringing their photography, film, reel-to-reels, cassettes, and saying, "Hey, I haven't listened to this material in 40, 50 years. Could you help me to document it?" So we quickly responded and found ways to digitize the material and share it with those mu

sicians, give them opportunities to share with their families, with their community, make CDs, DVDs, all of that. And now we're a full-on community-based archive. So this is a preservation effort. We've been working for a number of years to learn more about the musician community in Albina, and part of that learning is through the media and the documentation that exists, as well as the oral history. It's not just the musicians who are proud of this work, it's the community. I don't think you're

going to see a more extensive presentation of jazz, blues, funk, you know, black music from Oregon over the last 50 or 60 years. Pretty incredible, right? The reason why that music was able to thrive and all those musicians were able to survive is because there was a community that supported that. There must have been, at the height of it, 20 jazz clubs, and every night it was popping. And where we were situated, at the time, nobody thought it was that convenient. And then as time progressed, pe

ople started thinking, "Well, we kind of like that neighborhood now." There's something surprising happening in the south end of what most Portlanders think of as Albina. It's already reached the street where Ron Herndon lives. The house over here is one, a black family that lived in there. They got old and moved out. The white family moved in, and up the street there, a couple of other houses, exact same thing has happened there. And now the traditional residents of those communities can't affo

rd to be there. So that black community has been spread out literally all over the Portland metropolitan area. Wherever you find Black people, you're i Albina. And I would like to introduce you to Mr. Paul Knauls, Sr., the mayor of Albina, Oregon. I bought it was a club called the Cotton Club, and it was going down, down, down, down. I was able to make a deal, bought the club, got it going, and it turned out to be something else. Like you could go home after you've been to Portland, and you'd go

back and tell people you've been to Portland. I said, "I've been to Portland." I said, "You go to the Cotton Club." He said, "No, so you ain't been to Portland then." That's the kind of action that was going on at the Cotton Club. and became national Mel Brown. He started out at nightclub , went out with Earl Grant. He played for Martha the Vandellas. He played for Stevie Wonder. He played for Marvin Gaye. Then he went on the road for 12 years with Diana Ross. He came right out of the Cotton Cl

ub at 2125 North Vancouver Avenue, the only nightclub on the West Coast with wall to wall soul. Avenue, the only nightclub on the West Coast with wall to wall soul. When you see that smile, you know that you're in the good graces of Mr. Knauls. He's been an ambassador for our work. He has connected musicians to the project and also just been an advocate within the community for the value of preservation. Good to see you, Mr. Knauls. Come on in. How are you today, sir? Bless, bless. Come on in. C

ome on in. In 60 years, I've been in Portland, living in the same house, enjoying the house that I got married in. I lost my wife in 2014, so everybody asked me, "How old are you?" I tell them, "I'm 92 and I got stuff to do." Nowadays, they go in their garage and do a video and they're a star overnight. But in those days, you had to perform in front of a crowd. You build up your crowd. You go to the next city and the crowd might follow you to the next city. Recently, you got a name. You got a fo

llowing, you know, and a record company here about you and you signed. And so that's exactly what happened with some of our artists. They took off just, boom. Yeah, so Albina Music Trust has a number of programs and one of them is an operating record label. We realized real quick that there were many recordings that existed from musicians in this community. Oftentimes, demos that were just put together so the band could get a gig, but with the lack of a recording industry here in town, they just

never saw the light of day. We were about at our eighth or ninth release at this point. The first major project we did was the Gangsters LP, a lost reel-to-reel that had never been heard by many folks. It was put out in around 1970, we believe. We have been talking about these lost tapes and no one could find them, right? Whenever one of us was here, you know, whatever happened to the master tapes, right? And for 40 years, we were asking those questions. So when he passed away a few years ago,

my dear brother, Mr. Michael Cooper, his darling daughter, Michelle, she found the infamous lost Gangsters tape. Something told her, maybe Michael, to look in that box and there at the bottom of the box was the master tapes for the Gangsters record. And that's how we ended up getting that record made, thanks to Bobby. And that was pretty cool. We're not interested in keeping the material of anything. We don't have space for it. So our goal is really just to digitize and make available, create ac

cess to the material. We have some of the most dynamic musicians, some world-renowned as we have Pleasure, which at the time we were playing, they were called the Soul Masters. As we go around once again, the 360 degrees soulful sounds of Portland's own Pleasure from the album, Special Things, spreading that good feeling around the Rose City town, hey, on a sunny day. The Albina Trust has brought the history into the presence. All these musicians together sharing stories. We're all connected. We

're all connected here in Portland, Oregon. Hello, the longest serving mayor in the city of Portland. And there's only one person that can close this building the right way. Take me one more time back to the Cotton Club. It's the only nightclub on the West Coast with wall-to-wall soul. Now y'all wouldn't have to go home but you gotta get out of here.