Published in the Quad-City Times on Nov. 13, 2023

There is a misconception about how Watertown got its name that Larry Westbrook wants to correct. 

With major floods hitting the East Moline neighborhood over the years — notably in 2014 and 1965 — it’s easy to assume that the water in Watertown’s nomenclature came over the banks of the Mississippi. 

Westbrook, a local pastor and president of the Watertown revitalization group, said the water in Watertown’s name is fresher. He asserts that the area was named for its clean, artesian wells. 

That fact, and so many others, is one he learned from his lifelong friend, a man of “encyclopedic knowledge” — Nathaniel “Nate” Lawrence. 

On Aug. 15, Lawrence died in his home at the age of 80 — a number that his mentees and peers say was shocking, given his spryness and wit. 

Lawrence always sought to bring the best of Watertown and East Moline to the Quad-Cities. He was the co-founder of local jazz organization Polyrhythms, a public relations savant, a neighborhood advocate and curator of live music.

In Watertown and the Quad-Cities music scene, Lawrence was a permanent fixture, and his passing blindsided many. After all, his presence has always been as certain as the river itself. 

“We were just right here,” Westbrook remembered, eyes gazing through his car windshield at empty picnic tables in Watertown’s Hereford Park. There, the two close friends shared a family reunion just days before Lawrence’s passing.

Lawrence passed away three days before the Bill Bell Jazz & Heritage Festival, a free yearly Rock Island event that Lawrence helped develop since its inception in 2013. Despite his absence, the show went on. 

Nate Lawrence, the curator

Lawrence himself didn’t play much music, Westbrook said.

Lawrence’s sister, Charlotte Harper, remembers her brother playing the trumpet briefly in high school, but more than anything, he was a jazz fan and avid record collector. 

In a 2005 interview with the Quad-City Times, Lawrence recalled the music fandom of his youth.

“I was in high school (…) and right before lunch we’d throw our books in the locker, take the streetcar to the Orpheum in Davenport and they’d have big bands,” Lawrence said. “We’d sit through three or four shows. We’d seldom make it through a Friday at school.”

After he spent time in his 20s serving in the U.S. Air Force, Harper said Lawrence came back with a renewed sense of leadership and maturity. 

When she remembers her brother now, she recalls the time he’d spend every Tuesday at her place in Watertown for tea. Harper remembers him as Uncle Nathan, too — he was beloved by her kids and most in the neighborhood, despite never having children of his own. 

“They just loved him to death,” Harper said. 

Lawrence was most comfortable behind the scenes, as a curator rather than a performer. A mentor, rather than the star in the spotlight.  

Alongside co-founder Shellie Moore Guy, he started Polyrhythms’ Third Sunday Jazz Series, a monthly live music tradition that’s approaching its third decade. 

Lawrence and Polyrhythms sought to break the sometimes highbrow stigma around jazz by celebrating the genre’s legacy and cultural impact. They teach through local jazz history, discussing figures like Bill Bell and Pat Patrick, both of whom were from Watertown and went on to tour nationwide. 

Nate Lawrence, the mentor

Lawrence’s impact reverberated throughout the music community, in Watertown and beyond. Jerra Williams, 28, is a Rock Island-born keyboardist and producer who has been learning from Lawrence since he was 15 years old. 

Growing up, Williams said playing a show at the Redstone Room was his biggest dream. Now, following business lessons he’s learned from Lawrence, he’s played there three times.

“He would literally pick me up from my house, and take me to these jazz concerts and tell me about how he managed groups and how he became successful,” Williams said. “I owe him my career.”

Williams’ connection with Lawrence was facilitated by David Baker, radio host at KALA. Baker first met Lawrence in his early 20s, when he was new to Quad-Cities media. He learned about jazz and journalism from Lawrence, who once ran his own independent newspaper. 

Baker remembers Lawrence’s humor and style — when he thinks about seeing Lawrence at the radio station, he can still see the “coolest jazz T-shirts.” When Lawrence emceed Polyrhythms events, his ties and suits were fresh. 

At the first Polyrhythms events after Lawrence’s passing, Baker said he got through by imagining that Lawrence was just away for the weekend. When Third Sunday Jazz hosted its first event after Lawrence’s passing, Baker was called to emcee in his place. 

“It was tear-jerking for me to be up there, standing on stage doing what Nate would typically be doing,” Baker said. “When Nate first passed away, the initial thought was, ‘Are we still going to do this?’

“And of course, the answer was yes.” 

Reggie Reed, former treasurer at Polyrhythms, has filled Lawrence’s former role as the nonprofit’s president. While it’s been challenging to move on after Lawrence’s passing, he said, he’s grateful that Lawrence left a “blueprint” for the organization going forward.

Reed said he’s hoping to plan a memorial event for Lawrence in early 2024. Until then, the focus is on hosting holiday events. 

“We’re still having some aches and pains,” he said, choking up. “It’s been tough, but we stepped to it because he would’ve wanted it this way.”

Nate Lawrence, the ‘firefighter’

Outside of his time with Polyrhythms, Lawrence was a fierce advocate for human rights, city development and education. He’s served on various revitalization boards in East Moline and helped to develop the city’s riverfront in the early ’80s. 

Avery Pearl is a 28-year-old author and community activist who serves on multiple committees, seeking to address disparities in the Quad-Cities. An East Moline native, he’s known Lawrence for most of his life, but started working with him professionally in 2020, when Lawrence took Pearl in as a mentee. 

Pearl said Lawrence taught him about everything: city politics, Black history, public relations, even what Pearl’s great-grandparents were like growing up.

But Pearl was never crazy about jazz.

“I’m a digital-era baby,” he said.

After Lawrence passed, Pearl went to the first Third Sunday Jazz show afterward. He went alone, wanting to just take it all in. 

Pearl remembers seeing the band’s bassist and guitarist riff back and forth, mimicking call-and-response melodies. Then, the pianist joined in. It was competitive in a way, each instrumentalist performing a solo at the other. Finally, the whole band joined in and harmonized.

Pearl had an epiphany.

“Oh my God, this is community,” Pearl said. “They’re taking instruments that sound completely different and harmonizing them to make a cohesive sound. That really is what Nate did.”

Pearl said he believes that Lawrence would want him to keep on fighting, not memorializing. But what Pearl does reminisce on is the greeting every time he and Lawrence met. 

“How’s it going?” he’d ask. 

“The world’s on fire,” Lawrence would answer. “It’s burning up, but we’re the firefighters.” 

In Watertown, the fight for revitalization goes on. As does the mission of Polyrhythms. Each cause was as timeless as was Lawrence. 

“He had just an everlasting spirit about him,” Williams said. “He was just forever.”

In July 2000, Lawrence wrote a letter on the Mississippi River for the Quad-City Times, as part of a series celebrating the river at the turn of the century. 

“Like the dependability of the sun rising in the East and setting in the West, the river is always there, working and moving and going somewhere,” Lawrence wrote. “It is the major constant of our lives.”

He wrote of his Watertown neighborhood: crossing the railroad tracks, waving to familiar faces on 1st Avenue, marking the telephone pole to predict how high the water would flood. 

Lawrence recalled fishing in the river, hearing the waves lap against the shoreline. To him, the sound of the river was something truly musical, akin to a “Duke Ellington arrangement.”

It was beautiful because it was forever. 

“When you sat on the bank of the Mississippi River when you were 7 years old, what you observed was the same thing you saw when you were 17, 27 or (if you were fortunate) 77 years old,” Lawrence, then 57, wrote. “You saw a dynamics and a power that you understood you would never understand in 77 lifetimes.

“That, my friend, is what makes our awesome companion a thing of diffuse beauty.”