Indiana Avenue Jazz

By its heyday, Indiana Avenue ran roughly nine blocks through the near-west side of Indianapolis, lined with jazz clubs. Duke Ellington came. Cab Calloway came. Ella Fitzgerald came. They came because the clubs were good and the audiences were serious and the Avenue was one of the nodes in the national circuit of Black music and Black commerce that scholars later named the Chitlin' Circuit.

The Avenue had its own stars. Wes Montgomery was born in Indianapolis in nineteen twenty-three and grew up close by. He was self-taught, which is the wrong word, because he taught himself from the records of Charlie Christian and then devised a style entirely his own: picking the strings with his thumb instead of a pick, playing in octaves, finding a warmth no one else had found in that spot on the neck. He worked day jobs, including as a welder, to support his wife and seven children, then played the Avenue clubs at night, sometimes until sunrise.

His break came when the saxophonist Cannonball Adderley heard him at a club and told everyone who would listen. Within a few years Montgomery had several albums that reached the Billboard charts. He died in Indianapolis in nineteen sixty-eight at forty-five, at the exact moment he had finally broken through to mainstream audiences.

He never quite left. He kept coming home to the clubs on Indiana Avenue throughout his career, even as the Avenue was changing. Interstate Sixty-Five arrived, and the highway cut directly through the neighborhood. The expansion of Indiana University's Indianapolis campus took more. Urban renewal programs, funded by federal dollars, acquired surrounding blocks and demolished them. By the nineteen seventies, nearly all the original architecture of Indiana Avenue's jazz era was gone. The Walker Building remained. Almost everything else did not.