HAZEL SCOTT | RHAPSODY IN BLUE (1945) Photo

[Hollywood]: Warner Brothers, [1945]. Vintage original 8 x 10″ (20 x 25 cm.) photo. Near fine, with a Warner Brothers stamp on verso.

Portrait of Hazel Scott at the piano.

As haughty a diva as there has ever been, jazz pianist Hazel Scott… did much to alter the image of black women in American film in the early 1940s… There would be no dopey maid roles for this young woman. Instead she always came on as herself in movies, immaculately dressed and coiffed, a blazing symbol of black pride and assertiveness. No doubt Scott’s most elegant appearance is in a nightclub sequence of Rhapsody in Blue, in which she performs, part in English, part in French, Gershwin’s “The Man I Love”. (Bogle, Blacks in American Films, p. 463.)