Jack Arthur McCray, an iconic figure in Charleston and jazz impresario who did more than anyone to assert the cultural significance of the music he loved, was found dead Wednesday evening in his Coming Street apartment. He was 64.
He died of natural causes, probably Monday night, according to the Charleston County Coroner's office.
He had been coping with some health problems in recent months, friends and colleagues said, and complained recently of a cough and some numbness in a leg. On Oct. 30, his birthday, he was forced to cancel a family gathering because of sudden back pain.
"We tried to get him to see a doctor, but he wouldn't go," said Leah Suarez, executive director of Jazz Artists of Charleston, a presenting organization McCray helped found in 2008.
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Jack McCray worked at The Post and Courier from 1985 to 2008. After his retirement he became a freelance jazz columnist for Charleston Scene.
With a tendency toward self-effacement, McCray was an untiring advocate of jazz and helped create a "scene" in which local musicians could thrive. In recent years, he played a key role in establishing the Charleston Jazz Initiative, in partnership with College of Charleston arts management professor Karen Chandler.
The program, started in 2003, is just one method of institutionalizing and legitimizing a dynamic music history unique to South Carolina. The initiative has succeeded in archiving thousands of images, documents and recordings that, together, reveal the rich and important legacy of the area.
Jazz Artists of Charleston was formed by Suarez and other local musicians, with McCray serving as a rallying point. In late 2007, after years of promoting the growth of live performance in the area, McCray thought that the time was ripe for an institution that could formalize the presentation of jazz and capitalize on the jazz culture he had celebrated for so long, Suarez said.
A longtime employee of The Post and Courier, McCray began his journalism career in 1985 as a sports copy editor and writer, became an editor of the neighborhood editions, then turned his attention to arts and culture. He retired from the newspaper in 2008, then went on to become a freelance jazz columnist for the newspaper's weekly entertainment magazine, Charleston Scene.
McCray wrote "Charleston Jazz," a history of how the genre evolved in the Holy City.
Drummer Quentin Baxter first met McCray during a gig in 1993 at the Music Farm. McCray came for an interview and proceeded to ask unusual questions, Baxter said.
"He made you think," Baxter said. "He asked penetrating questions about the music itself."
He was writing not just about a particular gig but about the way that gig fit into the larger matrix of jazz in Charleston. It was a kind of dialectic, an ongoing conversation that helped to motivate local players, Baxter said.
"He made musicians feel as though Charleston was an important place, and the way he wrote, and how much he wrote, promoted the music to a point where managers of establishments wanted a piece of the pie."
Before long, the musicians he supported would be playing regularly in restaurants, bars, theaters and festivals in the city.
Born in the Ansonborough neighborhood of Charleston during the Jim Crow era, McCray attended Buist Elementary then C.A. Brown High School, where he played trumpet in the band under George Kenney before transferring to Burke High School.
As a teenager, he spent summers with relatives in New York City, an experience that exposed him to a lively cultural scene that would influence his worldview and cement a love for the big city, according to longtime friend and writer Walter Rhett.
He attended Claflin College in Orangeburg in the late 1960s and was among the group of students protesting segregation and school policy in February 1968 when state troopers fired buckshot into the unarmed crowd. Filled with fear, and horrified at the bloody mayhem, McCray fled the scene as fast as his feet would carry him, toward the infirmary up the hill, he said in an interview earlier this year. - http://www.postandcourier.com/news/2011/nov/10/jazz-advocate-jack-mccray-dies/
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