By Laura D.C. Kolnoski
RED BANK – “A Man & His Music,” an exhibit honoring West Side legend Ralph “Johnny Jazz” Gatta, has been extended through Aug. 30 at the T. Thomas Fortune Cultural Center on Drs. James Parker Boulevard.
Visitors can view a recreation of the family butcher shop and grocery store he ran at 135 Shrewsbury Ave. for almost 50 years on the center’s main floor, and more. The store also served as a makeshift jazz museum, packed with records and memorabilia Gatta collected while interacting with the musicians he enjoyed and befriended throughout his life.
Gatta passed away in 2011 at age 74. The borough park at the corner of Shrewsbury Avenue and Drs. James Parker Boulevard was named in his honor in 2015. As a seasonal outdoor music venue, the site continues Gatta’s legacy a short distance from where he created it.
Gatta, who took over operations of the store after his father John’s death in 1963, renamed it Johnny Jazz Market in his honor, and proceeded to play the music he loved, sharing it with the neighborhood. Patrons came in not only for groceries, but for the wealth of jazz lore Gatta loved to share. Among them was borough resident Gilda Rogers, now vice president of the T. Thomas For tune Foundation that runs the cultural center.
“We were friends for over 20 years,” Rogers said. “He never married, never had kids. His love was jazz. He put pictures of jazz musicians around his store and would engage customers in conversation about them.”
When Gatta closed the store in 2010 due to his deteriorating health, he offered Rogers part of his collection. She kept all the items in her home, “and now I have a place to display them,” she said.
In addition to albums, calendars, signed photographs, programs and cassette tapes he made of jazz radio programs, the cultural center’s exhibit includes newspaper articles written about the local icon.
“His customers were his community and jazz was his world,” his niece Mary Gatta was quoted in The New York Times. Added his brother John in The Hub, “Ralph saw no difference among people regardless of color, wealth, or disability. He stood up against segregation while in the military in the south in the 1950s. He would go to the back of the bus to sit with the ‘cool cats.’ ”
When Gatta closed the store, he gave the inventory away to the neighborhood with help from local musician Al Wright. That act was a continuance of the charity and generosity he demonstrated by ignoring debts of those who were not always able to pay their bill.
In 2007, Gatta was honored at Red Bank’s Two River Theater by The SOURCE Foundation youth services program at Red Bank Regional High School for his service to the community. A documentary short made and narrated by Rogers debuted during what Gatta later called, “The best night of my life.” Visitors to “A Man & His Music” can view the video and hear Gatta talk with passion about his love of jazz.
In his younger days, nattily dressed and wearing a fedora, he frequented Manhattan’s Birdland and other jazz clubs, meeting and becoming friends with jazz luminaries including drummer Max Roach, saxophonist Lou Donaldson and Dinah Washington, his favorite singer. Those and other jazz performers were frequent visitors at Johnny Jazz Market over the years.
“My dad took me to my first jazz event in Fair Haven when I was about 8,” Gatta related in the video. “I loved the trumpet sound. Jazz and the goodness of the people in this neighborhood are what kept me going in the store.”
“He nourished the community with food and education,” Rogers said. “He made you feel the music. This is the perfect opportunity to pay tribute to him. He was a great humanitarian.”
The exhibit opened July 26, attended by Gatta’s family members, musicians including Al and Ruth Wright, and many who told stories and turned the event into a laughter-filled memorial. “A Man & His Music” is open during regular cultural center hours, noon to 5 p.m., Thursday through Sunday. Admission is $8.
