Music for working, blue-collar cats

BALTIMORE (Map, News) - The Baltimore concert this Sunday by saxophone legend David “Fathead” Newman is a reminder that jazz — like blues and country, even a distant echo called rock ‘n’ roll — was once an entertainment of the working class.

When swing was dominant in the late 1930s, the jazz capital of Harlem was also a hotbed of politics of the working poor. Organ jazz was once a saloon staple in black neighborhoods, and Baltimorean Billie Holiday was known to complain between songs about having to scrub white marble steps for nickels.

Holiday, who stands in midsong and bronze at 1300 Pennsylvania Ave. near Druid Hill, is synonymous with the haunting 1939 protest anthem “Strange Fruit.”

The Fathead gig, in which the “Texas tenor” will be joined by fellow all-stars Larry Willis on piano, Louis Hayes on drums and bassist Steve Novosel, is a benefit for a resurrected champion of laborers everywhere, the International Workers of the World, founded in Chicago in 1905.

The show at St. John’s United Methodist Church comes a week after Newman’s 75th birthday and will feature cuts off his new album, “Life,” on the High Note label. In the early ’50s, Newman got his start in the Ray Charles horn section, and Jazz Week named his 2005 album — “I Remember Brother Ray” — its album of the year.

Sunday’s concert is being put on by jazz communicant Michael Binsky, who once hosted the fabled trumpet player Chet Baker in his Randallstown home for a week.

Binsky, an old “Wobbly,” as IWW members are known — except to those who dismiss them as bellyaching communists — is an old sea dog who sold aluminum siding in Baltimore as a teenager, a la Barry Levinson’s “Tin Men.”

He’s stood many a frigid lookout in the Bering Sea and more than once pulled lines without a winch during 40 years with the Sailors Union of the Pacific.

It is Binsky’s hope that the Newman concert will add moxie to the Baltimore branch of the IWW, reawakened recently by a new generation of impassioned believers.

“These new Wobblies might have blue hair and shackles in their ears, but they are dues-paying members of the union,” said Binsky with affection for the young people he has met through the work, a group whose unofficial headquarters is Red Emma’s bookstore at St. Paul and Madison streets.

Binsky and the IWW members, like many Americans who don’t share their radical politics, believe that capitalism has only become more brutal in a globalized, post-Reagan Wal-Mart world where greed is both fashionable and acceptable at all levels of society.

Even Helen Keller — the deaf, dumb and blind intellectual who died just before Richard Nixon took office — could see it coming. On a recent tour of Keller’s birthplace in Tuscumbia, Ala., just before viewing the famous water pump where she received the miracle of communication, I learned that she joined the IWW in 1912.

Keller wrote for the union paper — Solidarity — throughout the First World War, throwing her moral support behind the labor movement after learning more about disabilities in the United States.

“I was appointed on a commission to investigate the conditions of the blind,” she wrote. “For the first time I, who had thought blindness a misfortune beyond human control, found that too much of it was traceable to wrong industrial conditions, often caused by the selfishness and greed of employers.”

The Baltimore IWW has agitated on behalf of local bicycle shop employees, cafe workers and laborers at Oriole Park at Camden Yards. In New York City, it is working to organize Starbucks employees, a century down the road from the issues important to miners.

In those days, the IWW motto was: “An Injury to One Is An Injury to All.” Now it’s simply, “One Big Union,” with Sunday’s gig billed as “One Big Concert.”

But enough of this broken Woody Guthrie record.

After being on strike for almost four months with the Writers Guild of America, NBC eliminated my job on the cop drama “Life” along with hundreds of others throughout the network. I would not have traded the strike for my job, but I am ready for a sweeter song.

Fathead and the boys will surely bring it on Sunday night.

Catch the Soul

» Who: David “Fathead” Newman, Louis Hayes, Larry Willis and Steve Novosel.

» When: Sunday, 5 p.m.

»  Where: St. John’s United Methodist Church, 2640 St. Paul St. at 27th, Baltimore.

» Tickets: $25 in advance, $30 at the door, $20 with student ID. Picnic baskets welcome.

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