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PAUL JEROMEFor more than six decades, Lillette Jenkins-Wisner's passion to connect with audiences through music took her around the world. At 79 she shares her gift with her community.
SARASOTA - Off to the left of the music room is a half-open closet that glitters with gowns bedecked with sequins and shimmery beading.
Three electronic keyboards hooked into a PC and recording equipment stand against the wall, where posters, pictures and awards testify to a life dedicated to music.
And to the right, Lillette Jenkins-Wisner sits on a padded red bench, thrusting away at a digital grand piano, pounding out a pure classical rendition of Rachmaninoff's Concerto No. 2 that fills the room with sharp, resonant notes.
"Here's the change-up," she says with a gleeful cackle, abruptly dragging her thumb across a range of low-octave keys, delivering a sweet, skin-tingling flourish. She suddenly becomes rigidly upright and slowly begins to sway, pumping the pedal, flitting her fingers up and down, shifting the tempo from the Russian composer's piano classic to Amazing Grace.
This is the enthralling point in her concerts, she explains, where she combines traditional piano classics with hymns and spirituals. She calls it classical hymns, her trademark. It's like nature's hand suddenly quickening the slow-moving pace of a wide and gentle river to narrow rapids that swiftly take the listener on a heady ride to a place with which they're already familiar.
"I try to select very popular classics that people recognize and combine them with all the popular hymns that they sing every Sunday in church," she says. "It seems to give them that feeling of connectiveness."
Making audiences connect with music is what pianist and vocalist Jenkins-Wisner has been doing for more than six decades. She got her big start traveling the globe with USO tours during World War II, and since then she has played in clubs, in the theater, several times at Carnegie Hall, on world cruises, in the movies (Cotton Club, sharing scenes with actor Richard Gere); she even had a four-year stint as a regular on the daytime soap All My Children.
In between, she has taught music in the New York City school system, raised five children, sold Mary Kay cosmetics, directed music and choirs at several churches, was musical director of off-Broadway musicals and performed music therapy sessions at nursing homes, prisons and drug rehabilitation centers.
Today, at 79, she has slowed the hectic daily pace of commitments to shows and clubs, but there seems to be no stopping her. Every week or so, she is performing, whether it's at a local community college auditorium, an arts group charity event, a nightclub or a church. The engagements keep coming, and she keeps rising to the occasion.
"The only difference is now I do it at my pace, the way I want to do it because I have released myself from a lot of contracted things I was doing," she says.
Before she relocated from New Jersey to Sarasota in 1995, playing in church was confining for Jenkins-Wisner because she had "to be there for every occasion, everything that happens you have to be a part of it. And I was doing that in addition to my concert work, so it was quite a chore."
"I just don't commit myself to anything other than what I feel I want to do. I perform mostly concert engagements or else I am doing volunteer work, where I go to the nursing homes and conduct music therapy sessions. I enjoy that, and I can do it at my own pace. I just want to enjoy my music now and have others enjoy it."
At 6, she discovered her passion for bringing joy to others through music when she entertained the neighbor upstairs in their Harlem, N.Y., tenement by playing familiar tunes on a keyboard she could barely reach. The lady upstairs was so tickled by the child's talent that she told her parents if they gave the young Lillette music lessons, she would give the family her piano.
Jenkins-Wisner's fascination with the instrument has continued even as she approaches her eighth decade.
There's a grand piano in the high-ceiling living room of the airy home she shares with her third husband, Elbert Wisner, a retired electrical engineer. But it is the music room keyboards that she attacks every day for two to three hours of practice.
"I love to play. There's always something new. You never stop learning. That's the fascinating part about it," she says.
A native of Harlem and one of nine children born to a Barbadian tailor and Jamaican mother who was raised in Panama, Jenkins-Wisner thinks her physical capacity and mental acuity are a direct result of the daily regimen of piano-playing, which she considers a form of exercise.
"It's like aerobics," she says, reminding a visitor that for many years she played the organ, which requires a considerable amount of pedal footwork, plus shifting the hands across and up and down keyboards stacked three or four levels.
She does water exercises in her pool, but with no regularity. The relatively few physical workouts she does are not the primary reason she is fit and trim and still going strong. She thinks it has a lot to do with her genes, her metabolism and her philosophy of life.
Her mother lived to 93 and she expects to keep going past that point, although she dismisses the relevance of age, emphasizing the importance of mind over body.
Most people's thoughts are what determine whether they will be sick or successful, she says.
"Our society has programmed us that at a certain age we should act a certain way. When you reach 50, act this way. When you get to 60, act that way," she says.
"By the time you get to my age, you're supposed to be in a wheelchair. And people continuously think these things and they happen. Because if that's all you want to concentrate on, if you want to be sick, your body will make you sick. People ask me "where are your wrinkles?' I say I don't know. I am working on it. It's going to happen anyway, so why worry about it?"
Jenkins-Wisner finds that today many senior citizens lack a passion, a reason for living.
"After you have retired, what are you going to do with the rest of your life? You have to find something, some passion that's going to keep you alive the rest of your life. And if you don't know what that is, you're in trouble. A lot of people never found out what their passion in life is and for this reason sit around and wait to find out what time they're going to die," she adds.
She never contemplates dying, but focuses on the present, not the future or the past, over which she has no control.
Although she does not dwell on the past, she says, there are some significant experiences, life-alerting events that she can't help but ponder today. Such as when she first visited Sarasota in 1943 as part of a USO tour.
It was a twist of fate that brought her to settle on Florida's west coast more than 50 years after she had boarded a bus, sat behind the driver and was ordered to sit in the back, where Jim Crow laws had relegated blacks.
"I gave him a big argument, and he said if I don't like it I could get off the bus. While I was getting off, he says to me: "You know we have a 9 o'clock curfew in this town for you people, and if you're not off the street by 9, that tree is yours.'
"There I was traveling the world with the military, entertaining their families and friends while they're talking about hanging me from a tree. Here we are fighting for freedom and doing our patriotic duty for each other, and I run into this asinine situation."
When Sarasota founded its jazz club in the early 1980s, Jenkins-Wisner received a call in New York asking her to do a concert. She told her hosts about the trepidation she had about returning to a town where she had encountered racism. But the city rolled out its red carpet, welcoming her with a limo and flowers.
"It's so ironic that I would come back and settle here, the very place where I would never have wanted to live."
- Times staffer Paul Jerome is also publisher of "FlaVour" magazine, a quarterly lifestyle publication for black Floridians.