Celebrating life with Marjorie

 

Every single Sunday afternoon for the last 30 years, come rain or come shine, an elderly lady in Harlem opens her home to complete strangers.

Within a few hours all of us, sitting on rickety chairs, scattered around her apartment, have become good friends.

The woman is Marjorie Elliott and her love project, in memory of her dead sons, is to celebrate life through jazz music. 

It started in 1992. Her first son died on a Sunday and the Sunday concerts, which she arranged soon after, were a way for her to live through the pain, sorrow, and grief.

- Sundays are the days, I look forward to. They are the reason, I am still alive, she told me when I, many years ago, visited her place for the first time. 

Since then, yet another son has died and her third son disappeared a few years ago and has never been found.

Still, the celebration of life continues at Marjorie's, and you need no tickets to participate. 

There are no door charges nor any drink minimum. You just show up and find a free chair in the living room, the corridor, or perhaps in the kitchen. 

Then you settle down for a couple of hours and listen to this little, grand lady, playing the piano, while talented musician friends are sitting in, playing and singing.

Marjorie Elliott, who once played with Duke Ellington, lives in what was once a  ‘whites only’ apartment building at the corner of Edgecombe Avenue and W 160 Street. 

During the Harlem Renaissance, wealthy  African Americans - Joe Louis, Count Basie, Paul Robeson to name a few - moved into this and the surrounding buildings, and the area has since been called Sugar Hill, as black people here finally had found a place to live the sweet life!

When you leave the building, certainly more lighthearted than when you entered, you can imagine how the lobby must have looked in the days, when Count Basie lived here.  

Today the Tiffany leaded glass ceiling is slowly disintegrating, but up in apartment 3F, jazz seems to live eternally.