Salon97

Hazel Scott was not only a gifted pianist and singer — a child musical prodigy who at only eight years old was given a scholarship from the Juilliard School of Music to be privately tutored — she was also the first woman of color to have her own TV show (1950), and was an outspoken advocate for civil rights throughout her life…

Above, watch Hazel Scott play Black and White on two grand pianos in the 1943 Mae West film, The Heat’s On. There’s also a trumpet-playing puppet.

Have you ever wondered why it’s mathematically impossible to perfectly piano a tuna?

Oh sorry…

The idea came up at the time when I was completely bereft of ideas. I’d been working on my own music for a while and was quite lost, actually. And I really appreciated someone coming along and saying, “Here’s a specific problem – solve it.”

The thing from the agency said, “We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah- blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional,” this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said “and it must be 3 ¼ seconds long.”

I thought this was so funny and an amazing thought to actually try to make a little piece of music. It’s like making a tiny little jewel.

In fact, I made 84 pieces. I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music. I was so sensitive to microseconds at the end of this that it really broke a logjam in my own work. Then when I’d finished that and I went back to working with pieces that were like three minutes long, it seemed like oceans of time.