Artist: Hazel Scott

Hazel Dorothy Scott was a Trinidad-born American jazz and  classical pianist and singer.

She was an outspoken critic of racial discrimination and segregation. She used her influence to improve the representation of Black Americans in film. Born in Port of Spain, Scott moved to New York City with her mother at the age of four. Scott was a child musical prodigy, receiving scholarships to study at the Juilliard School when she was eight. In her teens, she performed at Café Society while still at school.  She also performed on the radio. 

Scott was renowned as a virtuosic jazz pianist, in addition to her successes in dramatic acting and classical music.

Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Scott performed  jazz, blues, ballads, Broadway  and boogie-woogie  songs, and classical music in various nightclubs. Thanks to the vision of Barney Josephson, the owner of Café Society, to establish a venue where artists of all races and ethnicities could perform, from 1939 to 1943, she was a leading attraction at both the downtown and uptown branches of Café Society.

Along with Lena Horne, Scott was one of the first black women to gain respectable roles in major Hollywood pictures. She performed as herself in the films I Dood It (MGM, 1943), Broadway Rhythm  (MGM, 1944) with Lena Horne, in the otherwise all-white cast of The Heat's On (Columbia, 1943),  Something to Shout About (Columbia, 1943), and  Rhapsody in Blue (Warner Bros, 1945).

She was the first person of African descent to have their own television show in America, The Hazel Scott Show, which premiered on the DuMont Television Network on July 3,1950. On the show, Scott performed with the jazz musicians Charles Mingus  and Max Roach who were among the members of her supporting band. 

Scott had long been committed to civil rights. Scott refused to perform in segregated  venues when she was on tour. She was once escorted from the city of Austin, Texas  by Texas Rangers because she refused to perform when she discovered that black and white patrons were seated separately. "Why would anyone come to hear me, a Negro," she told Time magazine, "and refuse to sit beside someone just like me?" 

Scott moved to Paris in 1957 and began performing in Europe, not returning to the United States until 1967.