Indie band the Goddess Lakshmi performs Sunday nights at the Paris Blues, a bar on Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard in Harlem. Performing original tunes by lead guitarist and Harlem resident Rene Calvo, the band draws a small, yet devoted, local following. “It’s an auspicious time in Harlem,” says Calvo, “whenever you have new groups of people meeting in a new place, it tends to mark a period of new collaborations and great creativity.”

On a chilly Saturday afternoon, the scene beyond the cobalt front door the Harlem School of the Arts is chaotic. Coats of every size and color are haphazardly strewn around the atrium:  on the floor, on purple plastic chairs and in front of the stage that eats up half the space. Children head to their classrooms carrying instrument cases that may be as tall as they are. Parents sit together amidst the jumble of coats, cases and chairs, chatting while keeping an eye on their kids or waiting for them to finish lessons.

Saturday is clearly the busiest day of the week at the school. Yet a mere eight months ago, on the first Saturday of April, the building stood empty, its blue door locked; the Harlem School of the Arts was forced to shut down for three weeks because, after several years of internal mismanagement, it had run out of money. After parents, students and alumni bombarded city officials with letters and protested outside the building, and four donors stepped forward with a $1 million gift, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced the school’s reopening from its front steps on April 21.

Since April the school has made significant changes, replacing the old board of directors, trimming the staff and sprucing up the building in an effort to rebuild its image.

The new board’s “$1 Million in One Hundred Days” campaign, launched on Sept. 23 in a bold attempt to reach financial stability, remains far short of its goal, but several financial institutions have pledged major gifts unrelated to the campaign.

“I hope they get the money,” says Ephraim Emmanuel, president of the school’s Parents Association.

Soprano Dorothy Maynor opened what was then called the School of the Arts of the St. James Community Center, Inc. in 1964; the school taught its first piano classes in the St. James Presbyterian Church’s basement.  The school moved to its current building at 645 St. Nicholas Avenue in 1978.

Its mission is to give Harlem children and young adults an opportunity to develop their artistry, creativity and self-confidence in a rigorous environment. It counts among its alumni 2008 Tony Award winner de’Adre Aziza, film and television actor Giancarlo Esposito, composer and arranger Ray Chew and the late Shannon Sky Tavarez, who at age 10 played the role of young Nala in Broadway’s “The Lion King.”

Seventy-seven faculty members now teach in its four disciplines: music, dance, theater and visual arts.  This fall, the school accepted 581 students, aged four through 18, who attend classes after school and on weekends.  Their annual instruction averages $5000 per year, but most students pay much less because tuition is subsidized through grants, scholarships and discounts, each type of aid determined by a different set of eligibility requirements.

“Without HSA I don’t know if I’d be an artist,” says Cherrye Davis, a former student and current faculty member. Davis enrolled in the dance department when she was seven, but after taking an acting class when she was 10, she was hooked by theater. Now she’s a program associate in the theater department and teaches theater history. “It’s deeper than a job. It’s deeper than a check,” she explains. “The closing showed us how close we are as a family.”

David Burnett's string orchestra class prepares to begin playing Bach. (Photo by Tahiat Mahboob)

The announcement of the school’s closing, in April as students were preparing for their final recitals, came very suddenly, Davis says.

“It was April 1 and they called us and said the school would not be open,” recalls Emmanuel’s 14-year-old son Kimani, who plays the piano and flute and performs with the jazz band. “The first impression was that it was an April Fool’s joke.” When he realized the truth, he asked his father to step in, and as Emmanuel worked with other parents to resuscitate the school, Kimani found an opportunity to help.

Channel 11 wanted to do a news story on the school’s closing and film Kimani playing music at his home. “He felt that the best place was to play in front of the closed school,” his father recalls. So the family drove to the school at 10 p.m. and the video cameras rolled as Kimani played his flute at the closed entrance.

“The board abdicated its responsibilities. They let the director run the school however she wanted,” says Emmanuel, speaking about the former board members  and director. He pointed out that the administrators had turned a surplus into a deficit.

An audited financial statement for 2009 shows that the school had an operating shortfall of $1,668,088 and that its net assets had decreased by $587,025 since 2008, but the school’s 990 tax forms show that its troubles started as early as 2006. “It gradually became apparent that we were spending more than we were bringing in,” says John Corwin, whom the former board hired as interim executive director last December to decipher what was happening with the school’s finances.

When the crisis hit, “I actually found out from one of my student’s parents,” says David Burnett, a violin teacher at the school for 21 years. “They got an email from the school and called me.” Some parents, students and former students, now as far away as Japan, were in tears; others sounded angry. Parents offered their workplaces or churches so that Burnett could still conduct lessons; he teaches  violin and viola and leads the chamber music and the string orchestras.

On Saturday afternoon, as the string orchestra takes center stage, the building fills with Bach’s “Konzert für Cembalo.” Between multiple starts and stops, he helps students correct their instrument positioning. Soft-spoken but firm, he also admonishes the musicians about keeping their homework clean. “If you had wasabi for lunch, I don’t want to see it on your sheet music,” he says drawing a collective chuckle from his students, poised with their bows.

Since the reopening, Burnett has noticed changes at the school, including many meetings with the new board; he sees far more transparency and communication. “We had never had meetings like that before,” he says.

The walls of the Harlem School of Arts are adorned with students' work. (Photo by Tahiat Mahboob)

“The condition given by the four donors before giving the million dollars was that there be a new board of directors,” explains Corwin.

The new board, chaired by Charles J. Hamilton, Jr., is taking steps to move the school towards sustainability. A partner in the real estate development corporation La Cité Development, LLC, Hamilton joined the three-week April campaign that led to the Herb Alpert Foundation, the Starr Foundation and two anonymous donors coming forth with $1 million to reopen the school.

The new board’s vice chair and secretary Janice Savin Williams is a co-founder and senior principal of The Williams Capital Group, L.P.  She and her husband Christopher made a $50,000 to $99,999 contribution, according to the school’s 2010 annual report, that helped recarpet the entire school and refurbish that stage in the atrium.

Other board members include Milton Irvin, a managing director for UBS; Nina Cooke John of Studio Level LLC; Edith W. Cooper of Goldman Sachs; Steven P. Henry, director of the Paula Cooper Gallery; Jeffrey Laikind, a certified financial analyst; and Dr. Mary Schmidt Campbell, dean of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. All have donated to the school. To promote communication, the new members also invited Emmanuel to join the board.

“The chairman of the parents association was rarely invited to the board meetings,” says Emmanuel, theorizing that the new board was responding to parents’ involvement in reopening the school.

“In six months’ time, the board accomplished some major changes and improvements in financial management,” says Melanie Dyer, director of development since 2009. She explains that the new board has created a strategic plan, audited two years of financial statements and conducted an external and internal assessment of the school. It will also complete this fiscal year’s audit on time, Dyer says.

The school has also begun to market itself more vigorously. “We had to let the public know we were alive and well and in full operation,” she explains. It held an open house and block party in September, featuring large banners with photos of past and present students; it plans to send existing and potential donors video interviews of students talking about their experiences at the school.

Dyer says the school is relying on the relationship between board members and individual donors to reach the “$1 Million in One Hundred Days” goal. “It’s definitely audacious. It’s unprecedented. It’s something that the board deemed necessary,” she says.

One new donor is Jill Kraus, who lives on the Upper East Side and serves on the boards of several non-profit organizations. A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, Kraus decided to contribute after board member Henry, a close friend, contacted her. While Kraus won’t disclose the amount of her contribution, she speaks passionately about the important role art plays in children’s lives.

“It’s so hard to get funding to the arts and arts education, especially in today’s environment where schools or communities are cutting back on arts education,” she says. “My husband and I feel very strongly that supporting projects where students get arts education is a huge component of a creative educational environment.”

A past donor, Ovation TV, has not only pitched in with $5000 but also offered $55,000 in airtime to broadcast a public service announcement seeking donations to the campaign. “We immediately helped,” says Sonia Tower, vice president of community relations. “A lot of organizations are in that spot because of the recession.”

Students gather around instructor John Russo after an afternoon of string orchestra practice. (Photo by Tahiat Mahboob)

Corwin explains that as the board expanded from five to nine members, the administrative staff was trimmed by 20 percent, with five positions eliminated and the remaining personnel trained to be more efficient.

Efficiency has become a mantra at the school. “We bought a new software system called Blackbaud,” says treasurer Milton Irvin. “We have a much better handle on the revenues coming in, students attending, etc.” The school has also brought in a consulting firm, Kiwi Partners, to monitor financial its transactions. “There’s an increased sense of visibility,” says Irvin. “The donors who had backed off are certainly rethinking their position.”

Back at the school, as the weak December sun fades outside, members of the string orchestra pack away their instruments and put away the chairs. But they quickly return to the stage when they hear the opening notes of Eric Satie’s “Gymnopedie” coming from the grand piano in the corner. John Russo, a part-time pianist at the school, stops midway through the composition to answer questions.

Burnett, who stepped away after class ended at 4 p.m., returns laden with boxes of pizza for his students. Their day isn’t over yet; the school’s resident dance company is having a recital later that evening.

With 17 days left in its 100-day campaign, the school has only raised $270,225. But Dyer says that the school has received additional support. Goldman Sachs Gives contributed $150,000, Open Society Foundation, City of New York gave a $200,000 multi-year gift and Darden Restaurant Foundation gave $25,000. “The million dollar campaign is not our only fundraising campaign that’s underway,” says Corwin. “We have other requests for funding that are outstanding.”

“One of the overall challenges for the new board has been to reestablish credibility in a funding community that has some skepticism, and one of the recent milestones achieved was the naming of the new director which a number of potential funders have been waiting to hear about,” says Corwin. “We expect that will accelerate or advance the fundraising revenue.” Last week, the school announced that Yvette L. Campbell, director of the Ailey Extension at the Alvin Ailey Dance Foundation, will be its new executive director starting January. Corwin also points out that a lot of non-profit organizations tend to give at the end of December.

“We feel confident,” says Corwin. “We intend to be operating well into next year, no matter what.”

“The board and faculty are committed to keeping the school open,” Dyer affirms. “And we’ll do everything humanly possible to keep the school open.”

Opus 118's founder Roberta Guaspari at the school on 125th Street and Park Avenue. (Photo by Ksenia Galouchko)

This fall the hallways of Opus 118, Harlem’s most famous music school, remain quieter than usual. Located on the 7^th floor of an office building at 125^th Street and Park Avenue, the school’s three studios and performance room no longer fill with 250 students during its after-school program.

Instead of teaching its usual total of 700 students, Opus 118 enrolled only about 75 in its after-school program, with reduced scholarships compared to past years, and 200 in the in-school program when it opened earlier this month.

The school needs $1 million—its annual budget— to resume operating at full capacity, says administrative principal Karen Geer.

“I don’t think right now we have the funds to continue past winter,” says co-founder and creative director Roberta Guaspari.

Dependent on donations, Opus has seen its budget shrink over the past two years.  The recession has taken a toll: board chairman Nathaniel Sutton say that donors have scaled back contributions and one foundation, formerly a significant supporter, has dissolved.

But internal conflict has also played a role, including the departure of influential board members who’d served for over 10 years, says a person active in the school’s founding.

The board members who resigned included major donors and people linked to them, like Dorothea von Haeften, the wife of prominent violinist Arnold Steinhardt. The couple’s friendships with investor Walter Scheuer and internationally-known violinist Isaac Stern, helped raise Opus’s initial funding and drew media attention.

The new board of trustees, according to this source, has been less effective at fundraising. Shortfalls led to the school’s abrupt closure last April; it usually runs through May.

“I handed the school over to the executive director Alexander Small with enough money in the bank,” Van Haeften says. She charges that the new board hasn’t maintained a relationship with the school’s donors. “When I left, the new board members didn’t get in touch with the donors; not enough personal effort was made,” says Van Haeften. “We had many donors among board members and they weren’t contacted, as they should’ve been.”

Guaspari remembers the days when budget shortfalls could be resolved with one donation. “Dorothea and I would go over to Wally’s,” she said, referring to Scheuer. “And he would just give us $300,000.”

Sutton says the small staff and loss of a development director more than six months ago has prevented fundraising from being “where we want it to be.” He adds that Opus cannot now afford to hire a development professional but that remains a high priority.

Opus’ financial and media supporters include Congressman Charles Rangel, actress Meryl Streep, who put Opus 118 on the map by playing Guaspari in the film “Music of the Heart,” and well-known violinists Mark O’Connor and Diane Monroe. The school has also received grants from the Department of Cultural Affairs, National Endowment of the Arts, New York State Council for the Arts, JP Morgan Chase, New York Community Trust, says Sutton via e-mail.

But the most effective fundraising strategy, Geer says, has been to invite charities, such as members of the Cruise Industry Charitable Foundation, to school concerts.

She is optimistic. “We are hoping for a steady cash flow,” Geer says. “Certain grants are going to be coming in over the course of the year, so every month we’ll be able to reinstate more kids and programs.” Not only does the school intend to return to full after-school enrollment in January, but to reinstate specialized private programs, like choir and guitar lessons.

But the school’s co-founders, Guaspari and Ellen Weiss, remain troubled by the financial situation. “I hope we can get someone who can get us back on our feet again,” Guaspari says. Weiss called the school’s situation “perilous.”

Over the summer, Opus alumnae and parents formed an alumnae and parent board to help the board fundraise.

“We are more hopeful because parents and alumnae have become actively involved,” Weiss says. “Alumnae have a fierce loyalty to Roberta, so when she reached out to them when the board asked her to, they started connecting with each other and working with the current head of the board Nat Sutton.”

But parent board member Stacey Willoughby cautioned, “There isn’t a solid fundraising program in place; the issues remain. Funding can become an issue once again soon,” she says. “We need a specially designated person who’ll make a fundraising plan.”

For Guaspari, who continues to head the school’s curriculum, financial problems aren’t new. In 1991, when public schools slashed Guaspari’s violin program, she managed to raise money, with support from parents and students, with a Carnegie Hall concert. Guaspari used the concert’s $1 million profit to make her music program more independent, forming the current separate center in 2002, says Geer.

Opus 118 currently hosts in-school music programs at three public elementary schools: Central Park East 1, Central Park East 2 and River East. The in-school classes started on schedule in mid-September and are taught by Guaspari, who is paid by the schools.

But there were significant differences this year. In addition to the in-school program, Opus 118’s after-school music program offers three performance groups according to children’s skill levels: preparatory, junior ensemble and advanced performance group.

To enter the performance group, students must first take small-group private lessons from Opus teachers, which require a fee. Until this year fees for the students in the lower two performance groups were cut in half, and waived entirely for advanced students. Students in other groups who needed financial support also received full scholarships.

But this year, Guaspari says, Opus can’t take beginners who can’t pay for private lessons, and only about 10 after-school students are fully subsidized by the school.  Sutton says that students who need financial aid will get scheduled depending on how many slots are open at the time.

The advanced performance group was the only after-school group to resume full classes this September, rehearsing twice a week. The other two groups started rehearsing a month later, with rehearsals cut from twice to once a week.

Weiss says Opus always gave scholarships to whoever needed them. “Opus is not about being selective, it’s about giving everyone a chance. Sadly, now they have to ask parents to pay for the after-school programs.”

Four violin teachers left Opus for other jobs after the school closed in April, and one new teacher got hired, says Guaspari. Nelson Ojeda, an Opus piano teacher for three years, says the school closed so abruptly he had to continue private lessons for Opus kids outside of school, so they could finish the semester.

“It’s a sign that we need stable funding,” says Ojeda, who also works at the Harbor Conservatory for the Performing Arts. “We can’t go into the semester without knowing whether we’ll be able to continue.”

The advanced group, the school’s key fundraisers, Geer says, perform 10 public concerts each year. Over the years its young musicians have played at Carnegie Hall and at the Children’s Inaugural Ball in Washington DC.

When the school closed in April, the performance group concerts continued as part of fundraising, says Loi Kail, whose son plays in the group. The children will play in honor of the jazz lounge Louis 649 on Oct 28, with proceeds from the $160 tickets going to Opus.

Shoes and CDs sold in Little Senegal at Bakh Yaye (Photo by Sam Petulla)

Customers entering La Malienne La Mama de Momy Mame Gakou announce themselves loudly.

“Moussa!” shouts a tall man wearing jeans and a black puffy ski jacket, walking inside to give Moussou Kassoumou, the store’s thin, soft-spoken manager, a handshake and an embrace.

Clattering, lush highlife music booms from a stereo inside the small music store, inviting sidewalk traffic and prompting visitors digging through the CDs to speak up when talking to the staff.

Across the street, two other music stores, New Africa Music and Video and Bakh Yaye, are selling many of the same CDs: Senegalese, Nigerian, Ghanaian, and Ivory Coast music.

The stores form practically a West African music belt in Little Senegal, a largely immigrant neighborhood on 116th Street east of Frederick Douglass Boulevard wedged between Columbia University, where Afro-prep band Vampire Weekend crafted its trademark “Upper West Side Soweto” style, and Harlem, where major-label rappers like Mase and Cam’ron claim the streets as home.

By outward appearances, Little Senegal’s music stores resemble typical New York variety goods businesses, the kind found on many uptown blocks. But the stores are distinct. La Malienne’s music selection is curated by Jose Toure, who has spent more than 20 years in the music industry. Bakh Yaye sells much of the same music that Mrde Jop, who is managing the store while the owner, his brother, is away in Africa, sold at a store he owned in Senegal in the early 80s.

West African music long ago caught music listeners’ attention as a secret sauce in likeable pop music. Artists like The Talking Heads, Peter Gabriel, and Bela Fleck have cited its influence, as have new Brooklyn music acts like The Dirty Projectors and Animal Collective. Recently, though, the music hasn’t been so easy to find.

“Tower records isn’t selling the African music like they used to. HMV closed,” said Toure, a producer who sells his artists’ CDs at La Malienne and consults for Central Park Summerstage, advising the booking for its international performer lineup. Once Virgin Megastore pulled the plug on its Union Square store and vacated New York, music stores with a sizable African music selection became scarce, he explained. Little Senegal became one of its last surviving outposts.

Yet the stores mostly serve as local favorites, appealing to the area’s West African immigrants, who know them by word of mouth and bolster sales by buying CDs in person from their fellow Wolof- and French-speaking West Africans.

“We almost never advertise,” said Jop. The stores’ main overture to outsiders is the shattering drumming and melodic vocals that drift from the stores into the street.

Miscellaneous wares supplement the stores’ music sales, making them reminiscent of outdoor street market vendors where incongruous goods mix freely. Bakh Yaye sells gold jewelry and pump heels, La Malienne sells knock-off designer luggage and cell phone accessories, and New Africa Music and Video’s cell phone service puts money on its owners’ phones, so they can call overseas.

CDs in the stores are cheap: two for $5 or one for $3 in all three stores. Samba Top, New Africa Music and Video’s owner, said that the more CDs someone buys, the cheaper he will sell them individually. Jop said that neither Bakh Yaye or La Malienne have been profitable in the last few years. Top, though, said New Africa Music and Video has consistently made a small profit because of its prepaid cell phone service.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

West African music’s influence on American rock and folk music has deep roots, critics say. Pitchfork Media’s African music critic, Joe Tangari, explained what he called his pet theory of West African music: “It’s one of the four proteins that make up modern American music’s DNA (the other three are European art music, European folk music, and electronics and the recording medium),” he said via e-mail.

Tangari outlined various influence streams. “You have a whole group of bands, the best known being Antibalas, that directly build their sound off of Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat. Then you have your Vampire Weekends, who use African elements in the service of indie rock. There are trans-Atlantic bands that pair American or European and African musicians—see the Kenyan-American benga-rock band Extra Golden, the Ghanaian-American highlife group Occidental Brothers Dance Band International, and the Malawian-British The Very Best, for some examples,” he said.

In fact, cross-pollination between West African and American music seems to be reaching new heights. Banning Eyre, Afropop.org’s senior editor, has followed the uptick. “West African music has a growing influence on American bands these days. Bonnie Raitt, Taj Mahal, Bela Fleck and Ry Cooder have all recorded with West African musicians,” he said.

Back in Little Senegal, conversations with Toure, who sips a cup of Lipton tea and wears a brown beanie, are interrupted by cell phone calls to artists, some of which escalate into heated arguments in heavily African-accented French. Toure disdains the other two shops on the street. “They’re not legit,” he said. “The other two do a lot of bootlegging … La Malienne’s CDs are made in Africa and France.”

But the fact is, music passes between Bakh Yaye and La Malienne all day as the owners partner up and transfer dozens of CDs, rearranging their shelves in the hopes of boosting sales. Staff from Bakh Yaye sometime walk over, carrying armfuls of CD cases, and stock La Mallienne by hand themselves.

Kassoumou said Bakh Yaye sells more Senegalese music than La Malienne, which specializes in CDs from Ghana, Mali and the Ivory Coast. Yet with the stores’s music in constant flux, any differences seem minimal, which explains why Bakh Yaye employee Mody Fill said the stores’ music is “all the same.”

Owners at all three stores agreed, though, that whatever the shops’ tastes, final judgment comes from the fans. “We sell Youssou N’Dour,” Fill said, “because all African people know him. I sell the music I like, and the people like. It’s the same music I sold in Senegal,” he said.

Youssou N’Dour, an artist whose name is repeated with chant-like reverence in Little Senegal’s stores, was a founding Senegalese mbalax singer in the 80s, Eyre explained. And he still records; Rolling Stone named his 2007 album, Rokku Mi Rokka (Give and Take), the 30th best album of the year .

N’Dour, who “in much of Africa … is perhaps the most famous singer alive,” according to Rolling Stone, occasionally visits the stores to wish the neighborhood well, said Top. Fans can take a photo with N’Dour or get an autograph.

The storeowners buy music from different distributors. At Bakh Yaye, employee Mody Fill, who stood in the backroom working at a computer, explained that African record stores ship him a single CD, which he duplicates. Then he sells the copies. “The stores in Africa don’t have the money to ship the CDs,” he explained. At New Africa Muisc and Video, Top said he buys from both Senegal record stores, who ship from overseas, and from American suppliers, who burn their discs stateside.

Customers trek uptown from Africa, France, and across the United States. Mamadou Kome, who was visiting New York for the weekend from Atlanta, made a point to visit La Malienne. “I’m buying two DVDs,” he said, deciding to pass on music. “But the people in Atlanta know this store. There isn’t a music store like this in Atlanta.”

Bronx resident Aicha Bamba, who was shuffling through a few CDs in the back of La Malienne, said she comes to the store three or four times a month. As she browsed, she walked between the CD rack and a boombox, where customers can sample music before making a purchase. “They’re the best,” she said, pointing to Moussa, whose recommendations have turned her onto obscure CDs like “coupe decale, Youssoun N’Dour, and Ishmael Isaac.”

Tangari expects that interest in African music will only rise. “There’s a Los Angeles-based band called Fool’s Gold that released an excellent debut album this year,” he explained. “It incorporates highlife and desert guitar and Tamashek influences very smoothly into an indie rock environment, and then includes lyrics sung partly in Hebrew.

“It’s hard to imagine something much more global than that. As the Internet and MP3s breed more musical omnivores, I think this trend will only accelerate.”

Marjorie Eliot’s Parlor Entertainment jazz sessions have become an institution. For 15 years, with the help of her son Rudel Drears, Eliot has been throwing open her parlor to everyone from travelers toting cameras and guidebooks to neighborhood regulars who help pass around punch and cookies during intermission. “This is the real thing,” says German tourist Dom Schick, a recent visitor. “This is the Harlem jazz scene you hear about.”

In Eliot’s apartment, photos of Martin Luther King and John Coltrane share wall space with Michael Jackson and Barack Obama. Folding chairs are crammed into rows in the small living room, kitchen and hallway. Eliot welcomes everybody with the same enthusiastic smile. She’s “somewhere over 50” and frail but wiry, elegant in her flowing Sunday best with a halo of gray hair. Her voice is measured and she speaks with effort, but projects well – a holdover, perhaps, from her days on the stage and in the choir. Eliot opens each session at the piano, softly ushering in the evening with a hymn or spiritual.

Drears, whose father is percussionist Al Drears (who has played with Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane and others), sings and alternates with Eliot on the ivories. An energetic musician in a crisp white shirt and black fedora, with blocks of cubic zirconia twinkling in his earlobes, he is prone to fits of post-performance chuckling.

About 50 people show up at 4pm every week. Though well-known musicians like bassist Bob Cunningham have been regular performers, the audience doesn’t come to meet the stars. “People come in for one reason, and that’s to listen to the music,” Drears says. “Some people find this to be a religious experience. Some people come here right after church, for communion – but it’s about the music.”

What Eliot calls “Studio 3F” has all the inclusivity of a house of worship, but with the secret air of a speakeasy. Saxophonist Gerald Hayes, who has played here regularly, calls Parlor Entertainment one-of-a-kind. “I like it because it’s cozy,” he says. “It’s personal. And it’s different. I’m just playing with two pieces, maybe three pieces, but it’s not a full band. I’m raw.”

Eliot grew up in a house with two pianos and began singing in church. Her family moved to New York in 1962, where she raised her five sons on music. “Her mother was her first teacher, just like she was my first teacher,” says Drears. Always active in the arts, Eliot appeared in the original production of Charles Gordone’s “No Place to Be Somebody”, the first African-American play to win a Pulitzer Prize. She acted in Sydney Lumet’s “Serpico” (playing a rape victim) and in a Broadway production of “The Member of the Wedding”. She wrote her own play, “Branches from the Same Tree,” in 1980, and won an AUDELCO award in 2003. She’s also taught theatre and music to children.

She started the parlor sessions as a way to cope with the loss of her son Phillip, an actor who died 17 years ago, at 32, of a kidney infection. The first intermittent performances took place at the Morris-Jumel Mansion, but soon musicians from Eliot’s circle of friends began playing regularly on Edgecombe Street. Drears remembers that “in the early days, it used to be maybe five people. Some days we would go the laundry room and say ‘Come upstairs, we’re doing a show.’”

As the word spread, mother and son had to set out more folding chairs each week. “We haven’t missed a single Sunday in all these years. We’re here rain, snow, blizzards…” Drears says.

Eliot pays the musicians out of pocket and with help from friends and a donation drum. “I don’t want to be funded, so nobody can tell me how to do it,” she says, adding that she has “lots of loans.”

“It’s kind of on a shoestring budget,” Drears says.

Three years ago, Eliot’s son Michael, a rock and R&B musician, died in his late 40s after an illness of several years. “It’s hard,” Drears says, “but God keeps us going. One of the things that makes this so great is the people that come through. They’re here to hear the music and they may be transformed.”

Regular visitor Bessie Mullings used to sing with Eliot at the Morris-Jumel Mansion; she comes to the parlor after church each Sunday. “After the second son died, she took it pretty rough,” she says of her friend. “But she still got to hold on to the piano. You can’t tell people how to heal. She’s been built up now, she’s coming back.”

Parlor Entertainment has become “the essence of my life,” says Eliot. “Everything kind of jumps off of this, and that really speaks to the universal language of music. It nourishes the soul.” At one recent performance, she told an audience that on Sunday nights, she’s “so happy that I can’t go to sleep.”

“People power” keeps the piano tuned and the punch flowing, says Eliot. “So much love and goodwill comes through these doors every Sunday. Folks have taken what is a very sad story and they make something beautiful of it.”