Beloved as the “Black Godfather,” Clarence Avant, 90, has been influential in music, sports, film and politics. Here’s what you should know about him.
Clarence Avant is a legend in the entertainment industry, known by many as the “Black Godfather,” a revered but limelight-shunning nonagenarian. And he was married for 54 years to Jacqueline “Jackie” Avant, who was fatally shot early Wednesday by suspects at their Beverly Hills home. As lionized as he is, including in a 2019 documentary, Clarence Avant is not a household name to many outside the worlds of music, sports, film and politics. The 90-year-old music executive, who was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this year, grew up as a poor kid in Depression-era North Carolina. He rose to become a behind-the-scenes titan of managing, deal-making and problem-solving across the spectrum of Black entertainment. “Clarence is a guy who wasn’t looking for the job he ended up with,” entertainment magnate David Geffen said in “The Black Godfather,” Netflix’s recent documentary about Avant that was directed by Reginald Hudlin. After joining the music business in New York in the 1950s, he was mentored by the late, mob-connected Joe Glaser, the legendary manager of Louis Armstrong. Avant started out managing a previous era’s jazz and soul royalty, including jazz singer Sarah Vaughan, jazz musician Jimmy Smith and Argentine composer-pianist Lalo Schifrin. Schifrin was the reason Avant relocated to Los Angeles in the late 1960s. Avant met his future wife, then Jackie Gray, who had modeled as part of the traveling Ebony Fashion Fair aimed at introducing new styles to Black communities, in the mid-1960s. By then a player in the New York music business, he wooed her with VIP treatment at such clubs as Birdland and the Apollo Theater.
