In reference to an earlier question about Marzette Watts, the saxaphonist, I can add some more detail since I knew him briefly. My cousin Helen lived with him for a couple of years on Bowery (or maybe Cooper Square) above a garage, next door to an empty lot and just down the street from the Five Spot. This was in 1961 and 62 I guess. They lived on the top floor upstairs from Leroi Jones (Baraka before he changed his name) and his family, and I visited them a number of times. Marzette was an abstract expresssionist and painted oils with a lot of impasto and swirling movement to them. It was his studio as well as where they lived so I got to see the paintings every time I visited cause they were stacked all over the place. He was really good.

I also remember that they were in the midst of remodeling the place (or tearing out the walls anyway) at one point and that there was no toilet for a while, so you had to do everything into the sewer pipe that was sticking out of the floor. The funkyness of that impressed me greatly. Later on when the building (and the rest of the block including the Five Spot) was going to be demolished they had to move and he stored most of the paintings at my Aunt's house for awhile so I got to see them quite a bit. My cousin still has a couple of them to this day.

It was a long time ago but I seem to remember that Marzette was a funny but intense guy and definitey a serious artist. He was a great painter but unfortunately he never got any recognition (probably because of his race cause the number of sucessful black painters in the 60's in NYC was about zero). At some point he got fed up with it all and destroyed most of the canvases, something that really upset both my Aunt and my cousin although I think they had broken up before that happened. It probably wasn't long after that that he started playing music and I remember seeing his album in the ESP catalog although I never heard it.

Frankly it's a crying shame that he destroyed all those canvases because he really was an excellent painter who deserved to be recognized for what was most likely his strongest talent. I suppose I could ask my cousin for more details about him, so if anyone is interested let me know.