My Uncle Numa lost his battle with pancreatic cancer this morning. He taught me to operate both sides of my brain. He was always giving me cameras and puzzles while I was growing up. Along with my parents and brother, he was my main cheerleader throughout my life. The article below about him appeared a little over 10 years ago in the Raleigh News and Observer.
May 13, 2008 – 80 Years old and still playing.
Jazzman doesn’t sing the blues By ALAN SCHER ZAGIER, Staff Writer from 2/22/1999 News and Observer
The steady chatter of customers and waitresses at the Irregardless Cafe doesn’t deter Pee Wee Moore. He just shuts his eyes and lets the saxophone carry him away.
The journey is long, a 70-year trip across the segregated South, through the finest New York nightclubs and back to his boyhood home. And the voyage is bumpy, a roller-coaster ride filled with the wrecks born of fast living and a love for the bottle.
His musical resume reads like a history from the golden age of jazz. He played baritone sax for big-band leaders Jimmy Lunsford, Lucky Millinder, James Moody, Louis Jordan and Illinois Jacquet. He was a member of the Apollo Theater’s house band. He gigged at the Newport Jazz Festival with Dizzy Gillespie.
If he didn’t play with them, chances are that Moore drank, ate, played cards or just hung out with them. Not just jazz giants like Charlie Parker and Miles Davis, but also seminal entertainers such as Frank Sinatra and Elizabeth Taylor.
That was then. These days, 20 years after returning to Raleigh to care for his mother and dry out, Moore makes his living as a handyman by day and as an itinerant musician at a handful of Raleigh restaurants.
While his music still draws smiles, his days of fame are long gone. “They don’t have a clue,” said Tonya Russ, an Irregardless waitress, describing most diners’ lack of knowledge about Moore’s storied past.
Numa Smith Moore was born March 5, 1928, and grew up on Lenoir Street in Southeast Raleigh. He attended the old Washington High School, an all-black school that is now the site of to a citywide elementary school.
At Washington, the diminutive Moore studied music under band director John Levingston after failing to make the cut on the football field. “I was too small to play football and had to be in something,” he said. “The coach laughed at me and called me ‘midget.’ I was weighing about 85, maybe 100 pounds.”
So “Pee Wee” Moore picked up the cymbals to plug the only vacancy in the marching band. Thanks to a steady exodus of musicians drafted to serve in World War II, Moore quickly advanced to the bass and snare drums. He persuaded his father, a railroad man, to buy him a clarinet for Christmas.
Moore bought his first saxophone, a King Zephyr model, with money saved from cleaning the Braxton Music shop after school and on weekends. By age 14, he was playing at the old Paradise Club and earning the then-substantial sum of $16 to $20 a week.
Moore then headed to Hampton Institute in Virginia as a pre-med student. That career path lasted exactly one semester. He quickly ditched plans to become a doctor, switched his major to music, and joined the Royal Hamptonians, touring with singer Ruth Brown on the USO wartime circuit.
Out on the town in the pre-dawn hours with some fellow musicians, Moore fell asleep in the back seat of a car headed from Newport News, Va., back to Hampton. The car collided with a construction truck, causing Moore to lose his left eye.
“When I woke up, the saxophone player was dead, and the other cat had 150 stitches in his neck and was lucky to be alive,” said Moore, who wears a patch over his missing eye.
In 1949, after meeting some touring musicians with the Jimmy Lunsford Band at the Chavis Heights swimming pool in Raleigh, Moore headed to New York to make his living playing music.
He remained in New York for nearly three decades, crossing paths with gangsters, politicians and show-business stars. Highlights included an appearance with Jordan’s big band on Milton Berle’s variety show and recording credits on “Moody’s Mood for Blues” and “Dizzy Gillespie Live at Newport.”
In many ways, though, the stage and the recording studio were refuges for Moore and his bandmates. Segregation was the rule of the day, keeping musicians who had won the cheers of white audiences from using the same bathrooms, eating at the same restaurants and sleeping in the same hotels.
One night in Birmingham, Ala., Moore and another musician left the auditorium between shows to get dinner and drinks. When they tried to return, police officers at the door told them “whites only,” Moore said. “So we went across the street and got drunk.” Intervention came from an unexpected source: Eugene “Bull” Connor, the Birmingham police commissioner who resisted court-ordered desegregation with fire hoses and attack dogs.
“He was in there to see the show,” Moore said. “He came into the bar to get us, looked at the officers, cussed them out all kinds of ways and told us to come on in.”
For all his musical talent, Moore ultimately let liquor get the best of him. He wound up quitting music and spending the last 10 years of his time in New York driving a gypsy cab, working at the post office, fishing and drinking. He decided to return home after waking up drunk one morning in the Bowery, a notorious New York neighborhood.
“I had all the opportunities to make a good living and do much more if I hadn’t taken to the bottle,” he said.
Back in Raleigh, Moore studied electronics and heating and airconditioning repair at Wake Technical Community College. He stopped drinking 15 years ago and has slowly returned to the local jazz scene.
Moore plays regularly with pianist Elmer Gibson and in a trio with bassist Ed Moon and pianist Sistie Howie at the Irregardless, Wicked Smile and other local eateries.
His bandmates relish every note played with Moore.
“Pee Wee is one of North Carolina’s treasures,” said Moon, a music teacher in the Wake County school system and former jazz professor at N.C. Central University.
Howie, who is studying jazz history at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, said that Moore provides insight no textbook can match. “Most of the stuff we learn I’ve already heard from him,” she said.
Moore spends little time bemoaning his missed opportunities, preferring instead to recall the good times with colorful anecdotes from
his turn in the limelight. True to form, he draws upon an early music lesson to describe his philosophy.
“You can’t back up,” he said. “That’s one thing music teaches you. Once it’s played, that’s a performance. And it’s over.”
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