NaN:NaN
- ABC News
- April 3, 2019
A beloved arts patron's greatest challenge yet
'I've lived my life like a run-on sentence with no commas.'
NaN:NaN
‘Bodhisattva’
Actor Michael Imperioli, who got involved with the Jazz Foundation after being moved by the spirit of their work, believes that her role in the industry is thoroughly unique.
![\"PHOTO:](\"http://a.abcnews.com/images/US/wendy-oxenhorn-ht-02-jpo-190330_hpEmbed_17x15_384.jpg\")
“I can encapsulate the thing that really inspires me about Wendy,\" he said. \"When we did the loft party in the fall and she went up and gave an award to Sweet Georgia Brown...I’m looking at Sweet Georgia Brown, who’s very touched and very moved. But then I looked at Wendy and her face was just full with joy -- like the joy was just beaming out of Wendy’s face. It just broke my heart.”
“Because I said [to myself] ‘This is what this is about for her.’ She gets an immense amount of joy from helping people. I’m a Buddhist, [and] in my religion, we call that a bodhisattva -- someone who actually dedicates their lives to serving and helping others and that’s who she is.\"
“I’m surprised that she hasn’t been interviewed by Oprah Winfrey and lauded in some public way -- not to single out any one person, but she deserves to be on that sort of platform,” Imperioli told ABC News.
“People should really know this person,\" Imperioli said. \"She should get a Congressional Medal of Honor as far as I’m concerned.”
'My heartbeat'
For her part, Sweet Georgia Brown called Oxenhorn “my heartbeat.”
After an apartment fire destroyed nearly everything she owned, the JFA got word and turned up.
“We’ve been together ever since,” Brown said. “Wendy has been my heartbeat.”
“She’s taken care of me, so I’ve gained a lot and I was so blessed to have them -- and Wendy and I get together all the time now. I love to cook and Wendy surprises me with shoes or clothes or pajamas or sexy things -- she keeps me pumped up, you know what I mean?”
Sassy as ever in the twilight of her career (“Write something good, Chris! Tell’em I’m still sexy at 72!”), Brown has been slowed down by a stroke she suffered last year, and has limited her regular gigs at a blues club in Greenwich Village. But her enthusiasm for the foundation was palpable during an interview last week.
“I’m 72,” she said. “I just had a birthday last week and they came and brought me a cake and champagne. I live in Hell’s Kitchen and I have a one-bedroom apartment the foundation got for me, looking over the city. I can see the Empire State Building. I can see all the tall buildings and the lights. I feel like I won the Lotto.”
Oxenhorn maintains an encyclopedic memory not just of her scores of musicians’ careers but their health problems, their bank statements and the names of their pets.
When she’s not working the room at her Wall Street fundraisers, or rehearsing with bands backstage at the Apollo, she’s out visiting her friends, as she describes them.
One day several years ago, down in Manhattan's East Village, Oxenhorn was sidestepping garbage in a housing project hallway to bring an impoverished old blues drummer -- who played in one of the most legendary jazz lineups in American music history -- a cake on his birthday.
She knocked on the door and whispered excitedly -- fan girl-like -- to me about all the legends he’s played with.
“He’s a-mazing,” she said.
Inside, as Oxenhorn leaned down to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to the elderly musician, with the late afternoon sun piercing a crack in the shades that illuminated him in the darkened apartment, the old man’s chapped, pursed lips slowly spread into a wide grin.
![\"PHOTO:](\"http://a.abcnews.com/images/US/wendy-oxenhorn-ht-01-jpo-190330_hpEmbed_4x5_384.jpg\")
With the exception of Odetta, Norman and some of the other well-known recipients of JFA support, the foundation rarely identifies the musicians it helps, and only does so if the musician decides they want their identities publicized. The ones that do, handfuls among hundreds, say that they want their stories to illustrate the foundation’s work -- particularly Oxenhorn’s work.
The Jazz Foundation provides a range of support including medical care, money for housing and food and other vital services for older musicians, and in some cases, brief but thrilling returns to the glory of their youth.
In 2004, Oxenhorn arranged for Dunson to sing with Costello at a sold-out Apollo Theater benefit, and then rolled the wheelchair-bound 83-year old woman onto the stage to an explosion of applause.
Dunson was paid $5 a head in the 1950s to straighten musicians’ hair backstage before they performed -- and is now credited with penning hundreds of blues songs,that later found their way into the American blues lexicon, many of them sold to or stolen by more famous bluesmen like Willie Dixon, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters and Jimmy Reed. She is said to have written the original versions of blues hits like \"Evil\" and \"Wang Dang Doodle.\"
\"When I first called her she was living in a state run [nursing home] in Chicago,'' Oxenhorn said. \"She had no visitors and she didn't leave her room except in the middle of the night when no one would see her collecting aluminum cans.\"
The foundation got behind her. They began helping her with rent money, and re-introducing her to blues audiences from Chicago to New York City. In 2004, Dunson appeared at the Apollo Theater with Costello.
Oxenhorn vividly recalls the evening.
\"You see this fragile, street-tough, savvy old girl, wheeled out in a wheelchair, and she takes this microphone in her hand and holds it like her life depended on it, and all of the sudden she starts singing, and the power that came out of her mouth brought people to their feet in seven seconds.'
\"At one point, she got up out of her wheelchair, took two steps -- gave me a heart attack -- but she got up! This sound that was healing the audience was healing her!\"
“And then,'' Oxenhorn said, her eyes wide with amazement, \"when it was all over.... she'd been playing with Elvis Costello! -- she didn't even know who Elvis Costello was -- but she said, 'Man that boy can play some.\"
![\"PHOTO:](\"http://a.abcnews.com/images/US/music-ht-jpo-190330_hpEmbed_3x2_384.jpg\")
'Romeo and Juliet'
Jarrett Lilien, former CEO of eTrade and a longtime JFA board member widely credited with getting Manhattan’s finance industry behind the cause, said Oxenhorn’s determination is legendary in the music industry.
“One time at eTrade she wanted -- really wanted -- to talk to me about the Jazz Foundation and I just had no time and I had all these meetings and I then was going to be traveling,” Lilien recalled. “And then she said, ‘No, but I really need to talk to you,’ and I said, you know, ‘I’m going to be walking from one meeting on, like, 40th Street to another meeting on like 55th Street, so you’ve got like 15 minutes if you want to walk with me.”
“So, she met me and we’re walking and we passed two kids you know probably 18 or 19-years-old with a sign that said something like ‘Just married and stranded in New York’ or something. And we walked past them. And I could see how uncomfortable she was, but I had to get to my next meeting, so she kept walking with me, and we got to the end of the block and she just grabbed my arm and said, ‘look, I’m sorry, we’ll have to catch up some other time, I’ve got to go back.’”
“Those kids slept at her apartment that night,\" Lillian continued. \"She got them a job at a restaurant through another person who’s a supporter of the Jazz Foundation and they earned enough….it was like Romeo and Juliet: their parents didn’t approve of them getting married so they eloped and came to New York and then were homeless and living on the street. And Wendy got them cleaned, got them some sleep at her apartment, let them work for a week or so so they got enough money to buy a ticket to go back to Ohio. That’s kind of Wendy in a nutshell.”
‘Their darkest hour’
Oxenhorn lights up when she recounts some of the most memorable connections that she and the foundation have made over the years.
\"These people spent their lives making music, and not making a dime,\" she told me in 2012. \"I mean, Jimmy Norman, who co-wrote [the Rolling Stones' first hit] \"Time Is On My Side,\" never got the publishing credits. He was one of The Coasters! He was one of Bob Marley's first producers.\"
\"When we found Jimmy, he was ready to be evicted,'' Oxenhorn said. \"He had emphysema so bad he couldn't sleep lying down, so he slept at night sitting up in a plastic chair,'' she said, growing visibly emotional. \"His apartment hadn't been cleaned in years because of the heart condition.\"
\"One of our volunteers found a tape from 1968 of him and Bob Marley writing songs in his apartment in the Bronx, songs that had never been heard before,'' she said. \"It sold at Christie's for $20,000. He got himself a computer and some editing software, and he finally recorded his own version of \"Time Is On My Side.\" His first CD! At 71 years old!\"
\"The people that you are helping are the people that were there for you your whole life - the people who literally played and wrote the soundtrack of your life,'' said Oxenhorn. \"These were the people that [wrote the songs] for your wedding, and the ones that were there [on the radio] at 2 a.m. when you got divorced.\"
![\"PHOTO:](\"http://a.abcnews.com/images/US/wendy-oxenhorn-ht-03-jpo-190330_hpEmbed_13x15_384.jpg\")
\"It was Muddy Waters, or Odetta, or whomever, that got you through that girl in high school that broke your heart,\" Oxenhorn insists. \"And now it's our turn to be there for them, in their darkest hour.\"
Jordan said that behind Oxenhorn’s child-like enthusiasm is years of saintly work among the most elderly and vulnerable musicians in the industry.
“She’s actually given almost two decades of her life to the foundation -- eating and sleeping the foundation and that is beyond commendable,\" he said. “It’s really extraordinary. Because what happens is when you work as hard as she has at trying to make people feel good, you start to kind of morph into the idea of the foundation itself. “
“So she is -- actually -- the foundation,\" Jordan insisted. \"And it’s hard to separate one from the other. She tries to take some time off but she can’t because she’s always thinking about who she’s working with, or whenever she gets away she gets a call -- there’s always going to be somebody who has that super private number when they really need to talk to her. She’s never really off. She can’t do it. It’s really impossible for her because even if she wants to get away somebody finds her.”
‘Magical Simplicity’
Several years ago, Oxenhorn herself got some life-changing news: a birth defect had produced an extra collection of blood vessels in her brain stem, which had lived undetected in the back of her neck her entire life.
The blood vessels have grown worn and dilated and don’t belong there in the first place, she said that doctors had told her. If any one of the errant blood vessels pops, she was warned, she will likely die almost instantly.
“When you get kissed by angel of death, all you really know is the moment -- and you begin to live in the now, and all your worries about your kids and what’s going to happen to them? All the sudden it just goes, and you are left with this moment.”
![\"PHOTO:](\"http://a.abcnews.com/images/US/street-news-oxenhorn-03-ht-jc-190403_hpEmbed_4x3_384.jpg\")
These days Oxenhorn spends any downtime she can get in a trailer park on a breezy island off the southern coast of the U.S. Her brightly-colored, lovingly-ornamented trailer, which sits beside a rippling stream that winds through her tiny trailer courtyard, was gifted to her by a JFA donor. It’s the place where she said she rediscovers herself every time she returns -- a place of “magical simplicity.”
“So when you go to your tin palace on your little island and you choose to live in this wonderful simplicity -- this magical simplicity -- surrounded by plants and animals that remind us there is a oneness and we are all connected to each other -- that state of being is our true nature.\"
\"Nature is free,\" she said. \"Trees are free. Wild animals are free. We have to learn from them. They tell you everything,\" she insisted. \"They are our teachers!”
She pauses for a beat to let the notion sink in -- for her and you both, it seems -- and then floats an even lighter thought.
“What’s so hilarious to me,” she concluded, looking back on a life of constant motion and endless charity, “is that what is going to kill me is stress – ‘physical and emotional stress are to be avoided at all costs,’ she said, mimicking her doctors’ admonitions.
‘But that’s just not me, you know?\" she said. \"I can’t live inside a bubble. I need to be out there dancing and in love with the world.\"
ABC News' Gerard Middleton contributed research to this report.
","canonicalUrl":"https://abcnews.com/Entertainment/angel-harlem-patron-saint-forgotten-generation-musicians-face/story?id=62060254","legacySlug":"/culture/story/angel-harlem-patron-saint-forgotten-generation-musicians-face-62060254","noIndexNoFollow":false},"publishTime":"20:04","publishDate":"04-03-2019","updatedTime":"19:07","updatedDate":"02-22-2020","socialImage":{"alt":"Wendy Oxenhorn performs at Apollo Theater in New York.","credit":"Enid Farber","ratio":"16x9","url":"https://s.abcnews.com/images/US/wendy-oxenhorn-ht-01-jpo-190330_hpMain_2_16x9_1600.jpg","width":992,"height":558},"datePublished":"4/3/2019 20:04:00 GMT","video":{"live":false,"id":62060254,"headline":"A beloved arts patron's greatest challenge yet","mediaAssetTitle":"Angel of Harlem ","description":"'I've lived my life like a run-on sentence with no commas.' ","duration":"NaN:NaN","posterImg":{"url":"https://s.abcnews.com/images/GMA/default-img-undefined.png","width":608,"height":342},"video":{},"playlist":["132488083","132306053","132266872"]},"relatedItems":[{"contentType":"video","date":"April 29, 2026","headline":"Grand jury indicts former FBI director over Instagram post","section":"News","slug":"/video/132488083","id":"132488083","image":{"alt":"VIDEO: Grand jury indicts former FBI director over Instagram post","credit":"ABCNews.com","ratio":"1x1","url":"https://s.abcnews.com/images/GMA/260429_gma_thomas_comey2_706_hpMain_1x1_608.jpg","width":384,"height":384},"images":{"alt":"VIDEO: Grand jury indicts former FBI director over Instagram post","credit":"ABCNews.com","crops":[{"16x9":{"small":"https://s.abcnews.com/images/GMA/260429_gma_thomas_comey2_706_hpMain_16x9_608.jpg","medium":"https://s.abcnews.com/images/GMA/260429_gma_thomas_comey2_706_hpMain_16x9_992.jpg","large":"https://s.abcnews.com/images/GMA/260429_gma_thomas_comey2_706_hpMain_16x9_1600.jpg"}},{"9x16":{"small":"https://s.abcnews.com/images/GMA/260429_gma_thomas_comey2_706_hpMain_9x16_608.jpg","medium":"https://s.abcnews.com/images/GMA/260429_gma_thomas_comey2_706_hpMain_9x16_992.jpg","large":"https://s.abcnews.com/images/GMA/260429_gma_thomas_comey2_706_hpMain_16x9_1600.jpg"}},{"1x1":{"small":"https://s.abcnews.com/images/GMA/260429_gma_thomas_comey2_706_hpMain_1x1_608.jpg","medium":"https://s.abcnews.com/images/GMA/260429_gma_thomas_comey2_706_hpMain_1x1_992.jpg","large":"https://s.abcnews.com/images/GMA/260429_gma_thomas_comey2_706_hpMain_1x1_1600.jpg"}}]}},{"contentType":"video","date":"April 23, 2026","headline":"Trump orders Navy to 'shoot and kill' any boat laying mines in Strait of Hormuz","section":"News","slug":"/video/132306053","id":"132306053","image":{"alt":"VIDEO: Trump orders Navy to 'shoot and kill' any boat laying mines in Strait of Hormuz","credit":"ABCNews.com","ratio":"1x1","url":"https://s.abcnews.com/images/GMA/260423_gma_scott_ceasefire3_hpMain_1x1_608.jpg","width":384,"height":384},"images":{"alt":"VIDEO: Trump orders Navy to 'shoot and kill' any boat laying mines in Strait of Hormuz","credit":"ABCNews.com","crops":[{"16x9":{"small":"https://s.abcnews.com/images/GMA/260423_gma_scott_ceasefire3_hpMain_16x9_608.jpg","medium":"https://s.abcnews.com/images/GMA/260423_gma_scott_ceasefire3_hpMain_16x9_992.jpg","large":"https://s.abcnews.com/images/GMA/260423_gma_scott_ceasefire3_hpMain_16x9_1600.jpg"}},{"9x16":{"small":"https://s.abcnews.com/images/GMA/260423_gma_scott_ceasefire3_hpMain_9x16_608.jpg","medium":"https://s.abcnews.com/images/GMA/260423_gma_scott_ceasefire3_hpMain_9x16_992.jpg","large":"https://s.abcnews.com/images/GMA/260423_gma_scott_ceasefire3_hpMain_16x9_1600.jpg"}},{"1x1":{"small":"https://s.abcnews.com/images/GMA/260423_gma_scott_ceasefire3_hpMain_1x1_608.jpg","medium":"https://s.abcnews.com/images/GMA/260423_gma_scott_ceasefire3_hpMain_1x1_992.jpg","large":"https://s.abcnews.com/images/GMA/260423_gma_scott_ceasefire3_hpMain_1x1_1600.jpg"}}]}},{"contentType":"video","date":"April 22, 2026","headline":"Fallout after Fed nominee grilled on Capitol Hill","section":"News","slug":"/video/132266872","id":"132266872","image":{"alt":"VIDEO: Fallout after Fed nominee grilled on Capitol Hill","credit":"ABCNews.com","ratio":"1x1","url":"https://s.abcnews.com/images/GMA/260422_gma_schulze_fed3_713_hpMain_1x1_608.jpg","width":384,"height":384},"images":{"alt":"VIDEO: Fallout after Fed nominee grilled on Capitol Hill","credit":"ABCNews.com","crops":[{"16x9":{"small":"https://s.abcnews.com/images/GMA/260422_gma_schulze_fed3_713_hpMain_16x9_608.jpg","medium":"https://s.abcnews.com/images/GMA/260422_gma_schulze_fed3_713_hpMain_16x9_992.jpg","large":"https://s.abcnews.com/images/GMA/260422_gma_schulze_fed3_713_hpMain_16x9_1600.jpg"}},{"9x16":{"small":"https://s.abcnews.com/images/GMA/260422_gma_schulze_fed3_713_hpMain_9x16_608.jpg","medium":"https://s.abcnews.com/images/GMA/260422_gma_schulze_fed3_713_hpMain_9x16_992.jpg","large":"https://s.abcnews.com/images/GMA/260422_gma_schulze_fed3_713_hpMain_16x9_1600.jpg"}},{"1x1":{"small":"https://s.abcnews.com/images/GMA/260422_gma_schulze_fed3_713_hpMain_1x1_608.jpg","medium":"https://s.abcnews.com/images/GMA/260422_gma_schulze_fed3_713_hpMain_1x1_992.jpg","large":"https://s.abcnews.com/images/GMA/260422_gma_schulze_fed3_713_hpMain_1x1_1600.jpg"}}]}}],"relatedContentSection":"news","schemaContent":{"name":"A beloved arts patron's greatest challenge yet","description":"'I've lived my life like a run-on sentence with no commas.' ","duration":"NaN:NaN","uploadDate":"04-03-2019","publication":"04-03-2019","images":"https://s.abcnews.com/images/GMA/default-img-undefined.png","link":"https://www.goodmorningamerica.com/news/story/angel-harlem-patron-saint-forgotten-generation-musicians-face-62060254"}},"playlist":[{"id":"132569874","contentType":"story","section":"news"},{"id":"132567885","contentType":"story","section":"news"},{"id":"132510121","contentType":"story","section":"news"},{"id":"132473181","contentType":"story","section":"news"},{"id":"132497933","contentType":"story","section":"news"},{"id":"132281378","contentType":"story","section":"news"},{"id":"132283010","contentType":"story","section":"news"},{"id":"132273278","contentType":"story","section":"news"},{"id":"132231169","contentType":"story","section":"news"},{"id":"132206748","contentType":"story","section":"news"},{"id":"132200241","contentType":"story","section":"news"},{"id":"132054443","contentType":"story","section":"news"},{"id":"132054798","contentType":"story","section":"news"},{"id":"132033010","contentType":"story","section":"news"},{"id":"131912713","contentType":"story","section":"news"},{"id":"131830583","contentType":"story","section":"news"},{"id":"131834976","contentType":"story","section":"news"},{"id":"131554765","contentType":"story","section":"news"},{"id":"131554815","contentType":"story","section":"news"},{"id":"131543053","contentType":"story","section":"news"}],"kvps":{"pgtyp":"article","lang":"en","sp":"goodmorningamerica","programmatic":"true","bundleId":"com.abcnews"}},"analytics":{"accountID":"wdgnewwdgnewgmaweb","ns":"gma","pageName":"gma:news:video","pageType":"video","globalSpecVersion":"v1.08","siteDifferentiator":"gma:site","tagID":"g_page01","userABCookie":"0","section":"news","title":"A beloved arts patron's greatest challenge yet","pubTime":"16:04","pubDate":"04-03-2019","modTime":"14:07","modDate":"02-22-2020","taxonomyTags":"none","id":62060254,"editorialOtherSubjects":"","wordCount":"none","columns":"none","authors":"","authorsUnit":"none","authorsBureau":"none","subBrand":"Good Morning America","provider":"Good Morning America","videoName":"A beloved arts patron's greatest challenge yet","mediaAssetTitle":"Angel of Harlem ","videoId":62060254,"mediaOnPage":"video","legacySlug":"/culture/story/angel-harlem-patron-saint-forgotten-generation-musicians-face-62060254"},"taboola":{}},"request":{"headers":{},"httpVersion":"1.1","method":"GET","url":"/video/62060254","vary":{"host":"www.goodmorningamerica.com","cached":true,"path":"/video/62060254","forwarded-proto":"https","device":"desktop","userab":"0"}},"viewport":{"width":1260,"height":0},"user":{}};