Culture & Community | Jazz | Music | Arts & Culture | Whalley/Edgewood/Beaver Hills | History
James "Dinky" Johnson literally receives his flowers at a ceremony at Neighborhood Music School in November 2023. The sculptor Susan Clinard is pictured in the background. Coral Ortiz File Photo.
You could hear the jazz well before the front door closed behind you, a smooth groove that bloomed between the sax and the drums, swirled around the guitar and the double bass. On Saturdays, the house band was jamming at 1 p.m., unstoppable by 3. Often, it wasn’t long before plates of food had made it out onto the tables, Dinky serving up drinks behind the bar before making his way through the crowd. His destination was an organ that became, briefly, a crown jewel of Goffe Street.
For five magical, mellifluous years in New Haven, that scene blossomed at the corner of Goffe Street and Sherman Avenue, where James “Dinky” Johnson ran the eponymously named jazz club with his wife, Edna, and a house band that became their second family. Three decades and hundreds of jam sessions later, friends, family and fellow artists are remembering him as they mourn a loss to not just New Haven, but Connecticut’s musical community.
Johnson, a beloved educator, professor, father, veteran and jazz giant, died at the West Haven VA Hospital in July, with a legacy that lives on in jazz jams, jazz and gospel brunches and performances from sharp young musicians that are unfolding across the city this fall. His daughter, Rhoda Phillips, said his death was peaceful and totally absent of fear, with visits filled with music and storytelling in the days that preceded it. He was 92.
“His club was the club to be in,” remembered musician Hardy Eason, now the minister of music at Zion Baptist Church in Waterbury, and a longtime friend and peer of Johnson’s. “I went halfway around the world and it was always fun to come home and play with Dinky. Jazz was the music that made things happen. He was a great musician, and he knew everybody.”
“He was always lifting others up, sharing the knowledge he had,” said the artist Susan Clinard, whose eldest son, Olivier, was one of hundreds of students Johnson took informally under his wing during Sunday jazz jams at Cafe Nine. “He was quiet, humble and very kind. He had such a deep, deep, deep passion for jazz, and for making sure that young people had the chance to get up on stage and perform.”
Johnson’s story, which includes a venerated chapter of Connecticut jazz history, is one of a Renaissance man, whose love for music still made space for a full teaching career, deep spiritual life and a family that was the center of his world. One of eight children born to James Johnson and Sara Holmes Johnson in 1932, Johnson grew up in Waterbury, interested in both the organ and the saxophone by the time he was a teenager.
In fifth grade, he had a teacher who couldn’t believe there weren’t music classes in the schools. Using her own money, she bought the class a tonette, a kind of elementary flute that resembles the recorders still used in early music education. Unlike a recorder, a tonette has more openings—meaning more chances for vibrant and varied sound. Once Johnson had tried it, there was no going back.
“She told us that we could use ‘em, [and] that just became part of my life,” he recalled in The Making of A Jazz Legend, an unreleased documentary from artist and filmmaker Iman Uqdah Hameen. “That instrument was the beginning of playing the saxophone.”
By then, New Haven was in its “Golden Era” of jazz, and Johnson soon slipped right into the scene. He spent years “jamming at the Monterey as a youngster,” wrote the journalist Khalid Lum in the New Haven Independent, then briefly in print, in May 1987. He cut his musical teeth playing with musicians like Bob Beverly and Sam Kimble, brothers Eddie and Bobby Buster, and attending shows at the Goffe Street Armory when it was still a multi-purpose venue and music hall. Sometimes, he played those shows too, jumping in on backup for the likes of Count Basie.
But when many of Johnson’s friends started touring during and after high school, he remained pragmatic, pursuing higher education instead. During the 1950s, Johnson pursued his studies in math and science at St. John’s College in Virginia, following a passion that would later lead to a career in education. His junior year, he enrolled in the U.S. Air Force, with a commitment to service that ultimately defined a generation of Black New Haveners.
During that time, Johnson was stationed at a base in Chicopee Falls, Mass. Instead of giving him planes to fly, his superiors told him about another urgent request, for teachers in Massachusetts. It was his first brush with working as an educator, for which hundreds of now-adult students now remember him fondly in New Haven.
In the late 1950s—Phillips remembers it as 1956—Johnson came home and jumped into working in New Haven’s schools and at Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU), where he turned his love for intricate equations and math problems into a full career. His love for jazz was always there, a sort of pleasant and earwormy backing track, but it was always in concert with the rest of his life.
In 1961, Johnson married Edna May Laiscell, who he met playing a show for Masons in the area, according to Lum’s reporting. Laiscell, who passed away in 2013, worked for both the State of Connecticut and Echlin Manufacturing during her lifetime, while also raising a family in Branford. In their Branford home, she became his rock, attending St. Stephen's AME Zion Church with him as he taught organ to several people at the church.
It was a union that bloomed into a daughter, Rhoda, and son, James Johnson III (Johnson also had a daughter, Brenda Walker, from a previous relationship; she passed away in Bridgeport in 2016). Even as he juggled a full workload and a dedication to music, Johnson was a doting father, teaching his children to swim at Branford Point, and later in a pool he installed in the backyard. Phillips remembered him as firm but endlessly kind, and willing to give his family the world.
“He was just a great teacher, and he had lots of patience,” she said, adding that he taught her everything she knew about the service industry through work at Dinky’s. “He was stern, firm, fair and consistent.”
A still, used with permission, from The Making of A Jazz Legend, an unreleased documentary from artist and filmmaker Iman Uqdah Hameen.
In New Haven, Johnson built a career as an educator and administrator, with a gentle, warm sensibility that radiated from his peers to his students, and made him universally beloved by the time he retired in 1982. At Fair Haven School, at least one student remembered him as “the man with the freckles,” recalled Phillips, her smile audible through the phone.
Within years, he was teaching math at Wilbur Cross High School, where he also coached men’s track and created an informal pipeline to St. Paul’s, using student athletics as a launchpad to higher education. He served as a math teacher and assistant principal at James Hillhouse High School, where he remained until retiring in the early 1980s. As those years intersected with the Black Power movement, he rode a wave of civil unrest and social justice, balancing a dedication to his students with a call for a more fair and equitable New Haven.
“There was an outcry for a better quality of life, which called for better schools, housing, medical centers and nutrition,” recalled Iman Hameen, who became the captain of the majorettes and the president of the school’s Black Student Union during that time. “Riots were erupting. The city needed to do something to ease the frustrations of the community. The mayor and school officials, one being Mr. ‘Dinky’ Johnson, were anxious to sit with the Black Panther Party and representatives of the student body to negotiate their demands.”
When they did, the city’s Board of Education agreed to hire more Black teachers, and implement a program for Black administrators, Hameen remembered. Johnson, with colleagues like Hillhouse Principal Kenneth A. Redmond, was among those educators who became part of its legacy.
“Mr. Johnson made history by becoming the first Black teacher, not only in New Haven but in Connecticut, to teach advanced level mathematics,” Iman Hameen remembered in an email. “He was very kind, a role model and beloved community leader who won our hearts the moment he entered the halls of James Hillhouse High School.”
“As my track coach he was a quiet motivator,” wrote New Havener Charles Moore in a post on social media following Johnson’s death. “He wouldn’t say much, but he knew how to use reverse psychology to get me to go after school sprint records. He would say things like, ‘I don’t think anyone has broken the school record in the quarter mile race yet.’ He helped me become 1978 Connecticut State track Athlete of the year.”
Johnson at the Elm City Freddy Fixer Parade in June 2024. Lucy Gellman File Photo.
Johnson’s commitment to jazz never took a backseat: it remained a steady backing track. Musician Jesse Hameen II, who has made jazz history several times over, met Johnson during that time, and instantly became close with the musician.
At the time, Hameen—who is eight years Johnson’s junior—had just recently come out of military service himself, and was eager to hop back onto the music scene. Around him, he could feel a certain magic, including the dazzling Buster Brothers, late Willie Ruff, and still-living legends Houston Person and Hank Bolden.
What amazed Hameen wasn’t just Johnson’ talent, although that was always present. It was also that he managed to remain kind and down to earth, eager to share what he knew with both his peers and the students of jazz who were just starting to come up through the community. He never hoarded knowledge, a quality that he practiced well into his 90s.
“He was a good man, a good person and a decent person, the kind of person that you want to be around,” Hameen said. “I felt good in his presence. He knew how to play with different people from different professions—how to make everyone feel comfortable, whatever social, educational, economic background [they came from]. He’s gonna be missed.”
While Johnson’s teaching career influenced hundreds of New Haven’s students, some who went on to become educators themselves, it was his love for and dedication to music that cemented him in the city’s history of jazz. By the time he retired in 1982, a once-thriving club scene had begun to shrink, losing institutions like The Recorder, The Golden Gate, and The Playback and their associated history.
Within months, he had put a bid on a building at the corner of Goffe Street and Sherman Avenue then known as the Unity Cafe, “already a jazz outpost,” according to Lum’s 1987 Independent article. He opened as a neighborhood spot, with sandwiches and a just-crisped fried chicken that people still talk about today (that, he was the first to say, was all Edna) and back-to-back Saturday jazz jams that started in the afternoon and went into the evening.
Part of the magic was the house band, called Perry and the Dynamics. Drummer Bobby Mapp, who had previously played in the Five Satins and helped nurture doo-wop from the basement of a New Haven church, remembered playing set after set on the weekends, feeling utterly at home. It wasn’t just the Johnsons—although the two kids helped out, and Edna “was the big boss,” he recalled with a laugh—but the sense of community that Johnson tended patiently.
“That was my second home,” Mapp remembered in a phone call from his apartment at The Towers. Years later, he and Johnson became part of a regular group that would attend jazz jams at Cafe Nine, mostly listening before stepping in to give advice and respond to musicians.
Even in his bar, Johnson was an educator, passing down his knowledge not in formal lessons but in jazz jams, frosted pints of beer, and rotating chances to use the space’s Hammond B3 organ and drum kit. Just as he had in the classroom, Johnson helped raise a generation of New Haven musicians, many of whom went on to play in the city and across Connecticut.
When the bar closed in 1987, that was ultimately the thing he was proudest of. In the club’s early days, Johnson would notice a handful of 20-somethings who came to watch, according to Lum’s article. In the five meaningful years that he was open, they started to come out of the woodwork and play before the end of the night.
“That was the whole purpose,” he told Lum when the space announced that it would be closing in 1987. “To develop a young audience, entertain people, help music have a place to develop. And it’s worked out pretty good. Very well.”
Alder Frank Douglass, who in the 1980s was working for Conrail, knew that sense of community well. After Dinky’s opened in 1982, Douglass would sell Libby’s Italian ice and clams on the half shell out of the back of his truck outside, and then at some point wander in to listen. By then, he already knew Johnson, who had helped with the gospel choir at Saint Martin de Porres. Douglass felt like he could listen to him play for hours.
“That place was just a welcoming center for everybody,” he remembered in a phone call. “He would invite anyone to play.”
When Johnson closed Dinky's in 1987, it didn’t mean that the music in his life stopped. To the contrary, he kept showing up, including at institutions like the old Elks Club on Dixwell Avenue. At home, his basement was a robust studio, filled with organs and other musical equipment that he offered to share with friends. He kept attending St. Stephens AME Zion Church, where he rarely missed a Sunday service.
Hank Bolden, an “atomic veteran” and sax virtuoso who met Johnson in the 1960s, remembered what a thrill it was to play with him. While the two had met during a transaction—Bolden bought Johnson’s 1956 Ford Mustang for $25, he remembered with a chuckle—they overlapped on a musical circuit for years. Part of what made them close friends was their connection to each other through music, which rarely necessitated words.
“It was much deeper than a friendship. It was a mentorship,” Bolden said.
Johnson kept those friend-mentorships going through the end of his life. For over a decade, he joined musicians like Bolden, Mapp, and Aubrey Grant, as well as newbie John Sabas, at Cafe Nine for a weekly jazz jam, not unlike the one he had once had at his cafe a few miles away.
He didn’t just love the music, Clinard remembered: he coached the young musicians who were up there, because he understood that they were the future of the art form.
“He was one of the last true gentlemen,” remembered Sabas, who met Johnson after taking sax lessons at Neighborhood Music School (NMS). The two became close, checking out both institutions like Cafe Nine and newer clubs that had received high praise, like The Side Door Jazz Club in Old Lyme. “Despite our age difference, he was one of my best friends. He was a great guy.”
Even at the end of his life, his generosity showed up in everything he did. In 2023, Clinard had the chance to sit down with Johnson for multiple sessions in a Whitney Avenue barn, as she sculpted a bust of him for a ceremony and celebration at NMS. As the two sat—Johnson remaining still as Clinard worked and reworked parts of the bust, getting it just right—he regaled her with stories from his career in the New Haven Public Schools and tales from his jazz club that had been lying dormant for decades.
“It was really poignant and riveting,” Clinard recalled. She was doubly moved when she saw how kind, and patient, he was towards her son Olivier, who is now a Wilbur Cross grad himself.
Clinard, who stayed close to Johnson after sculpting his bust for NMS, remembered visiting him in the VA Hospital just a day or two before he died. Johnson, snug under “a mound of blankets,” seemed ready to go after a life fully and well lived. He wasn’t complaining of pain. Clinard, who had welcomed him so tenderly into her studio, pulled up Etta James’ “Don’t Misunderstand” and placed her phone beside his ear. Johnson closed his eyes and sang.
“Dinky’s gonna be missed,” Mapp said. “Instead of four of us [at the jazz jams], there are three of us. He’s gonna be missed.”