Earl Arnett: "A Jazz Romance"

About This Event

Over the course of his life, Earl Arnett has been a newspaperman, an arts critic, a cabaret owner, a cultural ambassador, and a professor. But the role he has loved most is that of husband to the late Ethel Ennis, Baltimore’s First Lady of Jazz. From the time of their marriage in 1967—just months after the Supreme Court ruled laws banning interracial marriage unconstitutional—until her death in 2019, Arnett and Ennis were personally and professionally inseparable, devoting their lives to each other and to showcasing Ennis’s exceptional talent in forums from West Baltimore to China, Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. Along the way, they encountered—and in many cases befriended—fascinating figures from the realms of politics, show business, business, and the streets of their beloved Baltimore. Now, in A Jazz Romance, Arnett recounts episodes from that life with wit, incisive clarity, and the wounded wisdom of a widower still besotted with his late wife and the quietly epic life they lived. Earl Arnett will be joined in conversation by jazz historian Scott Brown. About the Author: During his 60-year residency in Baltimore, Earl Arnett has been a newspaper reporter and feature writer, magazine columnist, TV critic, music entrepreneur, college professor, novelist and essayist, community activist and cultural ambassador. During most of these years, he was also married to Ethel Ennis, Baltimore’s most famous, living jazz singer. Prior to Baltimore, Arnett was a military brat in Indiana, Washington DC, California, Austria and Japan. He graduated from high school in Tokyo, matriculated with honors from Wabash College in 1962 and spent three years as an Army intelligence agent in California and Germany. When he married Ethel in 1967—such marriages were still illegal in 18 states— Arnett moved into her small row house in West Baltimore, which they used as a home base for musical and personal travels around the US, Europe and Asia. Over the course of this vari