Meet Marjorie Eliot, GANYC 2016 Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

How to describe Marjorie Eliot’s weekly Jazz Parlor, which she hosts every Sunday from her living room at the historic 555 Edgecombe Avenue? It is part jazz concert, part poetry reading, part theatrical production, and part revival meeting. But what it is, most of all, is therapy.

Eliot, who will receive GANYC’s Lifetime Achievement Award at the second-annual Apple Awards ceremony on March 7, started the parlor in 1993 after the death of her son Phil. He passed on a Sunday, so Eliot began the parlor as a way to get past the day each week. Because of this, she says that as much joy as her audiences get from coming, she gets so much more out of it than any of her visitors.

“I knew I would still be doing it (all these years later), because I had to, emotionally,” Eliot says from her apartment about 30 minutes before a Sunday parlor in late January. “I couldn’t have imagined someone coming in from Russia, for example. But having faith in my great-grandmother’s teachings, I’m not shocked at that, because it’s the sincerest piece of me. I do it for the right reasons. The prettiest part of this is the audiences. They come and embrace the idea, and we are more alike than not, and that’s the thing that gets me.”

People from every corner of the globe – she casually recalls interactions with Australian and Finnish guests – fill the folding chairs that colonize her living room, kitchen and hallway to witness one of the most unique performances in New York. With Eliot behind the piano, an ensemble of musicians and actors enter and leave the parlor, interspersing several versions of the jazz standard “There Will Never Be Another You” with dramatic readings of Eliot’s poetry about the African-American struggle, as well as other jazz numbers. On this day, Eliot jokes with GANYC’s resident jazz tour guide, Gordon Polatnick, that he must be getting tired of hearing this song, since he brings so many visitors to see the show – today he has brought two clients from Holland. Polatnick will present the award to Eliot; she says that when he informed her that she was going to receive this award, she thought he was playing a practical joke on her.

The set lasts about two hours, ending after both a donation bag and a bag of protein bars have circulated the room – Eliot does not charge admission for this most intimate of performances. Latecomers line up in the hallway outside her apartment 3F inside the historic “Triple Nickel,” waiting for a seat to open inside. Regulars and newcomers are welcomed equally, and everyone sings in one voice at the grand finale, “This Little Light of Mine.”

“They get it,” she explains of her visitors. “They talk to me about it. I integrate theater, and they get it. One Sunday, a woman from Italy said, ‘Marjorie, I don’t speak very good English, but the emotions – I’m there.’ And I thought – this is it, this is it. So I feel that I’m a part of the family, I could go home with anybody (who comes to the parlor). I think they know I’m not complacent about them. We give the best we can do on a given day. That’s it.”

While claiming to not know much about the tour business, Eliot’s early efforts at publicizing the parlor in the mid-1990s are quite reminiscent of how many tour guides begin marketing their tours.

“Word of mouth is what got us going. I used to send out 200 calendars a month. Killing myself doing it. To let people know – friends, jazz lovers, taking it to the music stores: Sam Ash, Manny’s,” she remembers. “They would tell folks. A guy at the Edison Hotel, when they had music, he would say ‘It’s a cheap date!’ So many Columbia University thesis projects have been done about this. They would call and I would say, ‘I need an audience, get here!’ And they would come.”

Now, she bashfully states, the audiences look forward to seeing her play the piano – initially, she didn’t play very much during the sessions, but rather would sing duos. Her regulars also look forward to hearing her son Rudel Drears play. She has kept the parlor going in part to allow “Rudy” to perform in whatever style he likes, and her regulars talk about seeing him grow up, contributing to why Eliot humbly describes the parlor as having “morphed into a family affair.”

It has also morphed into such a joyous and popular New York attraction that GANYC has chosen her for its lifetime achievement award, an honor of which she is still trying to grasp the meaning.

“I haven’t allowed myself to think a lot about (this award) because, GOD!” she exclaims. “I didn’t even pick out my dress yet!”