Succeeding in jazz depends on taking well-timed risks. Ernest Gregory, who devoted most of his life to promoting and chronicling the musical genre which he adored, understood that as well as anyone who performed it.
Gregory — the “voice of the Atlanta Jazz Festival” — the emcee, who for decades called on concert-goers to “show your love” to every act that appeared onstage, died Oct. 30 of heart failure after years of health problems, including a kidney transplant. His death leaves a substantial hole in the city’s music scene. Gregory was 72 years old.
He was an exquisite and sometimes outlandish dresser — the epitome of jazz cool with a totally sanguine personality — and was also a photographer and leaves behind tens of thousands of photographs of famous jazz musicians. He is survived by two sons, Quincy Dudley and Dyani Gregory of Steubenville, Ohio, where their father was born; and his only surviving sibling, sister Eugenia Gregory, who lives in Atlanta.
“He was a character,” said New York photographer Frank Stewart, Gregory’s mentor in the photography craft and a former colleague at the Lincoln Center. It was there that Gregory went to work in 1996 in stage operations. The two followed the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra around the country — an outfit led by musical director and trumpeter Wynton Marsalis — taking photos of their performances. Stewart, an accomplished photographer who’s held or taken part in exhibitions around the country and overseas, said Gregory worked hard in developing his skills as a novice photographer picking up the craft in his 40s, and thrived.
“He would do anything to get the shot, even get in the way of customers,” Stewart recalled. “I told him, ‘Man, you can’t get in the way of paying customers.’”
And while other photographers would wear black to be less conspicuous on the job, Gregory would opt for, say, a “white hat, yellow scarf, green pants and a red shirt,” Stewart said. Stewart said Gregory favored his suits so much that he once rushed back to an evacuating New Orleans hotel to retrieve the outfit he’d planned to wear at a Marsalis brother’s wedding. At the time an untethered barge was threatening to strike the hotel.
Gregory’s penchant for taking risks and calling attention to himself perhaps dates back to his childhood, when his mother, Anna Mae, took him to a white’s-only pool in their small town of Weirton, West Virginia, and told him to go in.
“Make sure you get in the water. I’m gonna be right here,” his mother told him, according to Eugenia Gregory. Nobody stopped him.
Gregory later graduated from college, where he was named “Mr. West Virginia State,” the inaugural recipient of the crown. After college, Gregory worked in minority recruitment offices in Pittsburgh and Rochester, New York, before moving to Atlanta, where he took a job recruiting MARTA engineers. But he also picked up a gig hosting a jazz radio show at WCLK-FM and started getting involved in the new city-sponsored jazz festival that had launched in 1978.
Gregory, who’d grown up in a household ruled by old school parents who favored gospel, developed a love for jazz from an older brother who adored Miles Davis. Gregory tilted toward trumpeters and became a big fan of such luminaries of the horn as Clifford Brown and Roy Hargrove.
At first, Gregory served as an informal Atlanta emissary for the festival, picking up famous guests such as Davis and Max Roach and taking them on tours of the city. Later, Gregory’s role with the city’s Bureau of Cultural Affairs became more formal as he took on the emcee job for the Memorial Day weekend event, an annual gig he would hold for decades even after leaving Atlanta.
In that role, Gregory repeatedly showed Atlantans just how he felt about jazz.
“You can’t fake it if there’s no love or affinity for this music,” Gregory told ArtsATL in 2016. “You can’t window-dress. It’s got to be an extension of who you are, and I’ve got nothing but love for the genre.”
Fellow photographer Sue Ross said Gregory had a “tremendous eye for catching people at the absolute moment of creativity in their performance.” She called her friend and colleague “a keeper of the culture. His documentation of the Black music community is a national treasure.”
A funeral for Gregory is scheduled in Steubenville on Nov. 18 at the Mount Carmel Community Baptist Church at 708 N. Fifth St. Friends and family are preparing a separate memorial to be held in Atlanta.
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