![]() The audience watching Ellington’s band - and indeed any performing group at the Liberty - was overwhelmingly white. Many remembered how just a decade before, the Klan burned a giant cross on a hill overlooking Astoria, striking fear into the hearts of Black and Mexican and Chinese residents, along with Jews and Catholics as well. While Ellington and his musicians took to the Liberty’s stage in the mid-1930s, their civilian counterparts lived under Ku Klux Klan governance in the city and struggled with discrimination from co-workers and business owners. It’s a shocking juxtaposition: the image of an all-Black band enthralling Astorians in a region notorious as a hotbed of racial violence. One by one, the musicians stand for their solos in the spotlight - three singers, sax and trumpet, trombone and upright bass - while Ellington smiles and smiles, keeping time at the white baby grand. In the auditorium, hundreds of men, women, and children perch on the edges of their velvet-cushioned seats, bobbing their heads and tapping their toes to the jazzy beat. Fourteen musicians in tailored suits and bow ties explode into action behind him, playing one of the Duke’s most famous compositions: “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If it Ain’t Got that Swing).” So I stepped under the green metal dome past the glass-walled box office and pushed open the wooden doors to lead her inside.Įdward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington sits resplendent in shirt, tie, and suit jacket at a white baby grand piano on the Liberty Theatre’s stage, fingers thumping out a deft 4:4 beat. “Music, tap dancing, sword-swallowing, trained dogs, trained ducks, contortionists, jugglers …” “It’s an old vaudeville palace,” I told her with barely contained pride. Yellow and white light bulbs spelled out “The Liberty Theatre.” As I marveled at the retro signage, a young woman with binoculars and a backpack paused beside me. Stepping out onto the sidewalk, I aimed my camera at the vertical marquee mounted on the second story. “ the funnest man I ever saw - and the saddest man I ever knew.” ![]() I imagined them pushing toward the building’s ornate wooden doors, laughing and shouting in anticipation of the spectacles within. ![]() As for myself, I could almost see the 1920s loggers and fishermen with their families, dressed in their finest clothes, crowding under the awning to escape Astoria’s omnipresent rain. I paused before the building as people strode by on their way to shops and lunch spots, seemingly unaware of the landmark’s grand history. Its arches and columns and curlicues - sculpted in Italian Renaissance style - towered over an elegant domed awning wrought from green metal and protecting a box office walled, diamond-like, in glass. I passed the Flavel House Museum (rumored to be haunted) and the Uppertown Firefighters Museum (also haunted), stopping at the corner of Commercial and 12th.Ī 99-year-old building rose above the coffeehouses and antique stores, frosted in a white stone façade. On a sunny summer Friday in the town of Astoria on the northwest tip of Oregon, I wandered down a shop-lined street between Pioneer Cemetery and the vast Columbia River.
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